Stones v. Beatles ’23
The World’s Greatest Rock & Roll Band and Biggest Pop Phenomenon square off once again
For many of us in a certain demographic — 50+ with Spotify accounts — there’s a special thrill about the release of new products from The Rolling Stones and The Beatles simultaneously.
In the old days, of course, this happened a lot. In their ’60s heyday, the two friendly-foe bands even notified each other about release dates so they could compete on different weeks. In the ’70s, the Stones continued to crank out classic albums while the Beatles (i.e., Apple) countered with double sets full of classics: two are now called the Red and Blue albums. In the ’90s, the aging Stones attempted to generate classics (ha!) while the defunct Beatles dressed up a bunch of scraps to sell as their Anthology project.
Stones retread; Beatles recycle. We nostalgic fans lap it all up … then spew our opinions.
Now, the pattern continues. We have the octogenarian Stones’ new album Hackney Diamonds — with its vaunted supporting cast: Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Bill Wyman, Lady Gaga, and even Sir Paul (it seems Ringo was booked) — appearing just ahead of the new Final Beatles Single, Now And Then, with ghost cameos from John & George (and, yes, AI). This precedes a Beatles deluxe re-release of those Red and Blue albums.
Where to begin?
Hackney or Classic?
The Stones are first out of the gate. They call their new set Hackney Diamonds — slang for broken bits leftover after a car-or-storefront theft — which ain’t exactly an appealing image. Typical Stones provocation. (As I noted to a work buddy, they coined a weird, messy title with 1971’s Sticky Fingers, then spun it into art with Andy Warhol’s torso-zipper cover.)
The Hackney Diamonds cover is the real mess — a garish airbrush graphic that looks ready-made for an ’80s hair-metal group and the clearest indication that founding drummer and visual artist Charlie Watts is no longer with us.
Yet it was Charlie’s passing in 2021 that compelled Mick — then Keith et al — to finish this long-simmering song set. (Throw in a bit of Covid cabin fever.) Two pre-pandemic Charlie tunes were in the can; for the rest, they handed the sticks to his steady hand-picked successor, Steve Jordan. After bringing in wunderkind producer Andrew Watt to spice things up, the Stones set a deadline and banged out these tunes, mainly live in the studio.
The critical reaction varies from they’re-at-it-again hallelujah! raves to they’re-greedy-old-farts pans.
Initially, I fell somewhere in between. On first listen (walking around town with Airpods), I was skeptical. The set starts out with “Angry,” not my favorite Stones single in any decade. Mick’s pissed at an ex again, and his pals are joining forces behind him … whatever.
The tone is a frontal assault, signaling that this is, as Ronnie Wood called it, an “In Your Face” album. The sound is crisp and “compressed” — squeeze the voices into their own left-right spaces, crank ’em all up, and bring on the bells and whistles — which modernizes the Stones but feels a far cry from the grunge pioneers who delivered Exile from a basement. The tunes seem glossy yet primitive. (A bit of ’90s-era deja vu?)
I made a note to tell my buddy: This ain’t no Sticky Fingers. I longed for the Stones to crank out a country crooner. Then they broke into “Dreamy Skies,” with its languid twang from Ronnie’s slide guitar against Keith’s bass and Mick’s best Hank Williams imitation, and slight-but-spot-on lyrics about breaking away from it all. Keith’s background vocals signal that he had a lot to do with the hypnotic hook.
At this point, I turned a corner into New York’s Central Park, turned off my inner critic, and tuned into these new tracks. And the album itself turned a corner — shifting through varied sonic layers before climaxing in a final triptych of songs that (IMHO) elevate the whole project from hackney work to instant classic.
Sweet Sounds of Harmony
This is an album that gets better on repeat listens — I can’t say that about 2005’s A Bigger Bang because the repeats never happened. Starting with “Close to You,” this LP gathers steam from its bass lines, supplied by various players, as stalwart bassist Darryl Jones was busy on tour. Keith — who asserted his bass chops as far back as 1968’s “Sympathy for the Devil” — handles most of the bottom end, returning to overdub guitar on several tracks.
McCartney’s fab fuzz bass on “Bite My Head Off” lifts the punk piece to the heights of “Rip This Joint” or “Shattered.” Founding bassist Bill Wyman makes a cameo on “Live By the Sword” alongside Elton John’s honky tonk piano. That song features Charlie Watts’ distinctive backbeat, as does the obnoxiously catchy “Mess It Up,” — which seems emblematic of what the band does to this rocker by adding disco strains. The Stones love to mess it up: they’re back to form!
Stevie Wonder plays Moog bass (and soulful keys) on the album’s emotional highpoint, “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” a gospel masterpiece that could be called “Sympathy for the Angels.” Guest vocalist Lady Gaga channels her best Merry Clayton (of “Gimme Shelter” non-fame) on the song’s spontaneous coda — sadly truncated in the radio-friendly edit of the single.
