I Roll a Stoney
How badly did the Stones rip off the Beatles?
By November of 1963, the Beatles had already conquered jolly ole England and were starting to have their songs played on American radio. Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones weren’t even able to get their songs played on the airwaves in their own homeland. Until… one day the Stones manager (Andrew Loog Oldham – who had previously worked for the Beatles) ran into John Lennon and Paul McCartney on the streets of London. Oldham explained how badly the Stones needed a top 20 hit to crack the British airwaves. Since the Beatles were originally the ones who directed Oldham to the Stones, John and Paul felt bad for him. So they told Oldham they would meet with the Stones at a recording session at De Lane Lea Studio later that day. When Lennon and McCartney arrived, they quickly worked out a song called “I wanna be your man” and gave it to the Stones to record. Within days the Rolling Stones had gone from just another struggling local Rock and Roll group to a nationally known band with a #12 hit. From that point on the Stones would become very accustomed to riding on the coat tails of the Beatles.
The Stones signed with Decca Records after Decca had passed on the Beatles. As Decca watched the Beatles blow up, they needed to save face. Eager to start fighting for a share of the new young record buying market that the Beatles ruled supreme over, they signed the Stones as a Beatles replacement. And that gave Oldham an idea. He was smart enough to realize that no band could compete with the Beatles on equal terms, so he devised a brilliant plan that would get the Stones mentioned alongside the Beatles as much as possible. The plan was to market the Stones as the anti-Beatles. Whereas the Beatles manager Brian Epstein went to great lengths to clean the Beatles up and make them respectable, Oldham would do just the opposite with the Stones. He would take this group of middle-class kids and dress them down to look tough, dangerous, sloppy, raunchy. Soon, with Oldham’s encouragement, press releases were asking the question: “Would you let a Rolling Stone date your daughter”.
Oldham also encouraged the Stones Keith Richards and Mick Jagger to follow in Lennon and McCartney’s footsteps by writing their OWN material. But that soon proved to be a skill that did come as easy to them as it had to Lennon-McCartney, so they continued to record songs written by others – usually American blues artists. America was an important part of the Stones next development, for as Beatles conquered America and the British Invasion was in full swing, the Stones followed in the Beatles footsteps and headed to the USA for a tour that included a number of TV appearances along the way. The results were a disaster and after just a couple weeks the Stones limped back to their homeland, publicly mocked by lounge singer Dean Martin and upstaged by the Godfather of Soul James Brown.
The Stones were down, but not out – for, while they were in the U.S.A, they had visited Chess records in Chicago and met with the legendary blues man Muddy Waters. This proved to be a transformational experience. The Stones recorded their next album there at Chess and everything changed for them from that point on. For the next two years the Stones went on a streak of hit records that rivaled the Beatles. And it was at that point that a fabricated Beatles-Stones rivalry became common fodder for Rock audiences all over the world.
The Stones played this rivalry for all they could, particularly in their album cover art. The first album cover that the Stones emulated the Beatles on was Rolling Stones No. 2 which looked suspiciously similar to With the Beatles. This may have been a coincidence, but then the Stones put out Between the Buttons, with an album cover of them standing in the woods, wearing dark overcoats with their collars turned up and with portions of the photo out of focus – it was obviously a rip off of the amazingly similar cover of Beatles For Sale which came out over a year earlier.
Certainly the Beatles were aware of the Stones copycatting them by this point, for on the cover of their next album – the historic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – the the Beatles included a small sign that read “Welcome The Rolling Stones” – as if the Beatles knew the Stones were going to rip them off on this album as well.
