Beatles vs. Stones (45 page)

“the time has come to”
:
Mike Ledgerwood,
Disc
(April 9, 1966).

“There must have been a”
:
The Beatles Anthology
, 203.

“very cannily worked out”
:
Richards,
Life
, 141.

“That was a great period”
:
As quoted in Jann Wenner, ed.,
Lennon Remembers
(New York: Fawcett Popular Library, 1972), 88.

“We were at the peak”
:
As quoted in Miles,
Paul McCartney,
142.

“didn’t get hurt much”
:
As quoted in Wyman,
Stone Alone
, 331.

“She was laying into my”
:
Keith Altham, “The Rolling Stones: The Stones Hit Back,”
NME
(August 6, 1965).

“thundered on”
:
Alan Smith, “Second Half,”
NME
(May 6, 1966).

“I said to Lennon”
:
As quoted in Oldham,
2Stoned
, 320.

“I said they couldn’t”
:
As quoted in Badman,
The Beatles: Off the Record
, 202.

“I took my life into”
:
As quoted in Oldham,
2Stoned
, 320.

“John absolutely exploded!”
:
As quoted in Badman,
The Beatles: Off the Record
, 202.

and that turned out to
:
They would perform live in England just one more time, on January 30, 1969, on the top of the Apple Building in London. Of course, that concert was not preannounced.

George hid his face behind
:
See photo at
http://johnlennonbeatles.com/2010/02/john-and-george-go-vinyl-crazy/
.

“These are our friends”
:
As quoted in Dalton,
The First Twenty Years
, 65.

“Everything we do, the”
:
This quote is said to appear in Silver,
The Pop Makers
, although I was not able to find it in that text. Lennon has made a remark similar to this on other occasions, however. In his 1970
Rolling Stone
interview with Jann Wenner, Lennon said, “I would just like to list what we did and what the Stones did two months after on every fuckin’ album.”

They were in fact highly inventive
:
The Stones’ sound and attitude was also a major influence on the Garage Sound phenomenon that spread through the US in the mid-to-late 1960s, and that sowed the seeds of protopunk and later US punk (cf. the New York Dolls, the Stooges). Even some of the era’s most distinctive and established artists were influenced by the Stones, as witnessed by Bob Dylan’s studio workout around “I Wanna Be Your Man” (i.e., “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” unreleased until the 1980s) and The Velvet Underground’s intro to “There She Goes Again,” which may have been lifted from the Stones’ cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hike” (The intro appears on Gaye’s version as well.)

It must have been
:
By contrast, you find far fewer mentions of the Stones in the Beatles’ authorized biography by Hunter Davies, in McCartney’s authorized biography
Many Years from Now
, and in the Beatles’
The Beatles Anthology
book and film project. Once in an interview, Lennon forgot (or pretended to forget) Bill Wyman’s name. “I think Charlie [Watts] is a damn good drummer, and the other guy’s a good bass-player, but I think Paul and Ringo stand up anywhere, with
any
of the rock musicians,” he said.

“The possibility of the Rolling”
:
Keith Altham, “Rolling Stones Have Reached Peak at Home,”
NME
(March 25, 1966).

5: POLITICS AND IMAGECRAFT

“That means”
:
World in Action
television program, July 31, 1967.

“You are, whether you”
:
As quoted in Simon Wells,
Butterfly on a Wheel: The Great Rolling Stones Drug Bust
(London: Omnibus, 2112), 218.

“We swooped exhilaratingly”
:
John Birt, MacTaggart Lecture, 2005.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/aug/26/broadcasting.uknews
.

“like a lost scene”
:
As quoted in
Esquire
, Vol. 71 (1969).

“It was not the soft-liberalism”
:
William Rees-Mogg,
Memoirs
(New York: Harper Press, 2011), 159. Jagger no doubt made his point, but he used a poor example. (It would, under most circumstances, be a crime against society to kill oneself by leaping out of a window.)

“I’m not a keen protestor”
:
Paytress,
Rolling Stones: Off the Record
, 140.

“Musically, they are a near disaster”
:
Newsweek
(February 24, 1964).

“long abide as arbiters”
:
Vince Aletti, “Beatles’ Albums Divert Course of Pop Music,”
San Diego Door
(Jan. 25–Feb. 7, 1968), 4.

“Even those who did not”
:
Richard Flacks,
Youth and Social Change
(Chicago: Markham Pub. Co., 1971), 70.

What about this comment
:
Kane,
Ticket to Ride
, 38–39.

“But there’s not much we”
:
As quoted in “Bach Backs Beatles vs. Viet War,”
Berkeley Barb
(August 5, 1966), 2.

