John Lennon on how Chuck Berry influenced an entire generation: ‘Writing good and intelligent lyrics’
At the start of rock and roll, lyrics didn’t necessarily have to mean anything too deep. As much as people loved the idea of Bob Dylan singing about how the times were going to change, there were just as many who were interested in writing absolute nonsense in their tunes and hoping that the audience paid attention to the beat rather than the words coming out of their mouths. John Lennon was no stranger to songs that were absolute gibberish, but he thought that no one in rock and roll could have come close to what this artist was writing.
Because before rock and roll really had a face, a lot of the greatest songs of the genre were basically singing about rock and roll and nothing else. While Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ is still considered a classic of the genre, there’s not much going on underneath the surface aside from a few lines about rocking until the break of dawn and wanting to have fun at whatever sockhop people were playing at the time.
Those tunes may have been exciting, but Lennon always had his eye on the poetic side of the genre. You have to remember that he and Paul McCartney were as influenced by artists like Gerry Goffin and Carole King as they were by Little Richard, and that meant writing songs with the potential to break someone’s heart rather than making people jump for joy every time a tune started.
But even by the low standards of rock and roll lyricism, Chuck Berry was a living poet. While the songs themselves could sound fairly similar if you listened to one of his full projects, every track had a standalone story to it, whether it was complaining about a woman who wouldn’t be true like ‘Maybellene’ or talking about a kid who wanted nothing more than to play the guitar like ‘Johnny B Goode’.
For Lennon, this was what helped open his eyes to what lyrics could be. The lion’s share of all Beatles songs may have had to deal with love, but listening to Berry made it alright for him to move into different areas, whether that was the nursery rhyme acid trip of ‘I Am the Walrus’ or the political satire of ‘Revolution’.
If Berry hadn’t been around, though, Lennon thought that rock and roll would have looked entirely different, saying, “[Berry] was writing good lyrics and intelligent lyrics in the 1950s when people were singing ‘Oh baby, I love you so.’ It was people like him who influenced our generation to try and make sense out of the songs rather than just sing ‘do wah diddy.’”
But while Berry got the ball rolling for something new in rock, The Beatles took the whole thing to new heights. Regardless of how many times they got labelled as a teenybopper band back in the early 1960s, seeing them stretch out in the 1960s was Berry’s unique approach to lyrics if it were burst wide open, like ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ with its dazzling imagery or the clever turns of phrase in a song like ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’.
While Lennon could get a little too influenced by Berry when writing songs like ‘Come Together’ and indirectly stealing ‘You Can’t Catch Me’, it’s not like he was ever trying to go after Berry’s fortune, either. It was simply a tip of the hat to the person who convinced every other rock and roller that there was more to life than partying and that those three minutes they have to work with can go far beyond anything listeners could imagine.
