THE PUSH-PULL relationship between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones continued unabated for the balance of the ’60s.
KEITH RICHARDS: Everybody was talking about the Beatles versus the Stones and all that crap, and yet between us, it would be, “You come out first and we’ll wait two weeks.” We would try never to clash; there was plenty of room for both of us. There was a time when “Paperback Writer” came out, and one of ours—“Paint It Black” or something like that—came out before or after; we had stitched it up with them. There would be surreptitious phone calls. It was, “OK, ours is ready, yours ain’t” . . . “All right, you go first.”
PAUL MCCARTNEY: We’d be hanging out with the Stones, working on their sessions, it was a very friendly scene. There must have been a bit of competition because that’s only natural, but it was always friendly. We used to say, “Have you got one coming out?” and if they had, we’d say, “Well, hold it for a couple of weeks, because we’ve got one.” It made sense, really, to avoid each other’s releases. John and I sang on the Stones’ song “We Love You”—Mick had been stuck for an idea and he asked us to come along. So we went down to Olympic Studios and made it up . . .
When we asked Brian Jones to one of our sessions, to our surprise he brought along a sax. He turned up in a big Afghan coat at Abbey Road. He played sax on a crazy record, “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).” It’s a funny sax solo—it isn’t amazingly well played but it happened to be exactly what we wanted: a ropey, shaky sax. Brian was very good like that.
However, for every nice thing you can find a Beatle saying about a Stone, or a Stone saying about a Beatle, there is an equal and opposite devastating slag. Sometimes it got downright nasty. At his rage-venting-primal-scream best in 1971, John Lennon offered the following to Rolling Stone magazine:
JOHN LENNON: I think it’s a lot of hype. I like “Honky Tonk Women,” but I think Mick’s a joke, with all that fag dancing, I always did. I enjoy it; I’ll probably go and see his films and all, like everybody else, but really, I think it’s a joke . . . I never do see him. I was always very respectful about Mick and the Stones, 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 would like to just list what we did and what the Stones did two months after on every fuckin’ album. 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 [Sargeant] Pepper; “We Love You,” it’s the most fuckin’ bullshit, that’s “All You Need Is Love.”
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, musicwise or powerwise, never were. I never said anything. I always admired them because I like their funky music and I like their style. I like rock ’n’ roll and the direction they took after they got over trying to imitate us . . .
He’s obviously so upset by how big the Beatles are compared with him; he never got over it. Now he’s in his old age, and he is beginning to knock us, you know, and he keeps knocking. I resent it, because even his second fuckin’ record, we wrote it for him. Mick said, “Peace made money.” We didn’t make any money from Peace.
A quarter of a century later, and fifteen years after John’s death, Mick was still grappling with some of those brickbats hurled in 1971. He told Rolling Stone:
MICK JAGGER: [John Lennon] said something in your magazine. It wasn’t to do with appearance, more with music. When asked about the Rolling Stones, he said, “I like the butch stuff, and I don’t like the faggy stuff.” But you don’t want to be butch the whole time. It would drive you mad, wouldn’t it?
Admittedly, Mick has tempered his thoughts about the Beatles since John’s demise in 1980, but there are many recorded instances where he would casually drop a comment such as this in 1977:
MICK JAGGER: We were not the Beatles . . . the Beatles were a pop band . . . and, though we liked them . . . you know . . . I mean . . . Keith and Brian sort of liked them, but I didn’t really. I mean they were sweet and all that, but we were a blues band. We played blues and we played in clubs and we didn’t play ballrooms and we just played in clubs and we played blues . . . we didn’t play that kind of music, pop music. We didn’t play like . . . what was it? “Please Please Me” . . . we didn’t play adolescent love songs at all . . . we were doing “I Just Want to Make Love to You.”
