Beatles vs. Stones (14 page)

“Somebody said to me, ‘But the Beatles were antimaterialistic,’ ” McCartney later remarked. “That’s a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now, let’s write a swimming pool.’ ” In a 1965 interview with
Playboy
, McCartney summarized his feelings thusly:
“We’d be idiots to say that it isn’t a constant inspiration to be making a lot of money.”

Nor is it surprising that the Beatles should have been so giddy about all of the loot they were raking in. After all, they had been born into modest circumstances, and they came of age in a rigidly segmented and class-conscious society. And yet while they were still very young, the four Liverpool scruffs suddenly began accumulating fortunes rivaling those of politicians, captains of industry, and heirs and heiresses—the very types of people who, in any other circumstance, would surely have snubbed them. Meanwhile, just about everyone kept reminding the Beatles that they were but a fad. (An extraordinary fad, to be sure, but one that would soon wither and die.) As a result, the Beatles resolved to work feverishly, attempting to earn as much as possible before their narrow window of opportunity was completely shut. And that meant churning out pleasant and appealing pop songs that appealed to their market, which—though it was large and varied—mainly consisted of teenage girls.

That was the sticking point with so many hip Londoners in the early ’60s. Whereas they admired the Stones for dealing frankly with
sex, lust, angst, consumerism, depression, and suburbia, the Beatles had reined in their bohemianism. They respected propriety because to do otherwise would run counter to their goal at the time, which was to cash in on their unique ability to elicit a hormonal response from young teenage girls. No one in this era referred to Stones fans as rockists, but that was roughly their perspective. They felt that in seeking to appeal primarily to little girls, the Beatles had set the bar awfully low.

Even back then, however, careful observers might have discerned that the Beatles had more far-reaching ambitions than they were being given credit for. First, there was the moody, black-and-white Robert Freeman photo they used on the cover of their second album,
With the Beatles
, which was inspired by the artsy shots that Astrid Kirchherr and Jürgen Vollmer took of them in Hamburg. Clad in black turtlenecks and staring impassively into the camera, the Beatles looked like common beatniks, the types of subterranean youths who clustered together for poetry readings and jazz nights at Greenwich Village coffeehouses. EMI absolutely loathed the photo—why weren’t the Beatles grinning?!—and Epstein begged them to agree to something more in keeping with their happy-go-lucky image. They would not.

Then on November 4, 1963, the Beatles played a four-song set at the Royal Variety Show, which was nationally televised. The Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, and Lord Snowdon were all in attendance. As the Beatles prepared to launch into their final number, “Twist and Shout,” Lennon famously asked for the audience’s help: “Will the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewelry.” Had Lennon gone ahead with the line he’d privately threatened to deliver (“rattle your
fucking
jewelry”), he would have derailed the Beatles’ career. As it happened, he brought down the house. It was a cheeky reminder that the Beatles always knew there was something incongruous about the way they were embraced by the establishment.

Eight months later, in July 1964, the Beatles released
A Hard Day’s Night
. The soundtrack to Richard Lester’s loony comedy film hinted
at the Beatles’ quickly evolving creativity. It was their first album to contain only original material, and more than anything they’d done so far, it demonstrated the Beatles’ oft-remarked ability to make popular music that on the one hand seemed safe and familiar, and on the other hand, was daring and inventive. (
It would take more than forty years, and a mathematician, to even definitively figure out how they played the opening chord—
“Chaaaaaang!”
—on the title track.) Meanwhile, their film, with its pseudo-documentary style, subtle satire, allusive references, and intelligent repartee, was almost universally regarded as being several cuts above the types of banal, pop exploitation pics that preceded it. Even professional movie critics, who expected
A Hard Day’s Night
to be terrible, wound up loving it.
“This is going to surprise you—it may knock you right off your chair—but the film . . . is a whale of a comedy,” said the
New York Times
. The
New York Journal-American
compared it to the Marx Brothers’ comedies of the 1930s. A
Village Voice
writer called it
“the
Citizen Kane
of jukebox musicals.”

