A hidden tribute made by The Rolling Stones to The Beatles can be found on one of their psychedelic album covers.
The Mick Jagger-fronted group trailed the Fab Four in genre choices through much of the 1960s, from the psychedelic style of Their Majesty’s Satanic Verses to the pop-engineered, radio-friendly sounds of their earliest works. But there would soon be a shift for The Rolling Stones, especially after The Beatles disbanded in 1970. Though competitive in nature, the two powerhouse UK groups shared a friendly relationship with one another. Paul McCartney and John Lennon gave Jagger and Keith Richards their first hit, I Wanna Be Your Man. The Rolling Stones paid tribute to The Beatles too, paying tribute to the band on their album cover for Their Majesty’s Satanic Verses.
Photographer Michael Cooper tucked away the faces of McCartney, Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. The faces can certainly be seen if you look closely enough at the album cover.
Cooper’s son, Adam, has since shared the reason his father hid the faces of The Beatles on the album cover. He said: “The British press were constantly dreaming up rumours that relations between the Beatles and the Stones were always bad, and they presented this bad-boy image of the Stones and the clean image of the Beatles and all of that.
“It was a complete invention by the press. People believed it, so the Stones, by 1967, said: ‘We’ve had enough of this shit. Let’s try to communicate through the cover to tell the public this is not the truth.'”
Another subliminal message can be seen on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a revolutionary album remembered for its album cover, among other qualities.
Though the two bands were gifting one another songs and album cover nods, Lennon would remember the relationship a tad differently during an archival interview for The Beatles’ Anthology documentary.
He recalled: “It was a throwaway. The only two versions of the song were Ringo and the Rolling Stones. That shows how much importance we put on it: We weren’t going to give them anything great, right?”
His comment comes in relation to the I Wanna Be Your Man gift from Lennon and McCartney, though Jagger had a much more positive recollection of being presented with the song. He shared: “We knew [the Beatles] by then, and we were rehearsing, and Andrew [Oldham] brought Paul and John down to the rehearsal.
“They said they had this tune, they were really hustlers then. I mean, the way they used to hustle tunes was great, ‘Hey Mick, we’ve got this great song.’ So they played it, and we thought it sounded pretty commercial, which is what we were looking for, so we did it like Elmore James or something.
“I haven’t heard it for ages, but it must be pretty freaky ’cause nobody really produced it. It was completely crackers, but it was a hit and sounded great onstage.”
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