Remembering When The Beatles Donated a Hit to The Rolling Stones in 1963
Because they arrived on the scene around the same time and sported two vastly different images, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were often painted as enemies. In actuality, the two bands maintained a cordial relationship, occasionally indulging in friendly rivalry.
As a matter of fact, The Beatles provided The Stones with one of their earliest singles. But only after they first deemed that they didn’t want to put the song out there in that same way.
The frenzy that started to greet The Beatles in late 1962 in Great Britain soon enveloped The Rolling Stones when they started their recording career a year later. Whereas The Fab Four came across as polite and happy-go-lucky, The Stones put forth more of a bad-boy image.
But both enjoyed dizzying levels of success. And even when some in the press tried to imagine some sort of animosity between the two groups, they actually harbored no ill will toward each other at all. They regularly interacted in London as the beat music craze rolled through England in 1963.
One area where The Beatles enjoyed a pretty good head start on The Stones was the songwriting department. The Stones mostly relied on cover songs for their early material. Meanwhile, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote most of the stuff for The Beatles. And, in one case, they donated a single to The Stones.
Lennon and McCartney wrote the song “I Wanna Be Your Man” for Ringo Starr to sing. Since Starr didn’t write his own material, The Beatles’ chief writers tried to make sure there was something for him to sing on each album. They planned it for their second UK album, which would be titled With The Beatles when released in late 1963.
How the song ended up in the hands of The Stones is somewhat debated. Paul McCartney remembered members of The Stones randomly driving by in a cab and picking up Lennon and him on the way to the studio. In this version of the story, Mick Jagger and company asked if the two Beatles had any songs they might want to hand over. That led to them offering “I Wanna Be Your Man”.
Other principals, including members of The Stones, remember Lennon and McCartney actively pushing the song to the band, with Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham acting as intermediary. In any case, The Stones recorded their version and released it as their second UK single in November 1963. “I Wanna Be Your Man” hit No. 12 in the UK, their first Top 20 hit.
Source: americansongwriter.com/Jim Beviglia
