Beatles or the Stones?

[Testy Calibrate]

I say the Beatles because they wrote stuff that makes me happy. When they took drugs they took happy drugs. The Stones got all wired and kind of gross. Studio 54 kind of greasy.

I'm all about peace love and hippy beads. I do love the Stones but if I had to ditch one of them they'd be the ones. You can't always get what you want I suppose. I could imagine no Stones but no Beatles in my life?


ETA: Damn damn damn the C&P!!! Mods! Please make the thread Beatles or stones and the poll options too.

[Ray Moscow]

The Beatles produced a greater number of really interesting songs, although some of the Stones' songs are pretty damn good, too.

I can spend hours and hours playing around with Beatles music and a guitar or piano.

[Pingu]

Beatles, but it's hard to beat Satisfaction or Paint it Black.

ETA or Ruby Tuesday, or 19th nervous breakdown.

Geez, this is hard.

[Matt]

How is this even a question?

[Matty]

How is this even a question?

Yup. Seminal rock outfit or proto boy band.
Hmmm.

Much as i have time for lennon, im a Stones kinda guy, i simply cant get past blaming the Beatles for wankers like Take That, N Sync and Westlife. The single biggest legacy to the music industry is the formation of formulaic pretty boy setups with little to no redeeming musical value in comnparison to overblown marketing and hype.

(whistles quietly to self waiting for the usual uproar)

Oh yeah, and McCartney is a twat.

And the Stones have Keef.




Basically the stones had balls and the beatle didnt, is all it boils down to.

[Matt]

Yup. Seminal rock outfit or proto boy band.
Hmmm.

Much as i have time for lennon, im a Stones kinda guy, i simply cant get past blaming the Beatles for wankers like Take That, N Sync and Westlife. The single biggest legacy to the music industry is the formation of formulaic pretty boy setups with little to no redeeming musical value in comnparison to overblown marketing and hype.

(whistles quietly to self waiting for the usual uproar)

Oh yeah, and McCartney is a twat.

And the Stones have Keef.




Basically the stones had balls and the beatle didnt, is all it boils down to.

That's hilarious considering it was Lennon/McCartney who showed Jagger/Richards to write songs, and they only became famous after The Beatles were done with the pop image.


Stones is 90% crap and 10% generic rock singles. Nothing anywhere close to Abbey Road, Let it Be, The White Album, or even Sergeant Pepper.



If you want to give one British band of that era the title of rock greatness, you could have at least picked The Who.

ETA: Also, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Wanna_Be_Your_Man

the Rolling Stones themselves ran into Lennon and McCartney on the street as the two were returning from an awards luncheon. Listening to the Rolling Stones' camp plea for a single, the pair travelled back to rehearsal and finished off the song—whose verse they had already been working on—in the corner of the room while the impressed Rolling Stones watched. Lennon later commented, "That shows how much importance we put on it. We weren't going to give them anything great, right?"

JOHN 1980: "'I Wanna Be Your Man' was a kind of lick Paul had-- 'I wanna be your lover, baby. I wanna be your man.' I think we finished it off for the Stones. We were taken down to meet them at the club where they were playing in Richmond by Brian and some other guy. They wanted a song and we went to see what kind of stuff they did. Mick and Keith heard we had an unfinished song-- Paul just had this bit and we needed another verse or something. We sort of played it roughly to them and they said, 'Yeah, OK, that's our style.' But it was only really a lick, so Paul and I went off in the corner of the room and finished the song off while they were all still sitting there talking. We came back, and that's how Mick and Keith got inspired to write... because, 'Jesus, look at that. They just went in the corner and wrote it and came back!' You know, right in front of their eyes we did it. So we gave it to them. It was a throw-away. The only two versions of the song were Ringo and the Rolling Stones. It shows how much importance we put on them. We weren't going to give them anything great, right? I believe it was the Stones' first record."

(http://www.geocities.com/~beatleboy1/dba02with.html)

[Magdlyn]

Beatles

Not that the Stones suck entirely.

[hecaterin]

If I had to lose all the albums from one of them, then sorry, it's bye bye Beatles. Both were great, though.

[Pingu]

I'm just so glad I was a teenager in the sixties.

[Lucretius III]

Got to be the Beatles for me
I was only a little kid at the time (4 or 5 when their first singles were released ) and they were I suppose the "family friendly" pop group ,by the time I was ready to get into more "grown up " music ,it was the Who and the Kinks ,so the Rolling Stones sort of passed me by.I was aware of them of course but by the time I really listened to them it was in the almost self parody years of "It's Only Rock n Roll"
Having said that I do own an original Stones single The LastTime in near mint condition that my uncle bought me for my birthday in 1965

ETA I have the original releases of all the Beatles first half a dozen singles and EPs

[laughing dog]

I have never been a big Stones fan. Much of their music sounds the same to me. So, I choose the Beatles, whose music has appealed to me for decades.

[Matty]

i agree the who pwn the stones FWIW. The Who pwn most bands.

I just think the beatles are about 92% hype to 8% substance, and that increases with every year. Sure Rubber SOul on were pretty good albums but there was such an awful lot of twee boyband shit that preceded it and that get forgiven way out of proportion witheth savage implications they had.

I do like the beatles, dont get me wrong, 8 days a week is catchy as are lots of their boyband tunes, and i have a lot of time for later albums when they did finally grow some balls and start playing music, i just think the stones typically had it from the start and with no embarrassing cloneband stage to have to forget.

[Magdlyn]

Aww, the Beatles were so damn sexy, at any stage of their career together! Rock is all about teh sex.

