Chapter Six
Little did Andrew Oldham know what he had started when he pitched the Stones against the Beatles, dividing the country and by default the world in a war of cultural rivalry that would rage, simmer and boil again in the twenty-first century. Even though the fans who engaged originally in this petty clash of allegiances have grown up, faded away, shuffled off this mortal coil1 or could give no further toss, the feud persists, thanks to the artists themselves.
I’m having you on? Let’s see. Witness restrained but widely reported rantings by Sir Paul McCartney during the resumed Rolling Stones tour of America, autumn and winter 2021. While it may never have mushroomed to Liverpool v Manchester United or Spurs v Arsenal proportions, passion provoked by the discussion continues to rile the head rockers to an almost Premier League degree. Why do they care? Might it be time to get a life? Why on earth would something so trivial still bother them after all these years? Excellent questions. When Macca dismissed his former group’s arch-rivals as ‘a blues covers band’, explaining that the Beatles’ net was ‘cast a bit wider than theirs’, was he goading Jagger deliberately, and asking for trouble? Whether he was or not, he got some. Mick lashed back, during the Stones’ Los Angeles outing, with the tongue-in-cheek announcement that Paul was waiting patiently backstage, and was about to be ‘joining us in a blues cover’. Many a true word spoken in jest.2
I have a soft spot for the rivalry, ironic or otherwise. It affords us an inkling of the searing energy and fierce competitiveness that drove these groups in their angry young days, forcing fans to follow one or the other but never in a million to dare to like both. Playground battles were fought over it. Tanksful of saliva were spat. Miles of hair were torn. Swear allegiance and fall on your sword, was the size of it. Whether or not all this conflict was inspired by the friction between gangs of mods and rockers, the rival British subcultures that reigned from the early 1960s into the first half of the following decade and later experienced a brief revival, it rapidly gained momentum. It’s not hard to see why. The Stones were suggestive of the rockers: greasy, long-haired, black-leathered menaces on motorbikes, styled in the image of Hollywood heart-throb Marlon Brando in his 1953 hit film The Wild One, the original outlaw-biker movie. Their soundtrack was rock’n’roll, the music of American artists such as Bo Diddley, Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. The Beatles evoked some of the spirit of the mods, who had defined hairstyles, sharp suits and parkas, and who rode about on motor scooters. These were the soul boys, the aficionados of R&B, following British blues-inspired bands like the Who, the Yardbirds and the Small Faces.3
There was obviously musical overlap, as well as scope for interpretation. But neither the Beatles nor the Stones were oblivious of the significance of gang culture at a time of disaffected youth, rising drug abuse and a collective urge, at certain levels, to both destroy and self-destruct. We have all watched footage of both bands in their sixties incarnations, hounded and screamed at by hoards of hysterical girls leaking from every orifice. Bill Wyman recalled the stench of urine at shows not yet known as ‘gigs’ as ‘unbearable’. But the thrust of their popularity did not depend exclusively on frenzied females. The Beatles’ Hamburg residences saw them playing to shiploads of drunken, violent male sailors, their performances descending more often than not into furniture-and-skull-smashing brawls; while the Stones’ appearances incited angry gangs of ferocious male youths to attempt to wreck stages, venues and vehicles, attacking security guards, riot police and each other. Not that the fans were mad at the band. It was the energy generated on stage that provoked their collective loss of self-control. As Mick Jagger remarked, the Stones were not the cause, they were the catalyst.
In those early days, where the Beatles went, the Stones followed. Anything they could do … The latter clearly held the former in high esteem. After all, Ringo, George, John and Paul had reached the summit ahead of them, and had route maps to share, ropes to hand down, hard-won wisdom and experience to impart. But when the Beatles performed their last live concert at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, on 29 August 1966,4 the Stones were just getting going … and have hardly stopped since. The Beatles matured outwards, and away from each other. In order to grow and evolve creatively, they needed to go their separate ways. All four achieved success as solo artists. Had John Lennon not been assassinated in December 1980, a decade after the Beatles’ official dissolution, it is perfectly reasonable to imagine that they would have found their way back to the mothership, their collective identity, and that the band would have ridden again. No chance? I like to think otherwise.
