Music should never feel like a competition. As much as it might be fun going toe-to-toe with someone on the charts, the best songs always come from deep within rather than being written specifically to hurt someone or outdo the person next to you. But even when talking about the greatest songs of the 1960s, there are always bound to be people still going over whether The Beatles or The Rolling Stones have the title of the greatest rock band of the era.
Then again, if you were to ask either band, their supposed “rivalry” was never what it was made out to be. There were occasional times when they would go head-to-head on the charts, but given that John Lennon and Paul McCartney gave The Stones one of their first major hits with ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, it’s not like they were trying to deliberately sabotage their careers behind the scenes or anything.
As time went on, though, it looked like The Stones were carving out a path for themselves. The Fab Four still had a firm hold of the charts with albums like Rubber Soul and Revolver, but Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had already started working with some new influences from their favourite blues artists. It was one thing to do a carbon copy of Sgt Peppers on Their Satanic Majesties Request, but Beggars Banquet was when they truly started moving in the direction that would come to define them.
Even looking back on the record, Richards felt that this was one of the most important steps they could have taken at the time. They were already at half-capacity now that Brian Jones had quietly quit the group, but even with ‘Keef’ as the only guitar player on the record, tunes like ‘Stray Cat Blues’ and ‘No Expectations’ had the perfect mix of menace, sleaze, and heartache that would become the blueprint for records like Exile on Main St.
The Beatles couldn’t have made a more low-down and dirty record if they had tried, but that’s because they had evolved well past the blues. They were still going to go down to the record’s release party at the Vesuvio Club, but they didn’t come just to listen. If the Stones were throwing down the gauntlet, they needed to come prepared, and the fact that they showed up with a finished copy of ‘Hey Jude’ is downright devilish.
No matter how good songs like ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and ‘Salt of the Earth’ were, The Fabs stole all of the band’s thunder that night, with club owner Tony Sanchez saying, “I stuck the record on the sound system and the slow thundering build-up of ‘Hey Jude’ shook the club. I turned the record over, and we all heard John Lennon’s nasal voice pumping out Revolution. When it was over, I noticed that Mick looked peeved. The Beatles had upstaged him.”
It’s not like The Beatles weren’t pulling from The Stones’ blues playbook, either. John Lennon may have been emphatic about how many times Jagger copied his musical homework, but listening to them cutting loose on tracks like ‘Yer Blues’ from The White Album a few months later showed that they were at least trying to channel those same blues troubadours that The Stones had loved.
But since ‘Hey Jude’ was climbing the charts, it didn’t take long for Jagger to write a tune in response in ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, which has the same elongated outro with a big sing-along chorus. The Stones should be given a lot of credit for putting up a decent effort when battling The Beatles now and again, but they learned a valuable lesson at that release party: whenever someone tries to put up a fight against ‘Hey Jude’, they’re going to lose every single time.