Beatles vs. Stones (26 page)

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“Even beyond the usual hysterical interest attracted by any new Beatles record,”
Time
magazine announced, “Hey Jude” / “Revolution” was “special.” Released in the US on August 26, 1968, it soon became one of the bestselling 45s in music history. Many were drawn to “Hey Jude” for its infectious chorus and unconventional four-minute fade out, but it was Lennon’s raucous “Revolution,” on side B, that captured the attention of American radicals that summer.
“That’s why I did it,” Lennon said later, “I wanted to talk, I wanted to say my piece about revolution.”

“Revolution” opens with Lennon screaming abrasively over heavily distorted guitars, but it quickly settles into a bluesy romp, and it soon becomes apparent that Lennon’s sonic epistle to the New Left does not express solidarity, but disaffection. Though Lennon says he shared the goals of many radicals (“We all want to change the world”) he disavows their tactics (
“When you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out?”). Elsewhere, he expresses skepticism of the New Left’s overwrought rhetoric (“Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright?”) and he says he’s tired of being pestered for money for leftwing causes (“You ask me for a contribution, well you
know / We’re doing all we can”). The final verse amounted to an endorsement of the apolitical counterculture, and a toxic kiss-off to the Movement’s ultra-radicals:

You say you’ll change the constitution, well you know

We all want to change your head.

You tell me it’s the institution, well you know

You’d better free your mind instead

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao

You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow!

Anyone in the late ’60s who was unfamiliar with the controversy the song provoked would have to be a
“Cistercian Monk,” remarked one underground journalist. “The Beatles have said something and what they have said is not going to be popular with a great many,” announced Ralph Gleason, an influential music critic who helped found
Rolling Stone
.
“The more political you are, the less you will dig the Beatles’ new song ‘Revolution.’ ” But Gleason approved of the song’s message. Countercultural politics, he believed, would ultimately prove more transformative than “real” politics. Instead of presenting another ineffectual “Program for the Improvement of Society,” he argued that the Beatles had taken up a more noble task; they were teaching youths to transform their entire consciousness. Wrote Gleason:
“The Beatles aren’t just more popular than Jesus, they are also more potent than SDS,” the New Left’s leading student group.

Distributed through Liberation News Service (LNS), the radical news agency that served hundreds of American underground newspapers, Gleason’s essay was much-discussed. But it was a small radical British newspaper—
The Black Dwarf—
that was the locus of an even more spirited debate about Lennon’s “Revolution.” Edited by Tariq Ali, the paper’s first issue, dated October 13, 1968, contained a little-noticed essay in which a writer maintained that the Rolling Stones represented
“the seed of the new cultural revolution,”
whereas the Beatles were interested in “safeguarding their capitalist investment.”

Two weeks later, another item in
The Black Dwarf
drew a lot more attention. It was “An Open Letter to John Lennon,” written by an otherwise obscure socialist named John Hoyland. The fact that it appeared shortly after John and Yoko had themselves been busted for drug possession was not a coincidence. Hoyland later said that when Sgt. Pilcher’s drug squad goons stormed into Lennon and Ono’s apartment and found 219 grains of cannabis, it made
“the inadequacy of [Lennon’s] philosophy . . . even more evident.”

The last thing radicals needed to do, Hoyland stressed, was change their
heads
. Instead, it was time to pursue an aggressive politics of confrontation: “In order to change the world, we’ve got to understand what’s wrong with the world. And then—destroy it. Ruthlessly.” Hoyland also lampooned the Beatles’ recent ventures into hip capitalism, as represented by Apple Corps. “What will you do when Apple
is
as big as Marks and Spencer and one day its employees decide to run it for themselves?” he asked. “[W]ill you call in the police—because you are a businessman, and Businessmen Must Protect Their Interests?” Finally, Hoyland impertinently told Lennon,
“Recently your music has lost its bite,” whereas “the music of the Stones has gotten stronger and stronger.” The Stones, “helped along a bit by their experiences with the law . . . refuse to accept the system that’s fucking up their lives,” he maintained.

