Beatles vs. Stones (19 page)

Still, it was thrilling to spend two days working in the legendary studio where Muddy Waters recorded “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” and Howlin’ Wolf made “Moanin’ at Midnight”—the edifice of rock ’n’ roll. In addition to reveling in the atmosphere, the Stones were wowed by the studio’s technicians, who were so much more adept than their British counterparts. During their first session, Willie Dixon turned up and tried to hustle some of his songs. Buddy Guy came around, too, curious to know what a bunch of skinny young Brits were doing in such a tough neighborhood. The next day Muddy came by (this was the origin of the painting myth). So too did Chuck Berry, who—though he was not a friendly man—nevertheless peeked his head into the studio to say, “Swing on, gentlemen!”

And why shouldn’t he have been encouraging? The Stones impressed these blues and R&B pioneers. They dug the band’s vibrant, earthy sound, and if they were feeling magnanimous, they might also have been gratified to see these five white kids from England expressing such fanatical reverence for what was once marginalized as “race music.” Besides, people like Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon stood to make a good bit of money from the Stones.

The various highs on their US sojourn, however, were balanced out by low moments. An interview with a Chicago radio personality,
Jack Eigen, proved reminiscent of the Dean Martin debacle. Irritated by the host’s pesky questions, the Stones were less than loquacious, and after they left the studio, Eigen took revenge by implying that they all had lice. A hastily organized show in Minneapolis produced a crowd of only about four hundred. Before another show, Keith says he stared down the barrel of a revolver for the first time: a macho cop had pulled it out after he’d refused to tip out the contents of his plastic cup while in a public area. Another night they played the Detroit Olympia (“The Old Red Barn”), the beloved home of the Red Wings hockey team. That would have been a huge thrill if the stadium had been full, but only about a thousand people showed up—less than 10 percent of its capacity.

No wonder the Stones were so relieved to get back to New York City. Their final two shows, on June 20, 1964, had a different flavor than most of the others. First, they were held at Carnegie Hall, arguably the world’s most prestigious music venue. That was no coincidence:
the Beatles made headlines when they played there too, on their first American tour. Now just four months later, the controversial Stones were bringing their raucous act to same illustrious stage. Also, those last two shows on tour were barnburners. Fans surged up front and jammed themselves in front of the stage; others stood on their seats, screaming. Taken by surprise, the police first called for reinforcements, and then they made the Stones cut their second set short for fear of a riot.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” said Brian. “It’s marvelous, but it scares me a bit at the same time.”

It was an upbeat ending to a schizophrenic tour. On the one hand, the five Yankophiles all came back with some good stories. While in Texas, Bill reveled in the low-down allure of some authentic juke joints he found, while Charlie and road manager Ian Stewart bought pistols and roamed the countryside looking for rattlesnakes to shoot. Keith got a gun, too, and when he got back to England he told an amazed journalist,
“You can buy them as easily as you can buy candy floss.” In Detroit, Mick and Brian hung out with boxing
manager Jackie Kallen, tooling around Belle Isle in her ’64 Mustang convertible and taking turns driving “on the wrong side of the road.” They loved soaking in the California sunshine, and they all returned with stacks of new records. That first American tour also saved them from complacency. They had to work to win over their American audiences, and later they agreed that it made them an even sharper band.

And yet when it was all said and done, they were unhappy about how they had fared in America. It didn’t help that back home, London tabloids had gleefully kept everyone abreast concerning the indignities the Stones faced. A dispatch filed for the
Daily Mirror
said “Britain’s Rolling Stones got ‘the bird’ when they appeared at a show in San Antonio, Texas, last night.” The report went on to explain that although local acts drew cheers and applause, and even the trained monkeys were brought back to the stage for an encore, the Stones “were booed.” Sometimes, other men taunted the Stones with wolf-whistles.
A girl was quoted asking if they also wore lipstick and carried purses, like transvestites.

Some thought that after their big success at Carnegie, the Stones should have extended their stay in New York. Oldham claimed that was impossible; they had to fly back to Heathrow in order to honor a contract they had made the previous year, when they were only semi-famous, to appear at Magdalen College, Oxford, for a mere £100. And they did do that gig (sullenly). But the more prosaic truth was that they were flat broke.
“Oldham could not afford to keep them, or himself, in New York a minute longer.”

