Beatles vs. Stones (2 page)

Before long, however, the Beatles began to feel stifled by their cuddly, mop-top image, and they envied the Stones for their relative freedom of movement. The Beatles may also have been rankled as the Stones gained greater credibility with the “right” types of fans: discerning bohemians, as opposed to hysterical teenyboppers. Of all the Beatles, John Lennon especially hated to have to stifle his personality the way he often did. Later, he would be annoyed by the way that underground newspapers portrayed the Stones as left-wing political heroes, while the Beatles were associated with the hippies’ soft idealism.

The Beatles and the Stones also represent two sides of one of the twentieth century’s greatest aesthetic debates. To this day, when people want to get to know each other better, they often ask: “Beatles or Stones?” A preference for one group over the other is thought to reveal something substantial about one’s personality, judgment, or temperament. The clichés about the two groups are sometimes overdrawn, but they still retain a measure of plausibility. With some qualifications, the Beatles may be described as Apollonian, the Stones as Dionysian; the Beatles pop, the Stones rock; the Beatles erudite, the Stones visceral; the Beatles utopian, the Stones realistic.

None of the other famous dueling paradigms—say, in literature, painting, or architecture—tend to draw people into conversation like the Beatles and the Stones. How could they? The Beatles and Stones
were popular artists of unprecedented magnitude; their worldwide record sales are by now uncountable.

Obviously the two groups shared a great deal in common; so too did their fans. Had he lived long enough, Sigmund Freud—that master of unmasking human motivations—might have understood the Beatles-Stones debate in terms of
“the narcissism of small differences.” “It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of hostility between them,” Freud wrote. Nevertheless, it is
the opposing qualities of the Beatles and the Stones—which are widely known and well understood—that make comparison irresistible. Chances are, if you’re reading this book, you already have an informed opinion about which group was better.

Moi-même
, I don’t try to adjudicate the question here. Many others have already done so and anyhow, I’m not a rock critic; I’m an historian. In this joint biography, I’ve merely juxtaposed the Beatles and the Stones, examined their interrelations, and shown how their rivalry was constructed. That is not to say that I don’t hold a preference for one group over the other (of course I do), but rather that it is outside the purview of this book.

Besides, when rational criticism prevails,
both
groups are lauded. When they were in their prime, the Beatles and the Stones were
both
irreducibly great. Is that to repeat a dogma? Sure. But that doesn’t make what they accomplished any less remarkable. Somehow, the young men who made up the Beatles and the Stones managed not only to find each other, but also to burnish their talents collectively. Both groups melded and alchemized into huge creative forces that were substantially greater than the sum of their collective parts. They came of age during one of the most fertile and exciting periods in the history of popular music, and they exerted a commanding presence.

That, anyhow, is my own view. And I know I’m not alone. Marianne Faithfull, who dated Mick Jagger in the late ’60s, recalled the evening that I mentioned earlier, when members of the Beatles and
the Stones turned up at that trendy nightclub and showed off their latest creations for all their friends:
Beggars Banquet
, and “Hey Jude” and “Revolution.”
“Vesuvio closed a couple of weeks later,” Marianne said, “but the feeling in the room that night was: aren’t we all the greatest bunch of young geniuses to grace the planet and isn’t this the most amazing time to be alive? And I don’t think it was just the drugs.”

CHAPTER ONE

GENTLEMEN OR THUGS?

If you wanted to measure
the distance between what the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were
really
like, before they became famous, versus the heavily mediated, highly stylized images they projected to their fans, you might seek the perspective of someone who not only knew both groups, but who also knew exactly what they were up to when they went about crafting their public personas. That person would be Sean O’Mahony, a successful London-based publisher who frequently wrote under the
nom de guerre
“Johnny Dean.” In August 1963, O’Mahony began putting out
The Beatles Monthly Book
, the group’s fan magazine (usually known simply as
The Beatles Book
).
By December, he was selling about 330,000
Beatles Book
s each month. Then in June 1964, he launched the similarly minded
Rolling Stones Book
.

These were both official fan magazines, and naturally, before O’Mahony was awarded the rights to publish them, he had to win each group’s trust and affection.

