Beatles vs. Stones (38 page)

“They let me stay out”
:
As quoted in Geoffrey Giuliano,
Dark Horse: The Life and Art of George Harrison
(New York: Bloomsbury, 1989), 10.

“From about the age of thirteen”
:
As quoted in Bob Spitz,
The Beatles: The Biography
(Boston: Little, Brown, 2005), 120.

“You kept your head down”
:
As quoted in Spitz,
The Beatles,
335.

cries of
‘Seig Heil!’
and ‘Fucking Nazis!’
:
Philip Norman,
Shout! The True Story of the Beatles
(New York: Fireside, 2005, c. 1981), 92.

“Shimmy Shake” as “shitty shitty”
:
Richard Buskin,
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Beatles
(New York: Alpha, 1998), 109.

far more so than in England
:
Speaking of sex in England, George Harrison reminisced that in the late 1950s, “it wasn’t that easy to get. The girls would all wear brassieres and corsets, which seemed like reinforced steel. You could never actually get in anywhere. You’d always be breaking your hand trying to undo everything. I can remember parties and I’d be snogging with some girl and having a hard-on for eight hours till my groin was aching—and not getting any relief. That was how it always was. Those
weren’t
the days.”

“two or three girls each night”
:
As quoted in Geoffrey Giuliano,
Blackbird: The Life and Times of Paul McCartney
(London: John Blake, 1991), 46.

“It was a sex shock”
:
As quoted in
The Beatles
Anthology
, 53.

“Between the whores”
:
As quoted in Giuliano,
Blackbird
, p. 38.

“Virtually every night”
:
As quoted in Giuliano,
Blackbird
, p. 38.

“Within seconds the fellow”
:
As quoted in Coleman,
Lennon
, 275.

In another despicable episode
:
Norman,
John Lennon: The Life
, p. 216.

“They liked us because”
:
As quoted in
The Beatles
Anthology
, p. 57.

“raw. . . . They were always”
:
Liz Hughes, as quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght,
Oral History
, 72.

“commanded the stage”
:
As quoted in Andrew Solt and Sam Egan, eds.,
Imagine:
John Lennon
(New York: Macmillan, 1988), 37.

“ ‘Shurrup, you with the suits on’ ”
:
Coleman,
Lennon
, p. 241

“John . . . was always ready to have a go”
:
As quoted in Gareth L. Pawlowski,
How They Became the Beatles: A Definitive History of the Early Years
(London & Sydney: Macdonald, 1990), 35.

After Stuart Sutcliffe died:
Stuart’s younger sister, Pauline, alleged in her memoir
The Beatles’ Shadow: Stuart Sutcliffe and His Lonely Hearts Club
(London: Macmillan, 2002) that it was actually Lennon who made the fatal attack upon her brother, and that it occurred in Hamburg, not Liverpool. She also claimed that McCartney witnessed the vicious assault, and that she learned of it firsthand from Stu. But McCartney denies having seen such a fight, and Stu’s lover, Astrid, doubts it happened, “because if it had, Stuart would have told me.” Lennon was closer to Stu than anyone else in the Beatles, and all things considered the allegation does not seem very credible.

“The Beatles when they lived”
:
As quoted in Oldham,
Stoned
, 293.

“He was a rebel”
:
As quoted in Wyman,
Rolling with the Stones
(New York: DK Publishing, 2002), 19.

Brian “sometimes talked of becoming”
:
As quoted in David Dalton, ed.,
The Rolling Stones: The First Twenty Years
(New York: Knopf, 1981), 12.

“an old ladies’ resting place”
:
As quoted in Wyman,
Stone Alone
(New York: Da Capo, 1997), 77.

“He started to rebel”
:
As quoted in Philip Norman,
The Stones
(New York: Penguin, 1994), 54.

“Brian was totally dishonest”
:
As quoted in Wyman,
Stone Alone
, 103. Photographer Nicky Wright, who did the cover for
England’s Newest Hit Makers
, remembered a time when Brian came to him and said, “ ‘Here you are—here’s a present for you.’ Inside were all these wonderful records—Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker. Twenty years later I realized they belonged to Long John Baldry when I read a magazine interview where he mentioned he lent a stash of Chess records to Brian, and never got them back!”

“Within two weeks Brian”
:
As quoted in Wyman,
Stone Alone
, 107.

“One night Brian punched”
:
Wyman,
Stone Alone
, 82.

“Brian fixed anyone with his big baby eyes”
:
Norman,
The Stones
, 51.

