Beatles vs. Stones (32 page)

John clicked the off button and turned again to look toward the table, his eyebrows quizzical above his round glasses, seemingly genuinely curious about what reaction his little tape would elicit.

However often they’d shared small rooms in Hamburg, whatever they knew of each other’s love and sex lives, this tape seemed to have stopped the other three cold. Perhaps it touched a reserve of residual Northern reticence.

After a palpable silence, Paul said, “Well, that’s an interesting one.”

When Lennon asked the others what they thought, it’s easy to imagine that his mannerisms might have been a bit contrived. Surely, he was dissembling. He wasn’t really interested in their feedback or their critique or their opinion. No, this was just his way of informing the rest of the group that he wasn’t interested in being a Beatle anymore.

•  •  •

When the Beatles broke up in 1970 they also nixed the tantalizing possibility that they might form some kind of an alliance with the Rolling Stones. However febrile the idea sounds in retrospect, it was once a live possibility.
“There was always a ‘movement’ wanting to put the Stones and the Beatles together in any way possible,” Wyman recollected. A couple months after Epstein died, McCartney and Jagger bruited about the idea of merging the two groups’ business interests. Mick even went so far as to have a lawyer register the name “Mother Earth” as a possible moniker for a jointly owned recording studio. Paul was known to muse about how cool it would be to have a heliport on top of their headquarters. A statement from the Beatles’ press office said,
“the prospect of some professional tie-up between the Beatles and Stones is very intriguing. What the boys are contemplating is a separate business project for opening up a joint talent center that will build up on other people’s talents, produce and distribute their records.”

In other words, they were talking about collaborating on something a bit like Apple’s record label. Left to their own devices, it’s impossible to know if the Beatles and the Stones would have followed through. But Klein was naturally quite horrified by the possibility of a merger, and on October 17, 1967, he ordered Les Perrin, the Stones’ PR guy, to throw a wet towel over the whole idea. McCartney and Jagger had only had “preparatory conversations of a purely exploratory nature,” Perrin’s statement said.
“These conversations have not been resolved and any assumption to the contrary should be considered
premature.” A few years later, however, the Stones went on to form their own label, Rolling Stones Records, headed by Marshall Chess and distributed in the US by Atlantic Records. Although the Stones never wound up signing many artists, at the outset they had wanted it to resemble the Apple label, only without all of the grandiosity, chaos, and attendant headaches.

On December 31, 1970, McCartney filed suit against the other three Beatles to dissolve their partnership. Along with almost everyone else, the Rolling Stones were disappointed by the news. No doubt that was partly because they would miss their extraordinary music. In a 1971 interview with
Rolling Stone
, Keith Richards expressed his gratitude toward the Beatles, as well as his dismay about their demise.
“When they went to America, they made it wide open for us,” he said. “We could never have gone there without them. [They were] so fucking good at what they did. If they’d kept it together and realized what they were doing, instead of . . . disintegrating like that in such a tatty way. It’s a shame.”

Then again, Mick and Keith might also have been disappointed that the Beatles parted ways at the very time that the Stones seemed poised to overtake them as the world’s most important band. For about a six-year span in the 1960s, when both groups were churning out records at roughly the same pace, the Beatles’ efforts were generally better appreciated. When the Stones released
Beggars Banquet
in 1968, however, they showed they were no longer using the Beatles as a template; instead, they were concentrating their energy in their strongest medium: blues-inflected rock. Then in 1969, the Stones showed even more improvement with
Let It Bleed
. The smartest critics said that
Let It Bleed
surpassed the Beatles’
Abbey Road.
Then in 1971, the Stones—now featuring wunderkind Mick Taylor on guitar (replacing Brian Jones)—put out
Sticky Fingers
, a thrilling and wide-ranging album with an Andy Warhol cover. The following year they left Mother England for southern France, where they lived an even more decadent and perilous lifestyle than ever before, and yet
somehow managed to record
Exile on Main St.
—perhaps the finest album of their brilliant career. Even if the Beatles had stayed together, some find it hard to imagine that their output in the very early 1970s would have matched what the Stones accomplished. Of course, we’ll never know.

