Beatles vs. Stones (40 page)

“He was the kind of guy”
:
As quoted in
According to the Rolling Stones
, 42.

“Giorgio, there’s six of us, and three of them”
:
As quoted in Strausbaugh,
Rock Til You Drop
, 41–42.

“detected a certain Neanderthal”
:
Alan Clayson,
The Rolling Stones: The Origin of the Species
(Surrey: Chrome Dreams, 2007), 140.

“two hundred pair of arms”
:
As quoted in Strausbaugh,
Rock Til You Drop
, 42.

“No one had seen anything”
:
As quoted in
According to the Rolling Stones
, 50.

“formula-ridden commercial popular music”
:
As quoted in Oldham,
Stoned
, 203–204.

“My motivation in all this”
:
Gomelsky’s partnership with the Stones attenuated after Andrew Oldham and Eric Easton swooped in and offered the group a manager’s contract while Gomelsky was out of the country (at his father’s funeral, no less). “Sure, I was broken up about what happened,” Gomelsky later admitted. “Brian’s betrayal was very underhand, he was my friend, supposedly. . . . I guess I didn’t cut it with the vanity-driven mentality prevailing among those guys, particularly Brian and Mick.” Soon after Oldham and Easton signed the Stones, they met with Gomelsky. Supposedly they wanted to talk about compensating him for the work he’d already put into the group, but Gomelsky figured their main goal was to see that the Stones wouldn’t lose their precious Sunday-night gigs at the Crawdaddy. Magnanimously, Gomelsky let them continue their residency, even though he came to hold Oldham and Easton in poor regard. They were “two pretty low-flying characters with no interest in blues, underdog culture or social justice!” he said. “Dollar signs were pointing their way.”

“good, fluent band”
:
As quoted in Strausbaugh,
Rock Til You Drop
, 44.

“to bring about the still unperceived wit”
:
Philip Norman,
The Stones
, 80–81. Beatlemania is difficult to date. After examining various regional newspapers, Beatles authority Mark Lewisohn concluded that “Beatles-inspired hysteria had definitely begun by the late spring [of 1963], some six months before it was brought to national attention by Fleet Street press officers.” But the Beatles’ press agent, Tony Barrow, prefers a more precise date for Beatlemania: October 13, 1963, when the group debuted on the hugely popular television program,
Sunday Night at the Palladium
. The word “Beatlemania” did not appear in print, however, until November 2, 1963, when a writer for London’s
Daily Mirror
used it.

“explosive enthusiasm as just another”
:
As quoted in Strausbaugh,
Rock Til You Drop
, 47.

“I suppose I should remember”
:
As quoted in Strausbaugh,
Rock Til You Drop
, 47. Plans for the film were finally scotched when United Artists, the American film studio, swooped in and offered to finance three motion pictures with the Beatles. According to Clayton, Epstein “unethically” gave the synopsis they’d been working on to the American studio executives, and eventually it morphed into Richard Lester’s
A Hard Day’s Night
. But it’s hard to know if this really happened. Clayton also says that he misplaced the letter that Epstein sent him a couple of years later “in which he apologized. He said he didn’t know, he was naïve, blah blah.”

“to find out what was happening”
:
As quoted in
The Beatles
Anthology
, 101.

“Hey you guys, you’ve got to listen”
:
As quoted in Dalton,
The First Twenty Years
, 26.

Dylan “represented everything that Lennon”
:
Miller,
Flowers in the Dustbin
, 226.

“It was like meeting Engelbert Humperdinck”
:
As quoted in Spitz,
The Beatles
, 583.

“[W]e were provincial kids”
:
As quoted in Barry Miles,
Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now
(New York: Holt, 1998), 100.

who claims to be the “Mr. Jimmy”
:
He could be correct, but more likely the reference was to Jimmy Miller, the Stones’ producer when they recorded that song. The Chelsea Drugstore mentioned in the song was actually a chic King’s Road shopping center that opened in 1968.

but as musicologist Ian MacDonald points out
:
Ian MacDonald,
Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties
(London: Fourth Estate, 1997), 53.

Probably the Beatles got the idea
:
Another song from the era that featured a harmonica, which the Beatles covered, was “I Remember You,” which was a hit for Frank Ifield in 1962.

Phelge recounts the scene this way
:
Phelge,
Nankering with the Stones
, 29. Phelge claimed that the BBC show that captured Brian and Keith’s attention was
Saturday Club
, which featured the Beatles on January 26, 1963. On that show, the Beatles played “Love Me Do,” but they didn’t follow up with a Chuck Berry number later in their set, as Phelge maintains. The Beatles also played “Love Me Do” on
Talent Spot
on December 4, 1962, and
Parade of the Pops
on February 20, 1963, but they didn’t play Chuck Berry songs on those occasions either. Thirty-five years after the fact, it would be unusual if Phelge’s memory of the Beatles set list was perfectly accurate. No one, however, has risen to dispute his general account.

