Why Mick Jagger Didn’t Like The Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’
The Beatles and The Rolling Stones will be compared to each other until the planet Earth is destroyed and any extraterrestrial life will have no chance of knowing that rock ‘n’ roll ever existed. One of Mick Jagger’s girlfriends revealed what the frontman thought of The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” John Lennon also had plenty to say about The Rolling Stones.
Mick Jagger felt The Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’ was ‘silly’
Marianne Faithfull was Jagger’s girlfriend and muse in the 1960s. She’s most known for her solo ballad “As Tears Go By,” which Jagger co-wrote with Keith Richards. In her 2007 book Memories, Dreams & Reflections, Faithfull recalled the way that Jagger reacted to some of The Beatles’ songs.
“Mick might, very occasionally, put The Beatles down for their provincialism, which, if you’re from London and they’re from Liverpool, is a very natural reaction,” he said. “But he’d never put their music down. Well, of ‘Yellow Submarine’ or those whimsical Beatle songs he might say, ‘Now that is a bit silly.’ I never thought so; I loved it, still do. Also something like ‘With a Little Help from My Friends,’ but these are obviously not the sort of things the Stones would be into.”
The Rolling Stones released a whimsical, psychedelic single called “We Love You.” That wannabe Beatles song is completely awful and the public swiftly forgot about it. It’s as silly as “Yellow Submarine,” however, it doesn’t have the juvenile appeal that “Yellow Submarine” has.
Marianne Faithfull felt the Fab Four were more than ‘Yellow Submarine’
Faithfull, who recorded a famous cover of The Beatles’ “Yesterday,” revealed her own thoughts about the Fab Four. “Anyway, when you listen to The Beatles carefully, and the John Lennon stuff in particular, they aren’t all sweetness and light,” she wrote. “There’s an edge to their music; there’s a real soggy, dark, dirty bit in it that bleeds through.
“Their sweetness is very superficial,” she added. “You hear the undercurrent in Paul’s bass playing, you hear it in John’s harmonies, you hear it in the call-and-response stuff.” It’s true that for every bubblegum tune like “Yellow Submarine,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” or “Can’t Buy Me Love” that The Beatles released, they also put out a darker tune such as “A Day in the Life,” “Yer Blues,” or “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).”
What John Lennon had to say about The Beatles and The Rolling Stones
The book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono features an interview from 1980. In it, the “Imagine” singer predicted that The Rolling Stones and the former Beatles would become living relics of an earlier era. He joked that the band would stay together for well over a century. The “Power to the People” didn’t think the 1980s would be kind to The Rolling Stones.
The last prediction failed. The 1980s were great for The Rolling Stones. That decade saw the release of some of their best and most famous songs, including “Start Me Up.” The 1980s was also the decade where The Rolling Stones formally entered the pantheon of rock gods by getting inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
The Beatles and The Rolling Stones both ruled the world even though they didn’t always have nice words for each other.
