The 1960s rock band that Tom Hanks “could never trust”
A genre that was as dangerous as rock and roll didn’t really feel like it belonged in the same area as Tom Hanks.
He was always the nicest guy in Hollywood, and when looking through all of his greatest roles, some of the ones that didn’t register with the public were usually the times when he was playing a villain. And since the bad boys of show business tended to come from rock and roll, Hanks seemed like the opposite of that, but it’s not like he was ever willing to throw the entire genre out.
If anything, he was the target demographic for that when he first started listening to music. He was always listening to what the biggest names of the British invasion were doing, and even when he started working on Elvis for the first time, it’s not like he needed to do a lot of research on the kind of rock star that pretty much got the ball rolling for every other artist that came after him.
That Thing You Do was practically a love letter to that era of rock and roll, but that was only a small helping of what Hanks liked. The entire radio business at the time didn’t like the idea of preferring one genre over the other, and when you look at the way that all of them moved, it was all about keeping a well-rounded taste. You could be listening to country songs one minute, rock and roll tunes the next, and then the best of Motown only a few minutes later, and yet all of them would be on the same radio station.
At the same time, Hanks had his guard up when looking at some of the rock bands that he came across. He was never the kind of talk about becoming the same kind of hippy that Deadheads gravitated towards, and when looking at some of the biggest stars in the world, it didn’t take him long to pick someone like The Beatles and the Dave Clark Five over some of the more risque rock stars out at the time.
Unfortunately, though, The Rolling Stones checked every box for a band that had a bit more grit to them. They were made to be like the dark answer to what The Beatles were all about, and while Mick Jagger and Keith Richards did write good enough songs to be in the same league as the Fab Four, Hanks felt that he could never really find the time to really register with them the same way that he did with The Beatles.
The Liverpool lads were everything that a rock and roll band was supposed to be, and yet Hanks felt that The Stones were a bit too risque for what he was used to, saying, “The Stones, to me, were always the bad boys. I could never trust their motivations.” But if you look underneath the hood, there was a lot of heart just underneath the surface when it came to every Stones tune.
Not all of them needed to sound nasty as hell, and even though songs like ‘Gimme Shelter’ had a lot more attitude behind it, you could hear the earnestness behind a song like ‘Wild Horses’ coming through a lot clearer whenever they made one of their ballads. They had multitudes aside from being a rock and roll band, and it turned out that there was a golden shine on their hearts every time they broke out the acoustic guitars.
It wasn’t always easy to spot for someone who was used to hearing rock and roll as nothing but party music, but Hanks knew that there was at least some merit behind what The Stones were doing. They weren’t always the kind of rock star that anyone would have wanted to catch their daughter with or anything, but they were still willing to make music that would last multiple lifetimes as well.