Even journalist Peter Jones, now the band’s official scribe, didn’t bother trying to put much of a positive gloss on the tour when he wrote about it for the
Rolling Stones Book
. Instead, he wondered whether the Stones were a good fit for America. It had taken “guts” for the band to crisscross the US before they even had a hit record there, he pointed out, yet the results were mixed. They had done well in New York and Southern California, but elsewhere they elicited derisive, sniggering laughter. About all they could do was use the experience
to try to shore up their identity as hip Londoners. The Stones were “not interested in the funny faces, red noses and all the guff that goes with the ordinary variety,” Jones said. “But one thing will always be true. The Stones are
our
boys,
our
group.
Essentially British—and thoroughly loved by hundreds of thousands who accept them for what they are.”

•  •  •

It would only be about a year before “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” would become an international juggernaut, at which point the Stones began enjoying the success that at first eluded them in America. Ironically, during the same period that the Stones were fast rising, the Beatles began experiencing the downside to being so popular.

Recent findings in social psychology can help us understand how a group of young men with such stupendous good fortune as the Beatles could nevertheless be miserable a lot of the time. Part of the problem was that, like most humans, they weren’t very good at predicting what would make them happy in the first place. Surely they were euphoric when their career started taking off. (Joan Baez tells a charming story about meeting the Beatles relatively early in their career.
“They had discovered that the Coke machine in their sitting room in the hotel was
free
. They were thrilled!”) Naturally, every time they reached a new milestone—when they first heard themselves on the radio, when they had the first number one hit, when they played
Sunday Night at the Palladium
, and so on—they beamed with justified pride.

It was not long, however, before Beatlemania became the omnipresent, all-consuming force in their lives. They lived it every day, and so it started to seem almost normal, at which point they went back to experiencing the world within the same baseline levels of satisfaction and dissatisfaction they had always been accustomed to.
It’s a well-known phenomenon.

Additionally, the Beatles were now burdened with such tremendous pressure. Everyone wanted or expected something from them—an
interview, an autograph, a photo, a chance to be seen with them or to bend their ear. Music industry bigwigs were always clamoring for a new record, a new film, another tour—and their schedule hardly ever let up. From about June 1962 until August 1966, they only had one extended vacation.
“Everybody saw the
effect
of the Beatles, but nobody really ever worried about us as individuals, or thought, ‘I wonder how the boys are coping with it all?’ ” George Harrison later lamented. “It was a very one-sided love affair. The people gave their money and they gave their screams, but the Beatles gave their nervous systems, which is a much more difficult thing to give.”

The touring hassles the Beatles faced are well known. Their most agonizing stretch came in the summer of 1966. In July, while in Manila, the Beatles politely declined an invitation to a ritzy reception that the president’s wife, Imelda Marcos, had arranged to be held in their honor at the presidential palace. Had they better understood the political culture there, they would not have made such a foolish mistake. Marcos took revenge first by withdrawing security protection for the group, and then by having her gun-toting security goons intimidate and rough up the Beatles. Officials confiscated the Beatles’ earnings from their two concerts there (attended by 80,000), and when the group finally got out of Manila, they felt as if they were fleeing for the lives.

Later that month, Lennon’s infamous remark that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” provoked the wrath of religious zealots in the American South. When the quotation first appeared in a London newspaper in March 1966, Englanders scarcely seemed to notice. But when it was reprinted in the American teen magazine
Datebook
, it led to a frenzy of recriminations. Radio stations sponsored the mass burning of Beatles records, the Ku Klux Klan organized anti-Beatles protests, and death threats poured in to the Beatles’ London headquarters. The group was nearly forced to cancel its tour at the tune of $1 million. At a show in Memphis, someone chucked a lit firecracker onto the stage, which the Beatles momentarily mistook for a gunshot.
Others threw debris and rotten fruit that splattered on the stage at their feet.