Around the same time, John Lennon published his first book,
In His Own Write
, a slim, elegantly designed hardcover collection of surreal short stories, line drawings, and nonsense verse. Lennon had been dashing off that kind of stuff going all the way back to high school, mostly for his own amusement, and he downplayed the idea that his book would reward careful critical analysis. Nevertheless, it promptly drew comparisons to the works of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, James Thurber, Mark Twain, and James Joyce. Reviewing
In His Own Write
for
Book World
, Tom Wolfe called Lennon
“a genius of the lower crust.” Another writer, in the highbrow
Times Literary Supplement
, recommended Lennon’s collection to
“anyone who fears the impoverishment of the English language and the English imagination.”

All of this ought to have rendered ludicrous the rockist notion that the Beatles, because they desired the approval of teenyboppers, were therefore not to be taken so seriously. Then again, some of the group’s condescending critics might also have just paid more consideration to what the Beatles were actually saying—literally.

It was at a book launch party, celebrating the release of
In His Own Write
, that George Melly, the venerable jazz singer and music writer, buttonholed Lennon and started a conversation about the Beatles’ musical influences. One expects Lennon would have liked Melly. After all, they were both brazen and somewhat rakish characters, and they both hailed from Liverpool. Also, though Melly did not attend art school, he shared some of its enthusiasms, and he was donnishly smart about surrealism. Lennon might have been unnerved by Melly’s bisexuality, but he would have admired his hard-drinking insouciance.

Nevertheless, that particular meeting did not go well. “During the course of the party,” Melly remembered, “I suggested that despite his fame and money, [Lennon] was surely prepared to own up that not only did he owe a considerable debt to such Negro blues singers as Muddy Waters, but that objectively they were greater artists.”

Was that a bold statement? At that time, the Beatles had released three impressive albums and six singles—about two hours of music in total. And yet Lennon bristled at the notion that the Beatles weren’t any better than the American blues singers currently in vogue. In fact, it seems he had by then become seriously annoyed at the way so many young Brits were sacralizing the blues.

“He turned on me with sublime arrogance,” Melly remembered. “He’d admit no such thing. Not only was he richer but better too. More original and better.” Better than Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed—the whole damn lot of them. “We almost came to rather drunken blows.”

•  •  •

It can be bracing to recall that the first group that threatened to dislodge the Beatles from the top of the hit parade wasn’t the Rolling Stones, but rather, another London-based group. Styled in tweed jackets, high-heeled boots, and choke-collared shirts, the Dave Clark Five didn’t look or sound all that different from many of the Northern beat groups. Nevertheless, some claimed that they represented a new, commercial
vanguard—the “Tottenham Sound”—which was poised to finally steal the spotlight from the flourishing scene that Brian Epstein was presiding over in Liverpool. In January 1964, the Dave Clark Five’s hit “Glad All Over” knocked “I Want to Hold Your Hand” from the number 1 position on the UK charts, leading the
Daily Express
to proclaim in a headline, “Tottenham Sound Has Crushed the Beatles.” Considering that “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had already occupied the top spot for two whole months, and could already be found in an estimated 25 percent of phonograph-owning households in England, it was a bit of hyperbole—but it still fueled speculation that the Beatles were on the way out.

“Cartoonists had a field day,” reported Michael Braun. “Cruelest of all was an Elmwood cartoon in the
Daily Mail
: standing outside a theater where the Dave Clark Five are performing, a group of young girls are pointing at another girl of about sixteen. ‘She must be really old,’ they are saying; ‘she remembers the Beatles.’ ”

Publicly, the Beatles never appeared the least bit bothered, but privately, they were concerned.
“We couldn’t help it,” Lennon later admitted. “Everyone was telling us, ‘Dave Clark is coming, you’ve had it now.’ It worried us, but just for a minute, the way we’d worried in Liverpool that Gerry [and the Pacemakers] would beat us in the
Mersey Beat
poll.”

