The “beautiful” 1962 song John Lennon could listen to forever
John Lennon was never going to have a problem speaking his mind after The Beatles broke up.
They had been told to keep their mouths shut on a lot of serious issues when Brian Epstein was at the helm, and even though Lennon did find himself in hot water from time to time, he wasn’t going to stifle himself or take back anything he said if he had a heartfelt opinion on it. He was doing everything that he could to speak his mind, and that also applied to more than a few rock and roll classics as well.
Because as much as Lennon loved some of his heroes, there were more than a few times when he was disappointed after seeing them as well. Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry still felt like gods to him when he first jammed with them, but after The Beatles took the top spot away from Elvis Presley, Lennon remembered feeling a little bit dejected at what Presley had been reduced to during the final years of his life.
That kind of cynicism didn’t just stop at Lennon’s idols, either. Some of the best Beatles songs that he ever wrote were complete disasters to his eyes, and even if some of them had merit to them, like ‘I Am The Walrus’, he even expressed to George Martin that he wanted to record everything that they ever made over again and get them as close to perfect as he could after the fact.
It’s hard to really judge what Lennon was going for at the time since he was also releasing records like Two Virgins, but he never forgot about his love for rock and roll, either. He wanted the chance to make music that had the same punch that he heard out of the records he was playing in his Cavern Club days, but he never forgot about the more heartfelt side of his material whenever he played, either.
For as self-depricating as he could be about his playing style, Lennon was a fantastic ballad writer, and some of his softer pieces are often some of the greatest in his discography. He wasn’t afraid to open up if it was for the right song, and while he sounded a lot more tender in his solo career, all that he was doing was taking his cues from the kind of songs that people like Smokey Robinson had worked on back in the day.
The Miracles were practically a hit-making institution for Motown Records, but Lennon felt that nothing could beat listening to a song like ‘I’ve Been Good To You’, saying, “There’s just one line in this Miracles’ record – ‘I’ve Been Good to You’ – where it goes ‘You got me Cry-y-y-yeying’ – no breath, a beautiful little piece, I always love to hear it. I think he’s [Smokey Robinson] got the most perfect voice, you know, I just think the group’s got into such a same-y groove that it spoils it really.”
A lot of what Lennon did involved pushing his voice much further than that, but it’s not like Robinson’s music ever left him. ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’ even managed to find its way into the band’s jam sessions for Get Back, and even when Lennon abandoned the idea of the band getting back together at all, he was still working on honing his Robinson-style singing chops when working on records like Double Fantasy.
There were plenty of heavier singers that he could have pulled from, but for all of Lennon’s avant-garde experiments, nothing could dull his love for someone like Robinson. He was the gold standard for what singing should be about, and he would do everything that he could to get anywhere close to that kind of vocal performance.
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