Beatles vs. Stones (20 page)

As the Beatles began experimenting with newer and more sophisticated aesthetics, Martin’s role was, on the one hand, greatly enhanced. His arranging work, technical knowhow, and salutary advice deeply impacted some of the Beatles’ finest songs. In another sense, however, Martin’s role was diminished by the group’s evolving artistry. Soon they began telling him what
they
wanted their songs to sound like—as when Paul recorded “Yesterday”—and he would oblige. Fortunately, the new dynamic didn’t pose many problems.
“As I could see their talent growing, I could recognize that an idea coming from them was better than an idea coming from me,” Martin generously allowed. “In a sense, I made a sort of tactical withdrawal, recognizing that theirs was the greater talent.”

A few months later, the Beatles regrouped at Abbey Road to record
Rubber Soul
, their so-called transitional album. Critics said it was thematically richer and more sonically adventurous than anything the Beatles had yet attempted, and John and Paul agreed.
“You don’t know us if you don’t know
Rubber Soul
,” Lennon told a young interviewer shortly after the album was released. “All our ideas are different now.” Paul echoed his partner: “If someone saw a picture of you taken
two years ago and [they] said that was you, you’d say it was a load of rubbish and show them a new picture. That’s how we feel about the early stuff [compared to]
Rubber Soul.
 . . . People have always wanted us to stay the same, but we can’t stay in a rut. No one else expects to hit a peak at 23 and never develop, so why should we?
Rubber Soul
for me is the beginning of my adult life.”

The title of the album was a punny and playful corruption of a term that they had heard from a skeptical African American musician who disparaged the Rolling Stones by saying they played
“plastic soul”—by which he meant, he thought the Stones were just okay. Interesting, perhaps, but limited: a cheap knockoff of the real thing. Now the Beatles may have been trying to show how it was possible to appreciate Memphis soul, and incorporate elements of it into their work, without ever being called spurious.

In fact, the riff that propelled the very first song on the record, “Drive My Car,” was probably inspired by Otis Redding’s hit “Respect.” But the song also showed a glimpse of the Beatles’ new lyrical sophistication. Previously, John and Paul had almost always referred to women from a male narrator’s perspective. What’s more, their focus was on how
she
made
him
feel (
and it was never that complicated: she made him feel happy or sad). In “Drive My Car,” the agency belongs to a woman. Right off the bat, she announces that she wants to become famous, “a star of the screen.” More immediately, though, she wants to get laid. (
Presumably, she’s not offering someone a job as chauffeur.) She is also a modern woman, a bohemian, unlikely to be seduced by the clichés that were mainstays of the earliest Beatles songs. We know that because she stresses that her sexual invitation stands independent of the possibility of real romance (“and
maybe
I’ll love you,” she says). No doubt many misheard that crucial lyric, and the reason they discerned Paul to be singing “and
baby
I’ll love you” is because they were so steeped in the platitudinous idealizations of boy-girl relationships that dominated the mid-’60s pop universe. Now the
Beatles were moving in the opposite direction. “Drive My Car” isn’t terribly poetic or profound, but it is subversive.

The next song on the record, “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” offers more tantalizing possibilities for interpretation. Lennon was the song’s primary author, and he later admitted it was about an affair he’d had, done in an intentionally elliptical (he said “gobbledegook”) style in order to spare his wife’s feelings. The story in the song begins with the narrator coming over to a woman’s flat. He “sits on her rug,” bides his time, drinks her wine, and soaks in the décor: the cozy wood-paneled walls. He expects that soon they’ll make love, but then comes a surprise: she brushes him off. When the narrator realizes they won’t be having sex (she says she has to work in the morning), he disappointedly crawls off to sleep in the bathtub. When he awakes, she’s gone. What happens next is not entirely clear, but in one plausible reading, he takes his revenge by setting her apartment on fire.

