Beatles vs. Stones (11 page)

In a sideways kind of way, the Beatles had something to do with that, too.

•  •  •

It was September 10, 1963, and the Rolling Stones were in a terrible mood. They were rehearsing at the Ken Colyer Jazz Club (also called Studio 51), but nothing was coming together. The band’s debut single, “Come On,” had registered on the UK charts, but only very faintly. They were now hard pressed to deliver a follow-up—something both commercial and distinctive—and yet they were flat out of good ideas. Initially, they’d hoped to release a 45 rpm with the Coasters’ “Poison Ivy” on one side, and Benny Spellman’s “Fortune Teller” on the other. But they didn’t sound good (
Dick Rowe
called them “ghastly”). None of the other songs they were working on sounded good either.

In order to give the group some breathing room, as well as to cast off his troubled mood, Andrew Oldham decided he’d head out for a midafternoon stroll. He was not far along when he thought he overheard a couple of distinctive, adenoidal accents. Then he spotted two familiar figures popping out of a black taxi near right near him.

Dressed in matching wool suits, white oxfords, skinny ties, and Cuban-heeled boots, Lennon and McCartney looked for all the world as if they might have been en route to yet another of their marquee performances. In fact, they were just returning from a Variety Club luncheon at the Savoy Hotel, where soon-to-be British Prime Minister Harold Wilson had bestowed the Beatles with plaques that designated them “Top Vocal Group of the Year.”

A photograph from the luncheon shows the Beatles smiling widely as they display their awards for the cameras, but they were never comfortable hobnobbing in such stuffy environments. Perhaps as a result, Lennon and McCartney had apparently gotten themselves well lubricated. Oldham recalled that while Paul seemed only “slightly tipsy,” Lennon was “swaying visibly” as he counted out shillings to pay their driver. Not having seen any of the Beatles since he’d left Epstein’s employ about nine months earlier, Oldham was a tad nervous about how he’d be received by John and Paul, but in fact they were happy to see him. They were not only cheerful but, once they discerned that he was in a troubled mood, solicitous.
“The dialogue,” Oldham said, “really did go like this:

“ ‘You’re looking unhappy. What’s the matter?’

“ ‘Oh, I’m fed up. The Stones can’t find a song to record.’

“ ‘Oh—
we’ve
got a song we’ve almost written. The Stones can have that to record if yer like.’ ”

The three of them immediately headed over to the Stones’ rehearsal space, where everyone greeted each other effusively. Lennon
went on to explain that he and McCartney had been working up a Bo Diddley–ish number for Ringo to sing on their next album. Something they called “I Wanna Be Your Man.”

“I remember teaching it to them,” Lennon said. “We played it roughly [Paul, being left-handed, played Wyman’s bass backward] and they said, ‘Yeah, OK, that’s our style.’ ”

Only problem was, it wasn’t quite finished.
“So Paul and I went off to the corner of the room and finished the song while they were still there, talking. . . . Right in front of their eyes we did it.”

The Stones were impressed.
“We liked the song,” Richards said. “And the fact that John and Paul came down to a rehearsal of ours, and laid it on us, you know . . . It was just one of those
jams
! They got enthusiastic, and we got enthusiastic, and we said, ‘All right, we’ll cut it tomorrow.’ ”

Jagger would later flatter himself by expressing surprise
“that John and Paul would be prepared to give us one of their best numbers.” But Lennon said he judged the song a throwaway.
“We weren’t going to give them anything great, right?”

Oldham says the level of serendipity involved in all this left him with a hang-up he has never quite gotten over.
“Instead of patting myself on the back and saying ‘Only you, you lucky bugger, would have the luck to run into John and Paul and have them hand you a potential hit,’ I get only mad internal chatter in my head about the what and why of it all. What if I hadn’t left the Rolling Stones rehearsal at that particular moment? What if I had turned right? What if I’d turned left towards Covent Garden? What if I hadn’t run into John and Paul?”

