Rumors have always flown that The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had a long-running feud, but John Lennon and Mick Jagger got along well. During Lennon’s “lost weekend” phase, Jagger frequently visited him, and Lennon spent time at Jagger’s vacation home. In the 1960s, though, Lennon couldn’t help but feel jealous of Jagger. He thought Jagger had a rebellious image that he wasn’t allowed to have in The Beatles.
John Lennon thought Mick Jagger had taken over his image
In 1967, Lennon traveled with Jagger, the rest of The Beatles, and their wives to Wales to attend a seminar on Transcendental Meditation. The group spoke to the press about the seminar, and afterward, Lennon found a journalist’s notes.
“John found a reporter’s notes afterward in one of the college’s telephone booths,” Hunter Davies wrote in the book The Beatles: The Authorized Biography. “It had the heading ‘Paul, George, Ringo, John Lennon, and Jagger’ plus details of what each had been wearing.”
The notes led Lennon to believe that Jagger was taking over his image.
“‘You’ve taken over from me,’ said John to Mick Jagger, pointing out to him how the reporter had named each of them,” Davies wrote. “‘I just used to be called Lennon when I was wicked. Now I’m John Lennon. I haven’t yet reached the next stage of just being John. You’re still Jagger.’”
John Lennon was jealous of Mick Jagger
According to Davies, Lennon admitted that he was jealous of Jagger’s image.
“I knew, from having discussed it previously with him, that John felt jealous of Jagger,” Davies wrote. “Certainly not about his music, or his success, or his fame, but the fact that Jagger always had the rebel image, right from the beginning, which John felt was really him.”
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Lennon felt that The Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, had overly sanitized his reputation. Davies believed that this caused Lennon to tarnish his image in the future.
“I argued that it was thanks to the Beatles breaking so many rules that had allowed the Stones to come along later and build on what the Beatles had done,” Davies explained. “But John at that stage still resented the cleaning-up operation Brian had performed on them, ashamed in a way that he had gone along with it, which was why later, I suppose, he overcompensated by dishing the dirt about himself, making himself worse, if anything, than he had been.”
The two musicians got along well
Despite Lennon’s jealousy, he got along well with Jagger. The Rolling Stones singer visited him frequently during his “lost weekend” period in the early 1970s.
“We were always delighted to see him,” Lennon’s girlfriend May Pang wrote in her book Loving John. “Nattily dressed and always looking roguish, he’d turn up with a wicked grin on his face.”
Pang said they affectionately started referring to Jagger as “The Phantom.”
“John and I affectionately nicknamed him ‘The Phantom,’” she wrote. “We never knew when he’d materialize, how long he would stay, when he’d call again, or what was really going on behind those devilish eyes and big pouting lips.”
