Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

If you’re a rock band that formed in the late 1970s, you have a Beatles view of the world or you have a Stones view. Though Mick Jagger was the greatest frontman ever, we wanted to be The Beatles more than we wanted to be the Stones, in the sense that The Beatles changed their sound on pretty much every album. Sometimes their producer, George Martin, brought in orchestral players or quartets. Sometimes the band would solicit guest musicians like Billy Preston and Eric Clapton. Other times the four of them swapped instruments: Paul McCartney playing drums or Ringo singing “With a Little Help from My Friends.” Who knew? Wow! A strategy to keep things fresh for them and their audience, a strategy that spawned some of the greatest songs in all of songland. By contrast, the Rolling Stones. If you know their work well, close your eyes and listen to them play in your head. Above any one single song, it’s a single sound that you hear. It’s their sound. They own it. Its signature is a certain holler, a weave of guitar, a rhythmic gait that’s as Black as any white boys have been. A sexy, uninhibited sound that encouraged suburban boys like me to check out more urban influences like the Meters, the Isley Brothers, the blues in general, and, yes, the thrill I still have listening to some disco. The Rolling Stones have had many faces and facets over sixty years, but critics tend to overlook the sonic innovation of “2000 Light Years from Home” or the exotic hook lines that Brian Jones b...