So maybe the real questions here are: How do you define a love/hate relationship? Or can you have a sibling rivalry with someone who isn’t actually your brother or your sister? We could ask Don and Phil Everly about this. Or Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Or Ray and Dave Davies. Wouldn’t all of those be interesting conversations to listen in on? You could literally fill volumes about the dynamics and nuances of the personal and professional relationships between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, or Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Here are Mick’s thoughts about this very question:
MICK JAGGER: You don’t have to have a partner for everything you do. But having partners sometimes helps you and sometimes hinders you. You have good times and bad times with them. It’s just the nature of it . . . People also like partnerships because they can identify with the drama of two people in partnership. They can feed off a partnership, and that keeps people entertained. Besides, if you have a successful partnership, it’s self-sustaining.
This is certainly true of Mick and Keith. Unfortunately, we’ll never know how things might have turned out for John and Paul had they each been given an equal number of years on the planet.
Sometimes the rivalry between the bands was light-hearted and playful. For example, the Beatles putting “Welcome the Rolling Stones” on the cover of Sgt. Pepper, or the Stones putting the four tiny, semi-camouflaged faces of the Fab Four on the cover of Satanic Majesties.
It is difficult, though, not to acknowledge the plausibility of John Lennon’s “imitators” accusation. After all, didn’t “Paint It Black” owe something to “Baby’s in Black”? Couldn’t “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” be seen and heard as a close, seven-minute-plus companion of “Hey Jude”? Aren’t there parallels to be drawn between the two made-for-TV specials Magical Mystery Tour and The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus? And, certainly, wasn’t Their Satanic Majesties Request just a blatant, knee-jerk response to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? Well, not necessarily.
KEITH RICHARDS: I don’t know. I never listened any more to the Beatles than to anyone else in those days when we were working. It’s probably more down to the fact that we were going through the same things. Maybe we were doing it a little bit after them. Anyway, we were following them through so many scenes. We’re only just mirrors ourselves of that whole thing. It took us much longer to get a record out for us; our stuff was always coming out later anyway.
MICK JAGGER: I can’t remember anything that happened in 1967 I’m afraid . . . I’m sure there’s lots of other people who can’t remember either . . . everyone was wanting to do something else at that point. Everyone was fed up with just playing straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll, so they just . . . we just went in and just looked around . . . It was a very weird time for us because we were in and out of jail and were on kind of drug charges and we didn’t know what we were doing and . . . It was very peculiar and so we played very peculiar music that year . . . I think we were just taking too much acid. We were just getting carried away, just thinking anything you did was fun and everyone should listen to it. The whole thing [Satanic Majesties], we were on acid. We were on acid doing the cover picture. I always remember doing that. It was like being at school, you know, sticking on the bits of colored paper and things. It was really silly. But we enjoyed it (laughs). Also, we did it to piss Andrew off, because he was such a pain in the neck. Because he didn’t understand it. The more we wanted to unload him, we decided to go on this path to alienate him.
Mission accomplished! Oldham walked out in the middle of the recording sessions at Olympic Studios never to return.
There’s no denying that the album had its moments (“She’s a Rainbow,” “2000 Light Years from Home”), but it seldom appears on any lists of favorite, best, or most successful projects by the Rolling Stones. And Pepper eclipsed it by . . . well, about two thousand light years. It is a curio. A timepiece. A graphic reflection of the excesses of the period in which it was recorded.
BILLY ALTMAN: The Satanic Majesties album had been their first misstep really in their entire career. They’d always been kind of following the Beatles, but kind of doing things their own way. The Beatles would do something and then the Stones would do something in a similar vein, but also different and controversial that set them apart.
GLYN JOHNS: Recording Satanic was really boring. It really didn’t come off. I’ve never listened to it since its release.
Once the purple haze began to lift, it actually accelerated and paved the way for a soon-to-be new Stones era: a break with Andrew Oldham; a new producer; the sad departure and death of Brian Jones; and the eventual winding down of the Beatles as a day-to-day functioning reality. In a very real sense, the Stones were poised to finally step out of the shadow of the Fab Four, and make a run for Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band in the World status. That journey began in earnest in 1968.
This photo from 1965 at RCA Studios in Hollywood presaged the Stones’ psychedelic stage