The Stones were just flabbergasted by the ease with which the two Beatles completed the song. And they watched them do it at the very time that they were growing anxious about their lack of suitable songs to cover. Until then, none of them had ever thought much about authoring their own material; they were just interpreters and performers.
“A songwriter, as far as I was concerned, was as far removed
from me as somebody who was a blacksmith or an engineer, a totally different job,” Keith remarked. “I had the mentality of a guy who could only play guitar; other guys wrote songs.” The Beatles, however, were changing the rules of the game; their first two LPs,
Please Please Me
and
With the Beatles
, each contained six cover songs and eight originals.

Oldham, especially, thought it was important that the Stones should follow suit. Richards remembers him saying:
“Look at the other boys,
they’re
writing their own songs.” At first, the band was resistant; they said they were too busy, or too tired, or too distracted to try composing original material. Some, however, suspected a different sort of problem: perhaps they were too timid?
“The Beatles had set this trend—you had to write your own material,” recalled the Who’s guitarist, Peter Townshend. “The Stones had not yet proven they could write . . . and I think there was a lot of panic that they might not be able to do it.”

Richards always claimed, outlandishly, that Oldham finally became so fed up with Jagger and Richards’s equivocating that he
literally
locked them in the kitchen of their Mapesbury Road flat and refused to let them leave until they’d written an entire song.
“We spent the whole night in that goddamn kitchen,” Richards said. “We’ve got some food, piss out the window or down the sink, it’s no big deal. And I said, ‘If we want to get out of here, Mick, we better come up with something.’ ” The result, he said, was a ballad, originally titled “As Time Goes By,” and later renamed “As Tears Go By,” on which Oldham eventually got a co-songwriting credit. Marianne Faithfull recorded it in 1964, and the Stones recorded it in 1965.

Jagger’s memory is different.
“Keith likes to tell the story about the kitchen, God bless him.” In actuality, he explains, an exasperated Oldham might have jokingly said something along the lines of “I should lock you in a room until you’ve written a song!” But at no point were the two actually trapped anywhere. (And it would have been an odd kitchen if it locked from the outside.) The two also disagree
about which was the first song they composed. Jagger says it was “It Should Be You,” a monstrosity that the Stones recorded at Regent Sound in November 1963, but never officially released.

Either way, Jagger and Richards had taken their first tentative steps together as songwriters. Their initial efforts weren’t worth much. “As Tears Go By” was a pretty and sensitive song, and it was perfect for an ingénue like Faithfull—the virginally beautiful daughter of an Austrian noblewoman, an ex-convent girl, and soon to be a Swinging London debutante, whom Oldham was grooming for mass success. (
“I saw an angel with big tits and signed her,” Oldham liked to say.) But at the time, it didn’t really suit the Stones. The same held true for most of their early compositions, although a few of them were recorded by other artists (mostly Oldham protégés, like George Bean, Adrienne Posta, and the Mighty Avengers) and the American crooner Gene Pitney scored a Top 10 hit in the UK with a majorly rearranged version of a song of theirs called “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday” (originally titled “My Only Girl”).
Had Jagger and Richards brought any of these cloying and sentimental songs to the rest of the group, however, they surmised they would have been laughed out of the room.

Of the twelve songs considered good enough to make it onto the Rolling Stones’ 1964 debut album, only one of them, the
Jagger-Richards composition “Tell Me,” stands out, not because it’s especially good, or bad, but because on a record that mostly consists of revamped R&B numbers, it is pleasant, popish, and not at all dissimilar from sound that the Beatles had hatched up in Liverpool. (Later they released it in the US as a single, where presumably it seemed a little less derivative, and it reached number 24 on the charts.) However uninspired, the song clearly indicated that the Glimmer Twins, as Mick and Keith would later call themselves, were gaining confidence.

Oldham has been rightly credited for helping Jagger and Richards realize their previously undiscovered talent for songwriting, but Lennon and McCartney played an important role as well. It wasn’t
just that they set a powerful example by writing their own material (though there is that). They also personally and vividly showed the Stones just how it was done, huddling up in a corner and writing the middle eight to “I Wanna Be Your Man” on a moment’s notice. In this crucial period, the Beatles also gave the Stones precious words of encouragement. Jagger seems never to have forgotten this. In 1972, he sat down with the Australian pop music magazine
Go-Set
.
“Even though people don’t like giving them credit for it now, these days, because they’re gone and they’re passé almost,” he said, “the Beatles told me we could write our own songs.”

