Beatles vs. Stones (6 page)

Oldham not only lacked managerial experience—he didn’t even have a registered address, and it would be almost two years before he would be old enough to apply for an agent’s license.
The first person he phoned for help was Epstein, offering him 50 percent of the Rolling Stones management contract in return for some office space and enough upfront funding to finance a recording session. Citing his obligations to the Beatles and other Liverpool acts, Brian declined. Next, Andrew approached Eric Easton, an older, experienced, London agent who, after some hesitation, expressed interest in accepting a similar deal . . . if it could be arranged. Sean O’Mahony figured the Oldham-Easton partnership was an excellent one.
“Andrew was the young go-getter with loads of good ideas for promoting groups and giving them an image,” he said. “Eric was this rather conservative show business agent, a very straightforward businessperson, who had the necessary practical knowledge, knew how contracts worked, knew how to do bookings, knew that side inside out.”

The following Sunday, Philip Norman writes, Oldham made
“the most brilliant self-selling job the nineteen-year-old had yet pulled off, expertly mixing audacity with intuition. He came on to Brian, Mick, Keith, Stew, Bill, and Charlie as a London big shot who could give them anything they wanted and get anywhere they cared to go. At the same time, he was one of them, a rebel, an outsider who shared their quasi-Marxist ideals and evangelical zeal for bringing pure blues and R&B to a wider audience.” The bit about Andrew being an R&B fan was a particularly hideous distortion; in fact, he was glomming on to a trend he’d only just learned about.

No doubt Oldham also stressed his connection to the Beatles.
“He probably said, ‘I am the Beatles’ publicist’—how about that as a line?” Jagger mused. “Everything to do with the Beatles was sort of gold and glittery, and Andrew seemed to know what he was doing.”
Nevertheless, Keith Richards maintains that Oldham
“was looking for an alternative to the Beatles” from the very outset. Despite being from provincial Liverpool, the Beatles had already scored two big hits with “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me.” Never before had an act from so far north succeeded at that level. “I guess Andrew’s mind would work this way,” Keith reasoned. “If Liverpool can produce the Beatles, what can London produce? Liverpool was much further away from London than it is now. There were no streets, no highways. I mean, Liverpool is . . . as far as London is concerned, it’s Nome, Alaska.”

But in order to share in the type of success the Beatles were having, Oldham insisted that the Stones make some image and personnel adjustments. On the theory that six members was at least one too many for a successful group, Oldham made them kick out pianist Ian Stewart—who anyhow had too square a jaw for Andrew’s liking. Keith Richards was bizarrely instructed to drop the
s
from his last name; Keith
Richard
, Andrew said,
“looked more pop.” Meanwhile, he added a
g
to the band’s name, making them the
Rolling
Stones; otherwise, he said, no one would take them seriously. Twenty-six-year-old Bill Wyman was told to begin pretending he was twenty-one. But most significantly, Oldham persuaded the band to loosen up its performance. Though Jones still postured himself as the group’s leader, Andrew recognized Jagger’s electric appeal and insisted that he share in the limelight.

The idea to style the Stones as the
anti
-Beatles, though—to toughen up their image and encourage them to act as surly and defiant as they dared—came a bit later, and in fact that was the opposite of what Oldham originally had in mind. Instead, one of his first moves was to buy them a set of matching outfits. Wyman remembers a day when Oldham
“marched us up to Carnaby Street to put us in suits, tabbed-down shirts and knitted ties.” On other occasions, the band could be seen in tight black jeans, black turtlenecks, and Beatle boots. When the Stones debuted on national television, on
Thank Your Lucky Stars
, they were conscripted into hound’s-tooth jackets, high-buttoned shirts, and slim ties, looking every bit as dainty and amiable as the pop bands they despised. Wyman later remarked that in hindsight, it was
“obvious” that “Andrew was attempting to make us look like the Beatles. From his association with them, he was well aware of the power of marketing, and he was initially slotting us as their natural successors rather than as counterparts.”

