(Roughly) Daily

A reminder that your correspondent is traveling– to wit, more occasional posts. Regular service should resume on or about September 20…

John McMillan on a controversy that raged back when music mattered– politics and image in the age of “the wax manifesto”…

Many in the media were quick to notice the two groups’ contrasting styles. When the Rolling Stones arrived in the United States, the first Associated Press (AP) report described them as “dirtier, streakier, and more disheveled than the Beatles.” Tom Wolfe put things more sharply: “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” he quipped, “but the Stones want to burn down your town.” Since these comparisons proved useful to everyone, both the bands and the journalists collab­orated on the charade. In the early 1960s, Keith Richards re­marked, “nobody took the music seriously. It was the image that counted, how to manipulate the press and dream up a few headlines.” Peter Jones, who wrote about both bands for the Record Mirror, recalled being in a “difficult position” because he was expected to “gloss over” the Beatles’ tawdry indiscretions. “It was decreed that the Beatles should be portrayed as incredibly lovable, amiable fellows, and if one of them, without mentioning any names, wanted to have a short orgy with three girls in the bathroom, then I didn’t see it.”

Whether one preferred the Beatles or the Stones in the 1960s was largely a matter of aesthetic taste and personal temperament. Though clichéd and sometimes overdrawn, most of the Beatles/Stones binaries contain a measure of plausibility: the Beatles were Apollonian, the Stones Dio­nysian; the Beatles pop, the Stones rock; the Beatles erudite, the Stones visceral. But in the United States, during the watershed summer of 1968, the Beatles/Stones debate suddenly became a contest of political ideologies, wherein the Beatles were thought to have aligned themselves with flower power and pacifism, and the Stones with New Left militance. Though 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, neither of them ever 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.

Nowhere was the Beatles/Stones debate more fiercely fought than in American underground newspapers, which by 1968 could be found in every pocket of the country, and had a readership that stretched into the millions. “The history of the sixties was written as much in the Berkeley Barb as in the New York Times,” claimed literary critic Morris Dickstein. Freewheeling and accessible to all manner of left-wing writers, these papers generated some of the ­earliest rock criticism, and provided a nexus for a running conversation among rock enthusiasts nationwide. To recall how youths assayed the Beatles/Stones rivalry is to be reminded that when rock and roll was in its juvenescence, youths interrelated with their music heroes in a way that today seems scarcely fathomable. Amid the gauzy idealism and utopian strivings that characterized the late-1960s youth­quake, they believed that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—the biggest rock stars in the world!—should speak to them clearly and directly, about issues of contemporary significance, in a spirit of mutuality, and from a vantage of authenticity. Young fans believed that rock culture was inseparable from the youth culture that they created, shared, and enjoyed. In some fundamental way, they believed themselves to be part of the same community as John and Paul, and Mick and Keith. They believed they were all fighting for the same things….

…

… Even beyond the usual hysterical in­terest attracted by any new Beatles record,” Time magazine announced, “‘Hey Jude/Revolution,’” was “special.” Re­leased in the United States on August 26, 1968, it soon became one of the best-selling 45s in music history. Many were drawn to “Hey Jude” for its infectious chorus and un­conventional four-minute fade-out, but it was Lennon’s raucous “Re­volution,” on side B, that captured the attention of American radicals that summer. “That’s why I did it,” Lennon later said. “I wanted to talk, I wanted to say my piece about revolutions.”

“Revolution” opens with Len­non screaming abrasively over heavily distorted guitars, but it quickly settles into a bluesy stomp, and it soon becomes apparent that Lennon’s sonic epistle to the New Left does not express solidarity, but dis­affection. Though Lennon says he shares the goals of many radicals (“We all want to change the world”) he disavows the tactics of ultramilitants (“When you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out?”)2 Elsewhere, he expresses skep­ticism of the New Left’s overwrought rhetoric (“Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright?”) and says he’s tired of being pestered for money for left-wing causes (“You ask me for a contribution, well you know / We’re all doing what we can”). The final verse amounted to an endorsement of the apolitical counterculture, and a toxic kiss-off to Movement radicals…

…

… Contra to “Revolution” was the Stones new single from Beggars Banquet “Street Fighting Man,” which was re­leased in the United States on August 30, 1968, just four days after “Revolution.” (Years before, the two groups had agreed never to release their records on the same day, so as not to divide their fans.) Fearful that the song would further inflame the passions of militants involved in the now famous chaos surrounding the Democratic National Convention, most Chicago radio stations refused to play it. “No song better captured the feeling of 1968 than ‘Street Fighting Man,’” historian Jon Wiener argues. Jagger supposedly penned its lyrics after attending a March 1968 antiwar rally at London’s Grosvenor Square, where demonstrators and mounted police­men skirmished outside the U.S. Embassy. Witnesses are divided about the extent of Jagger’s participation; one remembers him “throwing rocks and having a good time,” while another recalls him “hiding [and] running.” Sup­posedly to his regret, Jagger had to abandon the protest after being recognized by fans and reporters. The song’s refrain was thought by some to evoke his feelings of impotence and frustration (“But what can a poor boy do? / except to sing for a rock ’n’ roll band? / ’Cause in sleepy London town / there’s just no place for a street fighting man”). Others saw the refrain as a hedge against the song’s more provocative lyrics…

Read this essay (from 2007) in full: “Beatles or Stones?” from @believermag. For even more, see the book into which this piece grew.

(Image above: source)

* Sean O’Mahony, publisher of both bands’ official fan magazines starting respectively in 1963 and 1964

###

As we choose a side, we might recall that it was on this date in 1963 that Swan Records released the Beatles’ “She Loves You”, with its flip side, “I’ll Get You” in the US. Although it was then number one in the UK, “She Loves You” was ignored Stateside until 1964 and the arrival of Beatlemania when it would reach the top of the US Pop chart.

source