Beatles vs. Stones (21 page)

Elsewhere on the record, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish between the singer (Jagger) and the narrator. In “Stupid Girl,” Jagger lashes out against his girlfriend, a vain and cynical sourpuss. “She’s the sickest thing in this world!” he sings. She grates on his nerves to no end and, to top it off, she isn’t even sexually competent (considering “the way she grabs and holds”). “Under My Thumb” is in the same vein. It’s a revenge fantasy, a kind of inverted funhouse mirror sequel to Lennon’s “Girl.” Now Jagger is gleefully in charge of the girl who once had him down. Now she’s a “squirmin’ dog” who “does just what she’s told.” Now it’s down to him, “the way she talks when she’s spoken to.” These are undeniably catchy and appealing songs, and yet forty years later, their misogynistic stench still lingers.

Remarkably, the Stones were not immediately stigmatized for the chauvinism on
Aftermath
. (That would come a bit later.) Instead, the record was hailed as an artistic breakthrough, on par with what the Beatles had just done. The
Rolling Stones Book
boasted that
Aftermath
was “doing a
Rubber Soul
,” in reference to the fact that contemporary artists were quick to cover a lot of the songs on both records (always a feather in a songwriter’s cap). Just as Lennon and McCartney had crowed about how
Rubber Soul
showed their band moving in a new direction, Jagger called
Aftermath
“a big landmark” and “a real marker” because “it was the first time we wrote the whole record.” A
Disc
reviewer opined,
“the time has come to elevate the Jagger-Richard[s] songwriting team to the ranks of John and Paul.”

None of this seemed to strain the social relationships between the two groups, however.
“There must have been a bit of competition because that’s only natural, but it was always very friendly,” McCartney said later. In fact, the two groups always kept each other abreast of what they were doing in order to ensure that, as much as possible, their record sales would not be diminished by direct competition. It was
“very cannily worked out,” Richards said, “because in those days singles were coming out every six, eight weeks. And we’d try to time it so that we didn’t clash. I remember John Lennon calling me up and
saying, ‘Well, we’ve not finished mixing yet.’ ‘We’ve got one ready to go.’ ‘OK, you go first.’ ”

The two groups seemed to hang out together the most in two separate eras. The first was in early 1963, shortly after they met, when the Beatles were still getting acquainted with London and the Stones were just kicking off their professional career. The second period began after the Beatles stopped touring in 1966, and extended until late 1967, when Swinging London was in its twilight phase.
“That was a great period,” Lennon said. “We were like the kings of the jungle then, and we were very close to the Stones.” They would tool around behind tinted windows and linger in the expensive darkness at clubs like the Ad Lib, the Scotch of St. James, and Bag o’ Nails.
“We were at the peak of our careers,” McCartney said. “We were young, we were looking pretty good and we had all this power and the fame and everything so it was difficult to resist playing with it.”

The Beatles and the Stones also sometimes tried to defuse tabloid news stories about their supposed rivalry. One night in 1965, for instance, Chrissie Shrimpton got into an altercation with some young teens who were staking out Ringo Starr’s home in Bryanston Mews East, which happened to be just around the corner from Mick’s flat. “Chrissie was knocking the Beatles and I won’t let anyone get away with that,” one fifteen-year-old girl alleged. Jagger admitted that he wound up kicking the stupid girl squarely in her bottom (although he was wearing plimsolls, he said, so she
“didn’t get hurt much”). He denied, however, that the kerfuffle had anything to do with the Beatles.
“She was laying into my girl and using filthy language,” he said. “They were not Beatles’ fans. Some papers are still trying to whip up a Stones-versus-Beatles war which does not exist.”

The groups also stayed mum to the press about a blazing row that took place between their managers, Epstein and Oldham, at a
NME
annual poll winners’ concert at the Empire Pool (now Wembley Arena) in the spring of 1966.
NME
called it “The Line-Up of the Century” because it featured the Beatles and the Stones in the same
show, along with the Who, the Yardbirds, the Small Faces, Roy Orbison, and a bunch of tertiary acts, all playing short sets before a lucky audience of about ten thousand.