The Stones endured long periods of separation, particularly when Mick and Keith were feuding, during which every member of the band developed solo interests. Jagger and Richards may have given Lennon and McCartney a run for their money as one of the greatest songwriting duos in music history. But they couldn’t light a candle to John, Paul or George in terms of solo achievement. Paul recorded twenty-six studio albums, four compilation albums, nine live albums, seven classical and five electronica, both solo and with Wings. John, working solo, with Plastic Ono Band and with his wife Yoko Ono, achieved eleven solo albums. George scored twelve solo albums, two live and four compilations. Mick managed four solo albums; Keith three; Bill six of his own and half a dozen with his post-Stones band, Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings. Charlie was the most prolific solo Stone, releasing ten albums with the Charlie Watts Orchestra, his Quintet and his ‘Tentet’. Pause to compare these busy drummers. Ringo enjoyed a string of hit singles during the early seventies, became a session musician for Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and more, forged new careers as a voice actor and author, and recorded twenty studio albums. It wasn’t all about Mick’n’Keef and John’n’Paul.
So there remain valid reasons for the rivalries. While we can no longer compare ‘Beatles’ with ‘Stones’ – given that the former as a viable entity have not existed for more than fifty years, while the latter, to borrow back my own quote, still roam the world like rusty tanks without a war to go to,5 sixty years after they were conceived – we can take vicarious pleasure from the all-too-evident fact that Jagger and Macca still ruffle each other’s feathers. Who knew what was to come when the two bands paid tribute to one another on their respective album covers? Seen that? Check out the sleeve of 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, to find a doll wearing a striped sweater bearing the slogan ‘WELCOME THE ROLLING STONES’. The Stones returned the favour on Their Satanic Majesties Request, working the faces of all four Beatles into the flower heads. That same year, John and Paul provided guest vocals on the tracks ‘Sing This All Together’ and ‘We Love You’ on the Satanic Majesties album, while Mick and Keith joined the Beatles for their historic telecast performance of ‘All You Need Is Love’.
But animosity is insidious. Undischarged, it accrues. John had clearly harboured resentment against Mick and Keith for some considerable time, for having plagiarised the Beatles on Satanic Majesties. In his interview for Jann Wenner, editor of Rolling Stone magazine, he finally erupted.
‘I would like to just list what we did and what the Stones did two months after, on every fuckin’ album,’ he raged. ‘Every fuckin’ thing we did, Mick does exactly the same. He imitates us. And I would like one of you fuckin’ underground people to point it out, you know, Satanic Majesties is Pepper. “We Love You” (on which Paul and John sang backing vocals) – it’s the most fuckin’ bullshit. That’s “All You Need Is Love”.’
Had he been as mad as all that with them, however, would he and Yoko have pitched up to take part in the Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus TV special? You may well ask. Then again, there’s that line in ‘Dig a Pony’ from 1970’s Let It Be, featuring John singing, ‘I roll a stoney/Well, you can imitate everyone you know.’ Incidentally, that’s Brian Jones on sax on ‘You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)’, the B-side of the ‘Let It Be’ single. Jones was already dead by the time it was released. What was the message here?
Lennon’s rambling, all-encompassing interview with Wenner, later published as a book, features John calling Mick ‘a joke’, and accusing him of ‘fag dancing’.
‘I was always very respectful about Mick and the Stones,’ he points out, ‘but he said a lot of sort 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. I resent the implication that the Stones are like revolutionaries and that the Beatles weren’t. If the Stones were or are, the Beatles really were too. But they are not in the same class, music-wise or power-wise. Never were.’
Cut to 1988, when the Beatles were inducted into America’s prestigious Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Who should be the inductor but Mick Jagger? Imagine Lennon revolving in his grave at Mick’s speech.
‘We went through some pretty strange times. We had a sort of … a lot of rivalry in those early years, and a little bit of friction, but we always ended up friends,’ said Jagger. ‘And I like to think we still are, cos they were some of the greatest times of our lives, and I’m really proud to be the one that leads them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.’
The Stones themselves would be inducted the following year, by Pete Townshend. Ironic, then, that his bandmate Roger Daltrey should follow McCartney into the public Stones-pummelling in November 2021, dismissing them in less than flattering terms.
Asked during an interview about the Who’s contemporaries, the veteran frontman responded, ‘You’ve got to take your hat off to [Jagger]. He’s the number one rock’n’roll performer. But as a band, if you were outside a pub and you heard that music coming out … some night, you’d think, “Well, that’s a mediocre pub band!”’
McCartney, incidentally, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a second time in 1999, as a solo artist. Ringo Starr was recognised too, in 2015. No such honour, to date, for any Stone man.
