Beatles vs. Stones (27 page)

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“America, with its ears turned to its transistors, has been following what it imagines to be an ideological debate between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” observed a London writer. Although both bands were culturally influential in ways that are difficult to quantify, on close examination the supposed ideological differences between them are harder to discern. Their albums were not, to borrow a phrase, “wax manifestos.” They were more like Rorschach inkblot tests, upon which youths projected their own interpretations. Although Jagger allegedly developed a left-wing critique of capitalism when he was briefly enrolled at the London School of Economics, an acquaintance observed that later,
“he grew rather fond of capitalism as first one million, then the next poured into his account.” The notion that he was “radicalized” by his drug arrest seems equally specious; after all, he apparently only attended part of one demonstration in his entire life. Jagger’s friend Barry Miles even suggested that when Mick showed up at Grosvenor Square, he did so at least in part because he thought of it as a social event.
“[Jagger] did have a genuine revulsion against the Vietnam War. But I think much more than that it was also the thing to do. That’s what everybody in Chelsea was doing that week, going to that demonstration.”

In 1968, the Stones appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s
Sympathy for the Devil
(also called
One Plus One
). Before he started filming, Godard announced his creative intentions with a series of non sequiturs that, even in the heady atmosphere of the late ’60s, must have been off-putting to anyone who was rationally minded. “What I want above all is to destroy the idea of culture,” he boasted. “Culture is an alibi of imperialism. There is a Ministry of War. There is also a Ministry of culture.
Therefore, culture is war.” What he wound up producing instead was an utter catastrophe of a film that blended documentary-style shots of the band working in the studio interspersed with clips of Black Panthers spouting ugly rhetoric and murdering white women in a South London junkyard. In one scene, a female character named “Eve Democracy” wanders around aimlessly in the forest and, no matter what question she is asked, answers only “yes” or “no.”
In another, a girl walks into a porno store and gives a Nazi salute. At one point an off-camera narrator announces that he is waiting on the beach for “Uncle Mao’s yellow submarine,” obviously a reference to the Beatles’ song. No one had even the slightest idea what the hell it was supposed to mean, but it certainly
seemed
radical.

On their 1969 tour, however, the Stones refused to allow the Black Panthers to appeal for funds from their stage. In hindsight, it is hard to regard the Rolling Stones’ radicalism as anything but a fad. After all, the band had already been moddish during the mid-’60s, and psychedelic during the Summer of Love; in the mid ’70s, the Stones would dally with reggae, and after that, they would enter a brief disco phase.

Meanwhile, Lennon’s political thinking in the late 1960s and early 1970s can only be described as muddled. Not long after “Revolution” came out, he launched a series of whimsically flavored avant-garde peace protests with Yoko Ono—beginning with their March 1969 Bed-In in Amsterdam—that seemed to endorse pacifism and flower power. They also sent “acorns for peace” to various world leaders,
lobbied for peace while cloaked in a white canvas bag, and commissioned billboards in major cities across the globe, announcing “War Is Over—If You Want It.”

The following year, after the Beatles broke up, he told Jann Wenner that he resented “the implication that the Stones are like revolutionaries and the Beatles weren’t,” but he never explained what he meant. In the same interview, Lennon disavowed his previous belief that “love [will] save us all” and professed (whether literally or metaphorically) to be wearing a Chairman Mao badge.
“I’m beginning to think he’s doing a good job,” Lennon said. When asked about the possibility of a “violent revolution,” Lennon tartly announced,
“If I were black, I’d be all for it.” In August 1971, he even turned up at a rally with a sign proclaiming “Victory for the IRA Against British Imperialism.” (The Irish Republican Army, of course, was a terrorist group.) Asked how he squared his pacifism with his support for the IRA, Lennon said,
“it’s a very delicate line.” That same year, he placed yet another phone call to the
Black Dwarf
’s Tariq Ali, only this time it was to play for him (literally over the phone) a didactic new song called “Power to the People,” which seemed to refute “Revolution.” (“We say we want a revolution / Better get on it right away.”) Later on he would change course again. In one of his last interviews, Lennon said,
“The lyrics [in ‘Revolution’] still stand today. They’re still my feeling about politics. . . . Don’t expect me on the barricades unless it’s with flowers.”