It was in this period that some of the goodwill between the two groups seemed to evaporate. In 1969, Jagger declared,
“I don’t really like what the Beatles have done very much.”
The White Album
, he said, was “ordinary.” Jagger was also horrified that the Beatles had allowed their ceaseless bickering and internal power struggles to become press fodder, and he vowed his group would never devolve into such a tawdry spectacle. When a reporter asked Mick if the Stones would ever break up, he answered,
“Nah. But if we did, we wouldn’t be so bitchy about it.

“. . . We’ll remain a functioning group, a touring group, a
happy
group.”

Lennon shot back in a famously cranky interview with
Rolling Stone
’s Jann Wenner. “I was always very respectful about Mick and the Stones, but he said a lot of tarty things about the Beatles, which I am hurt by, because you know, I can knock the Beatles, but don’t let Mick Jagger knock them.”

But his complaints against Mick ran much deeper than just that: “I would like to just list what we did and what the Stones did two months after, on every
fuckin’
album and every
fuckin’
thing we did, Mick does exactly the same. He imitates us. And I would like one of you underground people [sic] to point it out, you know,
Satanic Majesties
is
Pepper
, ‘We Love You’—it’s the most fuckin’ bullshit—that’s ‘All You Need Is Love.’

“I resent the implication that the Stones are like revolutionaries and the Beatles weren’t,” Lennon continued. “They’re not in the same class, music-wise or power-wise. Never were. And Mick always resented it. I never said anything. I always admired them because I like
their funky music and I like their style. I like rock and roll and the direction they took after they got over trying to imitate us.”

Lennon still was not through:
“[Mick] is obviously
so
upset by how big the Beatles are compared to him; he never got over it. Now he’s in his old age [he was twenty-seven] and he is beginning to knock us, you know. And he keeps knocking. I resent it, because even his second fuckin’ record [‘I Wanna Be Your Man’], we wrote it for him.”

In a rarely seen interview, filmed sometime in the mid-’70s when Keith Richards was etiolated from heroin, someone asked the Stones’ guitarist for a response to Lennon’s outburst. Richards didn’t hold back.

“I think John’s, uh, John’s just a little bitter, you know? Always has been, and [he] could never take another band coming up and doing things better than him maybe? Or you know, some things, they could do—when they were together—they could do things better than we could. And there was [sic] other things that we can do better than they can. John Lennon is probably past his golden period. Unless he does something soon, I don’t think anyone’s going to take much notice of what John Lennon says or does. Because musically he hasn’t turned out anything approaching six or seven years ago, what he was doing with the Beatles. None of them are.”

“Not even McCartney,” the interviewer said, with a touch of sadness.

“Not even McCartney,” Keith agreed.

EPILOGUE

At least the Beatles didn’t
break up because they started to suck.
Fans have long debated what a final “Beatles album” would have sounded like, if only the group had stayed together long enough to record the best songs from everyone’s early solo projects. Naturally, people disagree over which songs would have made the final cut, and the question raises numerous imponderables: Who would have produced the album—George Martin, Phil Spector, or someone else? How much would John and Paul have tried to shape each other’s songs? Would the two of them have finally granted George more space to feature his blossoming talent? Historians tend to shy away from these types of counterfactuals. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine that if the Beatles had lasted just a short while longer, they might have produced another masterpiece.

For a long time after the Beatles disbanded, the former members dealt with pesky questions and rumors about whether they would reunite.
Some have even speculated that on a few occasions the group came tantalizingly close to doing so. But that was probably wishful thinking. The last time all four Beatles even appeared in the same room together was for a business meeting in September 1969. And with each passing year, the odds for a Beatles reunion may well have been dwindling. In late 1980,
John Lennon taped an interview with
Playboy
magazine in which he ridiculed the idea that grown men should even
want
to carry on in a rock ’n’ roll group. It struck him as a pathetic thing to do. He also lashed out against fans who were still clamoring for a Beatles reunion.