The following month, though, when the Stones embarked on their first national tour (sharing a spectacular bill with Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and the Everly Brothers), they began wearing their outfits in a more slovenly style. One night, Charlie Watts unexpectedly doffed his waistcoat in a Fenland dressing room; eventually Keith’s jacket grew so bespotted with chocolate pudding and whiskey stains that it was no longer wearable. Onstage, the whole group loosened up, and Jagger took to chewing gum as he sang. Offstage, a journalist observed, they appeared in
“a jumbled assortment of jeans, silk cardigans, camel jackets and sloppy sweaters. None of the slick suits sported by Bill J. Kramer or Gerry and the Pacemakers.” When the Stones appeared on a BBC program in October 1963, they frustrated their interviewer by greeting many of his questions with simple “yeah”s and “no”s. Rather than hurt their popularity, however, all of this seemed to boost their appeal. Their audiences were becoming more demonstrative and more raucous to the point where the Stones, just as soon as they finished their sets, were forced to flee their venues through the back door and quickly speed off to avoid getting mobbed. Without ever devising or articulating a formula for instigating a cultural revolt, the Rolling Stones began to stumble upon one.

Put another way, though widely held, the idea that Andrew Oldham conjured up a belligerent attitude for the Stones,
ab ovo
, is a myth. First, he tried to smarten them up. But Oldham was quick—very quick—to see the potential in this new approach. By the time the Beatles conquered America on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, on February 9,
1964, Oldham was actively promoting the Stones as
“the band your parents loved to hate.” “The Beatles were accepted and acceptable,” he added, “they were the benchmark and had set the level of competition.” By contrast, “The Stones came to be portrayed as dangerous, dirty and degenerate, and I encouraged my charges to be as nasty as they wished to be.”

He
“made sure we were as vile as possible,” Mick acknowledged. “Andrew pitched it so we were very much the antithesis of the Beatles.” Of course, the Stones proved masterful at projecting arrogant, sour attitudes. Surely, Jagger was deploying his best Cockney put-on when he told an interviewer, circa 1964:
“If people don’t like us, well that’s too bad. We’re not thinking of changing, thanks very much. We’ve been the way were are for much too long to think of kowtowing to fanciful folk who think we should start tarting ourselves up with mohair suits and short haircuts.”

But Jagger was lying. It had only been a short while earlier that the Stones, eager for exposure, appeared on
Thank Your Lucky Stars
with acceptable hair and matching suits. If the Beatles had “sold out” by changing their image in order to improve their chances of becoming successful, so too did the Stones—only they went through
two
early transformations. First, they costumed themselves in matching suits and ties, just like any Liverpool pop group. Then within a few months, they began experimenting with a different approach of their own design—dressing sloppily, accentuating their sexuality, and behaving obnoxiously. That was an image that suited them perfectly. Though not quite “gentlemen” in the first place, they became rather convincing as thugs.

•  •  •

Even if they initially set out merely to become the best band in Liverpool, with their life options already severely circumscribed by the time they formed in 1960, the Beatles were quick to embrace one
of rock’s core myths: the idea that it promises an escape from the ordinary, workaday world into a parallel universe of wealth, prestige, and excitement. Lennon once revealed that as a child, his
“most vivid dreams” involved either flying over Liverpool or finding hidden stashes of money. “I must have had ambition without realizing it,” he mused, “a subconscious urge to get above people or out of a rut.” But the odds didn’t look good. Once when Lennon was a teenager, his headmaster forced him to produce a sheet of paper on which he was instructed to list some potential careers; Lennon wrote:
“salmon fisherman.” Though Paul seemed to have benefitted from his Liverpool Institute education, the rest of the Beatles were facing the likelihood of spending their lives in low-wage, low-prestige vocations. As Robert Christgau has suggested, the Beatles
“loved rock and roll at least partly because rock and roll was a way to
make it
.”