Despite the confusion and half-heartedness with which the Beatles and the Stones regarded the exigencies of their day, both bands held such clout over young music fans that their songs, lyrics, behavior, and mannerisms continued to provoke robust debate. Even those who turned against the Beatles after “Revolution” never doubted their influence. But this stirred another complaint: why didn’t they do more?
“They could own television stations,” remarked John Sinclair, the notorious Detroit radical. “They could do anything they want to do. They are in a position to carry out a total cultural assault program, the effects of which would be incredible,” and instead they frittered
away their energy on embarrassing hobbies like the Apple Boutique, a trendy retail store in downtown London.
“I think it may be safely said that they have more power and influence over the ‘revolutionary’ generation . . . than anyone else alive,” said another young writer. If they “
really
wanted to change the world, the world would feel it.”

Instead, the Beatles’ politics lagged.
“For a long time the Beatles were oracles for our generation,” said a wistful writer for Houston’s underground newspaper,
Space City!
“Whatever the state of the world was, they seemed to be able to make their music expressive of it; when we began to look analytically at our society they began to tell us what we saw.”

On the one hand, that was off base. Hardly any social criticism can be found in mid-’60s Beatles lyrics. And yet by 1968, one could plausibly argue that the group had fallen out of step with radical youths. “Revolution” was
“probably an honest statement,” rock critic Richard Goldstein remarked. “They probably don’t understand what
we
mean by revolution.” Recalling that the Beatles had received MBE awards from Queen Elizabeth in 1965, a writer for Milwaukee’s
Kaleidoscope
newspaper called them
“confirmed institutionalists,” adding, “[they] may yet become the Walt Disneys of their day.”

By contrast, radicals continued to regard the Stones as more militant and more authentic than the Beatles, and it was a perception that Mick Jagger encouraged.

At a Rolling Stones press conference in 1969, a reporter asked,
“What do you think about John Lennon returning his [MBE] medal” in protest of the Vietnam War?

“At last!” Jagger exclaimed, his Cockney accent back in force. “He should have done it as soon as he’d got it.”

“I don’t dig hero cults,” sniffed Dave Doggett, editor of Jackson, Mississippi’s
Kudzu
, “and the Beatles are beginning to smell of that sort of thing.” Jon Landau maintained that the Stones
“strive for realism in contrast to the Beatles’ fantasies.” Another writer observed that Beatles songs were frequently elliptical—one had to
search
for meaning—whereas,
“When you hear a Stones song, there is no question in your mind as to what they are trying to accomplish.”
“The Stones sing to and for the ‘Salt of Earth,’ reflecting their backgrounds,” added a clueless writer for Detroit’s
Fifth Estate
. Meanwhile, “the Beatles live in their beautiful, self-enclosed Pepperland.”

But the Stones’ bloom was brief; soon radicals charged them with elitism and aloofness, especially during their 1969 US tour, when they played in gargantuan arenas and gouged fans with exorbitant ticket prices.
This was a new thing; until then, the world’s most popular bands often played halls that held one or two thousand people, in part because the infrastructure and technology for facilitating arena concerts did not yet exist. Oftentimes, the Stones kept fans waiting until late in the night before they started their show, and the best seats weren’t even available for fans; they were reserved for music industry big shots. Youths who believed they shared some commonality of outlook and purpose with the Stones were quick to register their frustration.

After the Stones played Philadelphia, they were denounced in a lengthy, humorous front-page
Free Press
article. “A small band of daring fast-moving bandits . . . pulled off one of the cleanest and biggest hauls in recent history at The Spectrum. . . . Operating before almost 15,000 eyeball witnesses, the bizarrely dressed gang . . . made a clean getaway with cash and negotiable paper believed to be worth in the neighborhood of $75,000.” The paper revealed embarrassing details of the Rolling Stones’ contract (remarkable for its “sheer audacity”) and complained that little of the economic activity around the Stones’ show redounded to the community’s benefit. Worse still, the Stones acted like prima donnas, refusing interviews and traveling with a rough security team (“goons”) who made sure fans kept their distance. According to Philip Norman,
“Promoters in almost every city attacked them for the huge percentage [of the gate] they had taken, [and] their egomaniacal Rock Star arrogance. . . . To amass their two million gross, it was suggested, the Stones had systematically and callously ripped off teenagers all across America.”

