The “strange” 1960 record John Lennon called everything he wanted: “This is what it’s all about”
John Lennon was usually a difficult listener to please when he listened to rock and roll.
He wanted something that excited him every single time he turned on the radio, and even though he had some of the greatest rock songs of all time under his belt, he was usually the first one to say that half of them were either too cliché or weren’t performed right whenever he looked back on his time with The Beatles. He didn’t feel like everything worked out as it should have, but that’s because he had a pretty good idea of what perfection sounded like in his head when making his classics.
The progress that he made on some of the band’s later recordings was the stuff of legend, but Lennon felt that he always needed to push himself that one step further to get the sounds that he wanted. He didn’t like the idea of stopping because they had run out of tracks, and even when he made masterpieces like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, even George Martin remembered him saying that the band needed to re-record almost everything they had done to make everything sound right.
And that wasn’t something that magically went away when Lennon became a solo star, either. He knew that not everything that he was playing was perfect, and when you look through some of his albums, you can tell when he had made something honest and timeless and when he made a record that he felt would have been forgotten if it didn’t have a former Beatle’s name on the front.
A lot of that came down to the lyrics that he used in every song, but he couldn’t really go wrong listening to pure rock and roll. He liked the idea of making some of the catchiest tunes that he could, the same way that his heroes did, and if he could have come anywhere close to making a tune with the same energy as ‘Some Other Guy’, he would have been over the moon. But sometimes the greatest tunes were the ones that had a bit of a strange twist to them as well.
Lennon lived for music that sounded weird, and since Revolver marked one of the first times they had dipped their toes into avant-garde music, hearing other bands play around with strange sounds was music to his ears. Those records were meant to be intentionally unsophisticated in some respects, but when listening to some of the older rock and roll tunes from his youth, Lennon was more focused on the less polished songs like ‘Give Me Love’ by Rosie and the Originals.
‘Angel Baby’ was one of the band’s biggest hits when Lennon was growing up, but the B-side of the single was what turned his head because of how weird it was, saying in 1968, “An amazing record. It’s one of the greatest strange records; it’s all just out of beat, and everybody misses it – they knocked off the B side in ten minutes. I talk Yoko’s leg off, telling her this is it; this is what it’s all about.”
Given that The Beatles were already focused on making a back-to-basics album around the same time, it’s no surprise that Lennon was going there for inspiration, either. He didn’t want to have the same kind of studio polish that their last records did, and when you listen to Plastic Ono Band, he wasn’t afraid to have some of those musical blemishes in the mix, just like this tune did when he first heard it.
Critics could easily tear a song like ‘Give Me Love’ apart if they wanted to, but the main message that Lennon got from it was to always be himself on record. It’s not always easy for someone to keep all of those mistakes in the mix, but that’s usually what gives every single rock and roll song character.
