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By Root 710 0

power of the melodies and the lyric themes, the directness of the expression, the excellence of the sound structures as arenas for improvisation (and indeed the very idea of musical improvisation, the sense of simultaneous craft and immediacy), the way the music makes bodies move: all these now underlie popular music all over the world. Some of these elements trace to Africa. The way an audience behaves at a rock concert—with very active participation—is closer to African festive and ceremonial contexts than to European art music of the nineteenth century.

The Riff Not Taken

Nevertheless, though The Stones and Beatles started out in such a similar vein, they diverged quickly. Now many things might make someone prefer one to the other. For example, they positioned themselves differently on what might be termed the moral spectrum. The Beatles’ image—whatever the reality—was of wholesome young men: nonthreatening and charming. This was one reason they could appear everywhere in many media. It was the persona projected in A Hard Day’s Night and Help! In the early days, they were pre-teen and teenage-girl crush objects that even many parents could endorse or dismiss as harmless.

This essential wholesomeness continued as The Beatles got more hippie-like, grew out their hair, joined the peace movement, and explored Eastern religions. Still, in songs like “All You Need is Love”—the inspiring yet empty soundtrack for a hundred treatments of hippiedom and the Sixties—they captured the positive side of 1960s youth culture. The Beatles always projected a certain childlikeness, and many of their songs could without strain be covered by Raffi: “Yellow Submarine” (and its bright, happy animation) or “Magical Mystery Tour” were essentially children’s songs, though mounted like mini-operas amidst a swirl of distortions.

The Stones projected a darker and more dangerous image, constantly flirting with images of Satan, for example in Their Satanic Majesties Request or “Sympathy for the Devil,” in both of which they actually identified themselves, albeit with some irony, as the devil incarnate. Whereas The Beatles were associated with the summer of love, Sgt. Pepper having been released in June of 1967, The Stones were associated with Altamont, where a Hell’s Angel’s security guard stabbed a concert-goer. The two represented the kind of twinned fantasies of young female lust: the good boy and the bad boy, the wholesome young man you take home to Mom and the delinquent drug abuser you meet in the alley: the male equivalent of the Madonna-whore complex.

This idea of The Stones as The Beatles’ evil twins was probably deliberate. The bands knew each other (members appearing together, for example in The Rolling Stones Rock’n’Roll Circus), and probably in part defined their personae as complements. But though they both started as rhythm and blues or soul tribute bands, they quickly diverged and this, I think, is where the real question of The Stones versus The Beatles arises. The Beatles developed a new musical vocabulary that drove rock’n’roll for a decade or more. The Stones developed as well—they got much sharper and more focused and also more original as they went along. But they referred constantly back to the basic rock and soul and blues vocabularies that they started with. The Beatles developed into what we might think of—at least in the context of popular music with a massive audience—as avant-garde artists. The way The Stones’ developed is much more like what we see in the traditional arts.

You’re 2000 Light Years from Home

The turn in The Beatles’ style dates to Rubber Soul in late 1965, or Revolver in 1966. Certainly it is fully realized by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the middle of 1967. Here are some of the characteristics of the shift: a change away from a blues tonality to one that is European-oriented or perhaps British (McCartney associated the sound with British music halls of the 1940s); a shift away from basic rock instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums) to much more elaborate set-ups involving in