Beatles vs. Stones Read Online Free PDF

clearly shared some of Lennon’s capacity for antisocial behavior. But when we examine the backgrounds of the other future Rolling Stones, we find very little to suggest that they were destined to become the archetypal “bad boys” of rock ’n’ roll.
    As a teenager, Michael Jagger was accustomed to middle-class creature comforts, and he even had the means to become a regular mail-order customer of Chess Records, the famous Chicago blues label.“I never got to have a raving adolescence between the age of 12 and 15,” Jagger explained, “because I was concentrating on mystudies . . . but then that’s what I wanted to do, and I enjoyed it.” About the notorious teddy boy subculture, which anyhow was on the wane by the time he was old enough to participate, Jagger said he“wasn’t particularly impressed.” It is true that at around age fifteen, he began fashioning an insubordinate sort of attitude—his academic performance slipped as he became interested in girls and rhythm ’n’ blues, and his love of sports gave way to less salubrious habits, like beer and cigarettes—but never was he at any risk of failing out of Dartford Grammar School (the rough equivalent of a selective American high school). In fact, he passed seven O-levels, entered the sixth form, and was admitted into the prestigious London School of Economics, where he blended in perfectly and began laying plans for an elite career in politics or business.
    About Keith Richards, one must resist the temptation to make too much of the fact that he was, literally, a choirboy. In 1953, at age nine, he even had the honor of singing in Westminster Abbey at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. When he was twelve, though, he was sent to the lowly regarded Dartford Tech, and in 1959, school officials expelled him for truancy. By this point, Keith was styling himself in dark glasses, pink socks, and black drainpipe trousers, and carrying his guitar everywhere, slung over his back.“Rock and roll got me into being one of the boys,” he recalled. “Before that I just got me ass kicked all over the place. Learned how to ride a punch.” His next stop was Sidcup Art College—a tax-subsidized training school of last resort for people like Richards who, it was hoped, might be able to acquire some kind of marketable skill in the realm of commercial art.Instead, Richards found himself surrounded by many other alienated and vaguely bohemian musicians. It was at Sidcup that Richards made his first forays into recreational drugs (amphetamines and painkillers), but according to a biographer, he was not then regarded as a degenerate or a major troublemaker, but rather as a“free-spirited . . . pest,” blessed with a quick wit.
    Nor did Charlie Watts or Bill Wyman arouse any great fury asyoung adults. In fact, Watts was considered“the most stylish young man” at his advertising agency, “wearing charcoal-colored trousers and good quality sweaters when he did not wear a suit.” According to a friend,“Charlie’s concession to joining the Stones was taking his tie off at gigs.” Furthermore, around the time he hooked up with the Stones, his premier interest was not in rock or blues, but jazz. Bill Wyman also did not share the same musical interests as Jones, Jagger, and Richards when he joined the Stones; instead of R&B, he’d been playing “white rock ’n’ roll” in the Cliftons; but as he wrote in his memoir,“The major difference between the Stones and me when we met mattered even more than the music. I was a young family man with a wife, a nine-month-old child and a day job.” Wyman was also about six years older, on average, than the rest of the Stones.
    It is true, though, that early in the Rolling Stones’ saga, when Brian, Mick, and Keith all lived together, they seemed to deliberately slum up their Edith Grove flat in an attempt to fashion bohemian lifestyles.“The place was an absolute pit which I shall never forget,” wrote Wyman.