Beatles vs. Stones (44 page)

“Mick and I went down”
:
Mod
, insert in
Tiger Beat
(August 1966). A blogger has cleverly speculated that Shrimpton’s brass bird might have inspired Lennon’s song “And Your Bird Can Sing.” Another tantalizing possibility is that Lennon addressed the song to Jagger, after growing weary of hearing him boast about his new relationship with Marianne Faithfull: “bird” was British slang for an attractive female, and Faithfull could indeed sing.

“Later I introduced Mick to Andy”
:
As quoted in
According to the Stones,
79. Emphasis added.

“We were encouraged”
:
As quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght,
Oral History
, 170–71.

“multigenerational psychosis”
:
As quoted in Norman,
Mick Jagger
, 107.

Fact is that Beatle People
:
“Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!”
Daily Mirror
, November 6, 1963. (No byline.)

“An examination of the heart”
:
As quoted in Braun,
Love Me Do
, 65.

“I bet that about ten”
:
Murray Kaufman,
Murray the K Tells It Like It Is, Baby
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 97.

4: YANKOPHILIA

“The mop-haired singers”
:
Murray Schumach, “Teen-Agers (Mostly Female) and Police Greet Beatles,”
New York Times
(August 14, 1965).

“We spent weeks drawing”
:
As quoted in Danny Somach, Kathleen Somach, Kevin Gunn, eds.,
Ticket to Ride
(New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 63.

“You hear that up there?”
:
Spitz,
The Beatles,
577.

It remains one of the
:
You can see it in
The Beatles at Shea Stadium
, a 50-minute television documentary that first aired on the BBC in 1966, and then became increasingly widely available, first as a bootleg, then as part of
The Beatles
Anthology
DVD series, and now on YouTube.

“I don’t envy those Beatles”
:
Hutchins, “Prisoners on Floor 33 While Two Stones Went Free,”
NME
(August 20, 1965).

At first, they received him
:
Oldham had claimed that it was necessary to host the presser on a boat because there wasn’t a single luxury hotel in Manhattan that was willing to host the Stones, but that was just another publicity stunt, designed to make the Stones seem more dangerous than they really were.

“That’s us . . . We have to be better”
:
“The Rolling Stones,”
Hullabaloo
(November 1966).

“when we were all”
:
As quoted in Ono,
Memories of John Lennon
, 107.

“In the tracks of the Beatles”
:
As quoted in Paytress,
The Rolling Stones: Off the Record
, 55.

How do you compare
:
YouTube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3p2-LkN7EM&feature=watch_response
.

Murray the K’s Swinging
:
As quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght,
An Oral History
, 157.

“Oh, just play the fuckin’ ”
:
Oldham,
2Stoned
, 12.

The Rolling Stones, it is
:
Not only is the narrator in “I Just Want to Make Love to You” after sex; he also wants to score with a woman who is otherwise attached. He “knows by the way that [she] treats [her] man” that she’d be a good lay.

Then when Martin introduced
:
Wyman, 222.

“some dumb circus act”
:
Richards,
Life
, 151.

“sawdust fiasco”
:
Oldham,
2Stoned
, 9.

“They would shout across”
:
Richards,
Life
, 121.

“I get to meet The Man”
:
As quoted in Sanford,
Keith Richards
, 66.

“That throws you a curve”
:
As quoted in Bockris,
Keith Richards
, 81.

Muddy Waters grew to have
:
Asked about the story in an interview, Marshall Chess said, “No truth in it at all. But Keith maintains to this day that it actually happened. I’ve laughed in his face many times as he’s insisted he saw Muddy up a ladder with a paint brush in his hand.”

the Beatles made headlines
:
Years later, Muddy remarked, “The Rolling Stones created a whole wide-open space for the music.” He also appreciated that, unlike some other acts, the Stones gave him the credit he deserved. “They said who did it first and how they came by knowin’ it. I tip my hat to ’em. It took the people from England to hip my people—my white people—that a black man’s music is not a crime to bring in the house.”

“I’ve never seen anything”
:
As quoted in Wyman,
Stone Alone
, 232.

“You can buy them”
:
As quoted in Dalton,
The First Twenty Years
, 41. Candy floss is known in North America as “cotton candy.”

A girl was quoted asking
:
Jack Hutton,
Daily Mirror
(June 6, 1964).