In another interpretation that Beatles fans have bruited about, however, the song describes a successful late-night hook-up. In this view, the outcome was never really in doubt, because the narrator was an obvious prize. (“I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me?”) Lennon was famous for his impish wordplay, and the phrase “Norwegian wood” sounds a lot like “knowing she would,” as in, “Isn’t it good, knowing she would [put out]?” In the last verse, when the guy says “I lit a fire,” he might have been referring to a cigarette (smoked with smug satisfaction, James Bond style?) or a joint (Lennon once called
Rubber Soul
“the pot album”). Some believe the song disguised an encounter that Lennon had had with Maureen Cleave, the journalist; more likely it was about Sonny Freeman, a German-born model who was married to the Beatles’ favorite photographer. In any case, fans were left to wonder: what is it about,
really
? It’s a question the Beatles would continue to put to their listeners throughout the rest of the decade.

Mature and autobiographical themes abound on
Rubber Soul
. Lennon also channels desperate romantic obsession (“Girl”), writes touchingly about his past (“In My Life”), and turns his gaze inward (on “Nowhere Man,” which reflected his stoned isolation in his Weybridge mansion). The group presages the counterculture’s celebration of “love” as a universal principle (“The Word”), while McCartney parodies French cabaret music (“Michelle”) and chronicles his relationship troubles with Jane Asher (“I’m Looking Through You” and “You Won’t See Me”). The Beatles also demonstrated their growing eclecticism on
Rubber Soul
. “Norwegian Wood” was the first pop song to make use of a sitar, the 800-year-old plucked string instrument that George Harrison had lately become intrigued with. The guitars at the end of “Girl” sound like Greek bouzoukis. On “In My Life,” George Martin contributed a baroque piano solo that he played on a keyboard at half-speed, then sped-up on playback, in order to create a quivery harpsichord effect.

The Beatles were not alone, of course, in pushing back the lyrical frontiers of pop music or experimenting with exotic sounds. The entire group admired and perhaps were even a bit intimidated by Bob Dylan, whose influence on Lennon was obvious. They had heard the Indian flavorings in hits by the Yardbirds (“Heart Full of Soul”) and the Kinks (“See My Friends”), and Harrison in particular was intrigued by the Byrds’ big jangle pop sound (“The Bells of Rhymney”). They saw the Animals capture the pathos of teenage life in a fuller way than most pop artists had attempted (“We Gotta Get Out of This Place”), and they observed the Beach Boys moving away from formulaic surf ditties in order to explore slightly subtler soundscapes (“California Girls”). Nevertheless, when the Beatles ceased trying to be “cute”—that is, when they started conceiving of their albums as vehicles for mature artistic expression, and stopped worrying about how to turn on teenage girls—they had a galvanizing influence on the entire pop scene, and particularly upon the Rolling Stones.

Remember, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had already concluded
that the first proper song they wrote together, “As Tears Go By,”
was not fit for the Stones
. They seemed awfully certain about it, too. Richards said that if they had brought that melancholy acoustic ballad to the rest of the band’s attention, they’d have been
“laughed out of the goddamn room.” It would have been “Get out and don’t come back.” They only wrote it at Oldham’s insistence, and according to legend, he had been quite particular about what he wanted. He wanted
“a song with brick walls around it, high windows and no sex.” It was perfect for Marianne Faithfull, the beautiful ingénue. But it was
not
a Stones number.

Lo and behold, four months after the Beatles released “Yesterday,” the Stones came out with “As Tears Go By.” Both songs consisted of only a vocalist, a quietly strummed guitar, and a string arrangement. And just as the Beatles had released “Yesterday” as a single in the US (but not in England), the Stones released “As Tears Go By” as a single in the US (but not in England). It was in fact the Stones’ “Christmas Disc” in America, and thanks to the heavy rotation it received on easy-listening stations it rose all the way to number six on the
Billboard
pop chart. So why didn’t the Stones put it out as an A-side in the UK?
“Because we’d have had to go through all that dreadful business here about trying to copy the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday,’ ” Jagger moaned to a British journalist.