Everyone expected the Beatles to close the show, but that raised a concern. If the Beatles were the very last act on the roster, a throng of fans might be tempted to rush toward that backstage exit as they were finishing up, in which case the group would be trapped in the arena. It was a scenario they definitely wanted to avoid. Derek Johnson, a longstanding
NME
editor, remembers that about a week before the concert, a stinky-looking bum came tottering into his office; it was Lennon, dressed down in disguise, and eager to talk about the upcoming show. The two men apparently struck an unusual agreement: the Beatles would
not
be the poll winners’ concert headliners.

Around the same time, however,
NME
’s founder Maurice Kinn received an unexpected phone call from Andrew Oldham. The Stones had earlier declined an invitation to play, but now Oldham said they were up for it. They didn’t even desire to be paid. Oldham had just one important stipulation on behalf of his group, however: the Stones would not go on immediately before the Beatles. That wouldn’t look right. They didn’t want to cement their status as England’s second biggest group, or appear before their fans as if they were the Fab Four’s warm-up act. Mr. Kinn happily agreed to the arrangement, and he put his commitment down in writing. (At the time, he may not have been aware of the agreement that Lennon made with Johnson.)

The concert was held on May 1, and when the Stones strode onto the stage, the place just went wild. They played “The Last Time,” “Play with Fire,” and “Satisfaction.” The audience’s screams
“thundered on” throughout the short set, said one concert reviewer, growing “louder and louder until suddenly it was over.”

According to the schedule, after the Stones were done performing,
NME
was to hand out everyone’s awards, and then the Beatles would play four songs. When the Stones were about halfway through their set, however, the Beatles had turned up at the bottom of the
stage, carrying their guitars. Lennon announced that they were going on next.

“I said to Lennon, ‘John, you’re much too early,’ ” Kinn remembered. “ ‘The Stones have got another ten minutes, then it’s the awards. Go away, you’re not on for another thirty minutes.’ ” But Lennon insisted the Beatles would play next.
“I said they couldn’t and John shouted, ‘Didn’t you hear me the first time? We’re going on now or we’re not going on at all.’ ”

Epstein and Kinn huddled up and frantically laid out their dilemmas to one another. Epstein proclaimed that he was powerless: Lennon was insisting the Beatles go on immediately after the Stones, and that was that. The Beatles would play next, or they would not play at all. Kinn answered that in addition to being honor-bound to Oldham, he was legally required not to let the Beatles stride onto the stage right immediately after the Stones.

“I took my life into my hands,” Kinn recalled, “and said to Brian:

“ ‘Let me tell you the position. The Beatles are not going on next. I’m going to tell [compère] Jimmy Saville to tell the audience the Beatles are here but they refuse to appear. There will be a riot, this place will be smashed up, and not only will you, Brian, be responsible for the thousands of pounds worth of damage, but you’ll be sued by
NME
for the irreparable harm you’ve done to the reputation of my paper.’ Epstein gave me a bawling out: ‘We’ll never appear here again as long as we live. You can’t do this to us.’ I said, ‘I don’t care if it’s the King and Jesus Christ together. I can’t change it. I gave it in writing to Andrew. That’s it.’ ”

According to Kinn, after Epstein explained the situation to Lennon, “John absolutely exploded
! He gave me abuse like you’ve never heard before in all your life. You could hear him all over the backstage area. He said, ‘We’ll never play for you again.’ ”

And they did not. The Beatles played just four songs—“I Feel
Fine,” “Nowhere Man,” “If I Needed Someone,” and “I’m Down”—
and that turned out to be the Beatles’ last regularly scheduled performance in the UK. (Their fee was a token £70.) Remarkably, the whole contretemps was kept hush-hush for so long. The tabloids might have loved the story, but it did not become known until many years later.

Still, the two groups couldn’t always stop the press from fueling the rivalry narrative. One day in April 1966 when the Beatles were hard at work, they had their friend and road manager Mal Evans run out and fetch them a copy of the freshly pressed
Aftermath
. That same day, a photographer snapped a photo of John and George in the studio. They were both wearing headphones and sunglasses and holding up Stones records.
George hid his face behind the Stones’ single “19th Nervous Breakdown,” whereas John posed holding
Aftermath
in front of his chest and smiling inscrutably. Probably they meant this as a simple and supportive gesture, as if to say,
“These are our friends, check ’em out.” But when the photo was published in
16
magazine, the accompanying caption had a sarcastic ring. It reads: “Wait a minute Paulie—George and I are coming up with a couple of really original ideas.”

