10

MEET THE BEATLES

In April 1963, The Richmond & Twickenham Times published an article about the hysteria at the Station Hotel. The reporter wrote about the mood in the club, the pounding rhythm, the ecstasy of free-range rock ’n’ roll, kids in the darkness, musicians wailing away onstage, Jones playing off Jagger, who summoned the demons.

Brian carried the clip in his wallet for years. It was a triumph, confirmation his father had been wrong. Brian would become more successful, but never more satisfied. Thousands of others read the story, too, including the Beatles, who happened to be in London. Giorgio Gomelsky tracked John Lennon down at the Ken Colyer Jazz Club and invited him to the Crawdaddy.

The Beatles showed up halfway through the set. John, Paul, George, Ringo—they stood in the middle of the room, smiling. “They were dressed identically in long leather overcoats,” writes Bill Wyman. “I became very nervous and said to myself, ‘Shit, that’s the Beatles!’ ”

“Brian beamed over the top of his guitar, and Keith’s face seemed to light up for a moment, too,” James Phelge writes. “The Beatles were then invited up onto the stage. As cheers and applause greeted them, John Lennon waved back, and then the other Beatles took their hands from their pockets and waved, too.”

Members of the Stones often dismiss the Beatles as an influence or a facilitator of their success. Keith has damned them with faint praise: necessary but not always great. “They were perfect for opening doors,” he said, “but somewhere along the line they got heavy.” But artists tend to obscure their most important benefactors. By turning up at the Station Hotel, by dancing and waving from the stage, the Beatles anointed the Stones, touched them with Beatlemania. Over time, this gift would also prove a curse, raising up but limiting the Stones, consigning them to second place—the Beatles and the Stones, never the Stones and the Beatles. There’s tremendous power in being first. In birth order, in the mysterious circle of fame. Being first means being free to invent and go it alone. Being in any place but first means riding the wake. It means being defined in comparison. It means being the next Beatles, the anti-Beatles, the new Beatles, or the shitty Beatles. No matter how successful the Stones became, they could never entirely get over arriving on the scene when John, Paul, George, and Ringo were already stars.

The Beatles followed the Stones back to Edith Grove. Eisenhower and Khrushchev, a rock ’n’ roll summit, the key players comparing notes at the dawn of the era. Lennon and McCartney were shocked by the squalor of the flat. Mick Jagger and Brian Jones were middle-class boys playing at being working class; they’d let themselves go in a special way known only to rich kids. The Beatles really were working class, sons and grandsons of the proletariat. It was a weird irony—how the Beatles were cleaned up and sold as respectful middle-class boys, while the Stones, raised to be all those things, were remade into just the sort of raffish characters the Beatles had been born to play.

John Lennon and Brian Jones stood over the turntable, drinking wine and listening to music. Taste is more important than knowledge. Anyone can learn; only a few can know. On some things they agreed (Chuck, Muddy), on others they did not. When Jagger played Jimmy Reed’s “I’ll Change My Style,” Lennon listened for a moment, then said, “It’s crap.” The Beatles stayed till four in the morning. On their way out, they invited the Stones to their show at the Royal Albert Hall. It was a painful contrast: Royal Albert Hall versus the Crawdaddy. Just like that, you remember you’re akin but not alike. Lennon told the Stones they didn’t need tickets: just go to the loading bay, grab a guitar out of the van, and walk in like you’re crew. When Brian, with his long hair and velvet coat, got to Royal Albert Hall and picked up an instrument, he was mobbed by girls. They mistook him for a Beatle. He was disheveled when he got inside, but happy. He suddenly knew exactly what he wanted to be—a rock star.