Speaking to Howard Stern on SiriusXM, Paul McCartney agreed when Stern said The Beatles were the better than the Rolling Stones.
“You know you’re going to persuade me to agree with that one,” McCartney told Stern.
“They are rooted in the blues. When they are writing stuff, it has to do with the blues. We had a little more influences. … There’s a lot of differences, and I love the Stones, but I’m with you. The Beatles were better.”
Paul McCartney says whatever The Beatles did, the Stones did shortly thereafter.
“We went to America and we had huge success. Then the Stones went to America. We did Sgt. Pepper, the Stones did a psychedelic album. There’s a lot of that. We were great friends, still are kind of. We admire each other. … The Stones are a fantastic group. I go see them every time they’re out. They’re a great, great band.”
You have to love Paul McCartney’s ego. I mean, he is a Beatle, but Mick Jagger wasn’t having any of it.
Jagger explains: “That’s so funny. He’s a sweetheart. There’s obviously no competition”. “The big difference, though, is and sort of slightly seriously, is that The Rolling Stones is a big concert band in other decades and other areas when The Beatles never even did an arena tour, Madison Square Garden with a decent sound system. They broke up before that business started, the touring business for real.” “So that business started in 1969 and the Beatles never experienced that. They did a great gig, and I was there, at Shea stadium. They did that stadium gig. But the Stones went on, we started doing stadium gigs in the ’70s and [are] still doing them now. That’s the real big difference between these two bands. One band is unbelievably luckily still playing in stadiums and then the other band doesn’t exist.”