The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger: would The Masked Marauders album have worked?
In 1969, Rolling Stone magazine pulled off music’s silliest hoax. In one issue, there was a rave review of a mysterious new release by a group called The Masked Marauders. “It can truly be said that this album is more than a way of life; it is life,” the review declared. But if The Beatles, Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan truly had formed a supergroup to make a record, that type of statement would be understandable.
That’s exactly what the magazine was claiming had happened. Their review was reportedly of a “super session” where the leaders of rock and roll had formed a band. At a time when these artists were gaining notoriety on a level rarely seen before, and as countercultural scenes were hitting the big time with Rolling Stone bringing its tales to the evergrowing masses, it was a perfect storm of a prank. People were desperate for any scrap of these musicians; the magazine was establishing itself as an authority, and the merge of rebellious spirit with mainstream media set the stage beautifully for this hoax.
Because the Masked Marauders never existed. The “super session” was nothing more than a daydream conjured up by the magazine’s editor, Greil Marcus. There were tell-tale signs littered through the review as it regularly falls into total absurdity, claiming Mick Jagger sang lead on a song called ‘I Can’t Get No Nookie’ while writing that it included “an 18-minute version of ‘Season of the Witch’ (lead vocal by Dylan, on which he does a superb imitation of early Donovan)”.
If people weren’t so desperate for this band to be real, they would have instantly seen cracks, but instead, the magazine took it even further as fans fell for the plan. They hired imitators of the musicians to genuinely record this album, and gullible listeners sent it straight into the Billboard chart after buying vinyl copies of a bunch of parody artists doing their finest impressions of their musical heroes.
When it all came out as a big hoax, fans were naturally disappointed and left mourning what could have been. Even when revisiting the whole story of the Masked Marauders, the heart aches for the real thing that now can never be. But when back in 1969, could it ever have really materialised?
It’s not as if the imagined members of the band were worlds apart. There is a very real and reasonable chain of connection between them all. Bob Dylan and The Beatles met in 1964, with Dylan and Harrison especially striking up a friendship while Paul McCartney and John Lennon were once vocal admirers of the folk star. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were two sides of the coin for the British invasion, so they had always existed within the same loose circle, with the Beatles songwriters once penning them a song and Jagger stopping into the infamous Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band recording sessions.
Dylan once said, “The Rolling Stones are truly the greatest rock and roll band in the world and always will be” and Jagger sent praise back his way too. On the surface, it appears that the whole group know, likes and respects one another, which is why the hoax worked so well.
But liking each other and working with one another are two vastly different things. When delving into their processes and the more sly little remarks they’ve thrown each other over time, it’s clear that any “super session” would quickly descend into a chaos of squabbles and rivalry. Dylan would accuse the Beatles boys of copying him as he did during the Rubber Soul era.
Lennon would look down on Jagger’s writing like he did way back in the early 1960s by claiming that he and McCartney intimidated the Stones into writing their own music. Meanwhile, Jagger would simply be desperate for a little bit of swagger to be injected into a room where all the rest of them were deep in a pit of sonic experimentation while he still wanted good old-fashioned rock and roll.
Don’t get me wrong, there have been plenty of examples of supergroups where it has worked. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young balanced their respective genius for a while. Bob Dylan and George Harrison later proved they could work together within the Traveling Wilburys. Even today, Boygenius have shown that three solo artists can unite and make something spectacular.
But by 1969, the chances of that were surely long gone. Their fame was too high, their egos too big and their own paths were too golden and winding through their journeys of evolution and musical adventuring to ever unite in any authentic or good way. They indeed wouldn’t unite for an 18-minute cover of ‘Season Of The Witch’, and they certainly wouldn’t see Bob Dylan, with his poetic streak, playing on a track called ‘I Can’t Get No Nookie’ while Jagger danced around him. So, while the Masked Marauders was a beautiful daydream, it could only ever exist in the mind of a prankster.
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