In 1970, editors at Chicago’s
Rising Up Angry
completely revised their opinion about the Stones. The previous year, they wrote that,
“Unlike the Beatles and their passive resistance with ‘All You Need Is Love,’ and [‘Revolution’], the Stones take a different look at things. They know you can’t love a pig to death with flowers while he kicks the shit out of you.” Though “only a rock group,” the Stones address “real life and how to deal with it, not meditation and cop-out escape.” But fallout from the 1969 tour convinced them that the Stones deserved more critical scrutiny. “They should no longer be able to sing about revolution and give clenched-fist salutes, making money hand over fist unless they actively support what they sing about.”

To give an example, when the Stones were in Chicago,
[radical activist]
Abbie Hoffman went backstage to see them. He talked to Mick Jagger and they both congratulated each other on their accomplishments. Abbie then asked Jagger if he could donate money to the Conspiracy (trial defense). Jagger said they had upcoming trials, too. After the uneasy moment, Jagger told Hoffman to ask their business manager, who said no.

“If the Rolling Stones are part of the family,” antiwar activist Todd Gitlin asked, “why don’t they turn their profits into family enterprises?” Even Liberation News Service—which had once run an inadvertently humorous article headlined “LNS Backs Stones in Ideological Dispute with the Beatles”—turned on the Stones with a scorned lover’s fury.
“[C]lapping hands, cutting up, busting loose, fucking, blowing weed, and breaking windows is a far cry from seizing state power,” they observed. “And a lot of the Revolution so far is just a hip ego trip. What do groupies, pimps, PR men and ticket-takers have to do with Revolution? Mick Jagger is . . . a half-assed male chauvinist prick.”

Having recorded songs like “Under My Thumb,” “Yesterday’s Papers,” and “Back Street Girl,” the Stones were overdue for condemnation
on the sexism charge. But for many Movement politicos, it was the Altamont disaster that precipitated their final break. Nettled by criticisms about all the money they were making, the Stones boasted that they would show their gratitude to American fans by headlining a hastily organized “free” outdoor concert at Altamont Speedway, some forty miles north of San Francisco. (In fact, they expected to cash in indirectly since they knew their performance would be featured in the forthcoming concert film
Gimme Shelter
, directed by Albert and David Maysles.)

Altamont was a dirty, bleak space for a rock festival, almost completely lacking in amenities for the three hundred thousand concertgoers. Asked to guard the stage, the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang went on a drug-and-booze soaked rampage, assaulting countless hippies with weighted pool cues and kicks to the head. “Their violence united the crowd in fear,” one journalist remarked.

When the Stones played “Under My Thumb,” the Angels set upon an African American teenager, Meredith Hunter. While trying to escape a beating (possibly a stabbing), Hunter whipped out a pistol and held it high over his head; in an instant, the Angels stabbed and beat him to death. Ever since, historians have presented the Altamont disaster—along with the Manson Gang murders and the Weather Underground’s town house explosion—as the youth movement’s death knell.
“It would take a little while longer for the message to filter through to the rest of the world,” Tony Sanchez wrote. But at Altamont, on December 6, 1969, “all the beautiful fantasies of the sixties withered and died like flowers beneath the shower of paraquat.”

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Rock ’n’ roll had always been a popular and a performative art—based in part on the commercial exploitation of the blues—and even the most ostentatiously “radical” acts of the 1960s understood this. Neither the Beatles nor the Stones were very radical, however. Both of these immensely talented bands helped to construct images of youth
culture that generated powerful confidence, self-awareness, and libidinal energy among their listeners, and as a result, they stimulated a great amount of change. But neither group articulated, or proved willing to defend, a coherent political cosmology. The supposed “ideological rift” between the two bands was nearly as stylized as the contrasting costumes they wore on
The
Ed Sullivan Show
.