The guitarist should have taken heed of Mick’s words, and kept his gob shut. We’re talking Keith Richards, though, right? He has never been one to hold back when an opportunity arises to let rip and cause offence; which to his mind falls under the category of ‘telling it like it is’. It was no holds barred during his interview with Esquire magazine, when he dissed Sgt. Pepper as ‘rubbish’. He couldn’t help himself.
‘The Beatles sounded great when they were the Beatles,’ he sneered. ‘But there’s not a lot of roots in that music. I think they got carried away. Why not? If you’re the Beatles in the sixties, you just get carried away. You forget what it is you wanted to do. You’re starting to do Sgt. Pepper. Some people think it’s a genius album, but I think it’s a mish-mash of rubbish. Kinda like Satanic Majesties. If you can make a load of shit, so can we.’ What were the millions of Beatles fans in every corner of the globe who have long prayed to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as the greatest album ever made, supposed to make of that?
Paul McCartney may have seethed, but he kept his counsel. We now know that he was biding his time. An opportunity to redress the balance leapt out at him in 2020, when, during an interview with American shock-jock broadcaster Howard Stern, Macca was invited to comment on Stern’s personal assessment that the Beatles really were the greatest of the two rival bands.
‘You know you’re going to persuade me to agree with that one,’ responded Paul, God love him. ‘They are rooted in the blues. When they are writing stuff, it has to do with the blues. We had a little more influences [sic]. There’s a lot of differences, and I love the Stones, but I’m with you: the Beatles were better.’ Then he got provocative, hinting strongly that the Stones were blatant copyists.
‘We started to notice that whatever we did, the Stones sort of did it shortly thereafter. We went to America and we had huge success. Then the Stones went to America. We did Sgt. Pepper. The Stones did a psychedelic album. There’s a lot of that. We were great friends. Still are. Kind of. We admire each other. The Stones are a fantastic group. I go see them every time they’re out. They’re a great, great band.’
A bit too great, in the end, for McCartney’s liking? And did Jagger have the last laugh on that occasion?
‘That’s so funny. He’s a sweetheart,’ said Mick of Macca on Zane Lowe’s Apple Music show. ‘There’s obviously no competition.’ The big difference between the two groups, he explained painstakingly, ‘is that the Rolling Stones have been a big concert band in other decades and other eras when the Beatles never even did an arena tour … with a decent sound system. They broke up before that business had started’ – the touring business, he means. ‘That started in 1969, and the Beatles never experienced that. Yet they played and did a great gig. I was there: at Shea Stadium. But the Stones went on. We started doing stadium gigs in the seventies, and are still doing them now. That’s the really big difference between the two bands. One band is unbelievably, luckily still playing in stadiums, and then the other band doesn’t exist.’
Mick must have missed every Wings tour between 1972 and 1979, including Wings Over the World (a phenomenal sixty-six shows) as well as everything solo that Macca has done since: a modest sixteen solo concert tours, nine of them global. Not ‘Beatles’ tours as such, granted, but major sell-out tours nonetheless, by the man who represents one half of the most successful songwriting duo in history. In a nutshell? Shall we? Over a career lasting sixty years, the Rolling Stones have scored eight UK No. 1 singles and twelve No. 1 albums, and have shifted 200 million albums worldwide; while over a period of only eight years, counting from 1962 when Ringo joined the band to 1970 when Paul officially left (even though John had declared he was quitting the previous September), the Beatles notched up seventeen UK No. 1 singles and fifteen No. 1 albums. They have sold, to date, around the world, in excess of 600 million albums. They spent 176 weeks at No. 1, longer than any other artist, ever. The figures tell it. Perspective is all. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’6 Mick might be kidding himself a little. He knows.
Following the Oldham-Easton takeover, recalled John Mansfield, ‘we were no longer allowed to pay the Stones in person. In future, all cheques or postal orders were to be sent directly to Eric Easton’s office. We later received a letter from their accountants, requesting confirmation of any monies that we had paid to the band.’ Which was not the least of the changes wrought by the new Stones’ management. The apostrophe had to be dropped from ‘Rollin’ ’, decreed Andrew, and its ‘g’ restored. Stu, too, was dropped. Brian Jones was the designated executioner. He found this particularly galling, given that Ian Stewart had been both his friend and pianist long before they met Mick and Keith. Bill Wyman began to quake in his Chelsea boots at this point, fearing that he would be the next to be axed – for being too old, too square, a boring married father, because his feminine hands were not really big enough for the bass. Not even Keith, who had to be one of the least dispensable, measured up to Loog Oldham’s vision. The ‘s’ would have to go from the end of his surname, for a start. ‘Oldham felt it was somehow better for their profile!’ said Mansfield. ¿Qué?
