Free Beatles vs. Stones by John McMillian Page B

the Station Hotel, Richmond. . . . And we’re whacking our show out and everybody’s having a good time, you know. I suddenly turn around: there’s these four guys in black leather overcoats standing there. Oh, fuck me! Look who’s here! ” Mick’s reaction?“I didn’t want to look at them,” he recalled. “I was too embarrassed.”
    However goofy and good-natured the Beatles came across in their early television and radio appearances, in real life they often struck people differently. Writer Barry Miles observed that in this period the Beatles were bent on projecting“an intentionally intimidating image,” and journalist Chris Hutchins, who was friendly with the group sincetheir Hamburg days, agreed;he said their long leather jackets gave them the look of “gunfighters.” About a month before the Beatles met the Stones at the Station Hotel, Andrew Oldham had watched in the wings while the Beatles recorded a television appearance in London. Away from the klieg lights and cameras, he said,they exuded a kind of “Fuck You, we’re good and we know it” attitude. In early 1963, the teen-oriented Boyfriend magazine described the Beatles as“almost frightening-looking young men.” (They looked friendly when they smiled, the journalist continued, but that was “not often.” “The rest of the time they look wicked and dreadful and distinctly evil, in an eighteenth-century sort of way. You almost expect them to leap out of pictures and chant magic spells.”) Even the preternaturally cool Mick Jagger would later admit that when he first laid eyes on the Beatles, they struck him as“four-headed monster.”
    Aspinall thought the Stones were just “okay” that night—not particularly better or worse than a typical Liverpool band playing at the Cavern Club.“They could do their stuff and that was all you needed to do. A lot of people couldn’t.” The Beatles, however, were much more effusive.“I remember standing in some sweaty room and watching them on the stage,” Ringo recalled. “Keith and Brian—wow! I knew then that the Stones were great.” Harrison was struck by the tremendous enthusiasm of the Stones fans.“It was a real rave,” he reminisced. “The audience shouted and screamed and danced on tables. They were doing a dance no one had seen until then, but we all know now as the Shake.”
    Afterward, no one lingered around or chatted with fans for very long after the gig, since Jones had invited the Beatles and their crew over to the Stones’ slummy Edith Grove apartment. When the Beatles arrived, Phelge remembers, they“carried themselves with the air of a professional outfit. . . . All the members of their entourage were smartly dressed in the same dark-colored overcoats as the band, giving the appearance of one big team.” A few in the Beatles camp may have been disgusted by the putrid condition of the Stones’ dimly litflat—the piled high dishes, overflowing ashtrays, and accumulated rubbish—but Phelge says that after Paul surveyed the environment, “He did not seem unduly perturbed by anything—the look on his face said, ‘I’ve been here before.’ ”
    From interviews and firsthand accounts, we know just a few more things about what went on at Edith Grove that night. All evening long, records spun successively on the turntable, and members of both groups shared their musical likes and dislikes. Conversations proceeded energetically, with much crosstalk. “It was difficult to keep track of all that was being said,” Phelge recalled. “Occasionally Mick or John would mention an artist or song and say, ‘I like that. We used to do that.’ . . .Everyone was trying to find out as much as possible in a short period of time.” The Stones played the Beatles the five demo tracks they’d recently recorded at IBC Studios, and they were eager to show off their treasured collection of American imports.
    “John was really nice,” Mick said later. “I said, ‘You play