It is a part of life that we grow up with aspirations of emulating a figure we have either met in real life, heard on the radio, or seen on our screens. John Lennon is widely regarded as one of the most iconic men in music, but just like everybody else, he had his own heroes.
Growing up in the 1950s, as Britain began to emerge from World War II, there wasn’t much to scream and shout about on the streets of Liverpool. The city had been on its knees for some time, and very little in the way of glitz and glamour was ever offloaded on the Mersey. So when kids during this decade began to have rock and roll records imported from the US, the energy shifted.
Records would be played at parties and passed around among friends as a taste of America, bright shining and full of possibilities, hit British shores and promised an escape for the children who had suffered through post-war rations. Finally, they were off corned beef and were eating pure American steak in the form of their rock ‘n’ roll heroes.
Of course, for most, Elvis Presley was the ultimate hip-shaking hero. “Before Elvis, there was nothing,” the Beatle once famously said of ‘The King’. Likewise, he revered the work of Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins and Chuck Berry, about whom he said, “If you had to give rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry”. But for Lennon, there was another who was perhaps far more important: Jerry Lee Lewis.
“That’s the music that inspired me to play music,” Lennon explained to Rolling Stone in 1971 as he noted the impact of Lewis. “There is nothing conceptually better than rock and roll. No group, be it the Beatles, Dylan, or Stones, have ever improved on ‘Whole Lot of Shakin’’ for my money. Or maybe I’m like our parents: that’s my period, and I dig it and I’ll never leave it.”
The man behind ‘Great Balls of Fire’ was a powerhouse piano player who embodied the fearsome excitement of rock ‘n’ roll. Operating on the edge of acceptability, Lennon was inspired by Lewis’ unbridled lack of decorum. “I had only three childhood idols, Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee, and I haven’t seen any live,” Lennon reportedly told a friend, according to the book Lennon: The Definitive Biography by Ray Coleman, during his ‘Lost Weekend‘ when offered the chance to see the latter. His next response was simply: “Let’s go!”
According to Coleman, the performance was out of this world for Lennon, who was the first to clap as every track came to a close. Friend Elliot Mintz would offer Lennon a chance to meet his hero at the end of the concert. By this time, Lennon had met a large chunk of his heroes, even if he hadn’t seen them perform live, so you might expect him to have a certain degree of cool about him, but he threw that out the window and threw himself to his knees to kiss Lewis’ feet.
“That’s all right, son,” Lewis said to the Bealte in acknowledgement of the gesture, but still a little embarrassed. “You just get up now.”
Sadly, at this stage of his career, Lennon was not particularly concerned with such shame and spent the majority of his time deeply embedded in drinking. But hopefully, he did remember meeting his ultimate icon.
