John Lennon - Yoko Ono - The Beatles - 1969

Credit: Far Out / Alamy

The 1958 songs John Lennon called better than The Beatles: “That changed my life”

Sun 14 June 2026 18:15, UK

It’s hard to really understand what John Lennon even thought of The Beatles after they broke up.

He was more than happy to make the best tunes he could with his best mates, but as soon as their business dealings fell through, there’s a good chance that he didn’t have a kind word to say about 95% of their songs, whether it was Paul McCartney’s granny shit songs or his own incredible disappointments across their discography. A lot of that may have been him being a little bit insecure, but he knew that there were so many songs that mattered more than a bunch of their hits.

After all, Lennon was living in the moment, and he didn’t have time to get nostalgic for the Beatles directly after leaving the band. He needed to talk about what was on his mind in the moment, and a lot of the best moments of his solo career are about capturing those magical moments on tape. Sometimes he would be incredibly angry, like on ‘How Do You Sleep’, and other times he would sound like one of the most lovestruck people in the world on ‘Oh Yoko!’, but it was always about moving forward to some degree.

But when you look at the songs that he was writing a lot of the time, he didn’t like traditional rock and roll so much. He wanted his songs to be little art pieces for the most part, and when listening to the way that Plastic Ono Band plays out, you can tell that he’s using all of those dissonant chords and strange melodies to help sort out what was going on in his head. Then again, he could still rely on the old rockers to take him away to a better place.

Rock and roll had always been his escape when he was going through his troubles at home as a kid, and it’s not like the spark had dulled over the years. ‘Some Other Guy’ was still the kind of song that he had been chasing after ever since he heard it back in the band’s Cavern days, and as far as the greatest musicians of all time go, Lennon was starstruck standing next to someone like Chuck Berry or Little Richard.

These artists were the bedrocks of what he was all about, and even when the Fabs were making their first setlists in Hamburg, they were throwing in every single deep cut song they could. They had no problem stretching out some of their songs for tens of minutes on end to keep the crowd entertained, and they were more than happy to amuse themselves whenever McCartney was shredding his vocal cords on ‘Long Tall Sally’.

Lennon had come a long way from being the Chuck Berry acolyte he used to be, but he still felt that those songs hit way harder than just about anything that they ever did, saying, “To me, nothing has really happened to me (except Yoko) since 1958 when I heard my first Black rock and roll. This is the same music people talk about, The Beatles and Sgt Pepper and all that jazz. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

Adding, “All I talk about is 1958 when I heard ‘Long Tall Sally’, when I heard ‘Johnny B Goode’, when I heard Bo Diddley. That changed my life completely. I dropped my art (classes); I dropped out of school. I dropped everything. I got me a guitar, and that was the end of it.”

And even when looking at the other white artists that were happening around that time, none of them were hitting the nail on the head like Berry or Richard were doing. Elvis Presley was doing an imitation of all of his favourite artists to a certain degree, and while Buddy Holly did set the standard for what Lennon and McCartney wanted out of their songs, it’s not like the glasses-clad rock god was going to hold a candle to Richard’s shriek.

It was all about the energy that excited Lennon more than anything, and you can feel that love whenever he kicked off his own songs like ‘New York City’ or ‘Meat City’. He was nowhere close to matching his idols, but if he could give the audience the same thrill that his heroes gave him, he would have been happy.