Beatles vs. Stones Read Online Free PDF Page B

“I’ve never seen a kitchen like it—permanently piled high with dirty dishes and filth everywhere. They took a strange delight in pointing out the various cultures that grew in about forty smelly milk bottles laying around in mold and on congealed eggs.” They lobbed disgusting gobs of spit onto their own walls and let rubbish accumulate everywhere. What little heat they had emanated from an electric coin meter, but sometimes it was so cold they stayed in bed all day. A single, bare light bulb hung from the ceiling, and even food was scarce.“I never understood why they carried on like this,” Wyman later said. “Although Keith came from a working-class background, Brian and Mick were from well-to-do families. It could not have been just the lack of money that caused them to sink.” Instead, he concluded there was a voguish quality to their behavior; they must have been afflicted with some kind of “Bohemian Angst.”
    The image the Stones later embraced, then, was not entirely asurprise. People remember that although Mick Jagger was always interested in achieving financial success, he was also a skilled poser. Even before he joined the Stones, he’d traded in his given name, Michael, for the more laddish-sounding Mick, and he was known to switch easily between his proper London accent and a faux-Cockney tongue that might have fooled someone into thinking he was from the East End. But beyond this, and with the partial exceptions of Brian Jones (whose sociopathic tendencies were not immediately discernible), and Keith Richards (whose unruly demeanor really wasn’t all that unruly), we don’t find anything in the backgrounds of the future Rolling Stones to suggest that they would one day arouse such tremendous fear and indignation. No one would have expected them to become antiestablishment icons—objects of tabloid fury and rough justice from the courts.
    In fact, the very idea that Stones would soon become synonymous with debauchery and rock ’n’ roll excess—first across the British Isle, and then the world—would have seemed preposterous to the band in its earliest incarnation.When the “Rollin’ Stones” began performing together in July 1962 (consisting of Brian, Mick, Keith, Dick Taylor on bass, Ian Stewart on piano, and Tony Chapman on drums) they didn’t fancy themselves as rock ’n’ rollers, but rather, as R&B purists. They specialized in covers of black American artists like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Bo Diddley, which they performed while sitting down. Someone who caught the Stones early on described them this way:“They seemed accomplished and rather like art-school nice guys, no posturing; they were almost like jazzers. . . . They were gauche, naïve, friendly, and generally without any charisma, they were just doing their music.” Bill Wyman said something similar. When he got in league with the Stones in December 1962, he of course recognized Brian’s and Mick’s naturally projected sex appeal,“but on stage they were keen on projecting the music. Selling themselves as sexy pop stars had not crossed their minds.”
    “R&B was a minority thing that had to be defended at all times,” Jagger recollected. “There was a kind of crusade mentality.” By contrast, rock ’n’ roll seemed weak—artistically compromised and commercially corrupted. A substantial portion of the Stones’ audience consisted of bohemians and intellectuals, many of whom were men, and it wasn’t difficult to perceive a measure of snobbery in the Stones’ attitude, which seemed calculated to draw a distance between themselves, and what Jagger called“waffly white pop.” “But I mean there’s always going to be good-looking guys with great haircuts,” he added. “That’s what pop music is about.”
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    Brian Epstein was twenty-seven when he discovered the Beatles, and until then, he’d never expressed any interest in pop management. In fact, when he was sixteen, he carefully