The Stones had a window.Īftermath is very much a response to the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, but not in the way that listeners might have expected at the time. (They’re playing in Prague tonight!) In July, the Beatles’ persona as the more palatable, clean-cut option for Americans was jeopardized when John Lennon was quoted as saying that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus.” The comment - which originally appeared in a British magazine months earlier, eliciting no reaction -inspired death threats and mass record-burning parties in the States. The Stones, of course, would continuously sell out arenas for another 50 years. The Stones released Aftermath in April, and in the following months, the Beatles would perform their last ever official concert.
If the Stones were ever going to surpass the Beatles, 1966 would have been the year to do it. Stones, historian John McMillian frames the rivalry as “two sides of the one of the twentieth century’s greatest aesthetic debates…with some qualifications, the Beatles may be described as Apollonian, the Stones as Dionysian, the Beatles pop, the Stones rock, the Beatles erudite, the Stones visceral, the Beatles utopian, the Stones realistic.” Or put another way, the Beatles were the American dream, and the Stones were British exiles, beggars at a banquet. Personal preference is a more complex matter.
(If we’re counting solo records, the Beatles actually have 14 albums on the list). Both bands have 10 albums on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, but the Stones only have one in the top 10, while the Beatles have three, including the number 1 spot. The Beatles outsold the Stones from day one and solidified their legacy by quitting while they were ahead. If you set aside individual taste, there is an objective winner. 19 were some of the friendliest years between the bands they even coordinated when to release singles so they wouldn’t be directly competing with one another on the charts.(Things would get more outwardly contentious in the late ‘60s).
My parents came of age in the mid-‘60s, when teen magazines and radio DJs would pin the Beatles against the Rolling Stones, a rivalry both Brits dismissed at the time (at least in public). As I’ve written about before, loving the Beatles is the closest thing my family has to a religious tradition. We are an American family who has adopted the four lads from Liverpool as our own. When Homer Simpson lost his legal case against the Queen of England, he was literally dragged out of the courtroom, shouting: “America rules! Our Beatles are way better than your precious Rolling Stones!”
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