During the past six decades one of the common questions every Rock and Roll fan hears is: You prefer The Beatles or The Rolling Stones? A rivalry between the band fronted by Mick Jagger and the Fab Four was created and both groups were constantly compared. Over the decades Mick Jagger talked about many of his peers, including the late legendary John Lennon.
Mick Jagger’s opinion on John Lennon as a musician
The rivalry between the Rolling Stones and The Beatles was something only created by the press since the members of both bands were really good friends and helped each other. John and Paul even wrote the first Rolling Stones hit “I Wanna Be Your Man” and gave it to them to help to launch their career. Mick Jagger really admired John Lennon and they were friends as he recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 1995. He even admited that The Beatles were much bigger than The Stones and no one could compete with them.
“The Beatles were so big that it’s hard for people not alive at the time to realize just how big they were. There isn’t a real comparison with anyone now. I suppose Michael Jackson at one point, but it still doesn’t seem quite the same. They were so big that to be competitive with them was impossible. I’m talking about in record sales and tours and all this. They were huge. (…) They were bigger than Jesus! (…) Yeah, we were Band 2. Like Avis. It’s horrible being compared to a car.”
“(…) I liked John very much to start. We all had a good relationship with John. He seemed to be in sympathy with our kind of music, so we used to go out to clubs a lot. We did a lot of hanging out. There was a professional thing above the friendship. You could talk about problems, bounce things off each other and get a different take on it. Later, when John wasn’t in the Beatles any more, he was bouncing more ideas off me than ever before. I’m not saying I was the only person he bounced off of. But he used to bounce a lot off me – song choices and stuff.”
Mick Jagger continued:
“He was educated and very smart and cynical and funny and really amusing company. He had a very funny take on the rest of the Beatles. If they boasted too much about how great they were, he had ways to shut them up. He’d say, ‘Don’t worry, he’s just getting used to being famous. Shurrup!’ [Laughter] As if he’d been famous longer, you know. But I used to get on with Paul as well. Paul is very nice and easy to get on with – didn’t have the acerbic side. You always knew with John, you’re gonna be on the end of a lot of sarcastic remarks that you weren’t always in the mood for.”
“(…) He did wonderful things. John and Paul, I mean, because it’s hard to separate this thing, and having been through a partnership, with people always asking you who did what, and, of course, you either exaggerate your own importance or you downplay it, but you never get it right. I think John himself was a very talented guy, very influential and wrote some wonderful songs. And he was very funny. I think he really was larger than life.
“He obviously did more than just that (writing good music) , but he wrote really wonderful songs and performed them wonderfully. The stage performances were not mind-boggling, and after nineteen sixty-whatever-it-was, they didn’t do any stage performances. So for all intents and purposes, Shea Stadium and the concert on the roof was it. But great songwriting, great personality, and he had all these other sides, which added to it: the writing, the drawing, the little books, the all-embracing, modernistic push, which was refreshing without being pretentious,” Mick Jagger said.
Lennon played on “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus”
John Lennon was three years older than Jagger and alongside McCartney was The Beatles main songwriter. Curiously, in 1968, Lennon was part of the concert film “Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus”. He fronted Dirty Mac, his temporary supergroup which also had Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and the drummer Mitch Mitchell. But they only performed together during that concert film and played “Whole Lotta Yoko” and The Beatles’ “Yer Blues”.
12 years later he was tragically murdered in New York City outside the Dakota Builduing where he lived and the whole world was in shock. Jagger said that he was very shocked and sad at the time and recalled that Lennon used to tell him about the freedom he had to walk in the streets, have no bodyguards and for example take a simple cab rather than having a driver. According to him The Beatle liked how in big cities like NY you could be anonymous again, something he didn’t experienced since The Beatles were formed.
One year after his death, Jagger talked about it in an interview interview from the Reeling In The Years archive (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage). “It’s such a difficult thing (To say how I reacted). I just remember all the good times that we had. When a friend of yours dies that’s what you think of. All the good times that we had together.”
In 1988, The Rolling Stones vocalist was who inducted The Beatles into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. During his speech he recalled how he was jealous about them when they first became famous and praised their musicianship.