Why Oldham insisted that Jagger and Richards should start producing original material, without ever demanding the same from Brian Jones, has never been entirely clear. Obviously, Oldham’s gambit paid off. Even if their earliest material wasn’t quite right for the Stones, many of the smarmy ballads and pop songs that Jagger and Richards came up with were still good enough to donate to other artists, and several of them impacted the British music charts. In less than a year, Jagger and Richards had authored the Stones’ first batch of hits, including “The Last Time,” “Play with Fire,” and (of course) “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” all of which appeared on the American version of their 1965 LP
Out of Our Heads
(an album that was nevertheless dominated by cover songs).

During this same period, however, it became increasingly obvious that Jones almost completely lacked the gift for songwriting. When it came to playing the riffs around which many Stones songs were built, he was always nimble and often brilliant. During rehearsals, his contributions could be valuable and creative. The raunchy slide guitar that he added to “I Wanna Be Your Man” is a case in point; dirtying the song up the way he did helped to make it almost indisputably superior to the Beatles’ version, and it became the Stones’ first bona fide hit, peaking at number 12 on the UK charts. Later, he’d add a sitar to “Paint It, Black” and marimbas to “Under My Thumb.” No one else in the group had the ingenuity or the musicianship to attempt such
things. But try as he might, when it came to authoring his own compositions, Brian was frustrated.

By some accounts, Jones was simply “incapable” of songwriting (Ian Stewart).
Others remember him toiling away for hours on his own, often late into the night, only to come up with material that he was simply too fragile and insecure to present for the band’s consideration. (To varying degrees, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Marianne Faithfull, Alexis Korner, and Jones’s old girlfriend, Linda Lawrence, have expressed this point of view.) And on those rare occasions when Jones did bring songs to the Stones, Wyman says that they were invariably dismissed, not fairly or kindly,
“but out of hand: ‘
You
can’t write
songs
!’ ” Oftentimes, Lawrence recalls, Jones would come home
“quite upset, almost crying” after a rough day of rehearsal.

All of this begs the question: When Oldham metaphorically locked Jagger and Richards in that kitchen and told them not to come out until they’d written a song, was he trying to foment a change in the Stones’ equilibrium? If so, his plan succeeded brilliantly.

In his 2000 memoir, Oldham sounds almost Svengalilike when he describes moving in to Mick and Keith’s cramped second-floor apartment in West Hampstead, London, in late 1963:
“Now there was no distance to complain of, and three of the Rolling Stones’ leading lights beamed as one.” With Oldham’s encouragement, Jagger and Richards soon began fitting songwriting sessions into their schedules wherever possible (usually after gigs). The three “leading lights” also typically stuck together whenever they hit the road: Mick, Keith, and Andrew would travel in one car, while Brian, Bill, and Charlie rode with Stu in his van. (Oldham and Jagger grew particularly close in this period.) Meanwhile, Charlie Watts was on his own, Wyman lived with his wife, and Jones was cohabitating with his pregnant girlfriend in a home he had inaptly christened—perhaps out of a desire to make it seem like a locus of activity—“Rolling Stone.”

“Until that time Brian was pretty much the group’s spokesman,”
remembered Glyn Johns, the engineer who first recorded the Stones. “Then Mick and Keith were encouraged to write and sell their songs, and the whole balance of power shifted to them. They and Andrew took over directing the band.”

“Brian wasn’t really a writer,” Charlie Watts added, “so suddenly the band was going off in a direction he couldn’t hold on to. Brian loved being what one would call a ‘star.’ ”

It was the Beatles, of course, who gave Jones his first real taste of stardom, not as a remote fantasy (in the facile way that every young person who plays rock ’n’ roll privately dreams of glorification) but in actuality. Hobnobbing with the Fab Four, carrying their gear out of the back of the Royal Albert Hall, and getting surrounded by a bunch of girls in the throes of teenage ecstasy—all of this gave Jones a sudden, visceral, and even a thrilling idea of what pop superstardom was all about. The fact that it was also a tragically limited understanding is somewhat beside the point; he didn’t know otherwise. Having originally set out merely to revivify a blues aesthetic, primarily for an audience of London scenesters, now Jones suddenly possessed the same sort of vaulting ambition as the Beatles.