Beatles vs. Stones (15 page)

Nevertheless, he soon began lamenting that the show business
beat at
Melody Maker
was too much about the “biz” side of things. He was compiling tour date listings and cranking out celebrity puff pieces, rather than writing sharp and penetrating profiles. Eventually he grew so bothered by the paper’s fatuity that he tried to defect to the more highly regarded
Daily Telegraph
, but he was unsuccessful. At his interview, an executive asked him where he currently worked.

“
Melody Maker
,” Coleman answered.

“And where did you work before that?”

“The
Manchester Evening News.
”

His interviewer fixed him with a quizzical look. There was a pregnant pause. Finally, he said,
“Tell me, Mr. Coleman: Why did you leave journalism?”

The exchange motivated Coleman to work even harder at trying to improve
Melody Maker
. Eventually he became the paper’s editor-in-chief and then a respected celebrity biographer. In his writings on the Beatles and the Stones circa 1963 and 1964, however, he was in a transitional phase. His “Rebels with a Beat” profile showed his penchant for putting across shrewd insights while at the same time indulging in a bit of promotional hagiography. The Beatles were fond of Coleman, because he was one of the few writers they encountered who always expressed interest in their music, as well as their celebrity; but they may not have been thrilled to see the Stones—whom they had in some ways befriended, and whom they’d given a song—characterized as their new rivals.

Regardless, the template that Coleman helped to construct was picked up again and again. Many of the same journalists who had complacently described the Beatles as boyish and good-humored were now lazily portraying the Stones as filthy and obnoxious.
“They look like boys who any self-respecting mum would lock in the bathroom!” a
Daily Express
journalist remarked, just ten days after Coleman’s piece came out. “But the Rolling Stones—five tough young London-based music-makers with doorstep mouths, pallid cheeks and unkempt hair—are not worried what mums think! For now the
Beatles have registered with all age groups, [but] the Rolling Stones have taken over as the voice of the teens.” An Australian journalist, Lillian Roxon, remarked that while the Beatles
“looked as if they had been personally scrubbed down by Brian Epstein himself, the Rolling Stones looked as if they had been sent to bed every night for a week with the same clothes on and no supper. The Beatles’ songs had been rinsed and hung out to dry. The Stones had never seen soap and water. And where the adorable little wind-up Beatle mop-tops wanted nothing more than to hold a hand, the hateful rasping Stones were bent on rape, pillage and plunder.”

A bit paradoxically, some of the Stones’ popularity owed to the obscurity of the music they championed. Unlike “ordinary” teens, who could be counted on to unthinkingly embrace whomever the show-business Establishment decreed should be the flavor of the month, the Stones’ supporters fancied themselves as curious and more discerning types. In this way, they somewhat prefigured modern-day hipsters—those urban twentysomethings who prize, above just about everything else, their supposedly superior cultural knowledge. When the niche constituency for R&B started growing in England in the early 1960s, Jagger even wrote an unguarded (some would say “uncool”) letter to
Melody Maker
solely for the purpose of stressing that he had been in the vanguard of the whole scene. “I used to write letters to Pye Records [a British label] pleading with them to release Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley records long before this beat thing got commercial,” he said.

I don’t know if the people at Pye remember my name, but they ought to. They sent me back catalogues and they were very sympathetic. To the critics, then, who think we’re a beat group who came up overnight knowing nothing about it, we invite them to examine our record collection. It contains things by Jimmy Reed, Elmore James, (John Lee) Hooker and a stack of private tapes by Little Walter. That’s a good start.

Nevertheless, he had a point; it was not easy, in early-’60s England, to come across authentic Delta blues or amped up Chicago-style R&B. You had to make an effort. Oftentimes, that involved getting those types of LPs directly from the labels, such as Chess, in Chicago, or Specialty, in Los Angeles. American records were usually pricier than British ones, and of course you had to pay for shipping, too. Mick Jagger started ordering imported blues LPs as a teenager.
“He’d send money orders,” remembers Marshall Chess, whose father and uncle cofounded Chess Records in 1950. “I worked in the shipping room. I remember sending boxes of records to England. Filling out the customs forms. That first wave of blues lovers wanted those Chess albums. . . . It was rare. It wasn’t an everyday thing, to get an order from England.”

