The Beatles v.s The Rolling Stones

On Last FM. The Rolling Stones only had 80 members of their fan group in 2007, The Beatles had over 3,000 which is now over 12,000 and the average age of fans is 22 more guys than girls and they are from all over the world.


In 2006,2007 and 2008 The Beatles were the # 1 most listened music artists on Last.FM and they are very popular on YouTube and Rate Your Music where many male and female fans in their teens and 20's call them The Greatest Rock Band Ever!


The Beatles are still rightfully regarded by most people,most rock critics,and many other music and rock artists as The most creative,innovative,and prolific rock band ever! In 1995 25 years after they broke up their Anthology CD's went straight to # 1 around the world and I heard a rock DJ say that 40% of the people buying them were teenagers,the same exact thing when their 1CD came out in 2000 30 years after they broke,up and in 2009,39 years after they broke up,they were the second biggest selling artists in the last decade,and their 1CD was the biggest selling album!


The Beatles wrote *plenty* of great rock songs including hard rock on The White Album and Abbey Road and as many have rightfully pointed out Paul invented heavy metal with his 1968 song Helter Skelter and people have also said John's I Want You She's So Heavy on Abbey road was also one of the first heavy metal songs.


Even in their early days they wrote some great rockers that were very rocky for the times, as The All Music Guide said,in their very good review of Past Masters Volume 1 that they proved they could rock really really hard,with John's I Feel Fine from late 1964 which featured the very recorded feedback guitar on a rock song,and Paul's great blues rocker,She's A Woman also from late 1964,and what they called the peerless I'm Down which is Paul's screaming rocker from mid 1965 which they performed even harder rocking, and screaming in August 1965 at Shea Stadium.


Also John's You Can't Do That from early 1964,is a great rock song, so is Day Dripper,Paperback Writer, And You're Bird Can Sing,Oh Darling,Hey Bulldog, She Said She Said,Taxman, Revolution,Get Back,Come Together etc!

Oh and as many of you already know,The Beatles fake cleaned up image that Brian Epstein created in their early days was a joke! Like a pimp playing a priest! They were always very wild in their personal lives,even when they were playing in Hamburg Germany from 1960-1962 8 hours a night taking speed pills to stay awake to do it,and playing in sleazy strip clubs going to bed with the srippers,and many young women groupies and when they played in The Cavern in Liverpool from in the very early 60's they had sex with many young women groupies who were at the Cavern.Paul McCartney says in Hunter Davies book,The Beatles that he had sex at only age 15 in 1957 with a girl who was older and bigger than him in her house while she was babysitting her siblings. It was very uncommon for a 15 year old boy to have sex at only 15 in 1957.He said he bragged about it soon after to his class mates and he said he was like the first one in his class to get it as he called it.He said I suppose 15 is a bit (just a bit!?) young to get it.He also said that he and his friends got into strip clubs when he was like 13!

He also said that his mother found a nude drawing of a woman that he did in his coat pocket when he was like 12,he said he was the lad who drew them in his class.And when his mother confronted him and asked him did you do this,he lied and said no it was a boy in his class,but a few days later he admitted that he did it,and he said the shame was terrible.


When they toured from 1963-1966 they were even more wild having sex with *tons* of young women groupies,and many were under age teen girls.And before they started smoking pot,and later taking LSD,during their early years they loved to drink a lot of Scotch and Coke.


It's really ironic too that Brian created this fake cleaned up image for them in their early days,because Brian seemed so respectable and classy,but was also very wild in his personal gay sex life.He sadly got beaten up by violent lovers,and had tons of affairs,in Hunter Davies great only authorized Beatles 1968 biography,he says that in the summer of 1967 not long before Brain died,he called up a call boy service!

Years ago there used to be an online 1973 Charlie Watts interview from an old Magazine called,Zig Zag and the article was Charlie Watts The Drinking Man's Rolling Stone and in this article he said that the media's portrayal of this ''rivalry'' between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones was a myth and that in fact they were good friends who hung out together and that they were a lot alike as people.he also said what made The Beatles so great is that they made one great single and album after the next.

It's most of The Beatles songs and albums that are GREAT AND TIMELESS! And as a smart Beatles fan poster Ed Sullivan said on PopMatters:Meet The Beatles Again in The Fall of 2009,"I don't know anyone who has ever considered the Stones version of "Man" (he means The Beatles song The Rolling Stones covered, I Wanna Be Your Man) to be on the same level as The Beatles recording." " Played back-to-back and he says as it is on The Beatles Anthology DVD,probably just to prove this point, Mick Brian and Keith are utterly laughable compared with the polish and energy of Ringo and his musical brothers." " This comparison becomes doubly true for the distinction between The Beach Boys version of "Rock & Roll Music and what is presented on Beatles for Sale. The Beatles are obviously in a class by themselves.''


On You Tube most of the posters said The Rolling Stones didn't sound good playing The Beatles, I Wanna Be You're Man,one poster said they were piss poor here,and another who said he's a big Rolling Stones fan said he had to admit that The Beatles version is better.Quite a few posters pointed out correctly that The Rolling Stones version is slower and that THe Beatles version is faster and more rocking.One 28 year old guy from France said The Rolling Stones version put him to sleep and that The Beatles version is more rocking and faster.

