The Beatles vs The Rolling Stones | Page 7 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

I just finished reading Beatles vs. Stones by John McMillian. Now, I’ve been a Beatles fan since before my adolescence, and part of that discovery (and obsession) meant that I listened to a lot of “oldies” radio. There were plenty of other groups/songs that I learned to love, especially Simon and Garfunkel, The Monkees, The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix, etc. I only mention that to point out that I wasn’t 100% Beatles exclusive.

But I’ve never liked the Stones. Even their best stuff (“Paint it, Black”, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” and so on) only rises to the level of lesser Beatles songs, like “What Goes On ,” or “I’ll Get You ,” as far as I’m concerned. Whenever I’ve listened to compilations of top 60’s hits, I’ll rock out on songs like “So Happy Together,” “House of the Rising Sun,” “Crimson and Clover,” or whatever, but I just instinctively skip over Stones songs. They’re boring, to me.

After reading McMillian’s book, I think maybe I understand things a bit better. The Stones explicitly described themselves as “the anti-Beatles.” Yet, as even John Lennon angrily pointed out in an interview, they seemed to just copy the Beatles’ every move. When The Beatles released a unique track of Paul McCartney singing to a simple acoustic guitar and string quartet (“Yesterday “), the Stones quickly followed with “As Tears Go By.” When The Beatles made rock history by including a sitar on one of their tracks for the first time (“Norwegian Wood “), lo and behold, suddenly the Stones followed with “Paint it, Black,” featuring sitar work. When The Beatles turned a corner and started exploring new sounds and becoming “studio artists” with Rubber Soul and Revolver , guess what the Stones did?

John said that the Stones were basically riding The Beatles’ coat tails, and McMillian seems to suggest that, while The Beatles actually were a down-and-dirty, gritty, nasty rock-and-roll band who had their image falsely remade for PR reasons, the Stones were a group of far more posh, well-educated lads who had their image falsely remade into a “rough and gritty” group just so they could be an alternative to The Beatles.

Ok, so I’ve just spilled lots of words to get to this point: is my perspective as a life-long Beatles fan unique? Or do most Beatles fans tend to shy away from the Stones? Were the Stones really any good, or were they just hopeless imitators who wouldn’t have really gotten anywhere if not for patterning themselves after The Beatles, all while insisting that they were “the anti-Beatles”?

Ahhh Girl said

@PeterWeatherby Have you seen this discussion yet? I’m wondering if we should move your excellent comments to that thread to keep the discussion all together. Do you think that discussion is on target with the type of discussion you have in mind?

The book in the first post on the other thread isn’t the same one you mention here, but I do think your post will work well on that thread.

No, I hadn’t seen that post. Thanks for the heads-up. I’m not sure if this post should be moved there or not – sometimes it’s nice to keep things all together (now), and sometimes it’s nice to have topics opened a-fresh just because the old thread was started shortly after Noah got off the Ark.

These were the relevant quotes I picked up from watching a documentary on the Stones about a month ago (Crossfire Hurricane):

Keith Richards: “The Beatles have got the white hat. What’s left? The black hat.”

Mick Jagger: “So you’ve got heroes; you’ve got an anti-hero. It’s good to have an attitude to play the part.”

Maybe that was their PR team telling them to say that, maybe it’s what they really thought. I don’t know. However it played out, they were in existence to be a counter-argument to The Beatles. They were supposed to be “the bad boys” to the “good boys” that the Beatles were.

I think that’s a load of crap. The Stones never gutted it out playing sweaty rock-n-roll for countless hours in an old German strip club wearing leather outfits and popping upper/downer pills by the handful. No matter what Brian Epstein created by way of an acceptable facade, I think The Beatles had the true grit and rough-and-tumble of a rock-n-roll band, so it irritates me when people say that the Stones were more gritty and rough.

I think the emergence of Rubber Soul and Revolver forever settled the matter – The Beatles were the true musicians and gritty rock-n-roll artists, and the Stones were just pretenders who had very little original content to contribute if they couldn’t borrow ideas from the Fab Four. “Oh, but the Stones were more bluesy,” some people say, but I think that argument evaporates as soon as you hear original songs like “Drive My Car ,” “The Word ,” “Run For Your Life ,” “Taxman ,” “She Said She Said ,” “I Want To Tell You ,” and so on.

BTW, here are John’s comments about the Stones after The Beatles broke up, circa 1971 in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine:

RS: Do you see [Jagger] much now?

LENNON: No, I never do see him. We saw a bit of each other around when Allen [Klein] was first coming in – I think Mick got jealous. 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 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, music-wise or power-wise, never were. I never said anything, I always admired them, because I like their funky music and I like their style. I like rock and roll and the direction they took after they got over trying to imitate us, you know, but he’s even going to do Apple now. He’s going to do the same thing.

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 [“I Wanna Be Your Man “] we wrote it for him.

I think when it comes to the whole “the Stones were better at blues music” argument, that’s when I get the most irritated. To me, that betrays a poor understanding of blues music as a whole. Musically speaking, the blues – as a genre – is fairly boring. Again, that’s strictly speaking musically – blues music is made up of the three major chords in any given key. It’s very basic, and it’s not very interesting.

What makes the blues interesting or enjoyable is when someone like Hendrix pins it to the wall and beats the living crap out of it with excess energy, mind-blowing lead guitar work, or some other original spin that makes otherwise boring three-chord-music fun to listen to.

Now, it’s true, most of what The Beatles did by way of true blues music (three chord basic stuff) was cover music. When they wrote their own stuff, they got more creative and threw in relative minor chords, or borrowed fifths, etc. But when they did tackle the basic three-chord music, they absolutely took it to another level with that extra energy that made them so enjoyable in Hamburg.

Nothing the Stones did by way of so-called “blues” even comes close to McCartney’s balls-to-the-wall rendition of “Long Tall Sally ,” and that was just a cover song.