A few months after the Beatles released
Rubber Soul
, the Stones headed to Hollywood to record most of the songs for their next record, which they planned to call
Could YOU Walk On The Water?
but was released as
Aftermath
. Previously the Stones were known for getting in and out of the studio quickly. Now Oldham wanted everyone to know they were working with Beatle-like intensity. He phoned all the way to London to boast about it to a
Disc
magazine journalist. The Stones had “completely isolated” themselves in the studio, he said. One marathon session had lasted for seventeen straight hours, from 11:00 a.m. until 4:00 a.m. Then the next day they were back at it, doing overdubs. Oldham added that the Stones had hired Phil Spector’s
brilliant protégé, Jack Nitzsche, to assist with the recording, and he went on to spin a hilarious yarn about how the Stones were using a revolutionary new instrument, a Nitzschephone.
“This is actually a child’s toy piano, which is projected through two separate amplifiers,” Oldham stated. “Jack is able to make it sound like any instrument you like; on some tracks it even sounds like a trombone.”

That last outrageous bit of mountebankery was no doubt inspired by the Beatles’ growing reputation for studio sophistication, which was reverberating across the English pop landscape. Suddenly everyone was talking about “production values,” which the Stones had not heretofore considered. Their goal in the studio had always been to project, as much as possible, the same rough mood and funky sound that they got while playing in the clubs. Now, however, the Stones realized that if they were to stay
au courant
, they would need to showcase some of the originality and subtlety that the rest of the pop world was exemplifying. And some were wondering whether they had it in them.

“Everything in the Rolling Stones’ garden is very nice at present,” a
Melody Maker
writer observed in January 1966. “But despite their height of appeal, they haven’t got the staying power of the Beatles. Because of changes in taste in popular music, the Stones cannot hope for lasting popularity. The very nature of their music precludes drastic change. . . . It is difficult to see or discover which direction they are travelling in. Where do they go from here?”

Aftermath
helped to answer that question. Anyone who had doubted the Stones’ adaptive potential was left feeling kind of foolish. Front-loaded with some of their best tracks to date,
Aftermath
was the first Stones album to be completely comprised of original material, and when it came out in the spring of 1966, it was impossible not to notice the similarities to
Rubber Soul.
The Beatles had just released their most “mature,” adventurous and lyrically sophisticated work to date, and now the now Stones were vying to critically reposition themselves in a similar way.

The moods of the two albums, however, were at odds. Whereas
Rubber Soul
is sentimental and mirthful,
Aftermath
is dark and disturbing. Jagger had already shown a capacity for slurring trenchant and socially observant lyrics, but now the Stones were going even further in skewering genteel culture, venting their frustrations, and cultivating their rude, macho swagger. The first song on the British version of the album, “Mother’s Little Helper,” took up a topic that had not been addressed in pop music before: middle-class drug dependency. “Life’s just much too hard” for the delicate, nervous woman in the song, and so she bakes cakes out of a box, cooks frozen TV dinners, and takes her little yellow pills (Valium) four at a time. She gets them from her doctor, though, so it’s socially sanctioned. She’s obviously in distress, but Jagger addresses her plight without a scintilla of sympathy. When Jagger sings “What a draaag it is getting old,” it comes off like a taunt.

On the US version of
Aftermath
, the opening track is “Paint It, Black,” which officially made the Stones the world’s second pop group, after the Beatles, to use a sitar. Reviewing the album in the
Record-Mirror
, Peter Jones said,
“Brian played the sitar like he played rhythm guitar. It probably made George Harrison cringe, but it worked brilliantly.” Here again, the Stones veered into unlikely thematic territory. Whereas a great many pop songs had focused on melancholy and lovelorn characters, this might have been the first one in which the narrator is obviously clinically depressed and possibly suicidal. (“It’s not easy facing up when your whole world is black,” he says. “I want to see the sun blotted out from the sky.”) Beyond that, the song lends itself to various interpretations. Some associated it with the wretched feeling that sometimes accompanies an LSD comedown; others linked it to the Vietnam War; still others wondered about the inexplicable comma in the title (was it a racial thing?) and the “red door” in the song (was it the entryway to a brothel?). More likely the song reflects the outlook of a guy whose lover has just unexpectedly died. Asked about its meaning in 1966, Jagger replied with exasperation.
“It means paint it black,” he said. “ ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’ means I can’t get no satisfaction. The rest of the song is just expanding on that.”