Lennon was so disturbed by the letter that he phoned Ali to complain; Ali encouraged him to write a rebuttal, which appeared in January. It was not terribly coherent. Lennon began by saying, “I don’t worry about what you, the left, the middle, the right or any fucking boys club think,” which (as Peter Doggett has observed) raised the question as to why he was even bothering to reply in the first place. Next, Lennon labored to defend the position he enunciated in “Revolution” while simultaneously trying to maintain his radical cred. “I’m not only up against the establishment, but you too, it seems,” he
said.
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with [the world]—People—so do you want to destroy them? Ruthlessly? Until you/we fix your/our heads there’s no chance.” Lennon added that Apple Corps was less a moneymaking venture than a vehicle for the Beatles’ creative experimentation, and he professed not to care much about it. But Lennon was disingenuous; “Look man, I was/am not against you,” he said, even though Hoyland—who championed the revolutionary overthrow of the State—was exactly the type of person that “Revolution” targeted. But after radicals like Hoyland objected, Lennon pandered to them by suggesting that the song didn’t really mean what it seemingly meant. Still, he was pissed. “Instead of splitting hairs about the Beatles and the Stones,” Lennon added, “think a little bigger . . .”

Though Hoyland’s reply seemed to be written in the first person, it was actually written by the
Black Dwarf
editorial collective, which maintained that “Revolution” amounted to a
betrayal.

The feeling’s [sic] I’ve gotten from songs like “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “A Day in the Life” are part of what made me into the kind of socialist I am. But then you suddenly kicked us in the face with “Revolution.” That’s why I wrote you—to answer an attack you made on us, to criticize a position you took . . . in relation to the revolutionary socialist movement—knowing that what you said would be listened to by millions, whereas whatever reply we make here is read by only a few thousand.

During this period, countless other rock enthusiasts turned volte-face against the Beatles. The underground press
“ate the Beatles alive,” one journalist remarked. A writer from the
Berkeley Barb
disparaged “Revolution” as an “unmistakable call for counter-revolution.”
Village Voice
writer Robert Christgau was likewise disappointed that the Beatles went out of their way to criticize the political left. A writer for
New Left Review
called the song a
“lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear.” In
Ramparts
, Jon Landau called the song a “betrayal.” Even a
Moscow-based newspaper,
Sovetskaya Kultura
, chided the Beatles for their
“indifference to politics.”

Balanced against this, a few others read a more complicated message in Lennon’s song. Some held that its musical textures overwhelmed its lyrical content. “Revolution isn’t the strumming of a folk guitar, it is the crashing explosions of a great rock ’n’ roll band,” wrote Greil Marcus.
“There is freedom in the movement, even as there is sterility and repression in the lyrics.” “We owe an apology to the Beatles,” said another left-wing writer.
“However shitty the lyrics of ‘Revolution’ may be, the message”—that is, the question of whether a revolution was desirable or necessary, and how to go about effecting one—had at least provoked a useful conversation. Another writer credited the song with generating
“more thought and discussion over the whole question of violence and revolution among young people than any other single piece of art or literature.” Yet another fan simply would not be deterred.
“The Beatles’ politics are terrible,” he said, “but they’re on our side.”

•  •  •

Contra to “Revolution” was “Street Fighting Man,” the Stones’ new single from
Beggars Banquet
, which was released in the US on August 30, 1968, just four days after “Revolution” (thereby violating the much vaunted agreement that the Beatles and the Stones wouldn’t put their records in direct competition with each other).
The original record sleeve (very quickly withdrawn) shows a photo of an LA cop with his boot on the back of a young protestor who is lying, defeated, in the street. Fearful that the song would further inflame the passions of militants who had been involved in the chaos surrounding the Democratic National Convention, most Chicago radio stations refused to play it. Jagger supposedly penned its lyrics after attending a March 17, 1968, rally that began at London’s Trafalgar Square, which drew a crowd of about twenty-five thousand. After listening to speeches, many of the protestors clashed with mounted policemen
outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. Cops charged at the protestors with their batons, while youths swung back with tree branches and fence posts and showered them with debris. Half of the fifty people who wound up being hospitalized were police officers. By some accounts, Jagger was in the thick of the action; one remembers him
“throwing rocks and having a good time,” while another recalls him “hiding [and] running.” A Michael Cooper photograph taken at the event shows Jagger surrounded by demonstrators, keenly observing what was happening, but not quite participating.

