From day one, John Lennon was nothing if not a fan of all strains of rock and roll.
Although there were many avenues for him to go in the world of art, there was something about listening to tracks like ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ that was enough to light a fire on him and never want to work a day in his life. But even with all of the hysteria around Beatlemania, Lennon seemed to have that same kind of adulation for some of the founding fathers of rock and roll in his record collection.
But part of the beauty of The Beatles was hearing them interpret other people’s work whenever they wrote their own masterpieces. On a lot of their early tracks, you can hear the heartache of The Everly Brothers every time Lennon harmonised with Paul McCartney, the Carl Perkins fills whenever George Harrison played his guitar licks, and even the Little Richard-style shouts whenever Macca tore through tunes like ‘Long Tall Sally’.
If there was anyone that was bound to set the band’s world on fire, though, it was going to be Elvis Presley. He was practically the ambassador of the genre in many ways, and when Lennon was still a punk kid in Liverpool, he remembered thinking that Presley had the best job in the world when everyone started screaming whenever he came on the screen during one of his movies.
Then again, there was only so much influence Presley was going to have after he went into the army. When he got discharged, his comeback definitely endeared him to the rock and roll fans, but up until his death, Lennon didn’t have much time for him anymore, thinking that one of his idols had graduated to being the kind of nostalgia act that he had always despised from back in the day.
For Lennon, making music was about constantly evolving, and that came from hearing the legends like Chuck Berry still chugging away. Not all of his songs were necessarily the most complicated things in the world, but when you hear ‘Johnny B Goode’ or ‘School Days’, there was still that fire that sent Lennon crazy when he first started getting acquainted with rock and roll back in the day.
And even later down the line, Lennon had no problem calling Berry the main reason why he picked up a guitar and started playing, saying, “Berry is the greatest influence on earth. So is Bo Diddley and so is Little Richard. There is not one white group on earth that hasn’t got their music in them. And that’s all I ever listened to. The only white I ever listened to was Presley on his early music records and he was doing Black music.”
Beyond being a fantastic songwriter, one of the greatest parts of Berry’s career is that he never forgot about where he came from. He was always ready to play to whatever crowd that he could play to, and even if it meant hiring a pickup band a few hours before going on, he would make sure that everyone in that stadium got the same kind of thrill that they got when they heard Marty McFly pretend to play Berry’s licks in Back to the Future.
Lennon certainly managed to take the early version of rock and roll into the artistic world, but there’s no sense in debating the impact that Berry has had on legions of rock fans ever since he started. Presley did present a massive cultural change when he started, but when talking about the genre as a whole, it’s better to look at it as BC and AC: before Chuck and after Chuck.