“We don’t like war”
:
“Beatles Strike Serious Note in Press Talk,”
New York Times
(August 23, 1966).

“We’d heard rumors”
:
As quoted in Leo Burley, “Jagger vs. Lennon,”
The Independent
(March 9, 2008).

“was an event”
:
Geoffrey O’Brien,
Dream Time
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1988), 54.

“With a bit of effort”
:
Todd Gitlin,
The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
(New York: Bantam, 1987), 210–211.

“were no longer strangers”
:
Jonah Raskin,
Out of the Whale: Growing Up in the American Left
(New York: Link Books, 1974), 109.

“the power and audience”
:
Gene Youngblood, (Milwaukee)
Kaleidoscope
(Dec. 22, 1967–Jan. 4, 1968), 2.

“At idle moments more”
:
Marvin Garon, “And Now, a Word from Our Sponsor,”
Berkeley Barb
(February 25, 1967).

“the embodiment of everything we”
:
As quoted in Davis, 124.

“I didn’t have the slightest”
:
Strausbaugh,
Rock Till You Drop,
16.

By contrast, when the Beatles
:
Then again it is doubtful that the Beatles ever got word of the invitation, which was delivered via a fifteen-foot roadside sign that read “The Merry Pranksters Welcome the Beatles.”

“rockers, bikers”
:
Peter Coyote,
Sleeping Where I Fall
(Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998), 163;
Fresh Air
interview with Terri Gross, NPR (April 28, 1998).

“Mick’s case had made”
:
Sanchez,
Up and Down
, 85–86.

“I just wouldn’t be”
:
Jones was also quoted saying, “I remember the first time I took [LSD] was on tour with Bo Diddley and Little Richard.” That was either a fib, or else the reporters got it wrong. It is true that the Stones toured with Bo Diddley and Little Richard in the fall of 1963, but it’s extraordinarily unlikely that any LSD would have been around then. Possibly that is when Brian Jones first smoked cannabis.

“Pop Stars and Drugs”
:
News of the World
(February 5, 1967).

He confidently announced
:
As quoted in Wells,
Butterfly on a Wheel
, 86.

Mayfair gallery owner Robert Fraser
:
“Michael [Cooper] and Robert [Fraser] were both friends of mine,” Jagger later remarked. Fraser, he said, was a bit of “a taste guru” for both the Beatles and the Stones. But Mick also implied that he had the better and more authentic relationship with Fraser, and that the Beatles didn’t fit in quite as well in the Swinging London scene. “I think Robert saw the Beatles as a hustle. Everyone did,” he said. “They were the richest people in that age group. Very silly with their money, they didn’t seem to care. They did very good things, like
Sgt. Pepper
, and did attract good people. But people did target them as a hustle. Robert saw them as a gravy train when he knew that I was not.” As quoted in Harriet Vyner, ed.,
Groovy Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Fraser
(London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 130.

“This is the tao of lysergic”
:
Faithfull,
Faithfull,
99–100.

“There was the kind of social”
:
As quoted in
The Beatles Anthology
DVD, episode 8. For a time, the Beatles also seemed untouchable by journalists. The
Evening Standard
’s pop writer, Roy Connolly, recalled visiting Lennon in November 1968. “Suddenly, a character called Michael X showed up, a real bad guy.” (He was a Trinidad-born British black nationalist who would be hanged for murder in Port-of-Spain in 1975.) “He opened up this huge suitcase and took out enough grass to turn on the entire city of Westminster. Now, I’m a member of the press. Do I mention it? No, nor would John expect me to. That was the deal at the time.”

“There’s a big knock on the door”
:
As quoted in Dalton,
The First Twenty Years
, 98.

That late morsel of a detail
:
The irony, Keith later remarked, is that it was a
huge
rug, made of many dozens of rabbit pelts. All wrapped up in it, she was in fact “quite chastely attired for once. Usually when first you said hi to Marianne you started talking to the cleavage.”

“ ‘Bang, bang, bang”
:
As quoted in Dalton,
The First Twenty Years
, 98.

“Poor Mick—he could”
:
As quoted in Norman,
The Stones
, 227.

“Please don’t open the case”
:
As quoted in Norman,
The Stones
, 228.

When Snyderman skipped
:
For a time, Nicky Kramer was briefly suspected as well. After the bust, an authentic East End gangster named David Litvinoff roughed Kramer up in an attempt to get him to confess to betraying the Stones. When Kramer continued to maintain his innocence (according to Richards, even after being dangled outside of a window by his ankles), he was judged to be okay.