Some of the biggest rock stars in the world don’t really seem tangible half the time. As much as some people manage to live a quiet life and go through everyday routines just like the rest of us, it’s hard to fathom the idea that Brian May goes out to buy groceries or Paul McCartney drives his car into the office every single day.
These people feel like they are walking on air both onstage and off, and even the biggest names in music like John Lennon were prone to getting starstruck every now and again.
But, really, is there anyone who has played music in the last half-century who wouldn’t melt at the thought of talking with Lennon? He may have been the most self-effacing member of The Beatles after the 1960s faded from view, but even when he tried to push away from his fame and become real, that only made him more endearing to fans who wanted nothing more than to talk to a member of the Fab Four.
Lennon could certainly appreciate the adulation for a while, but there came a point where everyone wanted that to end. No one can handle being treated like a god every time they go out in public, and by the time that he posed in his full glory on the cover of Two Virgins, it was practically a PR statement on Lennon’s part. He was not going to be the person that people thought he was, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t do the same for his idols when they were working with him.
As far as the former Beatle was concerned, though, his heroes were always of a different breed. He was already being influenced by what Yoko Ono was doing, but whereas he saw people like Bob Dylan as a peer whom he would occasionally get jealous of when writing some of his classics, he knew there was no point in trying to touch anything that Chuck Berry was playing half the time.
Sure, Lennon’s old band had covered many tunes from ‘The Godfather of Rock and Roll’, but it was something else for Lennon to see him in the flesh, saying, “I still had that feeling that when I was 16, those were the records I listened to. I could never quite see him as a human ‘cos there was one of my idols talking to me. So I understand it in a way ‘cos if I see any of those people from that period of my life, when I was 16, I really don’t know quite if I’m all there when I’m talking to them. It’s a sort of effort to see it’s a human being but it is Chuck Berry.”
Then again, one of the benefits of meeting Berry was that he always wanted to play before anything else. He didn’t always need to have the greatest rapport with someone off the stage, but as long as they clicked musically, that was all Lennon could have asked for when he kicked off singing songs like ‘Johnny B Goode’. But what Lennon was doing was as important for Berry as it was for him.
After all, some of the biggest names in rock and roll never got the recognition they deserved because of both their race and BS recording deals. People like Berry and Little Richard never got celebrated in the same way that The Beatles did in their prime, so Lennon’s attempts to work with Berry over the years may as well have been his way of returning the favour for all the inspiration that he got from one of the fathers of the genre.
But when someone writes lines like ‘Maybellene’ and ‘Johnny B Goode’, they already secured their spot in rock and roll history. Even if the biggest names in the music industry didn’t listen to what Berry had to say all the time, Lennon knew that the magic that he created with his guitar and that duckwalk were not of this Earth.
