The Beatles songs that sent Mick Jagger crazy for very different reasons
In a recent interview before his performance at the Super Bowl Halftime Show, Kendrick Lamar spoke about his desire to be a great artist and stand out above the rest of his competition. “My intent was to always keep, I think from day one, was to always keep the nature of it as a sport,” said Lamar. “I don’t care how mother fuckers look at it as a collaborative effort, you know, that’s cool too, but I love when artists grit their teeth. Like, I still watch battle raps […] This has always been the core definition of who I am, and it’s been that way since day one.”
His honesty is commendable, and given how well he is doing at the moment, Lamar could be living proof that rivalry within the creative arts is a good thing. It’s not something artists openly admit quite as much today, but previously, when the charts were a much more competitive effort, and the means to publish music were more restricted, artists were willing to embrace their competitive side a little bit more.
If you need proof of this, look at some of the rivalries spawned due to The Beatles exponential rise to fame. The Beach Boys believed they were much better than this band taking over America and created beautiful records such as Pet Sounds in a bid to prove as much. The Rolling Stones also saw themselves as the antithesis to The Beatles, a much grittier, rock-heavy and more rebellious musical outfit that dived places the Fab Four would dare to tread.
“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 Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones manager, “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.”
These competitive relationships meant that artists always looked at what their creative counterparts were doing. Sometimes, they liked the work, and sometimes, they didn’t, and in Mick Jagger’s case, it often drove him crazy.
The Beatles songs that sent Mick Jagger crazy
‘Hey Jude’
Many people had their minds blown when they heard ‘Hey Jude’ for the first time, and that expansive outro kicked in. Combine that musical anomaly with the fact that Jagger first heard it in a late-night hashish-smoking basement in Tottenham, and you had a recipe for craziness. McCartney recalled the song coming and Jagger marching over to him, equally confused and delighted by what he heard.
“I remember Mick Jagger coming up: ‘Fucking hell, fucking hell. That’s something else, isn’t it? It’s like two songs’,” said McCartney, “It wasn’t intended to go on that long at the end but I was having such fun ad-libbing over the end when we put down the original track that I went on a long time.”
‘Love Me Do’
There was no escaping the fact that when the Rolling Stones first started making music, they were doing something that few other acts in the UK were doing. Their covers of blues and R&B artists were next-level, and as such, Jagger thought that he was part of the greatest band in the country—until he heard The Beatles.
“We thought that we were totally unique animals. And then we heard there was a group from Liverpool, and they had long hair, scruffy clothes,” recalled Jagger, “But they had a record contract. And they had a record on the charts, with a bluesy harmonica on it, called ‘Love Me Do.’ When I heard the combination of all these things, I was almost sick.”
‘Yellow Submarine’
While the above songs had an adverse effect on Mick Jagger because he enjoyed them, there were other tracks he couldn’t connect with because he felt they were beneath The Beatles. One of these was ‘Yellow Submarine’, which his ex-partner, Marianne Faithfull, recalled he detested because he felt it was silly.
“Mick might, very occasionally, put The Beatles down for their provincialism, which, if you’re from London and they’re from Liverpool, is a very natural reaction,” said Faithfull. “But he’d never put their music down. Well, of ‘Yellow Submarine’ or those whimsical Beatle songs, he might say, ‘Now that is a bit silly.’ I never thought so; I loved it, still do.”
