Beatles vs. Stones (16 page)

Fans, of course, loved it. Along with their hair, the motley assemblage
of colorful clothes that the Stones draped over their skinny frames was an essential part of their appeal. A teenager’s letter to the editor in 1964 amplified the point:

Suggestions that the Stones should go and have short back and sides are not just wrong but beside the point. You might as well suggest Jackie Kennedy should not dress elegantly, or that Fidel Castro should not have his beard. . . . The Stones are popular because they wear sweatshirts and cord trousers that we can buy too. Long hair is a sign of protest against the crop-headed discipline of the army during wartime. Bright, casual clothes for men are fashionable as a reaction against wartime grey and drab demob suits.

“I’m fed up with people saying they hate the Rolling Stones because of their hair,” wrote another fan. “England should be very proud of them. People are always moaning that Liverpool is beating the South in talent. Now we have a group to be proud of and half the people moan about them.”

Nonconformist teens were likewise drawn to the Stones’ live performances, which crackled with an air of danger, and in that important respect were completely unlike what any of the Merseyside acts were doing.
“Keith and I will talk about the music hall thing, the vaudeville influence that lay behind all these groups like the Beatles,” Jagger said later on. He was referring to their post-Hamburg professionalism—their hackneyed stage banter, choreographed bowing, and contrived cheerfulness. Jagger continued: “The North of England was so much further behind London culturally at the time—that wasn’t really a bad thing, they just were. So all those young groups had been brought up knowing about the music hall, going to it with their parents, so when a band like the Hollies actually got up on stage, they’d behave like vaudeville entertainers. They were not cool.”

By contrast, the Stones strutted onto the stage with angry intensity. Cordons of police officers shielded them from their fans, just
like they did for the Beatles, but they had to contend with unrulier audiences, who often rushed to the front of the theater, surging and swaying in a great mass (
“like palm trees in a hurricane,” Jones once said).
“We’d walk into some of these places and it was like the battle of Crimea going on,” Richards said. “People gasping, tits hanging out, chicks choking, nurses, ambulances.” It was just what the Stones wanted. Jagger learned to bait the crowds, vamping and goose-stepping like a rabies-infected soldier. Jones went for the same effect, advancing to the very rim of the stage, leaning over, and leering at one girl or another. If she seemed to be with her boyfriend, then all the better: he’d smack his tambourine right in the guy’s face and flash a wicked grin. Fans hurled gifts and souvenirs at the Stones from every direction. Sometimes, their performances lasted only a few minutes before pissed-off cops forced them to quit. Once the curtains fell, security bums rushed the band out of the venue and into their getaway vehicles. To let them linger any longer was to risk catastrophe.

The Stones also provoked a more complicated sexual response than any other act, and much of it owed to Mick Jagger’s visual appeal as an androgyne. Jagger’s long hair, wispy frame, and wide Caravaggio mouth gave him a feminine quality to begin with, and his preening and teasing mannerisms—the ways he shimmied, gestured, pranced, and wiggled—put it over the top. (It wasn’t for nothing that he’d later be called “the king bitch of rock.”) Phil May, the lead singer of the Pretty Things, always thought that this one of the reasons that Stones’ audiences always had a heavier male quotient than other acts.
“The way he performed, he had a sexual appeal for the girls and a homosexual attraction for the boys,” he said. “And I’m not talking about homosexual boys—Mick aroused heterosexual guys as well.” May’s view, which echoes a popular theory that Alfred Kinsey first put across in the 1940s, holds that sexual attraction exists on a gay-straight continuum. “The fact is that everybody has some homosexuality in his makeup,” May surmised, and somehow Jagger was uniquely capable of triggering latent or suppressed desires in some of his male fans. “I’m
sure if you had asked any of them that question, they’d have denied it. But there was a duality, especially in the Stones, no denying it.”

Either way, until the Stones came along, teenage girls were the most avid fans of popular music groups. “They had pictures of Gerry and the Pacemakers on their walls, Paul McCartney, but the guys didn’t do that,” May continued. What’s more, when guys did attend rock shows, it was usually just as a courtesy to their dates. Oftentimes, they’d stand amongst themselves in the back of the room, snickering and gawking. The Stones, however, provoked a totally different response; boys would be muscling girls out of the way in order to get choice spots in front of the stage. “The chicks were pushed further and further back because they were physically overwhelmed. As a result, the first twenty-five rows would be guys.” That had never happened before.

