In the early 1960s, before the Rolling Stones were the Rolling Stones in any meaningful commercial sense, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were living in a squalid London flat, barely eating, surviving on the belief that their music was worth something. The Beatles were already famous. Already on television. Already producing the hysteria that would become known as Beatlemania. And Jagger watched it — carefully, analytically, with the combination of admiration and competitive fury that would define his relationship with John Lennon and Paul McCartney for the next decade.
The moment of reckoning came in early 1963. Brian Epstein — the Beatles’ manager — and Andrew Loog Oldham — who would become the Stones’ manager — understood something that has shaped popular music marketing ever since: the market could hold both bands, but only if they occupied different psychological territory. The Beatles were lovable, suited, approved by parents, welcomed on television variety shows. They were the band you could bring home. Oldham’s genius insight was that the Stones should be everything else — dangerous, unwashed, sexually threatening, the band that parents specifically did not want in their living rooms.
Jagger understood this immediately and embraced it with the full force of his considerable intelligence. He was not, by nature, a rebel — he was a London School of Economics student with sharp instincts about image and branding. But he understood that authenticity in rock and roll is partly constructed, and that the Stones’ rebellious image, once established, would become genuinely self-fulfilling. If you tell people long enough that you are dangerous, you start behaving dangerously.
The strategy worked beyond anyone’s reasonable expectation. The Stones were banned from BBC programs. They were arrested. They were prosecuted for drug offenses in cases that many believed were politically motivated. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were jailed briefly in 1967, prompting a famous Times of London editorial — “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?” — defending them against what the paper called an establishment overreaction.
None of this was purely manufactured. But none of it was purely accidental either.
What Jagger did about the Beatles question was simpler and more honest than the marketing strategy: he out-survived them. The Beatles broke up in 1970. The Rolling Stones are still touring. Jagger is in his eighties and still performing to stadiums — still moving in ways that confound physiological expectation, still connecting with audiences who were born decades after “Satisfaction” was recorded. He cannot be as big as the Beatles were in 1964 because nothing will ever be as big as the Beatles were in 1964. But he has outlasted them by fifty years, and in longevity there is its own kind of greatness.
The irony is that Lennon and McCartney, the very Beatles Jagger measured himself against, both cited the Stones as important and influential. Lennon called them his favorite band. McCartney has performed their songs. The competition was, at some level, mutual.