The two bands are among those responsible for the beautifully deranged enterprise called rock n’ roll. Other musicians laid the groundwork – such as Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, the blues men, and Elvis, etc. – but it was The Beatles and the Stones who transformed the music of outlaws into an ideology, a religion, deliverance, a monolithic moneymaking machine, an excuse to ingest large amount of drugs, a way of life, among other things. (Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, etc. took it to another level.)
I read about the reactions, dialectics and synchronicities involving the two groups during the mid ’60s to the early ’70s – that golden age when The Beatles and the Stones were churning out album after album, transforming pop culture in the process.
Did you know that John Lennon and Paul McCartney penned I Wanna Be Your Man for the Glimmer Twins Mick Jagger and Keith Richards?
When The Beatles put out the sitars, the echo, the reverse tape effects, the sound collages, the brass section – while lyrically journeying inwards (to the inner sky with diamonds) – in "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band," the Stones responded with "Their Satanic Majesties Request," patching together pop and psychedelia, resulting in a misfire saved only by 2000 Light Years From Home and She’s A Rainbow.
Lennon dug a pony, while Keith rode wild horses. McCartney sang about Eleanor Rigby, while Mick reminisced about Ruby Tuesday.
Lennon and McCartney: "Yesterday, all my troubles seem so far away." Jagger and Richards: "It is the evening of the day… I sit and watch as tears go by."
The Beatles made the soundtrack to the revolution with Revolution, while the Stones took the streets chanting Street Fighting Man.
Two of the best double platters of all time are: "The White Album" and "Exile on Main St." But don’t take my word for it; listen to the albums and experience Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat for the ears.
The Beatles opened the floodgates of love with "Sgt. Pepper’s" and the Stones erected the tombstone by playing Sympathy for the Devil in that doomed concert at Altamont.
The Beatles’ "Let it Be" is the sound of mop-topped gods reaching twilight, an album of big ballads (The Long and Winding Road, Let it Be), raunchy rockers (I’ve Got A Feeling), acoustic mantra (Across the Universe), melded by Phil Spector’s patented wall of sound. While the Stones’ "Let it Bleed" is the sound of nitty-gritty bastard blues children talking about war, rape and murder (Gimme Shelter), drugs (Monkey Man), and cherry-flavored optimism despite epic jadedness (You Can’t Always Get What You Want).
A thousand years later – after the advent of progressive rock, punk, new wave, grunge, Britpop, nü-metal, wank rock, and whatnot – the Stones and McCartney (Lennon is in the afterworld with Mozart and Allen Ginsberg) are still in music magazines after releasing their umpteenth albums.
The Rolling Stones is not just a rock n’ roll band. It is an aural equivalent of the Museum of Natural History, an amusement park teeming with characters from Sweet Virginia to Sister Morphine to Lucifer. But are the guys from the Stones already rock n’ roll relics, already embalmed with hard drugs, heartbreaking women, heat from tabloids, and field trips to hell and back? Am I suggesting that their Satanic majesties – singer Mick Jagger, guitarists Keith Richards and Ron Wood, and drummer Charlie Watts – are relics, best confined to revisiting their back catalogue? Are they geriatric rockers we should gawk at as they go through the motions of playing Satisfaction like mosquitoes in amber arenas?
Should we expect "A Bigger Bang" (the Stones’ 22nd album according to MOJO; the 25th according to Q) to be the last gasp after the supposedly last gasp – the greatest hits package "Forty Licks."
No. No. And no. Apparently we Stones fans can’t get "no satisfaction."
Rough Justice arrives with its swaggering Keef slash Ronnie guitars and Charlie Watts’ pulsing toms. A digression: Watts was sidelined for a while due to throat cancer, so Mick and Keith ended up writing the songs together, neck to scrawny neck. No, the drummer’s brush with the big C and the chemotherapy sessions did not make the Glimmer Twins confront their own mortality. No (tumbling) dice. It’s business as usual for rock n roll’s most enduring enterprise. But, unfortunately, the new Stones album is a mixed bag. (Come to think of it, every record after 1981’s "Tattoo You" is.)