The Beatles did not write the caption, of course. Nevertheless, if the Stones saw it, they might have wondered if they were being mocked for their unoriginality compared to the Beatles.

Just to recap: A little more than two years earlier, the Beatles had put a moody black-and-white photo of themselves on the cover of their second album—a photo that veered sharply from the cartoonish conventions of pop photography. A short while later, the Stones used a similar looking photo of themselves on the sleeve of their debut L.P. Then a few months after the Beatles released “Yesterday,” Paul’s poignant ballad about lost love that features a string quartet, along came the Stones with “As Tears Go By,” a soulful ballad on which Jagger is likewise accompanied by strings. Later that year, the Beatles released
Rubber Soul
, a stylistically diverse album of original material designed to showcase their growing artistic maturity. The following spring, the
Stones did much the same thing with
Aftermath
. To Lennon, all of this amounted to a clear case of artistic larceny.
“Everything we do, the Stones do four months later,” he supposedly said.

Of course, the Stones weren’t simply mimicking the Beatles.
They were in fact highly inventive, and their successful take on American rhythm and blues influenced other bands down the UK scene, like the Pretty Things, the Troggs, and the Downliners Sect, as well as worldwide imitators like the Chocolate Watchband (from San Jose, California) and Los Mockers (from Montevideo, Uruguay). Even after the Stones backpedaled on their blues purism and started fashioning records that were appealing to the pop masses, they still had a rawer and more blues-inflected sound than the Beatles did. Moreover, they often put the unusual instruments they were now fooling around with—sitars, dulcimers, harpsichords, marimbas, bells, and so forth—to better and more innovative use than the Beatles normally did. Finally, the Stones’ original compositions in the mid-’60s seemed to grow out of their personal experiences and reflect their increasingly jaded outlook. The same thing could be said about the Beatles, but perhaps not to the same degree. Nevertheless, there is no gainsaying that as the Beatles began opening up some thrilling new musical possibilities in the mid-’60s, the Stones were drawn to what they were doing.

Put another way, there was a time when the Beatles were a creative muse to the Rolling Stones. Even today, if you read the main Stones memoirs—Bill Wyman’s
Stone Alone
, Keith Richards’s
Life
, and Andrew Oldham’s
Stoned
and
2Stoned
—it’s impossible to miss how preoccupied they always were with the Beatles, and how often they measured their own success against the Beatles’ accomplishments.
It must have been difficult at times.

In March 1966,
NME
journalist Keith Altham published a short puff piece on Brian Jones. Reading it today, however—knowing that the Rolling Stones finally fired Brian in June 1969, and that he had to be scooped from the bottom of his swimming pool less than a month later, at age twenty-seven, with inflamed lungs, an enlarged heart and
a diseased liver—it’s a little sad. It describes how Jones had just returned to England from the US, four days later than the rest of his bandmates, “due to the fact that clubs in New York are open 24 hours a day and he had been in one for four days with an insane Welsh harpist called ‘Hari Hari’ waiting for it to close!” (That’s probably not too far from what actually happened.) When he got to his home in Earls Court, he discovered he’d misplaced his keys, so he just smashed his way in through a ground-floor window and then summoned his friends for a party. He didn’t even know what day it was. Nevertheless, they all got rip-roaring drunk while Brian crowed about the Stones’ recent success. Later they sent out for beef curries and veal scallops.

“America is a great scene for us at present,” he said. “We’ve never been so powerful there . . . We overtook the Beatles ‘Nowhere Man’ in the charts with ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ and although I’ve no delusions about being bigger than the Beatles . . . it’s something an achievement.”

Altham wrote,
“The possibility of the Rolling Stones becoming a bigger attraction than that Beatles in America is intriguing, and I asked Brian how he saw the shape of things to come.”

Brian “smiled” (perhaps tightly). “You must understand that the Beatles are a phenomenon,” he said. “You can’t be as big as the Beatles until you’ve done something like Shea Stadium—and I doubt whether even they could do that so successful again.”