‘He (Andrew) wasn’t interested in the music,’ claimed Mansfield. ‘Such issues were of no consequence to him, it was all about maximising exposure and making the most money he could. He also wanted Jagger and Richards to start writing their own material, to avoid paying royalties.’
Was it that? I wonder. Mansfield had his reasons for feeling embittered. Andrew may well have had crazy ideas about world domination. He had met Phil Spector, and was desperate to reinvent himself in the wizard American producer’s image, despite the fact that he had not an hour of production experience to his name. But so many were doing it and getting away with it back then. He wasn’t the only one. He clearly has a genuine feel for and love of music, and is ignited to this day by brilliant songs. I could tell that simply from chatting to him over email. Isn’t it that he had found the key to the Stones’ success and longevity? That it had occurred to him that they would have to follow the glaring example set by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and roll their own, if they were to have a hope in hell of getting anywhere? Sure, he probably did have pound signs revolving before his eyes at the same time. Shame on him? Get real. He could hardly have called himself a music biz manager otherwise.
‘It was all about the rough edges,’ declares legendary publicist Keith Altham, who would soon find himself working with the band. ‘The Beatles were taken by Brian Epstein and had their rough edges knocked off. Andrew Oldham thought that this was the way to go. The Beatles were four Elvises. Oldham wanted his own five Elvises. Not six, that was too many, so bye bye Stu, who I was very fond of. It then dawned on him that, instead of merely copying the Beatles, he’d make more impact by having them do the exact opposite. The main lesson he had learned from Epstein was attention to detail. Make it leaner, shorter, better. Knock the odd letter off a name – especially an ‘s’, which dilutes its impact by making it sound plural – and the man who goes by it becomes singularly harder. By the time Keith added his ‘s’ back on, he didn’t need it any more. But the most significant change of all was Andrew locking Mick and Keith in the kitchen and making them write songs. It was the best thing he ever did for them. Maybe they haven’t realised it yet. Maybe, given their penchant for rewriting history – not uncommon among artists, by the way – they just thought it was their own idea.’
It has been said that the animosity that flared between Brian and Andrew after he was forced to offload Stu continued to build until it began to deprive poor Brian of reason. As early as the band’s first showcase on TV’s Ready Steady Go!, Brian feared that the rug was being pulled from under him. Jagger, supported and egged on by Oldham, was already stealing Jones’s thunder and assuming the role of Stones leader and mouthpiece. Jones didn’t have a leg to collapse on. How could he be a frontman if he couldn’t even sing? It was a fact of which he was reminded at regular intervals. But it had been angel-faced Brian with his golden hair, perfect pout and undulating body who had, from the outset, been the band’s principal showman. It was he who had whipped up audience participation by getting down among the guys and gals, shaking tambourines and maracas in their pretty faces (he avoided the ugly ones), playing instruments while he was flat on his back, jumping around like a lad insane. Stagecraft came naturally to Brian. He was born with it, more fool him. Mick had to learn, which made him the lucky one. Once Jagger had mastered the dark arts and had embraced his power, he was lethal and there was no stopping him.
Perhaps Brian knew even at that stage that his days with the Stones were numbered. But there were Stones thrills and spills galore to come before the Jones boy succumbed. There was America. It was not on Brian’s casual virtuoso musicality that this new band would voyage into the Promised Land of all their musical dreams since they had been wet behind the ears and everywhere else. It was Jagger’s reptilian ruthlessness that drove them onwards into the terrifying oblivion of superstardom.
Unlike most other artists of their era, they do not resort to the cloak, the smoke, the masks, the wigs and the rig-outs to render themselves oven-ready. They are who they will become. Their stage personas are not inflated versions of their usual selves. There are no ‘usual selves’ to be had, here. What you see is what you will never get. Authentic in their forsakenness, they are doomed to succeed.
Mists rise in shrouds over the vast and distant past, playing tricks with dates and times and woebegoneness. Do the Stones in their dotage chortle as they look back, or don’t they dare, and just keep squinting ahead? Is the big-break thing ever a blessing, or always damnation? Though most would have exchanged, in a heartbeat, their own life for those of the Stones, few could have guessed at the volume of blood that would be spilled. It is coming.