The Beatles revolutionized popular and rock music and were very innovative,prolific and creative,more than any other group. And their great timeless songs are the most covered in music history by everyone from jazz musicians,classical,Motown,rock,pop and even heavy metal recording and playing their great timeless music.


Many academic musicologists and music scholars have done serious studies,analyses and praise of their great timeless music,like university of Penn gradutate musicologist Alan W.Pollack who did an extensive 11 year detailed analysis of every Beatles song and it's online.He says he hadn't even listened to The Beatles in 20 years until they came out on CD for the first time in 1987.He said The Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn was one of the things that motivated him to do his Beatles study.He demonstrates that even though a lot of their lyrics were simple in most of their really early songs,most of their music wasn't and that a lot of their early songs have as many as 9 chords and interesting and unsual arangements.Paul's great rocker,You Never Give Me You're Money on their excellent amazingly modern sounding rock album,Abbey Road has 21 chords.


And university of Michigan music professor and musician Walter Everett who wrote the 2 volume,The Beatles As Musicians:The Quarry Men Through Rubber Soul and The Beatles As Musicians:Revolver Through Anthology.And British musicologist and classical composer and music professor (who is dead now)Willifred Mellers 1973 book,Twilight Of The Gods:The Music Of The Beatles,and he also wrote about Beethoven,Mozart and Bob Dylan.


And award winning music professor Dr.Glen Gass who has been teaching a course on what brilliant composers The Beatles were and a rock music course at Indiana University School Of Music since 1982.Dr.Gary Kendal's Beatles course is the most requested at North Western university ,university of California also has one and Oxford university had a recent Beatles course.


How many serious music scholars and award winning music professors are teaching and writing serious academic works studying and prasing what "brilliant" composers The Rolling Stones or any other rock bands were?

In the 2012 Newsweek Beatles special celebrating 50 years since their music came out,Steve Jobs was quoted from Walter Isaacson's biography as talking about how the band's approach to recording "refining and refining" influenced his own creative process. He said they were such perfectionists they kept it going and going he said. Steve Jobs said that this made a big impression on him when he was in his thirties.Newsweek rightfully says,that it's hard to imagine another rock band that influenced the way computers are made just as it is to think of one whose name became an adjective. And Newsweek said and that's why The Beatles still stand apart.
THey quote Steve Jobs saying,"Somebody else could have replicated the Stones,(Newsweek then says,nailing the difference between artists shaped by their times and those who shape them),no one could have been Dylan or The Beatles."

In 2010 I read an online article that had an interview with Ernie Isley of The Isley Brothers about a recent tribute to Jimi Hendrix,in which he says that Jimi played for The Isley Brothers & lived with them & that they & he were fans of The Fab Four from the moment they all watched them on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. I always thought that Jimi was only a later period Beatles fan,I knew he played Sgt.Pepper live the weekend it came out,& he played Day Tripper live also,& several people on different message boards said that when he was asked where the direction of music was going,he said ask The Beatles.

Also, I once saw a rock author on Good Morning America,I forget his name it was around 1991 he had written a book about The Rolling Stones and then he wrote a book about The Beatles. He said there was this common myth that both bands were bitter rivals but they actually were good friends,and they showed a picture of both bands sitting together. He said but The Beatles were genuises and The Rolling Stones were not,so they were envious of The Beatles.

Around 2003 I found an online interview with George Martin and he said that even though he has produced many other music artists,he has never known or worked with anyone as brilliant as The Beatles. He was also interviews in the 1990's on a Breakfast With The Beatles show on a local rock station,and he said that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were incredibly talented people and he said it like he still couldn't believe it.And he also said they both were extraordinarily talented song writers and great singers.

And in the excellent thorough book by Mark Lewisohn,The Beatles Recording Sessions,George Martin,and so many of The Beatles tape operators and recording engineers are interviewed,(and in the beginning there is a great 1987 interview with Paul McCartney) and they describe in detail how truly innovative,brilliant and creative especially John and Paul were in their amazing 8 year recording career.


And my cousin who was born in 1968 who used to be a lawyer,and his brother born in 62 who is still a lawyer,and their sister born in 64,their oldest brother born in 60,and their parents have always been Beatles fans.My cousin born in 68,went to England around 1991 and he told me that he was at a British Museum where the works of Shakespear,Dickens,Wodsworth and Keats,Lennon and MccArtney's lyrics are right in the same case. And he said the majority of visitors always said,forget the Shakespear etc,lets go over to the Lennon and McCartney lyrics.


When I once asked him,if he still liked The Beatles he said,best band there ever was.My step cousin born in 1958,said they probably were the greatest band ever.He saw Paul McCartney and Wings in May 1976 in concert when he was 18 and he said it was a great show.

As The Rolling Stone Album Guide said,not liking The Beatles is as perverse as not liking the sun. And Ozzy Osbourne said not loving The Beatles is like not loving oxogen. And a guy who runs Keno's Classic Rock n Roll Site and who runs a Rolling Stones and John Lennon fan site says in his review of The Beatles 1967-1970 Red Album damn The Beatles were one great group and he said in his great review of The Beatles 1962-1966 Red album, that if you don't love or at least like The Beatles and their music then you are not a true rock fan and more than likely will never ever get it.


He also says that John Lennon showed on Paul's rocker Get Back why he should have played lead guitar more often because he did such a good job of it. He also said he played a pretty good slide guitar on George's For Your Blue and he said John also played one of the first and best acid guitar parts on his great rocker Revolution.