To his regret, Jagger had to abandon the protest after being recognized by too many fans. The song’s refrain was thought by some to evoke his feelings of impotence and frustration. (“But what can a poor boy do? / Except to sing for a rock ’n’ roll band? / ’Cause in sleepy London town / There’s just no place for a street fighting man.”) Others saw the refrain as a hedge against the song’s more provocative lyrics.

Soon after “Street Fighting Man” was released, New York City’s most militant newspaper, the
Rat
, printed its lyrics in a sidebar. A little later, the
Black Dwarf
reprinted a handwritten copy of the lyrics that Mick Jagger had given them:
“Everywhere I heard the sound of marching, charging feet, boy / ’Cause summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy.” Some regarded the song as a clarion call. SDSer Jonah Raskin recalls marching up New York City’s Fifth Avenue in December 1968, protesting the recent police murder of two Black Panthers. When someone beside him started whistling the song’s tune, Raskin writes,
“I chanted the words myself: ‘The time is right for violent [sic] revolution.’ I arched one stone after another; the whole plate glass window collapsed.” During many shows on the Stones’ 1969 US tour, Mick wore a shirt with an Omega symbol on the front: the symbol of Resistance, an American antidraft group. When the Stones played Madison Square Garden that year, a group of New York radicals called Mad Dogs draped a nine-by-twelve-foot National Liberation Front (NLF) flag from the top of a balcony. When they played Chicago in November 1969, Jagger dedicated “Street
Fighting Man” to the people of that city,
“and what you did here last year.” When the tour reached Seattle, members of Weatherman crashed the gates and passed out leaflets. In Oakland, a group of anarchists distributed a broadsheet:

Greetings and welcome Rolling Stones, our comrades in the desperate battle against the maniacs who hold power. The revolutionary youth of the world hears your music and is inspired to even more deadly acts. We fight in guerilla bands against the invading imperialists in Asia and South America, we riot at rock ’n’ roll concerts everywhere. We burned and pillaged in Los Angeles and the cops know our snipers will return.

They call us dropouts and delinquents and draft dodgers and punks and hopheads and heap tons of shit on our heads. In Viet Nam they drop bombs on us and in America they try to make us war on our own comrades but the bastards hear us playing you on our little transistor radios and know that they will not escape the blood and fire of the anarchist revolution.

We will play your music in rock ’n’ roll marching bands as we tear down the jails and free the prisoners, as we tear down the State schools and free the students, as we tear down the military bases and arm the poor, as we tattoo BURN BABY BURN! on the bellies of the wardens and generals and create a new society from the ashes of our fires.

Comrades, you will return to this country when it is free from the tyranny of the State and you will play your splendid music in factories run by workers, in the domes of emptied city halls, on the rubble of police stations, under the hanging corpses of priests, under a million red flags waving over million anarchist communities. In the words of [André] Breton, THE ROLLING STONES ARE THAT WHICH SHALL BE! LYNDON JOHNSON—THE YOUTH OF CALIFORNIA DEDICATES ITSELF TO YOUR DESTRUCTION! ROLLING STONES—THE YOUTH OF CALIFORNIA HEARS YOUR MESSAGE! LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION!!!

Still spooked after nearly being sent to prison after his 1967 drug arrest, Jagger had declared on
World in Action
,
“I don’t really want to form a new code of morals or anything like that. I don’t think anyone in this generation wants to.” But in 1969, he left some believing that he did, in fact, endorse a general uprising. Asked about “Street Fighting Man” being boycotted by Chicago radio stations, Jagger mused,
“They must think a song can make a revolution. I wish it could.”