“Oldham could not afford”
:
Norman,
The Stones
, 136.

“Essentially British—and thoroughly”
:
Jones, “The Stones on America,”
Rolling Stones Monthly Book,
No. 2 (July 1964), 27.

“They had discovered that”
:
As quoted in Ono,
Memories of John Lennon
, 11.

It’s a well-known phenomenon
:
See Daniel Gilbert,
Stumbling on Happiness
(New York: Vintage, 2007). “Beatlemania took its toll,” Harrison has said; after a while the Beatles were “no longer on the buzz of fame and success.”

“Everybody saw the
effect
of”
:
The Beatles Anthology
, 354.

“After the gig, I remember”
:
The Beatles Anthology
, 227.

“That’s it. I’m no longer a Beatle”
:
As quoted in Miles,
The Beatles Diary
, 244.

They knew going in
:
Incidentally, the Stones also said that they sometimes could not even hear themselves play, but was that really true? A couple days after the first Shea concert, the Beatles played a show in Toronto in front of 35,000. Afterward, George complained that he and John had been out of tune, but they were helpless to do anything about it. “When you get on stage,” he lamented, “there’s such tremendous noise” that any attempt to adjust the pitch of his strings would only make things worse. “I’ve been seriously thinking of getting Keith Richard on tour to tune up all of us,” he quipped. “He sounds as if he’s in tune.” Furthermore, when the Beatles talked about how their fans drowned out their music, they often seemed dejected—as if to say, “What a bummer! As a result, we can’t play to the best of our ability.” When the Stones said that screaming fans overpowered their music, however, it often sounded like they might be boasting.

“They were four musicians”
:
George Martin,
All You Need is Ears: Inside the Personal Story of the Genius Who Created the Beatles
(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994), 132.

“[Paul] would say”
:
As quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght,
An Oral History
, 192.

“As I could see their talent”
:
Martin,
All You Need Is Ears
, 167.

“You don’t know us if”
:
As quoted in Michael Lydon,
Flashbacks: Eyewitness Accounts of the Rock Revolution, 1964–1974
(New York: Routledge, 2003), 12.

“plastic soul”
:
Paul can be heard using the phrase on the compilation album
The Beatles Anthology 2
, after the first take of “I’m Down,” which they recorded on July 14, 1965, and was probably inspired by Little Richard. “Plastic soul, man, plastic soul,” he says. The Beatles had been kicking around different ideas for the title, and then settled on it after their photographer, Robert Freeman, inadvertently created an elastic effect on one of their photos as he projected it onto a 12" x 12" piece of cardboard.

and it was never that complicated
:
In “I Feel Fine,” however, the narrator is exuberant about how he can make
her
feel. “She’s so glad, she’s telling all the world.” Another song, “It Won’t Be Long” also has an unlikely inversion (coming from a male narrator). They sing “It won’t be long,
till I belong to you
.” The Stones would have said, “till you belong to me.”

Presumably, she’s not offering
:
It is doubtful whether the Beatles were familiar with Robert Johnson’s 1936 song “Terraplane Blues,” in which a Terraplane (a model of car made by the Hudson Motor Company) is a metaphor for a woman’s body. (The Stones knew it, however.) Regardless, the two songs had different spirits: the Beatles’ sentiments were mirthful, and Johnson’s were ugly. But the Beatles may well have known Chuck Berry’s 1965 single, “I Want to Be Your Driver.” (“I would love to ride you,” he sings mischievously, “I would love to ride you . . . a-round.”)

“the pot album”
:
As quoted in Norman,
John Lennon
, 432.

“laughed out of the”
:
Richards,
Life
, 143, 172.

“a song with brick walls”
:
As quoted in Spitz,
Jagger
, 66.

“Because we’d have had”
:
As quoted in Keith Altham, “The Rolling Stones: Neurotic Bird Song,”
NME
(February 11, 1966).

“This is actually a child’s”
:
Oldham,
2Stoned
, 224.

“Everything in the Rolling Stones’ ”
:
As quoted in Wyman,
Stone Alone
, 352.

“Brian played the sitar”
:
As quoted in Nigel Goodall,
Jump Up: The Rise of the Rolling Stones
(London: Castle, 2011), 41.

“It means paint it black”
:
As quoted in Caroline Silver,
The Pop Makers
(New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1966), 117.

“a big landmark”
:
As quoted in Davis,
Old Gods
, 163.