Beatles vs. Stones (42 page)

At the time, the group’s popularity
:
People sometimes forget just how young the Beatles’ core audience was. In November 1963, the knowledgeable British critic George Melly said “the average age of the fanatic Beatles fan today is about twelve.” In 1964, a disc jockey who was master of ceremonies at a Beatles concert in Vancouver estimated that 80 percent of the audience was between the ages of thirteen and sixteen.

By the time they ventured
:
The Beatles are thought to have performed 150 different songs, at least once, before they released
Please Please Me
in March 1963. Although American rock ’n’ roll songs always dominated their ever-expanding repertoire, the multiformity of their approach is impressive. One scholar broke it down this way: Lennon-McCartney (26 songs), Chuck Berry (14 songs), Eddie Cochran (2 songs), Everly Brothers (6 songs), Buddy Holly (11 songs), Little Richard (12 songs), Carl Perkins (11 songs), Elvis Presley (8 songs), Larry Williams (6 songs), Other rock and roll artists (15 songs), R&B and Motown (18 songs), US pop (15 songs), US girl groups (9 songs), Pre-1945 vaudeville and pop (10 songs), Stage and film musicals (5 songs), UK pop (1 song), “Others” (8 songs).

“I thought of the Beatles”
:
According to the Rolling Stones
, 78.

“Like a lot of my friends”
:
As quoted in Stark,
Meet the Beatles
, 203.

“The Beatles were richer”
:
Tony Sanchez,
Up and Down
, 1.

“Even in 1965 we Stones fans”
:
As quoted in Oldham,
2Stoned
, 284.

“idolizing the authentic legend”
:
Kelefa Sanneh, “The Rap Against Rockism,”
New York Times
(October 31, 2004).

On more than a few occasions
:
The Beatles’ press officer, Derek Taylor, described one such spectacle when the group was touring in Australia in 1964: “The routes were lined solid, cripples threw away their sticks, sick people rushed up to the car as if a touch from one of the boys would make them well again. . . . The only thing left for the Beatles is to go on a healing tour.” Naturally, the Beatles hated all of this. Eventually they began referring to undesirable hangers-on as “crips.” If any of the Beatles were ever annoyed with “outsiders” who were crowding their space—perhaps in a dressing room or a hotel suite—they only had to mutter the word “crips” to one of their aides, and the room would promptly be cleared.

“immature lungs produced a sound”
:
As quoted in Spitz,
The Beatles
, 577.

When the band we now know
:
Thankfully, they never went with another name that was supposedly bruited about: “Long John and the Silver Beetles.” Had they done so, history might not have been the same.

“I had a group”
:
As quoted in Jann Wenner, ed.,
Lennon Remembers: The Full Rolling Stone Interviews from 1970
(London and New York: Verso, 2000 c. 1972), 133.

(Presumably, this is where)
:
This remarkable agreement, which was never legally binding, endured until 1976, when Paul reversed the authors’ credits on the Beatles’ songs that are featured on his live album
Wings Over America
, so the read “McCartney-Lennon.” It did not cause much controversy (and Lennon may not even have known about it).

“He used to follow me”
:
As quoted in Geoffrey Giuliano,
Two of Us: John Lennon and Paul McCartney Behind the Myth
(New York: Penguin, 1999), 8.

“that spark [that] we all”
:
“Interview,”
Playboy
(January 1981).

“had that quality that”
:
As quoted in Stark,
Meet the Beatles,
128.

John was typecast as
:
“None of us would’ve made it alone,” Lennon said later, perceptively. “Paul wasn’t quite strong enough, I didn’t have enough girl-appeal, George was too quiet, and Ringo was the drummer. But we thought that everyone would be able to dig at least one of us, and that’s how it turned out.”

“We really looked out”
:
As quoted in
The Beatles Anthology
, back jacket flap.

“Had those reporters been women”
:
Devin McKinney,
Magic Circle: The Beatles in Dream and History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 51.

For reasons that even psychologists:
The most famous psychologist who was asked to explain the Beatles’ unusual appeal was Dr. Joyce Brothers, the American syndicated advice columnist. She observed that the group displayed “a few of the mannerisms which almost seem on the feminine side, such as tossing of their long manes of hair. These are exactly the mannerisms which very young female fans (in the 10-to-14 age group) appear to go wildest over. . . . Girls in very early adolescence still in truth find ‘soft’ or ‘girlish’ characteristics more attractive than ruggedly masculine ones.” And why? “I think the explanation may be that these very young ‘women’ are still a little frightened of sex,” Dr. Brothers continued. “Therefore they feel safer worshipping idols who don’t seem to masculine, or too much the he-man.”

“We were actually named after chicks”
:
As quoted in David Laing, “Six Boys, Six Beatles: The Formative Years, 1950–1962,” in Kenneth Womack, ed.,
The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles
(New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 23. Also see Miles,
Beatles Diary
, 52–53. Many claims have been made about the origins of “the Beatles.” In a 1961 article for
Mersey Beat
, Lennon joked that that the group’s name “came in a vision—a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them, ‘From this day on you are Beatles with a A.’ ” (Amusingly, Yoko Ono has long insisted that Lennon meant for this quip to be taken literally; she thinks that he really had a hallucination like the one he described.) “The Beatles” may also have been an homage to Buddy Holly’s group, the Crickets. After Harrison suggested
The Wild One
might have been the inspiration for the name, Derek Taylor (the Beatles’ former press agent, and a good friend of Harrison’s) echoed the claim. It was surely Lennon, however, who cleverly proposed the group’s name should be spelled “Beatles” instead of “Beetles.” “When you said it,” he said, “people thought of crawly things; and when you read it, it was beat music.”

