Authenticity is a Con: Rolling Stones Edition
The Rest Is History: 558: The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1), 21 Apr 2025:
And for me, Andrew Lou Goldham's genius as a manager is having started out thinking I will make them like the Beatles. He ditches that quite quickly and realizes we cannot possibly compete with them because they have such a massive head start. The gap in the market is for the anti-Beatles, it's for a group teenagers can have for themselves that will shock their parents.In his memoir, he says at the end of 1963, he consciously decided to turn the Stones into quote, the group parents love to hate, dangerous, dirty and degenerate. And he said to them, be as nasty as you can be in your interviews and your public performances.
And he is the guy who's kind of spoon feeds titles like, you know, would you let your daughter go up with the Rolling Stone, things like that to the press. So it's very, very calculated, isn't it?
Exactly. And that's the interesting thing, right? People always at the time and afterwards have said, well, the Beatles were very commercialized.
They were manicured. The Stones are more authentic because they're more rebellious. Actually, that is totally wrong.
The Stones' rebelliousness is completely contrived and manufactured.
[...]
He [Bob Stanley] said, the youthful authority, the Stones perceptively had, which even the Beatles lacked, resulted not from their knowledge of muddy waters, bee sides, but from their complete control of their image, sound and media angle from the start. Olden produced the records and designed the sleeves, while Jagger and Richards made sure there would be no Pantos, no synchronised head shaking on stage, nothing predictable.
So it's the lack of predictability that enables their rise to become predictable.
The contrivance, the manufacture is the lack of contrivance, if you know what I mean. There's a story, Olden gets a guy called Gerard Mankiewicz, a very well known photographer to photograph them. And he says, you know, snarl more, make it more...
More pilt down.
More pilt down, more moody, you know, look more angry and difficult. Whereas in fact, actually, they're not especially angry and difficult off stage. But the media love this.
Everyone's happy.
It works for everybody. So by early 1964, the media are playing along.