And rip them off they did! Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band was an album that re-defined the Rock landscape and was so in tune with the psychedelic sound of the time that it struck a chord with a generation of new music critics and fans alike that has never really been witnessed since. It was so huge and influential that everything in its wake was in its shadow. So when the Stones were ready to make their next album they decided to stick with their formula of copying the Beatles. Not only did they fill their next album with psychedelic songs, but they hired Michael Cooper (the artist who photographed Sgt. Pepper cover art) to create a 3D photo for their own album – which they titled Their Satanic Majesties Request. The result was a cover that blatantly ripped off the covers of both of the Beatles 1967 releases; Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour. The rip off was so complete that the Stones actually had Cooper hide images of the Beatles faces in the flowers on the cover!
Their Satanic Majesties Request was not as well-received as Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, but that did not stop the Stones from continuing to copycat the Beatles. In 1968, the Beatles released their eclectic self-titled album, commonly referred to as the White Album. The White Album mixed folk, music hall, pop, blues, rock, experimental sound collage, and even a country-flavored tune or two into a double album. The Stones followed later in the year with their own eclectic offering of county and blues songs, Beggar’s Banquet. Most striking however, was how the Stones, once again, copied the Beatles cover art for the album:
But the Stones didn’t stop there. Next, still trying to ride on the Beatles coat tails, the Stones began plans to shoot an ad hoc film called The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus with hopes of having it air on the BBC. Filming came exactly one year after the BBC aired a Beatles ad hoc film titled The Magical Mystery Tour.
Interestingly enough, Beatle John Lennon even directly participated in this copycat endeavor by fronting and performing with a one-off supergroup called the Dirty Mac with the Stones Keith Richards on guitar. Dirty Mac performed the Lennon song “Yer Blues” which he had previously recorded with the Beatles for The White Album. Lennon’s participation in the Rock and Roll Circus seems to hint that the Beatles took the the Stones imitating them all in good fun. The Stones and Beatles were good friends after all. Still though, the Stones imitating the Beatles became so blatant by 1969 that Lennon decided to call them out for it in his song “Dig A Pony” when he sings:
I roll a stoney.
Well you can imitate everyone you know.
Yes, you can imitate everyone you know.
I told you so!
This did not deter the Stones however. One month after the filming of The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, the Beatles recorded the song “Let it Be” which also eventually became the title of the album they were recording. The Stones’ founder Brian Jones played saxophone on the B-side of “Let it Be”. And in December of 1969, the Stones followed “Let it Be” with their song “Let it Bleed” which also became the title of their next album.
Would the copycatting ever cease? In 1970 it seemed as though it would, for the Beatles famously broke up and there would be nothing new for the Rolling Stones to copy cat from then on. But lo and behold, what did the Stones do after that? Trying to make a comeback in the later 1970’s, the Stones fittingly made them selves up to look like whores for their album cover for Some Girls and dug into the past to copycat the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night:
It’s hard to believe that all this copycatting could just be a coincidence. It is easier to believe that the Stones deliberately “ripped off” the Beatles – perhaps as a joke. Everyone said the Stones were the anti-Beatles or were riding on the Beatles coat tails, so why shouldn’t the Stones have some fun and go over board with it? Sorta like when John Lennon wrote the lyrics for “Glass Onion”. Lennon was making fun of the media for reading too much into his lyrics. Maybe the Stones were making fun of the media for reading too much into the Beatles-Stones rivalry.
Really enjoyed this piece. I’d heard some of the early Beatles/Stones crossover before, but you filled in a lot of gaps for me. The only thing I’d add is that the “Stones ripping off the Beatles” angle feels a little harsher than the history supports. The bands were genuinely friendly with each other. Any rivalry lived with the fans, not the musicians. The “Beatles or Stones?” question became a personality test for a reason — both bands were doing something distinct. However, the correlations, especially the album cover comparisons, were brilliant.
"Maybe the Stones were making fun of the media for reading too much into the Beatles-Stones rivalry." - Good point to end your article! That was exactly how it was at the time. We loved the Beatles and the Stones very much. There was no reason to like one or the other, we could enjoy them both and the good-natured banter between them. It was a magical time and lots of small bands sprung up under the influence of those two iconic bands.
I am especially astonished that the Stones are still together and touring. Who would ever have expected that?