As in most of pop history, there was a noticeable contradiction between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in Rock Dreams. The Beatles had already adapted other personae on the albums Magical Mystery Tour and, most successfully, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Cohn and Peellaert showed them almost the way they were in real life: outside the doors of the Star-Club in Hamburg, being chased by a bobby in the streets of Liverpool or having tea with the Queen Mom.
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The Rolling Stones on the other hand were not so polite and always had a rawer image about them. Peellaert pictures them in a series of progressively decadent tableaux, counting down the members of the greatest rock 'n' roll band on earth: six at the beggars banquet, five leather-clad transvestites in a hotel bedroom, four Nazi's feasting on pre-pubescent nymphs, three wasted in a hotel room watching a young woman disrobe, two pirates dancing on a coffin and one all alone in his room. No wonder Mick Jagger had a few questions when he met Peellaert in Germant (Peellaert answered "It was Nik, it was Nik!" when Jagger asked him what he had meant with the Nazi's and the drag queens and "I don't know Mick" when questioned about the coffin but "Mick knew very well it was supposed to be Brian Jones").
pictures by Guy Peellaert
text next to pictures by Nik Cohn