Let Me Down Slow sounds like a lamer Hang Fire or Mixed Emotions. Sweet Neo Con sounds like a song cobbled together by a CNN reporter drunk on bourbon, singing Miss You in a karaoke joint and ranting against George W. Bush at the same time. A letdown, considering how capable the Stones are in penning brilliant, politically charged tunes like Salt of the Earth and Street Fighting Man. Biggest Mistake is a country rock ballad in a state of rigor mortis. Tracks like Look What The Cat Dragged In, Dangerous Beauty, and Oh No Not You Again are fillers.
Great tunes abound, though.
Laugh I Nearly Died, a ballad that boasts great jangling guitars, is reminiscent of Fool To Cry. The Place is Empty has Keef on lead vocals (just like in Happy from "Exile"), sounding like Tom Waits on good, phlegm-less days. Rain Comes Down has a funky bassline and sleazy Stonesy groove. Back Of My Hand is a blues number that won’t stick out of "Sticky Fingers."
My favorite is Streets of Love, with the lines, "I walk the streets of love for a thousand years… and they’re drenched with tears." Great song, although it could never measure up to immortal ballads like Angie, or Wild Horses, or Moonlight Mile. Nothing could, anyway. How could anything compete with the wonderfully wasted Stones classics? Not even the Rolling Stones could surpass the Rolling Stones.
And if the Stones try awfully hard to remain as the Stones, Paul McCartney wants to depart from the Macca of old.
He wants to dispel the notion that John was the iconoclastic and poetic rebel dreamer, and Paul was the cutesy balladeer. That, for Paul, smacks of Disneyland. Did you know that Macca wrote the punkish Helter Skelter on "The White Album," which was appropriated by mass murderer Charles Manson? Aside, of course, from penning cosmic karaoke tunes Let it Be and Hey Jude. But his post-Beatles work has made Macca a middle-of-the-road poster-boy. With exceptions:
His Wings phase was remarkable for tracks like Band On The Run and Live And Let Die, which was appropriated by Manson-admirer Axl Rose. Macca also wrote tender ballads with balls like Maybe I’m Amazed and Let Me Roll It. He played jaw-dropping bass in tracks like Silly Love Songs (remember those killer basslines in The Beatles’ Something and She Came In Through The Bathroom Window). His backup band at one point included guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Ian Paice.
But…
McCartney was responsible for atrocities like Say Say Say and The Girl is Mine, two duets with Michael Jackson. The former reminds me of the showbiz reporter who always rolled his eyes in Inday Badiday’s talk show every time that song was played. The same with Ebony and Ivory (which is not about Jackson).
A confession: I always thought of Macca as a songwriter, not a crafter of great albums – unlike John who had "Double Fantasy," "Imagine" and the first Plastic Ono record. Paul always needed a foil. In The Beatles, it was John. In Wings, it was wife Linda. "In Flowers in the Dirt," it was Elvis Costello. In "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard," it’s producer Nigel Godrich, who has manned the controls for Beck and Radiohead.
Godrich’s stamp is apparent in the new album. Although Macca plays most of the instruments (guitars, piano, drums, shakers, Hofner bass, etc.), and his unique voice has never been more upfront, it is the melangé of weird strings and strange counterpoints courtesy of Godrich that gives color to the tracks.
Fine Line is vintage Macca. How Kind of You has a weird ("Paranoid Android") undercurrent to it, aside from a James Bond riff. Jenny Wren evokes chirpy Blackbird. At The Mercy is too morose and modal to be old Macca. A Certain Sadness mines the acoustic MOR territory ruled by Eric Clapton and Phil Collins. But Riding to Vanity Fair has a bit of menace to it, which is amplified by the strings, toy glockenspiel and the Wurlitzer. The lyrics are interesting: Macca rails against an old friend by saying, "And I was open to friendship/But you didn’t seem to have any to spare/While you were riding to vanity fair." A seemingly mellow song with enough bile in it to drown the person being addressed to. Could it be Lennon who inspired the vanity song? An overdue revenge for John’s How Do You Sleep?
Lennon now lives in the realm of legend, jamming with Jimi, Janis, Jaco, Bonzo and Johnny Cash. Should we now tell McCartney to roll over and tell the Rolling Stones the news? To enjoy their pensions, nurse their knighthood, sire more heirs, while talking about the day "Sgt. Pepper’s" expanded people’s minds and Sympathy for the Devil blew heads wide open?
No. Not yet. Besides, rock n’ rollers hate to "go gentle into that good night."