Beatles vs. Stones (37 page)

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION

“When it was over,” Sanchez said
:
Tony Sanchez,
Up and Down with the Rolling Stones
(London: John Black, 2011), 93–94. Paul McCartney and Marianne Faithfull have both told this anecdote as well, and the Beatles’ press officer, Tony Barrow, has commented on it. But the date it occurred is in dispute. Sanchez claims the party took place on Mick’s actual birthday, July 26. But “Hey Jude” was probably not finished then; it was mixed in stereo on August 2 and in mono on August 8.

“It was a wicked piece”
:
As quoted in O’Mahony, ed.,
Best of the Beatles Book
(London: Beat Publications, 2005), 214.

“You could dance”
:
See
http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/music/news-and-features/beatles-or-the-stones-choose-both-1-513103
.

“The Beatles want to hold your hand”
:
As quoted in Peter Fornatale,
50 Licks: Myths and Stories from Half a Century of the Rolling Stones
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 45.

Fans registered their loyalty
:
Many other writers have dichotomized the Beatles and the Stones in a similar fashion; cf. Philip Norman’s observation: “Whatever passing allegiance for this or that newly fashionable group, being a pop fan in 1964 Britain depended on one fundamental question: ‘Are you Beatles or are you Stones?’ asked with the searching ferocity of rival factions in a football crowd. Even football factions, though, had scarcely been as rife with implications of reflected character. To answer ‘Beatles’ implied that one was oneself similarly amiable, good-natured, a believer in the power of success to effect conformity. To answer ‘Stones’ meant, more succinctly, that one wished to smash up the entire British Isles.”

And as most people understand
:
“There is little friendship in the world,” Sir Francis Bacon remarked, “and least of all between equals.” Gore Vidal spoke to the same point when he admitted, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” Both thinkers are quoted in Joseph Epstein’s 2006 treatise,
On Friendship
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 8.

“the narcissism of small differences”
:
See Sigmund Freud,
Civilization and Its Discontents
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 58–63.

the opposing qualities of the Beatles and the Stones
:
That said, some interesting and whimsical takes on the Beatles versus the Stones can be found in the outer reaches of intellectual and pop culture. In 1997, philosopher Crispin Sartwell gained a bit of notoriety when he devised a tongue-in-cheek mathematical formula that he says proves, definitively, that the Stones were the superior band. In 2006, Marxist postpunk rocker Ian Sevonius subjected the groups to addlepated analysis in his chapbook
The Psychic Soviet
(Chicago: Drag City, 2006). (“The Beatles vs. Stones dialectic then, was actually Lennon/McCartney’s industrial Sovietology vs. Mick and Keith’s agrarian Maoism,” he concludes.) In 2010, novelist Alan Goldsher published
Paul Is Undead
(New York: Gallery, 2010) a comic postmodern horror tale (in the form of an oral history) in which the Beatles are portrayed as zombies on a quest for world domination. The plot thickens as England’s foremost zombie hunter, Mick Jagger, begins chasing after the Fab Four.

“Vesuvio closed a couple”
:
Marianne Faithfull, “As Years Go By,”
The Guardian
(October 5, 2007).

1: GENTLEMEN OR THUGS?

By December, he was selling
:
See Andrew Loog Oldham,
Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 256.

Since O’Mahony was already
:
Oldham remembers meeting O’Mahony when the latter was working for Robert Stigwood, the future music impresario. And after Oldham introduced O’Mahony to Eric Easton, and the two became fast friends. See
Stoned
, 216, 266.

In 1964, when journalist
:
See Mark Lewisohn, “Foreword to the 1995 Reprint,” in Michael Braun,
Love Me Do! The Beatles Progress
(New York: Penguin, 1995, c. 1964), 6.

When publishing photos
:
As quoted in Ray Coleman,
The Man Who Made the Beatles: An Intimate Biography of Brian Epstein
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), 323.

Many years later, though
:
As quoted in
Stoned
, 256.

“We were the ones”
:
As quoted in
The Beatles
Anthology
(San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002), 8.