“Botticelli angel with a cruel streak”
:
Christopher Sanford,
Keith Richards: Satisfaction
(London: Headline Books, 2003), 39.

As a teenager, Michael Jagger
:
cf. George Harrison, on his Liverpool childhood: “You couldn’t get a cup of sugar, never mind a rock ’n’ roll record.”

“I never got to have a raving”
:
As quoted in Christopher Sanford,
Mick Jagger
:
Rebel Knight
(London: Omnibus Press, 2003), 16.

“wasn’t particularly impressed”
:
As quoted in David Dalton and Mick Farren, eds.,
The Rolling Stones: In Their Own Words
(London: Omnibus, 1980), 11.

“Rock and roll got me”
:
As quoted in A. E. Hotchner,
Blown Away: The Rolling Stones and the Death of the Sixties
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 52.

Instead, Richards found himself
:
Journalist George Melly described the British art schools of the 1950s as “the refuge of the bright but unacademic, the talented, the non-conformists, the lazy, the inventive, the indecisive: all those who didn’t know what they wanted but knew it wasn’t a nine-to-five job.” The list of noteworthy rock musicians who spent time in art school is remarkable; in addition to John Lennon and Keith Richards, it includes Ray Davies, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, David Bowie, Roxy Music’s Brian Ferry, and Dick Taylor, who very briefly played with the Stones before helping to start the Pretty Things.

“free-spirited . . . pest”
:
Christopher Sanford,
Keith Richards
, 34.

“the most stylish young man”
:
Wyman,
Stone Alone
, 91.

“Charlie’s concession to joining the Stones”
:
James Phelge,
Nankering with the Stones: The Untold Story of the Early Days
(Chicago: A Capella, 224), 44.

“The major difference between the Stones”
:
Wyman,
Stone Alone
, 111.

“The place was an absolute pit”
:
Wyman,
Stone Alone
, 112.

“I never understood why”
:
Wyman,
Stone Alone
, 112.

When the “Rollin’ Stones”
:
When their debut gig was announced in
Jazz News
, they were misidentified as “The Rolling Stones,” but they meant to go by the “Rollin’ Stones” (apostrophe after the
n
) and that is how they were known until they met Andrew Loog Oldham in the spring of 1963.

“They seemed accomplished”
:
As quoted in Oldham,
Stoned
, 207.

“but on stage they were”
:
Wyman,
Stone Alone
, 131.

“R&B was a minority thing”
:
As quoted in Stephen,
Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones
(New York: Broadway Books, 2001), 52. Additionally, rock ’n’ roll was associated with the working class. “Nice respectable grammar school boys preferred jazz,” Peter Doggett wrote me in an informal email, “and so they might have reached the blues via that direction. Liking rock ’n’ roll in the ’50s was an admission that you were, or wanted to be seen as, a kind of hoodlum. Many boys from middle-class homes used to pretend they didn’t like pop and rock ’n’ roll because their friends would have laughed at them if they admitted that they did.”

“waffly white pop”
:
As quoted in John Strausbaugh,
Rock Til You Drop
(London & New York: Verso, 2001), 40.

“Liverpool’s best-dressed bachelor”
:
Ray Coleman,
The Man Who Made the Beatles
, 29.

“They used to drive us crackers”
:
As quoted in Coleman,
The Man Who Made the Beatles
, 76.

“Inside the club it was as black”
:
Brian Epstein,
A Cellarful of Noise
(New York: Doubleday and Co., 1964), 39.

“fascinated” by their “pounding bass beat”
:
Epstein,
Cellarful of Noise
, 39.

“They were not very tidy”
:
Epstein,
Cellarful of Noise
, 39.

“This accusation has been”
:
As quoted in
Brian Epstein: Inside the Fifth Beatle
(DVD, Passport, 2004).

“he looked efficient and rich”
:
The Beatles Anthology
, 65.

“The Beatles are going”
:
As quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght,
An Oral History
, 86.

Except for on one slightly infamous occasion
:
One late night circa 1963, while the Beatles were working, Epstein unexpectedly showed up with one of his paramours at Abbey Road Studios. No doubt eager to impress, he leaned into the intercom and made a suggestion about Paul’s vocals. Lennon’s voice boomed back at him: “You look after your percentages, Brian. We’ll take care of the music.” It was the type of remark that would have sent the Beatles’ fragile manager reeling.

“Brian wanted to be a star himself”
:
As quoted in Geller,
Brian Epstein Story
, 58.