“It was an attack from the North”
:
As quoted in Davis,
Old Gods
, 33.

“They had long hair, scruffy clothes”
:
Of course the Beatles were not, at that point, known for wearing “scruffy clothes.”

“That’s when I told them”
:
As quoted in Dalton,
The First Twenty Years
, 26.

Gomelsky continues:
“The club used to open”
: As quoted in Dalton,
The First Twenty Years
, 26.

“Shit, that’s the
Beatles!
”
:
Wyman, as quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght,
An Oral History
, 122; Wyman,
Stone Alone
, 127.

“We were playing a pub”
:
YouTube clip, “Keith Richards—Friends with the Beatles.”

“I didn’t want to look at them”
:
As quoted in Yoko Ono, ed.,
Memories of John Lennon
(New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 105.

“an intentionally intimidating image”
:
Barry Miles,
The Beatles Diary, Volume One: The Beatles Years
(London and New York: Omnibus Press, 2001), 93.

he said their long leather jackets
:
Chris Hutchins,
Elvis Meets the Beatles
(London: Smith Gryphon, 1994), 66.

they exuded a kind of “Fuck You”
:
Oldham,
Stoned
, 171.

“almost frightening-looking young men”
:
Boyfriend
magazine, 1963, n.d, n.p.

“four-headed monster”
:
As quoted in
MOJO’s
The Beatles: Ten Years That Shook the World
, 67.

“They could do their stuff”
:
As quoted in
The Beatles Anthology
, 101.

“I remember standing in some sweaty room”
:
As quoted in
The Beatles Anthology
, 101.

“It was a real rave,” he reminisced
:
As quoted in Wyman,
Stone Alone
, 127.

“carried themselves with the air”
:
Phelge,
Nankering with the Stones
, 105.

“Everyone was trying to find out”
:
Phelge,
Nankering with the Stones
, 106.

“John was really nice”
:
As quoted in Ono,
Memories of John
, 105.

“A harmonica with a button”
:
As quoted in
The Beatles Anthology
, 101. Apparently under Jones’s influence, Lennon came around to this point of view as well. Six weeks later, on June 1, 1963, the Beatles performed Chuck Berry’s “I Got to Find My Baby” for the BBC show
Pop Goes the Beatles
, and this was the first time Lennon was recorded using a harp. What’s more, when disc jockey Lee Peters tried introducing the song by mentioning that Lennon would be playing a “harmonica” on it, Lennon abruptly cut him off.

“Harp! It’s a harp,” he said pedantically.

“What’s a harp?”

“The harp. I’m playing a harp on this one.”

“You’re playing a harp?”

“Harmonica I play in ‘Love Me Do.’ Harp in this one [unintelligible].”

Not understanding the difference, Peters said to Lennon (in mock frustration): “Do you want to do these announcements?” and then pretended to storm out of the studio. In all likelihood, Lennon had quickly absorbed Jones’s predilection for playing a harp (and later, he would conclude that the harmonica he’d played on “Love Me Do” hadn’t been “funky-blues enough” for his taste). Still, the distinction is rather silly, since all harps are also harmonicas.

“Mick says [that meeting] is what made”
:
As quoted in Barry Miles,
Many Years from Now
, 101.

Only later would they discover
:
Still, the Beatles’ success was totally unprecedented. By 1964, they were making so much money (on an 83 percent tax rate) that Board of Trade president (later Prime Minister) Edward Heath quipped that they were propping up the entire national economy. (The Beatles responded in 1966 with George Harrison’s song “Taxman.”)

Brian Jones asked them to autograph a magazine photo
:
This is according to biographer Stephen Davis in his book
Old Gods Almost Dead.
But the story about Brian asking for an autograph and taping it to the wall does not seem to appear in any of the extant primary sources.

“They were very cool guys”
:
As quoted in
According to the Stones
, 55.

“Brian read it again aloud”
:
Phelge,
Nankering with the Stones
, 104.

For months afterward, Wyman said
:
Wyman,
Stone Alone
, 126.

“We looked like this before”
:
As quoted in Davis,
Old Gods
, 45. Emphasis added.

“Mick was made up”
:
Davis,
Old Gods
, 43. I have not been able to find this anecdote mentioned in any primary sources, or in any secondary literature that was published prior to Davis’s book in 2001. When I sent a note to Davis through his publisher, he failed to reply.