He met the Beatles for the first time in May 1963, when they appeared at London’s Playhouse Theatre to record some songs for the influential BBC radio program
Saturday Club
. “As soon as I shook hands with John, Paul, George, and Ringo, I realized this wasn’t going to be one of their jokey encounters with the press,” O’Mahony recollected.
Instead, the group peppered him with questions and suggestions. “Editing their magazine meant that they would have to admit someone new to their inner circle,” he explained, “and put up with me in their dressing rooms, recording studios, homes—in fact, virtually everywhere they went.”
Since O’Mahony was already acquainted with the Rolling Stones’ managers—Andrew Loog Oldham and Eric Easton—the sussing out process would not have been as formal, but presumably he had to reassure them as well.

Though the Beatles and the Rolling Stones regularly appeared in all of the British music periodicals (
Melody Maker, Record Mirror, New Musical Express, Disc, Music Echo
) as well the nation’s teenage pop magazines (
Boyfriend, Jackie, Fabulous, Rave, Valentine
), O’Mahony operated from a special vantage: awarded the sole and exclusive rights to publish their profit-oriented fan magazines, he became thickly intertwined in a socio-professional relationship with Epstein, Oldham and Easton, and the groups they managed. Whatever O’Mahony’s private knowledge or feelings, his acquiescence was complete.
In 1964, when journalist Michael Braun released his book
Love Me Do!—
a gossipy account of his travels with the Beatles during the first flush of Beatlemania, which rather contradicted the group’s “squeaky clean” image—its publication was not even mentioned in
The Beatles Book
. Nor was O’Mahony eager to reveal that John Lennon was married, since Epstein feared that that knowledge would adversely affect the band’s popularity with teenage girls.
When publishing photos of the Beatles, O’Mahony often turned to retouch artists who would fix any splotches or blemishes on their faces, thereby making sure they were “the sort of pictures Brian wanted fans to see.”

In other words, O’Mahony in this period closely resembled a Madison Avenue flack. Whatever inside information he had, he would never have wanted to print anything truly revelatory about John or Paul, or Mick or Keith or Brian. Instead, his magazines were merely platforms; they were meant to promote the Beatles and the Rolling Stones’ carefully considered “brands” meticulously.

Many years later, though, when he had no need to belie his true feelings, he summed up the two groups this way: “The Beatles were thugs who were put across as nice blokes, and the Rolling Stones were gentlemen who were made into thugs by Andrew.” Like many summations, this one may be a little too neat. But it’s much closer to the truth than either band would like to have admitted during most of the 1960s.

•  •  •

“Thuggery” is of course a moral category, not a socioeconomic one, but much has been made of the fact that, however sunny their dispositions, the Beatles emerged from dreary old Liverpool, a declining industrial seaport that was pummeled by the German
Luftwaffe
during World War Two. Diversely populated, but largely consisting of the descendants of Irish refugees, Liverpool’s hub teemed with roughhewn seamen and grimy pubs, and was almost completely lacking in refinement. Owing to some measure of pride, obstinacy, and self-deprecation, many Liverpudlians self-identified as “Scousers,” but elsewhere in England, the term was applied purely with derision. By contrast, the Stones came from the outskirts of London. Though hardly affluent, on the whole they grew up a bit more comfortably than the Beatles, and in Britain’s class-riven society, the distinction mattered enormously.
“We were the ones that were looked down upon as animals by the Southerners, the Londoners,” John Lennon remembered.

Given the scarcity and hardship that afflicted all of England in the immediate postwar period (to say nothing of the difficulties of drawing class distinctions), it is important to put the differences between the Beatles’ and the Stones’ backgrounds in careful perspective. A good treatment of the Beatles’ origins can be found in Steven D. Stark’s
Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of the Band that Shook Youth, Gender, and the World.
Yes, Stark points out, the Beatles came from downtrodden Liverpool, but John, Paul, and George all resided in the city’s leafy suburban districts, on the “good side” of the Mersey River. (
Only
Ringo came from central Liverpool; he was born in a ramshackle row house in a notorious neighborhood called the Dingle.) Lennon was the sole Beatle who was fortunate enough to grow up in a home with indoor plumbing, but that is not quite as remarkable as it might seem, since fewer than half of British homes had indoor toilets in that period. And while Paul and George were both raised half a mile apart in state-subsidized “council houses,” their quarters carried none of the stigma attached to American-style housing projects.
Their homes got very cold in the winter, but they still compared favorably to the lodgings of many working-class families at that time.

