The forgotten guitarist John Lennon worshipped: “I always liked simple rock”
I don’t know if it’s just me, but John Lennon being a guitarist is always something that I kind of forget about.
To be fair, it was partly his own fault: his songwriting godliness always rightly took precedence, he certainly didn’t possess the technical wizardry of his bandmate George Harrison, and was always quietly understated when it came to his abilities on the six-string. Despite this, it is not to say that he didn’t know his worth.
“I was rhythm guitarist… it’s an important job,” he once stated, not incorrectly, but it actually meant a lot more than just merely holding down the fort. Take his turns on ‘All My Loving’ as a prime example – could someone who was supposedly just adept at the guitar really achieve that sheer level of mastery?
In a nutshell, Lennon was a far better guitarist than he ever let on, and to this end, had a pretty good eye for spotting talent when he saw it, too. It didn’t need to be flashy or particularly blistering, because time and time again, the Beatle proved that the kind of music he truly loved was the sounds that seemed close to home.
That meant it was simple rock, the type you’d hear in pubs and local working men’s clubs, that really pricked Lennon’s ears. Naturally, it always had to involve some hint of the blues, and it could never not be completely authentic. For that, the hugely underrated Dave Edmunds was the perfect candidate to fit the bill.
“Well, I always liked simple rock,” Lennon once aptly commented. “There’s a great one in England now, ‘I Hear You Knocking’.” Indeed, when Edmunds covered the classic 1950s rhythm and blues standard in 1970, he breathed a whole new life into it that led to a six-week stint at number one in the UK and the selling of over 3million copies overall.
Indeed, Lennon was clearly so charmed by Edmunds’ music in his lifetime that he was hired to play at his 50th birthday tribute concert, as a mark of remembrance to the true roots of the sounds that the singer worshipped so much. The whole point was that it was understated, quiet, and unassuming.
The cynics might say that this was the precise antithesis of everything Lennon ended up becoming, but in many ways, you could look at his love of Edmunds as being tinged with a slight whiff of jealousy. At the end of the day, when things got too much, did he yearn for a time when he could have gone back to Liverpool and just played in a pub for the rest of his days?
That’s not to discredit Edmunds in any form, as he went far beyond just the hometown circuits alone, but the point still stands that a more mundane way of life, playing the type of music that truly enraptured him in the first place, may have seemed like a golden chalice to Lennon when the world’s manic media was constantly at his door. This was worship, but of a very different, reversed kind.