The Beatles covered nine girl group
:
The Beatles recorded “Chains” (by the Cookies), “Boys,” and “Baby It’s You” (both by the Shirelles) for
Please Please Me
. Two more girl group songs appeared on
With the Beatles
: “Please Mr. Postman” (the Marvelettes) “and “Devil in Her Heart” (the Donays). Live, the Beatles are known to have performed “Keep Your Hands off My Baby” (Little Eva), “Mama Said” and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” (the Shirelles), and “Shimmy Shimmy” (the Orlons).

“a male Shirelles”
:
As quoted in Stark,
Meet the Beatles
, 129.

“fan favorite”
:
Mark Binelli, “Sir Paul Rides Again,”
Rolling Stone
(October 20, 2005).

“Should it be”
:
As quoted in Braun,
Love Me Do
, 85.

“little trick”
:
As quoted in Walter Everett,
The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men Through Rubber Soul
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 108. “We knew that if we wrote a song called ‘Thank You Girl,’ that a lot of the girls who wrote us letters would take it as a genuine thank you,” Paul continued. “So a lot of our songs—‘From Me to You’ is another—were directly addressed to fans.”

An early variation on this formula was “She Loves You,” which Lennon and McCartney wrote together in Newcastle in the summer of 1963. McCartney was the one who cleverly suggested that it be put across in the third person. (Here he was influenced by Bobby Rydell, the teen idol who deployed a similar trope in “Forget Him,” which was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic.) The result was a song that any teenage girl might identify with. Acting as a go-between for a young couple, the narrator advises the boy in the relationship to apologize to the girl whom he has hurt, and whose love he should be grateful for.

“She was just seventeen”
:
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld ribbed McCartney about the song at a 2010 White House ceremony, where President Barack Obama gave McCartney the Gershwin Prize for his lifetime contribution to popular music. “Sir Paul, you have written some of the most beautiful music ever heard by humans in this world . . . I love you for it,” Seinfeld said. “And yet, some of the lyrics, some of the songs, as they go by, can make one
unsure
, even
concerned
, sometimes, about what exactly is happening in song? Songs such as, ‘I Saw Her Standing There,’ and I quote: ‘She was just seventeen /
And you know what I mean
.’ I’m not sure I
do
know what you mean, Sir Paul! I
think
I know what you mean!”

And certainly it’s difficult
:
The bawdy lyrics in “Please Please Me” speak for themselves, but the real giveaway is the tension in Lennon’s voice when he sings the call-and-response “come on”s with Harrison and McCartney. “Come on, come on, come on” sounds like a sexual exhortation. (You wouldn’t likely exclaim “come on, come on, come on,” to someone from whom you only wanted reciprocal emotional affection.) In his 1994 opus,
Revolution in the Head
, musicologist Ian MacDonald claimed that EMI’s American outlet, Capitol Records, was at first unwilling to release “Please Please Me” in the US because the song “was widely interpreted as an exhortation to fellatio.” But no one has produced evidence proving that. The first critics to describe “Please Please Me” as an “oral sex song” were probably Robert Christgau and John Picarella, writing jointly in the
Village Voice
in 1981.

“the Pill”
:
As quoted in Stark,
Meet the Beatles
, 121. At Twickenham Studios in 1964, during the filming of
A Hard Day’s Night
, the Beatles took time to answer questions for a televised broadcast. When an attractive young woman plaintively and jokingly asked, “John, why did ya have to get married?” Lennon was clearly rankled. He rolled his eyes and replied, “Because the same reason anyone gets married. I don’t want to be slushy-like, but you do it, don’t you, when you want to get married. When you got a girl, you got a girl, I always say. Anyhow,” he continued (now peering into the camera and using a nasty tone that at he rarely displayed in public), “what’s it got to do with you?”

“difficult position”
:
As quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght,
An Oral History
, 128.

“Take your pick”
:
Larry Kane,
Ticket to Ride: Inside the Beatles’ 1964 Tour That Changed the World
(Philadelphia: Running Press, 2003), 77.

Ronnie Bennett was likewise aghast
:
Ronnie Spector,
Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness, or, My Life as a Fabulous Ronette
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), 80, 84.

“The only thing they seemed”
:
As quoted in Glenn A. Baker,
Beatles Down Under: The 1964 Australia and New Zealand Tour
(Wild and Woolley, 1982), 89.

It is doubtful that most
:
One night in 1965, the Stones sat together in a hotel room and tallied how many different girls they’d slept with since the band got together. Charlie hadn’t slept with anyone (he was happily married), Keith said 6, Mick counted 30, and Brian said 130. Bill Wyman, an obvious sex addict, and also a loathsome man (who at age forty-eight was carrying on sexually with a fourteen-year-old girl, Mandy Smith), claimed 278 partners.