Many years later, George’s older sister, Louise, quibbled with the perception that their family was so rough-and-tumble poor.
“My father drove a bus, and Mom looked after us at home,” she said. “Occasionally she would take a job at about Christmas time . . . but we never thought of ourselves as poor or anything. Afterward you read these stories about The Beatles growing up in slums and all this kind of stuff. . . . [But] we had a good, warm, friendly family life.” And in one of his final interviews, Lennon stressed that his childhood hardly resembled
“the poor slummy kind of image that was projected in all the Beatles’ stories.”

Naturally, when the Beatles were growing up, they all endured the UK’s rationing of food and petrol. Fresh eggs, fresh milk, and juice were hard to come by. All four Beatles would have walked and played amidst bombed-out buildings and charred rubble left over from the war. The dazzling array of consumer goods and leisure opportunities that so many American teens enjoyed during the booming 1950s would have been completely foreign to them.
But by the standards of their day, only Ringo—who in addition to being poor, was afflicted by two major childhood illnesses—suffered real deprivation.

Growing up, the Rolling Stones were also familiar with rationing and wartime rubble, but they were better off than the Beatles. Brian Jones, the group’s charismatic founder and early leader, came from an upper-middle-class home in Cheltenham; his father was an aerospace
engineer and church leader. Mick Jagger was from Dartford, Kent; his well-educated father was an assistant schoolmaster and college phys ed instructor, and his mother was a hairdresser (an occupation that carries a bit more prestige in England than in the States).
According to the Stones’ official 1965 biography, Jagger was raised in a climate of “middle-class ‘gentility.’ ” His three-bedroom childhood home had a name (Newlands), and when he was young his family vacationed in Spain and St. Tropez. Keith Richards likewise came from Dartford. After briefly attending the same primary school as Jagger, his parents migrated to a drab, cheaply built council estate, but they never gave up their middle-class aspirations. In response, Richards cultivated what he later described as “an inverted snobbery.”
“One was proud to come from the lowest part of town—and play the guitar too,” he boasted. “Grammar school people were considered pansies, twerps.” Only the Stones’ two peripheral members, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, were solidly working class: Bill’s dad was a bricklayer, and Charlie’s drove a truck. But in spite of England’s strict class hierarchy, whereby sons typically marched lock-step into the same types of professions as their fathers, both young men could afford to be fairly optimistic about their prospects by the time they joined the Stones: Watts was working as a graphic designer, and Wyman held a department store job while playing bass semiprofessionally.

Furthermore, the Stones came from Southern England, and the Beatles from the North. Differences between the two regions were stark. Writing in 1845, Benjamin Disraeli described Northern and Southern England as
“Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy,” and a hundred odd years later, the situation had hardly changed.
“To Londoners,” Steven Stark writes, “Liverpool seemed almost like the frontier—impertinent, emotional, and a lot less important than the capital city, which was considered the center of almost everything the establishment considered English.” Liverpool actually may have had a more robust music scene than London, but as fledgling musicians with thick Scouse accents, the Beatles knew
the odds were stacked against them.
“With us being from Liverpool,” Harrison remembered, “people would always say, ‘You’ve got to be from London to make it.’ They thought we were hicks or something.”

George was correct: initially, the Beatles were seriously disadvantaged by their origins (maybe even more than they realized). Certainly Decca executive Dick Rowe—aka “The Man Who Turned Down the Beatles”—had Liverpool on his mind after he heard the group’s audition tape in early 1962. It’s not that he thought the Beatles were
bad
, but with limited resources, his company had to make a choice: they could sign the Beatles, or they could go with Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. Many years later he explained that his unfortunate decision had rested, at least in part, upon the fact that Brian Poole was from London. That meant that his staff
“could spend night and day with Brian at no cost to the company, whereas Liverpool is a long way away. You’ve got to get a [steam-powered] train. You’ve got a hotel bill to pay. You don’t know how long you’re going to be up there. And London is so very strange about the north of England. There’s sort of an expression that if you live in London, you really don’t know anywhere north of Watford. So, you see, Liverpool could have been Greenland to us then.” Mick Jagger’s old flame Marianne Faithfull likewise confessed that geographic prejudice against the Beatles was rampant among her charmed circle of friends.
“We looked at them as being very provincial, very straight, sort of a little behind the London people,” she said. Only later did she conclude that that attitude was “very patronizing and not really true.”