John hated the Stones’ rough reputation. He knew they were really just nice middle-class boys
The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were always being treated as rivals. They had first met just over a year before, at the Station Hotel in Richmond, Surrey. At that point the Beatles were far ahead, topping the bill on a nation-wide tour, while the Stones were still playing in pubs.
In the first week of May 1963, George Harrison was judging a talent contest at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, and found himself on a panel with Dick Rowe of Decca Records, who was already widely known as The Man Who Turned Down The Beatles. Rowe told George that he was still kicking himself for that mistake. Graciously, George replied that he had probably been right, as they’d done a terrible audition.
Sensing Rowe’s disappointment with the talent on show at the Philharmonic, George tipped him off about a great new group who played every Sunday in Richmond. Within days, Rowe had offered them a contract.
Ever competitive, the Beatles were distressed that the Stones had negotiated a better deal with Decca than they themselves had with EMI. They soon began to worry that the underdog was becoming the overdog. From then on, there was always an edge to their friendship.
One day, John and Paul were emerging from music publisher Dick James’s office on Charing Cross Road when they heard Mick
BEATLES SETTLED FOR HOLDING HANDS, THE STONES WENT THE WHOLE HOG
and Keith shouting at them from a passing taxi. The two Beatles cadged a lift, and as the four of them travelled along, Mick said, ‘We’re recording. Got any songs?’
John and Paul thought of one straight away. ‘How about Ringo’s song? You could do it as a single.’ And so, from this chance encounter, The Rolling Stones gained their first top 20 single, I Wanna Be Your Man.
In some ways, John helped to fuel his own fears that The Stones were a more authentic version of the Beatles – the Beatles freed from Sunday best. Mick Jagger sang ‘wanna’, while John sang ‘want to’; the Beatles were happy to settle for holding hands; The Stones aimed to go the whole hog.
The rough, bluesy insolence of the Stones reminded John of The Beatles before they had been buffed and polished by Brian Epstein. In hip circles it had become fashionable to regard The Beatles as soft, pretty and artificial, and The Stones as tough, bullish and real.
John was increasingly riled by the comparison. ‘John went bananas about all the publicity the Stones were getting for being rough,’ recalled Bill Harry, editor of Mersey Beat. ‘He knew The Stones were middle-class boys from the Home Counties, not leather-jacketed Teds at all. While the Beatles had been swearing and whoring it in Hamburg, they had been attending trendy schools. John hated it. He really hated it.’
After the premiere of their film A
Hard Day’s Night on July 6, 1964, John, Paul and Ringo went with Brian Jones and Keith Richards to the Ad Lib Club near Leicester Square. Paul left comparatively early – they had to mime on the next day’s Top Of The Pops – and Ringo left shortly after 4am, having stayed up to look at the reviews of the film in the early editions of the newspapers, but John was clearly in for the long haul, draining Scotch and Cokes one after the other.
‘His hand gripped his glass as if he were trying to crush it,’ noted one observer. ‘His eyes seemed hard, sharp and unsmiling. His upper lip sometimes curled as he talked, displaying hard white teeth.’
The more the night wore on, the fonder John grew of the two Rolling Stones present. ‘I love you. I loved you the first time I heard you,’ he said.
But, even when drunk, he never plunged so deeply into sentimentality that he was unable to haul himself back out. ‘But there’s something wrong with you, isn’t there? There’s one of you in the group that isn’t as good as the others. Find out who he is and get rid of ’im.’
The talk turned to music: Jones and Richards argued that The Stones played genuine rhythm and blues, while The Beatles just played commercial pop. This was a sore spot for John, who abruptly changed the subject.
First, he looked at Jones. ‘Your hair makes it,’ he said. Then he looked at Richards. ‘Your hair makes it,’ he said. Then he turned to absent friends. ‘But Mick Jagger. You know as well as I do that his hair doesn’t make it.’
And so it went on.
John said, ‘In another year,
I’ll have me money and I’ll be out of it.’
‘In another year,’ said Brian, ‘we’ll be there.’ John took a philosophic drag on his cigarette. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but what’s there?’
John’s fixation with The Rolling Stones lasted for years to come, not least because people like him tended to prefer groups like them. At the same time, he resented them as copycats who stole ideas from The Beatles.
Like rival Elizabethan households, Britain’s two most illustrious groups operated a delicate rivalry, its wheels oiled by deference from the upstart towards the grandee. From George Harrison’s perspective, ‘Mick Jagger was always lurking around in the background, trying to find out what was happening. Mick never wanted to miss out on what the Fabs were doing.’
Jagger lived in Marylebone Road, a walk across Regent’s Park from Paul’s house in St John’s Wood. They would meet from time to time, but it was Jagger who would always come to McCartney, not vice versa. ‘I don’t remember him coming to us,’ Marianne Faithfull, Jagger’s thengirlfriend, says of Paul. ‘Mick always had to come to his house, because he was Paul McCartney, and you went to him. Paul never came to us. I was always very curious about how Mick saw him, how Mick felt about him. It was always fun to watch. There was always rivalry there. Not from Paul, none at all. Paul was oblivious, but there was something from Mick. It was good fun. It was like watching a game on the television.’
In some ways, the two bands were mirror images of one another: Paul and Mick the savvy front men, always with an eye on the prize; Ringo and Charlie the older, unflappable blokes on drums; John and Keith the rogues, the hard men, the undeceived; and Brian and George the other-worldly ones, nursing resentment at their exclusion by
MICK WAS LURKING, HE NEVER WANTED TO MISS OUT ON WHAT THE FABS WERE DOING
the top dogs.
Beneath his brittle façade, John was scared by life. Nicky Haslam, who knew him and liked him, describes him as ‘a wuss’. Sensing this vulnerability, Keith Richards would goad him.
Like many bullies, John dreaded being bullied. He would try to get his dig in first, but unlike him, Richards was impregnable.
On one occasion John told Keith that his guitar solo in the middle of
It’s All Over Now was ‘crap’. Keith remained unruffled: ‘Maybe he got out the wrong side of the bed that day. OK, it certainly could have been better. But you disarmed the man. “Yeah, it wasn’t one of my best, John. Sorry. Sorry it jars, old boy. You can play it any f ****** way you like.”’
In the early days, Richards enjoyed telling John that he wore his guitar too high. ‘Got your f ****** guitar under your f ****** chin, for Christ’s sake. It ain’t a violin.’
‘Try a longer strap, John. The longer the strap, the better you play.’
‘No wonder you don’t swing, you know? No wonder you only rock, no wonder you can’t roll.’
As time went by, he would note with satisfaction the furtive but steady descent of John’s guitar strap.