Epstein encouraged them to clean up their act and wear those suits, but that period didnt last all that long. Before the Fab Four era, they were pretty hard edged fightin fuckin Liverpool dudes. During the Fab Four era, the Beatles behind doors were drinking and drugging and shagging like any Rolling Stone. A ton of the songs they wrote during that time were revolutionary. After they got out of that "mod" mold, they created the cutting edge of album rock and the 60s Zeitgeist, alongside stuff happening with Dylan and other bands, such as Jefferson Airplane, the Dead, etc.

The Stones were just dirty stinky arrogant brats. I never found them sexy. They had a few good songs tho. I don't hate them.

Gimme Shelter
Ruby Tuesday
Mother's Little Helper
Satisfaction
Brown Sugar


The only album I ever bought of theirs was Sticky Fingers. But I own the entire DVD collection of The Beatles.

11 Beatles songs (including Imagine) make Rolling Stone magazine's top 100 rock songs. The Stones have the number 2 song which is good on them, but only 3 songs total in the top 100.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/500songs

[Matt]

Here's the 500 greatest albums of all time, according to RS. The first page is quite telling.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto...ms_of_all_time

[Matty]

Hmm, as we know from the idol stuff, popularity dont make a band great. The best selling band in the last fuck knows how long are the SPice Girls, for example.

And i'm afraid the Beatles really dont deserve to be in the same sentence as Dylan, The Band, Jefferson Airplaine, The Velvets, all these bands had real tangible influence.

Most of the claims to how influential the beatles were are over hyped and biased in the "history rewritten by the winners" way. Claims to them kicking off or being massively influential in the psychedelia movement are the most commonly wrong claims, What they actually did was jump on an existent bandwagon (kicked off by JA and the like) and then get hyped as pioneers simply because of their already sky high fame.


Looking at that list, would you really be aggrieved if over half of those Beatles albums werent there.
Would you really be complaining that 'Please PLease" me didnt show? I doubt it. Same with Rubber SOul, possibly my favourite Beatles album, but top ten of all time is a total stretch.

I actually think that is a pretty decent list with the exception of a way OTT showing for teh Beatles. 3 in the top ten? Bollocks.

SGT Peppers, best album of all time, i dont think so. It certainly deserves to be u pretty high but i'd happily swap almost anything else in that top ten for it. Highway 61 as an album, for example, pwns anything the Beatles ever did.

[Magdlyn]

And i'm afraid the Beatles really dont deserve to be in the same sentence as Dylan, The Band, Jefferson Airplaine, The Velvets, all these bands had real tangible influence.

LOL

[JamesBannon]

In terms of musicianship, I would go with the Stones, although I'm not a huge fan of either band. Keith Richards went way up in my estimation as a guitarist when he did the documentary for the Chuck Berry benefit: some really excellent understanding and playing. Charlie Watts has always been a decent Jazz drummer, much better than Ringo.

[Testy Calibrate]

In terms of musicianship, I would go with the Stones, although I'm not a huge fan of either band. Keith Richards went way up in my estimation as a guitarist when he did the documentary for the Chuck Berry benefit: some really excellent understanding and playing. Charlie Watts has always been a decent Jazz drummer, much better than Ringo.

Keith is one of my all time favorite guitarists. I don't think he'd do for all time high because he is way too subtle, not hard but neverendingly creative.

[deadman_932]

I think you're all sick, dissecting my heros like they were cadavers..I mean, okay, I can see mistaking Keith Richards in that light, but...dammit, how DARE YOU?!?! I hope Keith throws coconuts at you from his tree.

Edit To Add: I chose The Beatles, following BWE's groovy good vibes thinking above. I CAN actually manage to think of life without The Rolling Stones. But I still listen to them more. But the Beatles were better compositionally. But the Rolling Stones have a bigger, more varied corpus of music. But Lennon was a great artist. But Keith is a better guitarist...

STOP!!!! YOU'RE TEARRRRING MEE APARTTTT..

[dug_down_deep]

Stones were great, and I'm learning to love them, now that I've downloaded much of their early catalogue from emusic. But please, nobody was as consistently entertaining and creative as The Beatles. And John Lennon's solo career was even better, IMO.

Best Beatles album wasn't Sgt Pepper. It was the white album.

[Pingu]

Eleanor Rigby

[Meathead]

LOL

We've certainly been down this path before, eh Matty?

[Matty]

lol, No shit eh.

you wait till i get going on Brian May in the guitarist thread. that'll be the full deja vu set.


What was that lol for Mags, i take it you think that the Beatles had a more tangible influence than the start of hype based merchandising?


I dont know why so many N Americans love the Beatles out of all proportion to the brits either. Not saying anything judgemental , its just an observation. Perhaps the brits have become jaded over the later zillion twattish comments from Macca and the like, or perhaps, and i think this is entirely possible, have a more realistic view of what they were and did as opposed to a bealtmania only perspective.

In the other thread akin to this one someone posted a Zombies vid as evidence of a far far superior (in musical terms) band that were contemporary of the Beatles and yet destined to sink without a trace relatively (compared to the beatles) speaking, and i thught fair play to that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBdrD...eature=related

[dug_down_deep]

Well, yeah. You can compare a lot of bands to the Beatles' early stuff and they get whipped. It was the post-pepper stuff that was great.

[JamesBannon]

Well, yeah. You can compare a lot of bands to the Beatles' early stuff and they get whipped. It was the post-pepper stuff that was great.

Yep (apart from "Hey Jude" - jeez, but I HATE that song).