The Stones’ name, of course, was a tribute to Muddy Waters’s 1950 song “Rollin’ Stone,” and their earliest fans would have gotten the reference immediately. As the group’s popularity swelled, however, the majority of youths who heard about them would not have experienced such a pleasurable frisson of recognition. Initially, Stones fans were predominately city dwellers, and they fancied themselves as a savvy and discerning lot. They were the types of youths who, in addition to liking R&B, may also have been conversant in jazz. They might have taken some of their style cues from the Beats—Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. A few of their more literary minded enthusiasts might have gone so far as to line their bookshelves with Rimbaud, Dostoyevsky, and William Blake. They’d have bonded over, and felt protective about, their beleaguered “outsider” status, and they would have snickered at pop’s lumpen love of the Beatles. One Stones fan from the Netherlands recalled that at his local disco, the Pink Elephant,
“Beatles fans were not allowed. The sign on the door said ‘Stones Fans Only.’ ”

Naturally, when parents declared that they were horrified by the Stones, or tried to make life difficult for them, they only bolstered the group’s status as rebellious icons. Later on, of course, the Stones would become the most gargantuan touring band of all time, and with a retinue of lawyers and personal assistants, they practically immunized
themselves from petty hassles. But it was very different in the early ’60s. At some hotels, nighttime porters even prevented the Stones from bringing female guests into their rooms. Other times, they were banned altogether from hotels, refused rides by taxi drivers, denied service in restaurants, or heckled by local yokels. “We’d even go into a shop to buy a pack of cigarettes and they would refuse to sell us any,” Wyman recollected. “We don’t serve the likes of you in this establishment,” they’d sneer. “Kindly leave.” Once, when the maître d’ at the Grand Hotel in Bristol turned them away, it provoked yet another tabloid headline:
“The Rolling Stones Gather No Lunch.”

Uptight authorities even picked on Stones
fans
. In May 1964, the
Daily Mirror
reported that a Coventry headmaster had suspended eleven students for
“imitating the Stones’ hairstyle.” They were told to stay away from the school until they “cut their hair neatly, like the Beatles.”
American music critic Anthony DeCurtis recalls that in October of that year, the day after the Stones appeared on the
Ed Sullivan Show,
“[E]very single one of my teachers gave a lecture about the Rolling Stones and how repulsive they were. They’d pat you on the head for liking the Beatles. They got a kick out of them. They didn’t get a kick out of the Rolling Stones.”

Similarly, some parents forbade the Stones. One fan recalled feeling lucky growing up, because although her parents would have preferred it if the Beatles had been her favorite band, they at least allowed her to keep Stones LPs in their home. By contrast, most of her young girlfriends
“had to sneak the records and hide them from their parents,” she said. “This, of course, just added to the fun. I can remember listening to
England’s Newest Hit Makers
with my friend Linda, the record player muted under a stack of pillows in her bedroom. That was how much her mother hated the Stones.”

On July 4, 1964, the Stones made a notorious appearance on
Juke Box Jury
, the BBC’s nationally televised music panel show. The footage has since been lost, but a surviving photo captures the group’s mood. Instead of chatting amiably about the records they heard, the Stones were
impolite and abrasive.
“Nobody was particularly witty or anything,” Keith Richards said later. “We just trashed every song they played.” According to a
Daily Sketch
reviewer, the Stones
“indicated their pleasure or displeasure by catarrhal grunts that an ear, trained in the illiterate school of young people, could sometimes distinguish as ‘Well, yeah, er, I, er, mean, like, well it’s, ha-ha, awful then. Naw, definitely not, in’nit?’ ” Even
New Musical Express
, a music paper that was normally favorable to the Stones, called their appearance on
Juke Box Jury
“an utter disgrace.” In lieu of an apology, the Stones later maintained that they had not set out to cause a furor, but rather that the show’s producers had asked them to comment upon a boring batch of records.

Ten days later, the Stones headlined a gig at the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool that ended in a major riot. The trouble began when a youth started spitting at Brian Jones from the front of the stage. (According to an eyewitness, he’d taken exception to Brian’s
“effete posturing.”) Keith responded first by standing on the kid’s hands, and then by kicking him in the face. Instantaneously, the whole hall erupted. The Stones beat a hasty retreat, and before police could restore order, fans had thrown shoes, bottles, and coins, ripped up their seats, torn down curtains, smashed a bunch of crystal chandeliers, and leveled a Steinway grand piano. Fifty people required hospital treatment for their injuries, and the town council banned the Stones from ever appearing there again.