LENNON:
They want to hold on to something they never had in the first place. Anybody who claims to have some interest in me as an individual or even as part of the Beatles has absolutely misunderstood everything I’ve ever said if they can’t see why I’m with Yoko [instead of the Beatles]. And if they can’t see that, they don’t see anything. They’re just jacking off to . . . it could be anybody. Mick Jagger or somebody else. Let them go jack off to Mick Jagger, OK? I don’t need it.

PLAYBOY:
He’ll appreciate that.

LENNON:
I absolutely don’t need it. Let them chase [Paul McCartney’s group] Wings. Just forget about me. If that’s what you want, go after Paul or Mick. I ain’t here for that. If that’s not apparent . . . I’m saying it in black and green, next to all the tits and asses on page 196. Go play with the other boys. Don’t bother me. Go play with the Rolling Wings.

PLAYBOY:
Do you . . .

LENNON:
No, wait a minute. Let’s stay with this a second; sometimes I can’t let go of it. (
He is on his feet, climbing up the refrigerator
.) . . . You know, they’re congratulating the Stones on being together 112 years. Whoooopee! At least Bill and Charlie still got their families. In the Eighties, they’ll be asking, “Why are those guys still together? Can’t they hack it on their own? Is the little leader scared someone’s going to knife him in the back?” That’s gonna be the question. That’s a-gonna be the question. They’re going to look back at the Beatles and the Stones and all
those guys as relics. . . . They will be showing pictures of the guy with lipstick wriggling his ass and the four guys with evil black makeup on their eyes trying to look raunchy. That’s gonna be the joke in the future. . . . It’s all right when you’re sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, to have male companions and idols, OK? It’s tribal and it’s a gang and it’s fine. But when it continues and you’re still doing it when you’re forty, that means you’re still sixteen in the head.

Lennon’s remarks sound harsh, but it’s important to remember that back then, there simply wasn’t any precedent for middle-aged men playing rock ’n’ roll. Cameron Crowe made the point in his beautifully evocative film
Almost Famous
, which is set in 1973. A gung-ho music manager, Dennis Hope (played by Jimmy Fallon), tries to persuade the fictional band Stillwater that they mustn’t squander their opportunities—that they need to strike while the iron is hot. And why? Because rock ’n’ roll is a young person’s art form. “If you think Mick Jagger will be out there trying to be a rock star at age fifty, you are sadly, sadly mistaken,” he says. And yet the Rolling Stones have now outlasted the Beatles by a staggering forty-three years.

Not only that, but there was a brief period when it seemed like the Stones could do no wrong. Almost everyone agrees that they had a five-year stretch, beginning in 1968 and ending in 1972, during which time they knocked out four of the most enduring and ass-kicking rock records in history:
Beggars Banquet
,
Let It Bleed
,
Sticky Fingers
, and the double LP
Exile on Main St.
It was a
“run of albums against which all other rock ’n’ roll will be forever measured,” averred one critic. Another called it
“a series of roughly perfect albums.” This was the Stones’ “imperial phase,” and they capped it off with a legendary series of concerts. Nowadays, their 1972 North American tour (also called the
S.T.P.
tour, for “Stones Touring Party”) is often remembered as a carnival of lubricity. But it was also the bookend to an era. If the
Rolling Stones had simply disbanded after it was over—without ever releasing another album or appearing on a stage again—surely they would be widely regarded today with the same kind of mystical reverence that is often reserved for the Beatles.

Instead, the Stones soldiered on (though eventually at a much slower pace), and over the years critics have noticed an obvious decline in the quality of their recorded work. In the ’60s, it was Establishmentarians who complained that the Stones were god-awful and graceless and tacky. Eventually, insightful rock fans began saying many of the same things. That is not to say that the twelve studio albums the Stones have made since 1973’s
Goats Head Soup
haven’t all contained at least a couple of admirable songs (surely they have) nor is it even to make an aesthetic judgment. It is just a plain statement about how their work has been received. For a long stretch in the ’70s, Mick’s immersion in the high society jet set seemed to eclipse his interest in making music, and Keith got so strung out on smack as to be nearly useless.
The only thing that complicates the Stones’ declension narrative is 1978’s
Some Girls,
an eclectic and wittily priapic album that was justifiably hailed as a return form. After that, the Stones languished in mediocrity.