Ready, Steady, Go! by Shawn Levy

Author:Shawn Levy [Shawn Levy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007375752
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

But London could itself issue forth talent as raw and hungry and willing to dash custom for the sake of the new. And by the mid-’60s, the Londoners had moved aside the Northerners and come to stand boldly in the centre of the picture. In the movies, it was Terence Stamp and Michael Caine who were the new hot properties, and in pop music, London bands were virtually all that mattered anymore – with an enormous exception that none of them could disallow. London acts like the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Who might’ve ruled the world in 1966, but for the colossal fact of the Beatles.

That spring, for instance, the Stones released an album that felt, like the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, of a piece: Aftermath, unlike the three Stones studio albums that preceded it, wasn’t a hodgepodge of nifty tracks but a through-and-through conception, with songs strung together in a purposeful pattern and a real sense that a coherent vision was at work. The textures and tones were varied – there was room for sitar and harpsichord, for instance, as well as for the enormously varied lyrics of such songs of such diverse temper as ‘Stupid Girl’ and ‘Lady Jane’. But then a few months later, the Beatles’ Revolver appeared and made the whole thing seem limp, tame and dated.

Time and again, musically, the Beatles trumped the Stones. There was the night in the summer of ‘68 that a party was held to mark the opening of a new club (with Stones money behind it) on the Tottenham Court Road, and the soundtrack for the evening was Beggar’s Banquet, which hadn’t yet been released. The crowd was stunned, as well they should have been, by what turned out to be the band’s first true cut-to-cut classic. But then Paul McCartney showed up with an acetate of his group’s latest – a single of ‘Hey, Jude’ with ‘Revolution’ on the back. One spin on the turntable, and the Stones were back in the caboose with everyone else. As Stones agent Sandy Lieber-son recalled, the night ended in a really dark, druggy mess, with people being accidentally dosed with acid, and Paul McCartney walking out muttering, ‘the Stones are evil.'

And yet, for all these setbacks, the Stones had clearly outclassed the Beatles in one key area: more than any other band, the Stones were the essence of the spirit of mid-’60s London. The Beatles were bigger and more famous and sold many more records and had two hit movies and broke far more new ground. But the Stones were much more implicated in the white-hot centre of the goings-on.

Perhaps the Beatles were just too famous. When the Stones were still trying to figure out whether they were a pop or blues act, the Beatles were running for their lives from fans on four continents; McCartney couldn’t walk to the shops in London, but had to take taxis for two-block shopping trips and even then was mobbed; ditto George Harrison, who would take two cabs to visit Andrew Oldham, who only lived just across the road.

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