A late-night incident at a gas station in Stratford wound up providing the Stones with even worse (read: better) publicity. It was March 18, 1965, and the Stones were in an upbeat mood; they’d just been voted the most popular recording artists in France, and they were on their way back from their last stop on a short and successful tour with the Hollies—fourteen shows in fourteen consecutive nights. At around 11:30 p.m., they stopped off to stretch their legs and let Bill Wyman use the restroom. But the attendant, a button-downed forty-one-year-old man named Charles Keeley, curtly told them that there wasn’t one. Wyman knew that there was, and so he persisted in asking
to use it, only to be denied again. Then the other Stones joined into the fray, badgering the attendant to just let Wyman use the bathroom. Neither side would budge, and the conversation quickly grew heated.

“Get off my forecourt! Get off my forecourt!” Keeley supposedly shouted.

“Get off my foreskin!” Jones responded.

Three of the Stones—Jagger, Jones, and Wyman—then proceeded to unzip their trousers and relieve themselves against a nearby wall.

The incident would have been forgotten if an offended eyewitness had not taken down their license plate number. But he did, and so this led to The Great Urination Bust of 1965. Three months later, Wyman, Jagger, and Jones were made to appear before the East Ham Magistrates’ Court in London. According to sworn testimony, as Jagger was urinating that night, he yelled, “We’ll piss anywhere, man!” Then the others, as if on cue, supposedly began chanting the phrase: “We’ll piss anywhere! We’ll piss anywhere!” One of them even allegedly did a weird dance as well. As they peeled out of the service station, several of them allegedly stuck their hands out of the windows of their chauffeured Daimler touring car and showed the attendant “a well-known gesture.”

Noting that Mr. Keeley had referred to the Stones as “long-haired monsters,” the defense attorney asked him if he was pressing charges simply out of spite.

“The conception of ‘long-haired monsters’ did not influence my decision to complain,” Keeley testified, “although it might have started the ball rolling. It made me determined not to let them go to the staff toilet.”

The three Stones were fined £5 each for “insulting behavior” and ordered to pay court costs. The magistrates’ chairman concluded,
“Whether it is the Rolling Stones, the Beatles or anyone else, we will not tolerate conduct of this character. Because you have reached the exalted heights in your profession, it does not mean you have the right to act like this. On the contrary, you should set a standard of
behavior, which should be a moral pattern for your large number of supporters. You have been found guilty of behavior not becoming young gentlemen.”

The trial got heavy coverage in London’s tabloid press, and as rock writer Marc Spitz points out, it added substantially to their growing legend.
“The notion that the Stones should act in a way that would firmly establish them as volatile Cains to the Beatles’ true-blue Abels was already planted in the band members’ heads, and so here was the water-passing, watershed moment. The Beatles pissed where pissing was designated. The Stones did what they liked.”

Occasionally, the Stones professed to be aggrieved at the treatment they received by adults.
Sometimes they claimed they were unfairly persecuted for their long locks. Other times, they protested that the reports about their bad hygiene and slovenly appearance were inaccurate. “Simply because we chose to do something different and wear our hair long they had to make up these ridiculous stories about our hygiene,” Brian Jones complained.
“I happen to be particularly fastidious when it comes to washing and wearing clean clothes, so the kind of rubbish which reporters wrote about our not washing is both untrue and unnecessary.” But they must have known that this was a mug’s game. No amount of remonstration was going to deter anyone who wanted to believe that the Stones had fleas leaping off their heads.

That’s why the Stones more commonly answered their critics with practiced arrogance:
“I don’t particularly care either way whether parents hate us or not,” Jagger told an interviewer. “We know a lot of people don’t like us ’coz they say we’re scruffy and don’t wash,” he said another time.
“So what? They don’t have to come and look at us, do they?”
“My hair is not a gimmick,” Jones added. “To be honest, I think it looks good. I think I look right with long hair. So I’ll tell you this much: my hair’s staying as it is. If you don’t like it: hard luck.”