David Crosby Said The Beatles Had a Skill The Rolling Stones Couldn’t Do ‘for Squat’
The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were two of the biggest bands of the 1960s, and they influenced many of the musicians who came after them, including David Crosby. Crosby, who began his own music career just as both bands were reaching heightened levels of success, was a fan of both. Still, he thought The Beatles were the better band. Crosby discussed something he thought The Beatles did well but The Rolling Stones couldn’t quite pull off.
David Crosby said The Beatles could pull something off that The Rolling Stones couldn’t
While doing a Q&A with Rolling Stone, Crosby was asked to name, once and for all, the better band: The Beatles or the Stones. He didn’t hesitate in his answer.
“Beatles,” he said. “Mainly because of the range of stuff that they did. The Stones did have a fairly wide range that they did, but The Beatles had a much wider range of writing that they could do.”
Crosby also felt that The Beatles’ ability to sing harmony set them apart from The Rolling Stones. They had four singers who could balance each other out; the Stones only had one.
“And The Beatles could sing harmony,” he said. “The Stones can’t do that for squat, but The Beatles can do it really well. It’s a matter of personal taste, of course. But for me, Beatles, no question.”
David Crosby was a big fan of The Beatles
This interview was not the first in which Crosby expressed his long love of The Beatles. He, like many other musicians, said that the moment he heard The Beatles for the first time, his life changed.
“Those guys could really play and sing,” Crosby told Music Radar. “They had the goods. And they really had the songs. Up till then, I was a devotee of Pete Seeger’s — bless his soul. I wanted to be a folkie. I liked pop music because of The Everly Brothers, but seeing The Beatles made something else click. It changed my life. They changed my life.”
When Crosby rose to fame with The Byrds, he had the chance to meet The Beatles. He was happy to find he liked them as a people just as much as he liked their music.
“They were all so wonderful and kind to us,” he said. “And they knew that we weren’t America’s answer to The Beatles — it wasn’t tough for them to figure that out. But they liked that we were willing to push the envelope.”
Keith Richards made a similar observation
Interestingly, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richard made a similar observation to Crosby’s. He recognized that The Beatles emphasized group vocals much more than the Stones did.
“The Beatles were basically a vocal band,” he told NPR in 2010. “They all sang and one song, John would take the lead. Another, Paul [would] or George and sometimes Ringo. Our band set up totally differently — with one frontman, one lead singer, and what I loved about it is that there’s an incredible difference in it between The Beatles and ourselves, but at the same time, we were there at the same time, and you’re dealing with each other.”
He said that he didn’t feel much of a competition with the other band, despite the way it may have seemed.
“And it was a very, very fruitful and great relationship between the Stones and The Beatles,” he said. “It was very, very friendly. The competition thing didn’t come into it as far as we were concerned.”