Another cause of worry, less often mentioned, was the threat that bad weather posed when they were scheduled to perform outdoors. After the Memphis disaster, the Beatles were meant to play in Cincinnati, but a heavy downpour earlier in the day had made it risky; the stage was still so soaking wet that the Beatles could have been electrocuted. Yet they feared that if they did not play, a riot might break out. They ended up postponing the gig until early the next afternoon. Then just as soon as they were done, they packed up their gear and flew 350 miles to St. Louis, where they encountered still more rain. This time, the group soldiered on and played beneath a flimsy tarpaulin.
“After the gig, I remember us getting into a big, empty, steel-lined wagon, like a removal van,” McCartney said. “There was no furniture in there—nothing. We were sliding around trying to hold onto something, and at that moment everyone said ‘Oh, this bloody touring lark—I’ve had it up to here, man.’

“I finally agreed. I’d been trying to say, ‘Ah, touring’s good and it keeps us sharp. We need touring, and musicians need to play. Keep music live.’ I had held on to that attitude when there were doubts, but finally I agreed with them.”

When the Beatles played San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966, no one knew for sure that that would be their last-ever regular concert. But the Beatles surmised as much. McCartney asked press officer Tony Barrow to record the show for posterity, and in between songs, the Beatles took pictures of themselves with time-set cameras that they’d placed on their amplifiers. Flying out of town to Los Angeles, en route to London, Harrison told the others,
“That’s it. I’m no longer a Beatle.”

In the ensuing years, whenever they were asked why they gave up touring, the Beatles usually gave the same answer: it was too stressful. The implication has always been that if going on the road had not become such an excruciating, moiling farce, they would have liked to
continue. To get an idea of how seriously they took their craft, you need only to see a short clip from the
Beatles at Shea Stadium
, which shows Paul and George backstage before the big show, warming up their fingers with fretboard exercises, just like any professional musician would. But to what end?
They knew going in that the audience’s high-decibel screaming was going to overwhelm their every note.

At the same time that touring was becoming nearly unbearable, the Beatles were increasingly finding satisfaction in Abbey Road Studios. For roughly the first three years of the Beatles’ recording career, producer George Martin said he felt a bit like a teacher with his pupils. The Beatles did whatever he asked of them, not because he was particularly officious, but because that’s just how things were done back then. Besides, the Beatles didn’t know anything about recording. Meanwhile, Martin did not attempt to make a big creative imprint upon their work.
“They were four musicians—three guitarists and a drummer—and my role was to make sure they made a concise, commercial statement,” he explained. “I would make sure that the song ran for approximately two and a half minutes, that it was in the right key for their voices, and that it was tidy, with the right proportion and form.” He did a terrific job, but many other salaried producers probably could have gotten a comparable result.

The relationship between the Beatles and Martin began changing, however, in the mid-1960s. Several of the tracks on
Help!
exemplified the group’s new audacity, and Paul McCartney’s most famous song, “Yesterday,” was clearly a bellwether. Paul said that one morning when he was just twenty-two years old, he awoke with the melody playing in his head. Still foggy from his previous night’s sleep, he sat down and worked out the chords on a nearby piano. It sounded lovely, perhaps even flawless, but for a long time he was reticent to do anything with it for fear that he’d subconsciously lifted it from somewhere else. Then when he finally decided otherwise and recorded it, in June 1965, he had a new concern: it didn’t sound like a Beatles song. There was
nothing for the rest of the group to do. As Paul strummed it on his guitar, however, it also seemed a bit spare.

Martin suggested they add a string quartet. That wasn’t quite a novel idea (a few other pop songs had featured strings), but it was still a daring one. At first, McCartney was leery of the suggestion, for fear that it might turn out schlocky, but Martin insisted that it could be scored in a restrained and tasteful manner. To further put young Paul at ease, Martin allowed him to oversee the whole arranging process.
“[Paul] would say, ‘Can we have cello doing this bit?’ And I’d say ‘Sure, why not?’ or ‘No, that’s out of their range.’ . . . So it was kind of a collaborative experience.” Paul was also in the studio when the overdub was recorded and mixed into mono. Later on the rest of the group heard it, and they all agreed it sounded fabulous.