Yes, Stark points out:
Steven Stark,
Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of the Band that Shook Youth, Gender, and the World
(New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 113.

Only Ringo came from central Liverpool
:
Hunter Davies,
The Beatles
(New York: Norton, 2002, c. 1968), p. 189.

Their homes got very cold
:
Steven D. Stark,
Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of the Band That Shook Youth, Gender, and the World
(New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 42.

“My father drove a bus”
:
As quoted in David Pritchard and Alan Lysaght, eds.,
The Beatles: An Oral History
(New York: Hyperion, 1998), 17.

“the poor slummy kind”
:
As quoted in David Sheff, “Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono,”
Playboy
(January 1981). One of the first books about the Beatles, which
Record Mirror
journalist Peter Jones published under the pseudonym “Billy Shepherd,” professed to the tell “the real story behind [the Beatles’] rise from the slums of Liverpool to skyrocketing fame.” See Billy Shepherd,
The True Story of the Beatles
(Bantam, 1964), unpaginated first page.

But by the standards
:
When Ringo was six, his appendix burst and he developed peritonitis, sending him into a coma that lasted ten weeks. Then when he was thirteen, he developed chronic pleurisy, which kept him in the hospital for almost two years. All of this wreaked havoc upon his schooling, so the poorest Beatle was also the least educated. On an early press release, he spelled the word “anyone” as “enyone.” And on the Beatles’ first US tour, in 1964, a waiter who served the group at an upscale restaurant said that Ringo seemed incapable of ordering off a menu and was baffled by the word
oven
(as opposed to
cooker
). Ringo also did not come from an educated family; Freda Kelly, the Beatles’ fan club secretary, recalls a time when Ringo asked her to help with his fan mail. “I told him he must be joking. ‘Get your mum and dad to do it. All the other parents do.’ But he just stood there pathetically and said, ‘Me mum doesn’t know what to put.’ ”

According to the Stones’ official
:
Jon Wiener,
Come Together: John Lennon in His Time
(Champagne-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 56.

“One was proud”
:
Victor Bockris,
Keith Richards: The Unauthorized Biography
(London: Hutchinson, 1992), 7.

“Two nations between whom”
:
As quoted in Stark, 40.

“To Londoners,” Steven Stark writes
:
Stark, 40.

“With us being from Liverpool”
:
As quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght,
Beatles Oral History
, 51.

“could spend night and day”
:
As quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght,
Beatles Oral History,
89.

“We looked at them”
:
As quoted in Debbie Geller (ed. Anthony Wall),
In My Life: The Brian Epstein Story
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 85.

He was, by his own admission
:
As quoted in Hunter Davies,
The Beatles
(New York: Dell, 1968), 59; as quoted in Stark, 53.

“His work, erratically presented”
:
Ray Coleman,
Lennon: The Definitive Biography
(London: Pan Books, 1995), 83.

“He was the biggest micky-take”
:
As quoted in Coleman,
Lennon
, 97.

“he had a very small capacity”
:
As quoted in Coleman,
Lennon
, 199.

“came to be regarded”
:
Pete Shotton and Nicholas Schaffner,
John Lennon: In My Life
(New York: Henry Holt, 1987), 61.

Though Hunter Davies’s authorized biography
:
Hunter Davies,
The Beatles
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2010, c. 1968), 59.

Somehow, he touched her breast
:
Lennon: “I was just remembering the time I had my hand on my mother’s tit in [One] Bloomfield Road. It was when I was about fourteen. I took a day off school, I was always doing that and hanging out in her house. We were lying on the bed and I was thinking, ‘I wonder if I should do anything else?’ It was a strange moment, because I actually had the hots for some rather lower class female who lived on the other side of the road. I always think that I should have done it. Presuming [or “Presumably”] she would have allowed it.”

“It was the worst thing”
:
As quoted in Philip Norman,
John Lennon: The Life
(New York: Harper Collins, 2008), 146.

“All I wanted was women”
:
Geoffrey Giuliano,
Blackbird: The Life and Times of Paul McCartney
, 17.

“Without question one”
:
Giuliano,
Blackbird
, 15.