The night Paul McCartney beat Mick Jagger

mid 1968 . The Beatles and the Rolling Stones are the two greatest musical forces on Earth, but they no longer show their teeth aesthetically or commercially. There’s no nudging who has the best hairstyles or wears the best costume. In part, to some degree, it’s the end of the race.

Now the battle is different: who surpasses the rival in creative terms and who achieves greater influence over his contemporaries . The combo y combo had been in development since 1966, when the Beatles hit the plateau with Stirthis synthesis of psychedelia, baroque music and exploration in the service of pop, while the Stones attacked with Consequenceshis first full opus of original songs, a journey of guitars carved with detail and sophistication.

The next year the face to face they raise it Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band And Request from Their Satanic Majestiestwo colorful period manifestos which present the musicians as creators of universes as lysergic as they are inventive.

Until 1968 happened. What to do when rock seems to have reached its artistic and commercial peak? When the long-awaited future was already here? Easy: turn in the opposite direction. Look back and indulge in an exercise that until now the genre did not seem to have done: nostalgia. Today such a widespread worship of the past.

Rock had a brief existence, but long enough to have distant idols. It had conquered such a level of complexity that precisely the characters who had launched it – more rustic, more austere in their melodies, more skeletal in their sonority – rose like echoes of a candid and distant time: Elvis, Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly. , Little Richard, Eddie Cochran.

But the men and women of the 60s who embodied tomorrow have decided to return to all. This season sees the emergence of Creedence Clearwater Revival, a band of lumberjack-like Californians thrown into the woods – worlds away from the colorful glamor of London and New York – and with a frontman, John Fogerty, who always seems to sing about at the edge of a canteen, as if he emboldened his rough throat from time to time with a glass of whisky.

Canadians The Band surprises with the bucolic and rural profile of Music by Big Pink, where they also pushed Bob Dylan to resume his minstrel and troubadour cachet; meanwhile, Frank Zappa showed that the avant-garde also drank from the past, with an album (Cruise with Ruben & the Jets) which paid homage in a satirical way to all the vocal music and the typical doo wop of the 50s.

1968 also felt like a resurrection of the Sun Records heroes who had spearheaded the rock and roll rebellion a decade earlier. Bill Halley Toured England, Elvis Returned After Years of Irregularity with His Fundamental Show Return special and Johnny Cash launched the must-have At Folsom Jail, recorded in a prison. It is also the year in which Led Zeppelin, the group that makes stylistic archeology its greatest compass, germinates.

The Beatles and the Stones were also ready to converse in past perfect. And they were going to face each other one evening to show who was doing better in the present. Even though they probably didn’t know it yet.

On August 8, 1968, Mick Jagger headlined his birthday party at the Vesuvius club in London. a recently inaugurated venue and one of the best nightlife venues ever to exist in the English capital, in the words of its owner, Tony Sánchez, thanks to its Moroccan flair and latest fashion design.

For this reason, the singer felt happy and entertained among the black lights, the multicolored tapestries, the models, the actresses, the singers who marked the avant-garde of the city and, of course, a menu that included the hand-to-hand transfer of silver bowls with mescaline, plates filled with hashish cake and Turkish hookahs for the occasional puff. A dream postcard, as described in the book The Beatles: Off the Record by Keith Badman.

In this environment of show-off without counterweight, Jagger wanted to surprise all his guests and brought an exclusive preview: a copy of Beggar’s Banquetthe Rolling Stones album which will be released four months later and which was already climbing as one of the most anticipated of the season, precisely because it was about the group’s return to its blues and rock and roll origins after their flirtations psychedelics.

“Mick rushed in from Los Angeles at the last minute with the early first pressing of Beggars Banquet, the album everyone was waiting to hear, because it was the work on which the band’s future depended. The club was magnificent, waiting for the moment. Everyone’s only fear was the proximity to the Tottenham Court Road police station. He was only three hundred yards away. If a curious police couple had wanted to arrest every star in Britain, they could have done it perfectly,” the story continues in the text. The Beatles: Off the record.

But that didn’t happen. In exchange, Jagger got to play the vinyl in the middle of the party and sparked instant ecstasy from those in attendance. thanks to awesome songs that no one had ever heard, like Sempathy for the devil, street fighter either stray cat blues.

The book The Beatles vs. The Stones: the greatest rivalry in rock history, by John McMillian, records the reaction of the participants: “When the album started playing through the loudspeakers, people flooded the dance floor. The whole team was jumping like crazy and enjoying the record (which would soon be dubbed the Stones’ best album to date).

But the good mood will be short-lived. At least that of its main protagonist.

Just when everyone was buzzing, Paul McCartney himself arrived at the party. It went relatively unnoticed, but it had a weapon up its sleeve: the owner of the place, Tony Sánchez, discreetly handed over a copy of the next Beatles single, the one containing the future anthems. Hey Jude / Revolution, and that no one outside the inner circle of the quartet had heard. It will be released at the end of this month of August and will serve as a prelude to the white scrapbookalso the track that would rediscover the band with the rawest guitars and devoid of major ornamentation.

The DJ, a few minutes later, spun it under the needle. The blow was immediate. No one even remembered Beggar’s Banquet nor stones . “The slow, booming crescendo of Hey Jude it shook the foundations of the club and the attendees demanded that the disc jockey play the seven-minute song over and over again,” reads the text. The Beatles vs. The stones.

But the unexpected victory didn’t stop there. “The disc jockey played the next song and everyone heard John Lennon’s nasal voice spitting out the words to revolution”.

Tony Sánchez recalls that when the two Fab Four songs ended, Jagger was in a daze. “I saw that Mick seemed upset. The Beatles stole the show.”

Tony Barrow, the men’s press secretary yesterdayalso remembered it like this: “It was an incredible promotional success.”

McCartney himself, in The Beatles: Off the recordtakes care of the reaction of his colleague: “We were playing the songs and I remember that Mick Jagger approached me and said to me: ‘Fuck! Condemn! That’s something else, isn’t it? It’s like two songs.

In this nocturnal, flippant cock between the two biggest groups in history, it was clear who had been the winner. Mick Jagger had emerged sad and beaten from his own birthday.