How did The Beatles end up writing The Rolling Stones’ second single?
Few rock and roll bands can compare or compete with The Rolling Stones. Led by a peerless frontman in Mick Jagger, the London-born rockers penned some of the genre’s most enduring hits, from the hook-heavy ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ to the endless wooing of ‘Sympathy For The Devil’. Infusing their songs with sex and riffs in equal measure, they earned their place as one of the most influential rock bands of all time, perhaps second only to one: The Beatles.
In 1960, just a couple of years before the inception of the Stones, four lads from Liverpool got together to start a rock and roll outfit of their own. In the years that followed, they experimented with genre and with drugs, created countless all-time greats, and spread Beatlemania across the world. By the time the decade was done, they had secured their place as the most important band not only in rock, but in music history.
A collaboration between the two bands, then, would mark one of the biggest clashes in rock and roll, and it happened very early in both of their careers. In 1963, the Stones put out a single called ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, which had been penned by the songwriting duo at the centre of the Fab Four, Paul McCartney and John Lennon. But how did this mammoth collaboration come about?
When The Beatles were coming up in the early 1960s, they began spending more time in the capital city, where they would stumble upon the Stones. “The Stones were just up and coming in the clubs then,” Lennon remembered during a chat with Dennis Elsas, “And we knew Giorgio [Gomelsky] through Epstein and we went down and saw them and became good friends.”
Their friendship soon turned into a creative collaboration when the Stones found themselves in need of a sophomore single. The band had put out a cover of ‘Come On’ by Chuck Berry in the summer of 1963 and, according to Lennon, they needed a “quick follow up”. Their new manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, thought Lennon and McCartney were the right duo for the job.
After all, someone had to do the job, and the Stones were presently incapable. Around 1963, with Bob Dylan’s profoundly personal songwriting beginning to shift the dial away from jazzed-up blues covers, it became increasingly imperative for bands to write their own material to become bonafide rockers. The Rolling Stones’ goal had previously only been to become the premier blues band in London, but suddenly, the Beatles showed that an alternative superstardom was possible.
It wasn’t always Beatles vs Stones, then?
“He came to us and said, ‘Have you got a song for em?’” Lennon recalled of his conversation with Oldham, “And we said, ‘Sure,’” making one of the biggest collaborations in rock music sound like easy work. The track they brought to the Stones was ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, though it wasn’t quite finished yet. “We virtually finished [the song] off in front of them,” Lennon explained, “because they needed a record.”
Despite superstardom beckoning, the casual nature is also indicative of how rock quickly rose from young lads playing around for fun, to a passion that was transfiguring into a cultural revolution. It is both ironic but deeply telling that ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ was both a blase ordeal and yet a significant chapter in the evolution of modern music.
The Stones learned the track, performed it with their own distinctive rock and roll style, and released it as their second single. It maintained that Beatles quality—the distinctive writing style of Lennon and McCartney shining through. However, the band also undoubtedly made it their own, indicative of the fact that the Stones certainly already had an idiosyncratic style. This is only further emphasised by The Beatles’ recording of the song, which arrived not long after but proved quite widely different.
Despite the apparent ease of the collaboration, this would mark the only time that the band released their version of a song penned by the Beatles duo as the Stones returned to Chuck Berry covers and eventually began recording their own material. Still, the single remains an impressive clash of two iconic rock bands and provides an interesting look at the differences between the two in recording style.
While the tale has, to some degree, been buried as an unlikely curio by the revolution that followed – spearheaded by both bands – it most certainly would’ve contributed to spurring changes for both. For the Rolling Stones, they knew that to compete with the lads from Liverpool, they would have to write their own songs.
But to keep their pride intact, they could happily tell themselves that they were a live band who brought a unique energy to tunes, a narrative that has largely continued. As for the Beatles, it surely would’ve served as a boon for artistic confidence to be roped in as young lads to try and provide a hit for one of the biggest emerging bands in London.
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