Later in 1964, however, they started fielding questions about a different group. In 1964, the Beatles cut off a journalist who began to ask, “Are you concerned about a poll in Britain which indicated that a group called the Rolling Stones—”

“There’s
many
polls,” Ringo snapped. “They just won one of them.”

An exchange with a female reporter at a Jacksonville, Florida, press conference went this way:

REPORTER:
Are you worried about rumors going around that the Rolling Stones are now more important than the Beatles?

RINGO:
Is it
worrying
us?

JOHN:
[turning toward Paul, taking the piss] “Is it worrying us,” she said! No.

GEORGE:
Not at all.

PAUL:
It doesn’t worry us, ’cuz you get . . .

JOHN:
[interrupting] We manage our grief.

PAUL:
[giggles] You get these rumors every so often, you know. I mean . . .

GEORGE:
[dings his teacup with a spoon] Dave Clark!

PAUL:
Dave Clark was [supposed to be] bigger than us a couple months ago.

JOHN:
Blind fool.

GEORGE:
Every two months we hear of ’em taking over.

Still, the Stones had by then garnered a large amount of media attention, in which they were reliably portrayed as noisy upstarts who faithfully reflected the concerns of disgruntled teenagers. An early and paradigmatic article of this type, headlined “Rebels with a Beat,” appeared in the February 18, 1964, issue of
Melody Maker.
Ray Coleman began his profile of the Stones by describing an exchange he’d had with a forty-two-year-old London cabbie who had picked him up in Mayfair.

“Was that the Rolling Stones you just left?” the driver asked him.

“Yes. What do you think of them?”

“A bunch of right ’erberts!” he replied. (“Herbert” being mildly abusive slang for scruffy, working-class youths.) “ ’Ere, aren’t they the boys they say are trying to knock the Beatles off the top?”

Coleman remembered thinking at that moment that if he’d been a talent agent or a record executive, “[He] would probably have signed that taxi driver immediately as [his] trends advisor. The Rolling Stones might have had other ideas, like punching him on the nose. Because they deeply resent any suggestion that they are attempting to overtake the Beatles. Yet if the Beatles are to be knocked off from their perch in
the future, by a British group, the popular notion is that the Rolling Stones could easily be their successors.”

The reason, Coleman continued, had a great deal to do with their image, which he said was “perfect.” He described the Stones as “five disheveled rebels who have already made a firm imprint on the hit parade, who have gained a huge following among young people, who never wear stage uniforms, and who JUST DON’T CARE.”

“There are even rumblings inside show business of a swing against the Beatles in favor of the Rolling Stones,” Coleman added. As evidence he cited a letter that an “alert writer” had sent to
Melody Maker
. “She asserted that young pop fans instinctively turn against an idol whom their parents endorse, like the Beatles. Fans actually enjoy hearing their elders spurning their worship of their heroes. That way, there is an outlet for their emotional involvement.”

When Coleman sat down with the Stones, and asked them if they were jealous of the Beatles’ success, Jagger reflexively answered “Yes
!” while the rest of the group said “No!” A bit later in the interview, though, Wyman boasted that in some circles, the Stones were being touted as London’s answer to the Beatles. That prompted an interjection from Jagger: “Whatever you do, don’t write that article saying we’re knocking the Beatles,” he said. “They’re good mates of ours. We like ’em and they’ve done much good for the whole scene, see?”

Coleman was also behind the “Boiling Beatles Blast Copycats” story mentioned in chapter 2, as well as the infamous “Would You Let Your Sister Go with a Rolling Stone?” headline. He did not, however, fancy himself as the type of lowbrow hack who was always trying to stoke controversies. Privately, he had middlebrow tastes (jazz, chess), and by the time he joined
Melody Maker
in 1960, at around age twenty-three, he had already worked in the newspaper trade for eight years, having started out as a copy boy for the
Leicester Evening Mail
. At
Melody Maker
he hoped that by taking a serious approach to his trade, he could help vitalize the public discussion about pop music.