Of course, sexual attitudes were already unloosening in the British Isles well before the Beatles and the Stones came along in the early ’60s. Teenage promiscuity was becoming a public worry, censorship was on the wane, and the stodginess of the older generations was being cleverly satirized in the legendary
Private Eye
magazine, and in the popular comedy stage revue
Beyond the Fringe
, performed by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller. Nevertheless, the Stones were completely alone in deciding that a song like Slim Harpo’s “King Bee” was fit for teenage consumption. (“I can make honey, baby, let me come inside.”) When the Stones covered Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster”—ostensibly a song about a chicken—Jagger sang it with such lascivious intent that American radio stations refused to play it. And of course the Stones’ monster 1965 hit, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which reached number one in England and America, was about as sexually frank as anything that had ever been played on commercial radio: In the third verse, the narrator complains because the girl he wants to fuck is on her period (“baby better come back, maybe next week.”)
^I

Meanwhile, many youths began championing a new ethos of candidness and authenticity in personal relations. No doubt this was largely a response to the glad-handing insincerity that was so rampant in the conformist-minded ’50s. Few baby boomers were as sensitive to the cultural reserve of the Lonely Crowd than punk poetess Patti Smith, who saw the Stones for the first time from her living room, when they performed on
The Ed Sullivan Show
in 1964. Her father, a Jehovah’s Witness assembly-line worker, was watching as well, “glued to the screen, [and] cussing his brains out” during the band’s entire three-song set. He’d probably have been even more upset if he’d known that at that that very moment, his daughter was experiencing a sexual and generational awakening. Years later, she’d write about it in a weird, modernist-flavored prose poem.
“I was trapped in a field of hot dots,” she said:

the guitar player had pimples. the blonde kneeling down had circles ringing his eyes. one had greasy hair. the other didn’t care. and the singer was showing his second layer of skin and more than a little milk. I felt thru his pants with optic x-ray. this was some hard meat. this was bitch. five white boys sexy as any spade. their nerve was wired and their third leg was rising. in six minutes five lusty images gave me my first glob of gooie in my virgin panties.

Mick Jagger would later be rather cruel to Patti Smith. In a 1977 interview with the British magazine
Sounds
, he called her
“crap,” “awful,” “full of rubbish,” “full of words and crap,” “a poseur of the worst kind,” “a useless guitar player,” “a bad singer,” “not attractive,” and “not really together musically,” before finally concluding (incongruously) “she’s all right.” Flash back to 1965, however, and she was precisely the type of fan the Rolling Stones were connecting with. She certainly wasn’t a teenybopper. At the time, she worked in a New Jersey toy factory, and she longed to go to art school even though she couldn’t afford it. She was creative, aware, and literate, a thrift-store scavenger and a shoplifter of esoteric books. Personality wise,
she would have been at stark odds with the types of young teens who, Stones fans claimed, were fecklessly glomming onto the Beatles.

At the same time that the Stones courted fans like Patti Smith, they were busily insinuating themselves into the extravagant lifestyles of the English upper class. Jagger was by far the most socially anxious of the whole bunch. When he started dating Chrissie Shrimpton in the fall of 1963 (he was twenty years old and she was eighteen), it was probably at least partly because he saw her as a ladder up to where he wanted to be. Chrissie was the well-heeled younger sister of Jean Shrimpton (“the Shrimp”), arguably the world’s first supermodel. Known everywhere as the sexy face of new London, Jean was engaged to England’s hippest photographer, David Bailey. (Later she’d be linked to the nation’s trendiest actor, Terence Stamp.) Chrissie wasn’t quite the doe-eyed knockout that her older sister was, but she was certainly very pretty, and she was confident beyond her years. Legend holds that she introduced herself to Jagger by boldly approaching him after a gig asking, “Will you kiss me?”

They were a power couple, and initially, Chrissie had the upper hand; she was more worldly and better connected. Nicky Haslam, a British socialite and interior designer, remembers that when Chrissie first started bringing Mick around, she sheepishly joked to her fancy friends,
“he’s my cleaner—I put an ad in the paper and he turned up.”

Soon enough, though, she was raving about her new boyfriend to everyone in fashionable London.
“He’s great,” Bailey remembers her saying. “He’s going to be bigger than the Beatles.”