The Stones burned with ambition, too, but not because they were desperate. If white R&B had never caught on in England, and the Stones had never escaped London’s dingiest clubs, it still would not have been impertinent for Brian Jones or Mick Jagger to hope that they might become stereotypically successful. Granted, it’s hard to imagine Keith Richards doing anything besides playing rock guitar, but considering the British class system, as a teenager his prospects were always a bit better than those of the Beatles. Fortunately for the Stones, they didn’t have to grind it out for years playing in slummy bars the way the Beatles did—otherwise they would never have made it. Jagger would have ditched the band to finish his education, and as a unit, the Stones were never friendly or trusting enough with each other to stay bonded for a prolonged, frustrating period. After the Beatles pried open a tremendous market for British bands, the Stones rose to fame comparatively quickly—as the
anti
-Beatles.

For the most part, the two bands were friendly toward each other. Especially early on, the Beatles were helpful to the Rolling Stones, and the Rolling Stones were grateful. But as the Stones began burning up the charts, the Beatles couldn’t help but recognize that their act was (as
George put it),
“more like [what] we’d done before we got out of our leather suits to try to get on record labels and television.” And while it might have been ludicrous for the Beatles to be truly jealous of anyone, there’s little doubt that if they thought they could have reached the toppermost of the poppermost without having to smile, bow, and wear suits, they’d have leapt at the opportunity.

Meanwhile, the Stones seemed to envy the Beatles’ success more than their music.
“Sure, they were very creative, but somehow they seemed to regard it all as a joke—and it was,” Jagger later said. “The Beatles were so ridiculously popular, it was so stupid. They never used to play—they just used to go on making so much bread, it was crazy.” Musically, Richards said,
“We saw no connection between us and the Beatles. We were playing blues; they were writing pop songs dressed in suits.” Furthermore, the fact that the Beatles emerged from Liverpool must have seemed stupefying to the Stones.
“For the first time, London had been left out in the cold till the very last minute,” a British writer remarked. But it was way more than that. When the Beatles were at the peak of their success, the poet Allen Ginsberg said, they briefly made Liverpool
“the center of the consciousness of the human universe.”

Eventually both groups would become settled enough in their success that they wouldn’t worry so much about manipulating the media. In 1966, the Beatles even decided they’d had enough of their silly fan magazine, and so they stopped providing Sean O’Mahony with the access, interviews, and photographs he needed to keep
The Beatles Book
afloat. But O’Mahony would not be deterred so easily. In response to the Beatles’ new attitude, he phoned his lawyer and called for a meeting. Epstein likewise showed up with his solicitor, plus two more advisors, and he matter-of-factly told O’Mahony it was time to wind down his publication of
The Beatles Book.
Asked for an explanation, he replied,
“They feel you don’t tell the truth. You’re not reporting them as they are . . .”

“O’Mahony exploded with anger,” said Epstein’s biographer:

The truth? What do you mean? Do you mean for example when we were in Blackpool, John Lennon flinging open the window of the dressing room and shouting to the fans below: “Fuck off and buy more records?” Was that the level of revelation Epstein and the Beatles expected from their authorized mouthpiece? Should the Beatles be reported as they really were? Or were there no-go areas?

A brief silence fell over the room, after which the two parties were able to proceed amicably enough to reach an agreement. O’Mahony continued publishing
The Beatles Book
until December 1969 (and then he revived it in 1976 and kept going until 2003). Though O’Mahony labored to keep the Beatles’ images up-to-date, he went about his work delicately, always refraining from saying too much about the controversies in which the group became embroiled. To adopt a sharper or more discerning approach would, said O’Mahony, “be like shooting myself in the foot.” Instead, he presented the Beatles as gentlemen.

CHAPTER TWO

“SHIT, THAT’S THE BEATLES!”

The Beatles played Liverpool’s Cavern
Club for the 292nd time, and for the last time, on August 3, 1963. They brought home £300 that night, and according to the Club’s legendary compère, Bob Wooler, they put on a rip-roaring show, a bit reminiscent of the very first time they performed there, for only £5.
Inside the venue, it was so sticky hot that the Cavern’s electricity blew, and the show was interrupted as the club’s owner rushed to repair a fuse.
Still, the “fans loved it,” he said. “It was such a marvelous scene.”

It was also, however, a bittersweet occasion. The Beatles had obviously outgrown the cramped, dingy venue, and although Brian Epstein tried to reassure Wooler that someday his boys would be back, privately, he must have known that was unlikely.