1. The Rolling Stones Frank ZappaThe Rolling Stones
It came out at the same time as The Beatles – I was still a teen, first discovering rock and this was when it was being invented. The modern era of rock music, as opposed to the Elvis Presley era, was really kicking off in ’63. We’d had The Beatles with ‘Please Please Me’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, and against that came the ‘un-Beatles’. They were loose and sleazy and sexy, and they didn’t give a fuck. They had much longer hair than The Beatles, and The Beatles were guys with outrageously long hair until The Stones came along and actually looked like girls. It’s hard to remember what the 1950s had been like. It was such a repressive time and the Stones just didn’t care. We didn’t care who’d written the songs when we were in school, we just heard the sound of liberation and that was it. On ‘I’m A King Bee’, Jagger slurs out [sings] “I can buzz better baby, when your man is gone” [laughs]. He was talking about when you’ve left The Beatles and come to us, we’ll fucking look after you. It was as big a split as pro-punk and anti-punk was in ’77. You were either a Beatles person or a Stones person, you weren’t allowed to like both. But of course we did, we just didn’t let on. They were both so great in so many different ways.