While many Hackney lyrics wax banal, repeat listens reveal nuances. “Depending on You” seems more than a schmaltzy heartbreak ballad; some of it might be heard as lines to Mick’s longtime BFF L’Wren Scott, who left him by suicide in 2014. Keith’s heartily crooned “Tell Me Straight” is a case study in honesty. And while it’s hard to imagine the “Whole Wild World” ever being against Mick Jagger, he seems to recall the Stones’ desolate early days in London.
The album’s closer harkens back to those days. It’s a sparse duet between Mick and Keith on “Rolling Stone Blues,” the Muddy Waters song that became their namesake when Brian Jones spotted it as a band moniker. With Mick wailing on harp alongside Keith’s dobro, they sound like Glimmer Twins joined at the hip. If this is how they go out (that’s a big if), it fits the bill.
Here Comes the Fun
Meanwhile, the surviving Beatles have reunited with a take on one last cassette demo from John. As if on competitive cue (and in time for gift holidays), Paul & Ringo released “Now and Then” as a single, just ahead of the expanded rerelease of the Beatles’ greatest-hits combos — Red & Blue albums — which have long served as the band’s synopses for neophytes.
Anyone who cues up “Now and Then” expecting a Lennon masterpiece may be disappointed. It’s a thin tune lyrically, with a haunting, deceptively simple melody and unorthodox, Lennon-esque chord changes around its bridges and choruses. But all that makes it another tune that gets better on repeat listens.
The reasons this demo didn’t get released back in ’95 with the Anthology project — along with “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” — are two-fold:
- The sound quality on the “Now and Then” original demo was piss-poor, with a pesky buzz-hum behind John’s voice-piano mono track (recorded at the Dakota in 1977).
- George Harrison gave up on overdubs, calling John’s tune “f — king rubbish.” Whether he meant that about the song or the recording is debatable … but he was frustrated that Ringo left after doing an early drum part, Paul nixed George’s slide guitar as too much like “My Sweet Lord,” and George just balked. Paul later noted, “The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”
In later years, George was gone, though his acoustic-electric guitar fingerprints remained, and the song stayed “in the cupboard,” but Macca couldn’t shake it from his creative conscience. Not least because the tune’s title contained (reportedly) the last three words John ever said to Paul in his Dakota hallway: “Think about me every now and then, old friend.”
All these years later, the turning point was Peter Jackson’s newfangled tech trick of isolating voices — put to use in the 2021 Get Back film and on Macca’s onstage evocation of his former song-mate on “I’ve Got a Feeling” in ’22 — which allowed for John’s voice to be brought to the fore, and for his piano to be woven in around overdubs. Peter, Paul & Ringo saw the light: “Now and Then” had a new life.
We can make a real song with this unfinished piece! And Sir Paul did everything in his power to do so.
The TLC that went into this is apparent in the 15-minute how-we-did-it-doc and the official video by Jackson himself, in new waters as a music-video director. The result takes the dynamic seen in Jackson’s Get Back video series — cut-paste cinéma vérité with hagiography — to new extremes, as the lads from the past rollick with their graybeard selves. It borders on what’s become known as Uncanny Valley — when computer-generated beings evoke uncomfortable responses.
For the song itself, Paul does a heavy edit-rewrite, as evidenced by Lennon’s demo. There, John had an unfinished extra bridge that was excised from the tune, but many of John’s wild chord changes make the final edit, along with new ones from Paul, who tidies up transitions and embellishes the end. It’s not unlike Paul’s trick of teasing out start-up ideas to flesh out the tune on John’s ’65 classic, “In My Life.” Later, they both claimed authorship; they both were right.
George Martin’s son Giles provides a score for “Strawberry Fields”-esque strings. Paul and Ringo add vocals, bass, drums, keyboards, and more guitars, including a “tribute” slide solo by Paul, which sounds like a pale imitation of George playing slide).
All that TLC — plus tech improvements, overall fealty to John’s vision, and the poignancy of the lyrics — make this recycling effort more satisfying than either “Free as a Bird” or “Real Love.” Time will tell that it’s not a bad career closer.
As for the Red & Blue album reissues following this single: Giles Martin and Sam Okell add more remix magic using that Jackson noise-separation technology — and there are worse things than listening back through these classics with fresh ears. Why add more tracks to each double-set? Well, any retro project that brings such gems as “Taxman,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Blackbird,” and “Hey Bulldog” out of the shadows sounds like a worthy idea.
If last year’s tech-enhanced reissue of Revolver is any indication, the new mixes could be riveting. However, the flip side of the Now and Then single — a remastered take of the album version of the Beatles’ first single, “Love Me Do” — shows how limited new tech is with old-tech material.
The great thing about “Love Me Do” is that it has Ringo on drums — not Andy White, who played on the single. White hits the beat straight-on, whereas Ringo slides behind it, putting a bit of roll with the rock. With Paul dutifully thumping along (and extra handclaps), it’s crude but powerful, the nascent beginnings of Brit-Rock’s second funkiest rhythm section.
As for the age-old question of Stones v. Beatles — not to mention Dylan, The Who, etc. — the real answer is: all of the above. They’re rock royalty; they can do what they want. We should feel lucky to have ’em around.
