beatles v stones

At a New York dinner party a couple of years back, a beautiful woman — who else would dare? — teased Mick Jagger: “Everybody’s either a Beatles person or a Stones person. Which are you?” Characteristically inclined to repel even deadly serious questions with an eye roll and a shrug, Jagger took this one straight. “I’m a Stones person,” he replied.

That response is telling. Ever since they pulled ahead of the Fab Four on the hipness front in the late ’60s, the Stones have been weary and resentful of Beatles comparisons. In fact, the bands were frenemies from the start. Jagger hilariously describes being intimidated by the Beatles in their leather coats when they came to see the Stones perform in their very early days. And as Londoners, the Stones would forever be gobsmacked by having to stand in the shadow of a quartet from, of all provincial places, Liverpool. While Allen Ginsberg asserted that the Beatles made Liverpool “the center of the consciousness of the human universe,” Keith Richards saw it somewhat differently: “I mean, Liverpool is . . . as far as London is concerned, it’s Nome, Alaska.” The Beatles, to be fair, could be equally dismissive of their surlier rivals: “I think Mick’s a joke, with all that fag dancing,” John Lennon once sneered.

Nonetheless, the Beatles’ pre-eminence is undeniable. Far more than a band that you might like or dislike in relation to any other, “the Beatles are a phenomenon,” the Stones guitarist Brian Jones once evenly stated to a British journalist. In the ’60s rock solar system, they were the sun around which everything else revolved, and the Stones benefited too much from the Beatles’ reflected heat to be able to deny it. As far as America is concerned, without the Beatles’ breakthrough, there could have been no Rolling Stones. When it counted, the Beatles wrote a hit song for the Stones, talked them up in interviews and helped get them a record deal. Later on, the two camps would stagger their record releases in order not to hurt each other’s sales.

 Even the most gnarled and intransigent veterans of the Beatles-Stones debates will emerge enlightened by this book.  Far-flung sources demonstrate how profoundly these bands’ songs, statements and actions roiled the counterculture. It’s hard to imagine any artist, musical or otherwise, having as direct a social impact today. Both bands have middle class pretensions. Mick Jagger was born into a middle-class family in Dartford, Kent, England.His father, Basil Fanshawe "Joe" Jagger (13 April 1913 – 11 November 2006), and grandfather David Ernest Jagger were both teachers. His mother, Eva Ensley Mary (née Scutts; 6 April 1913 – 18 May 2000), born in New South Wales, Australia, of English descent,was a hairdresser and an active member of theConservative Party. Richards too was of the middle class or from a family with those pretensions . So both bands came from the aspirant middle class if not the full blown middle class. The Stones though come across as a much more working class band while the Beatles not being able to stay the course come across as a kind of fey middle class art school band in comparison witgh the Stones.

1. Why were the Beatles such an impact on the counter culture
2.why did Lennon not like Jagger
3. What class did the bands come from
4,What did the Beatles do for the stones
5.Why did Richards liken Liverpool to Nome Alaska
6Why were the Stones intimidated by the Beatles