Do The Rolling Stones owe their success to The Beatles?
A lot of people call The Beatles overrated; they say that the music isn’t as good as people make out and the band shouldn’t be placed on such a high pedestal. This would be a reasonable comment if all The Beatles contributed to the music industry was music, but they did a lot more than that. The timing at which The Beatles came around meant that they gave people permission to have fun again. Equally, when they broke America, they managed to prove that British bands could market themselves in the States.
Before the Beatles, a few different acts from the UK had gone to America and had mild success, such as Cliff Richard and Billy J Kramer, but none of them had anything lasting. It was beginning to look like UK musicians were never destined to break America, and then the Beatles came along.
The band were well established when they came to the US, as Steve Van Zandt points out, though they had only had a couple of singles do well in the charts, they were halfway through their careers when British soles touched America runway. “By the time they came to the US, they were halfway through their career,” he said, “They had been going since ’57 and were gone in ’69. So by ’64 they were quite sophisticated and highly evolved.”
It meant that their songs were well-ironed and ready to go, and their live performance was top-tier. This helped them a great deal; as if the success of singles like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ weren’t enough to kickstart Beatlemania, their live performance on the Ed Sullivan Show was. It was viewed by households across the States and was all people were able to talk about.
“There was no real future for a British band before The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. That was the turning point, after which there was an avalanche,” said Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, “It totally transformed the possibilities, and as usual, The Beatles were the frontrunners. In music, there is The Beatles, and then there is everybody else.”
The end of Oldham’s quote is slightly up for contention. The Beatles kicked off the British invasion, and many bands followed in their wake. Because the Beatles paved the way for British bands to make a name for themselves in America, many individuals believe that some bands owe their success to them. Oldham is included in this.
“The Rolling Stones got there long after The Beatles, The Dave Clark Five and Herman’s Hermits,” he said, “They were the pioneers. If The Beatles ever looked over their shoulders, The Rolling Stones were not the first thing they saw – it was The Dave Clark Five.”
It’s fair to call The Rolling Stones the biggest British band on the planet. In terms of record sales, impact and the fact they can still tour and sell out arenas, there is no escaping the fact that nobody else is making music or having the influence they do. Do they owe everything they have to The Beatles? Or is this an unfair judgement?
The first thing to ask is if The Beatles never existed, would the British invasion have found its way under another band? Oldham refers to Dave Clark Five and Herman’s Hermits, both of whom had big hits in America at the time. Fair enough, they didn’t continue to be as successful as the Beatles, but to kick start the British invasion, they didn’t have to be; they just had to give people an appetite for British bands. It could be argued that another band would have filled that slot even if John Lennon and Paul McCartney never wrote music.
The other argument is that even if the British invasion had never happened, would the Rolling Stones have been able to find their feet in the US? It’s not unrealistic. The music the Rolling Stones made was quite a lot different from bands like The Beatles and Dave Clark Five, as Mick Jagger and co. were a lot more into R&B music and artists such as Muddy Waters.
Given that so many R&B artists were American and rock music took off in a big way in the States, the Rolling Stones could more than likely still have found a market, even if the US weren’t as open to listening to British bands.
It’s hard to know what music would look like if The Beatles never existed, because they did exist, and shaped most of the music industry as a result. However, while it’s an argument that might have some merit, suggesting that a band like The Rolling Stones owe their success to the Fab Four seems a bit harsh.
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