The death of legendary musician John Lennon was called “ironic” by The Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger.
Though the pair had a friendly relationship as artists growing up through the 1960s in the United Kingdom, a handful of comments from Lennon saw the relationship with Jagger wither. The Beatles member would suggest Jagger and The Rolling Stones were imitating the Fab Four. Lennon would fume: “I would like to just list what we did and what the Stones did two months after on every fucking album. Every fuckin’ thing we did, Mick does exactly the same — he imitates us.” Lennon’s comment came off the back of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus release, a concert performance where The Rolling Stones were outshined by The Who earlier on the bill.
Jagger was nonetheless left saddened by the death of Lennon, and in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine founder Jann Wenner, said it was “horribly ironic” the Imagine songwriter was killed in New York City. He said: “I was very sad and surprised. And it was all so horribly ironic.
“He thought he had found a place to be on his own, have this life, and he was quite taken with the idea that he was no longer in the Beatles, that he didn’t have to have a lot of protection, bodyguards. He used to tell me how he would go in a cab in New York – go in a fucking yellow cab.
“Which, as you know, is probably to be avoided if you’ve got more than $10. A London cab is one thing, but a New York cab is another. He wanted freedom to walk the block and get in the cab, and he felt in these big cities, you can be anonymous.”
Jagger and Lennon would have a friendly relationship through the 1960s, with The Beatles offering Jagger and Keith Richards one of The Rolling Stones’ earliest hits. Paul McCartney confirmed the Fab Four had gifted the Jagger-fronted group which The Beatles had not planned on releasing as a single.
McCartney said: “John and I were walking down Charing Cross Road in London, in the early sixties, and two guys were going past in a taxi and shouted ‘Oi! Oi!’ and it was Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Richards] of The Stones and they were going along this way. So we said ‘ey, give us a lift’ you know, so we bunked into their taxi and Mick was saying ‘oh we’ve got a recording contract, you know, we’re with Decca now.’
“We said ‘ah great, congratulations,’ because it was a very friendly scene. There’s not a lot of rivalry, actually, you know, it now seems like there was this bitter feud, The Stones were the dirty, you know, horrible longhairs, and we were the cute, real nice guys, but it wasn’t like that at all.
“We were very similar in tastes and in clothes and everything. So Mick said, ‘Have you got a song?’ and I said, ‘Have we got a song? There’s this Ringo song,’ and I knew they were into Bo Diddley, Not Fade Away and stuff like that, we knew they did that stuff.
“So I said, ‘I know a song, we’ve got this Ringo song off of the album and it’s not going to be a single for us, but maybe you guys could take it.’ So that’s what they did, and it was their first single I think.” The song in question was I Wanna Be Your Man, which Lennon and McCartney wrote for The Beatles’ With The Beatles album.
