Why John Lennon thought Yoko Ono and Little Richard had “the same effect”
Any prospective musician has to always learn the lesson of not trying to emulate their heroes. It might make sense to pull inspiration from them, but the minute that someone starts trying to be a reincarnated version of their band is normally when they start leaving originality behind and become a glorified covers act with none of the good songs behind them. While John Lennon could usually spin any of his favourite artists into something new when he made his own songs, he felt that other times he could work on going beyond the glory years of rock and roll.
That’s not to say that Lennon was ever ashamed of wearing his influences on his sleeve. Throughout most of The Beatles’ time in the spotlight in the early 1960s, it was clear that he was pulling from Chuck Berry’s and Roy Orbison’s playbooks when writing some of his greatest material. And, despite some of them being more on-the-nose than others, it didn’t really matter so long as there were those heavenly harmonies anchoring everything behind him.
Even when the Fab Four started venturing out on their own, it wasn’t out of the question for Lennon to go back to his record collection. ‘Come Together’ may have been a great example of how far he had come from writing bluesy songs back in the day, but the fact that it was also a carbon copy of Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ for two of its lines did get the songwriter a few raised eyebrows from Berry’s label.
If Berry was Lennon’s major inspiration, then Paul McCartney’s muse was Little Richard. Even though every member of The Beatles loved the androgynous rock and roll singer, Macca was always best suited to take the vocal on his songs, whether that was shredding his voice working on ‘Long Tall Sally’ or ripping off his style wholesale on ‘I’m Down’. But that was only the beginning of Lennon’s history with screaming.
Because the band was fine-tuning their songs around the time of Sgt Pepper, Yoko Ono started opening up Lennon’s mind to something a bit more atonal than usual. While Two Virgins and most of Yoko’s subsequent material fall on the wrong side of listenable for many people, hearing her scream and vocalise her way through songs is a lot more inventive than anything the band was doing at the time.
Although Lennon ended up doing his fair share of screaming on The Beatles’ later albums like ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy),’ he felt his other half managed to put the rock and rollers of old to shame, saying, “People’s perception of what Yoko was made them not understand what she was saying. ‘Why?’ has the same effect on me as when I heard ‘Tutti Frutti’. Yoko just takes out all of the word bits and sings like ‘Be-Bop-A-Lu-La’ right through the song.”
And once people start breaking down that sonic barrier, it’s easy to see what Lennon is talking about. Yoko does manage to sustain her notes properly when she wants to, but during those moments when she’s flying off the handle, she sounds closer to a wild saxophone or another horn instrument, playing off the band in the same way that Lennon would be doing when adding the right lick to a song.
It didn’t take Lennon long to put his own spin on everything, either, eventually putting together tunes like ‘Cold Turkey’ and ‘Mother’ that were driven solely by that visceral approach to vocals. So while there are still many people who think Yoko sounded like nails on a chalkboard throughout her entire career, the true power behind her voice came from when she used it like an instrument rather than the harmonies everyone else used.