The only problem was, the two rarely seemed to get along very well. Almost everyone in the Stones’ orbit back then remembers how frequently and furiously Mick and Chrissie used to argue with each other. In his memoir,
Stoned
, Andrew Oldham recalls when he went to see the Stones for the very first time in April 1963—before he even knew exactly who Jagger was, or what he looked like—he saw Mick and Chrissie having a blazing dispute in an alleyway outside the Crawdaddy Club. Marianne Faithfull has a similar recollection in her
memoir about the night
she
met Jagger, in March 1964, at a record release party for Adrienne Posta. Chrissie
“was crying and shouting at him, and in the heat of the argument her false eyelashes were peeling off,” she said. Maldwyn Thomas, a friend of the couple, remembers
“famous, plate-throwing, Hollywood-style rows.” Sometimes, Chrissie would attack Mick in a pugilistic fury, lock him out of the house, or find someplace to disappear to for a few days, so that he had no way of reaching her.
“Mick would cry a lot,” Shrimpton said many years later. “We both would cry a lot.”

Oldham figures that many of their problems arose as the relationship’s balance of power shifted as a result of Mick’s
“growing charisma . . . and his obvious enjoyment of it.” Chrissie arrived at the same conclusion.
“We’d be walking down the street,” she said, “and suddenly he’d see some Stones fans. My hand would suddenly be dropped, and he’d be walking ahead on his own.

Eventually, Jagger would vent his frustrations in his music. “Under My Thumb,” “Stupid Girl,” “19th Nervous Breakdown”—each of those scathing and abusive songs are thought to have been written about Chrissie Shrimpton. Jagger’s most vicious put-down was probably “Out of Time,” which the Stones recorded while he was simultaneously winding things down with Chrissie while avidly courting his next inamorata, Marianne Faithfull. (“You’re obsolete my baby, my poor discarded baby . . . you’re out of time.”)

Then again, Chrissie had done a lot for young Mick. She introduced him to London’s fashionable intelligentsia, and she took him to trendy boutiques, like Bus Stop and Biba. She was also the first person to get him entry into forbidding clubs like the Ad Lib, the Cromwellian, and the Scotch of St. James, where Mick mingled with pop culture royalty.
“Mick liked to imagine their romance to be the stuff of newspaper gossip columns,” a biographer observed. “So he would refer to it, in tour interviews with provincial journalists, sitting on the cold back stairs of some northern Gaumont of ABC, sniffing with the faint flu that plagued all the Stones and tilting a Pepsi bottle against his lips.
‘ . . . there’s all those lies being written about me and Chrissie Shrimpton.’ ” After the Stones became popular in the US, Chrissie even started writing a column for
Mod
, called “From London with Luv,” in which she kept American girls informed about all of their fabulous activities.

“Mick and I went down to visit George and Pattie Harrison last week,” ran a typical entry.

They were just about ready to go out to a Saturday night movie when we arrived and so they asked us to go with them. The film happened to be at John Lennon’s private home cinema. What a great way to see a movie. We saw a film called Citizen Kane [by] Orson Welles surrounded by Bourneville chocolate and cups of coffee! . . . Recently I had my 21st birthday. . . . Mick gave me a huge rocking horse on big rockers which I named Petunia. Also a birdcage with a Victorian brass bird in it. The bird sings. That is, it does if you put money into it.

But of course when Mick and Chrissie first met, Jagger wasn’t famous at all. At that point, he didn’t even know that it was customary to leave a tip at a posh restaurant! Bailey recalled taking Jagger to an extravagant dinner at a place called the Casserole, on King’s Road. “I told him to leave a tip and he said, ‘Leave a tip? What the fuck for?’ I said it was normal practice and suggested he leave a ten-shilling note, one of those old brown banknotes. Mick put the ten-bob note on the plate, but as we were putting our coats on, I noticed his hand slip out and pop the ten shillings back in his pocket.”

Bailey tells another anecdote:
“Later I introduced Mick to Andy Warhol, who I already knew. The first time I took Mick to meet Warhol was at Baby Jane Holzer’s.” Holzer was a flamboyant and well-connected young model who had recently married a wealthy real estate heir; together they shared a colossal property on Park Avenue. “Mick sat down and stuck his feet on her favorite lattice Chinese table,” Bailey continues. “I thought, ‘Fuck, she’s not going to be pleased,’ because I
wouldn’t have done something like that, but Mick could get away with it, because
the Stones were the cool group
.”