The 1950s rock star Paul McCartney called rock “the greatest legend all over the world”
It’s impossible to overstate the influence that The Beatles had over an entire generation.
Even though John Lennon and George Harrison were the most fed up with the kind of god-like status that they had in the rock and roll world, Paul McCartney seemed to be one of the only members of the group who seemed to truly understand the weight that every one of their classic songs had over an entire generation. But if you look at the way that Macca makes music to this day, he’s still trying to chase after that same kind of thrill that he got when he was listening to rock and roll as a child.
You have to remember that McCartney never let go of his rock and roll roots, no matter how far he strayed from the genre over the years. He loved the idea of making classical compositions and the easy listening music that turned up on Kisses on the Bottom, but nothing seemed to give him more of a rush than hearing Little Richard singing ‘Long Tall Sally’. If it weren’t for Chuck Berry, though, none of The Beatles would have been doing what they were doing in the Hamburg clubs in their early days.
Berry didn’t claim to reinvent the wheel by any stretch, but if you’re talking about pure rock and roll guitar playing, all roads trace back to him. He was the one who practically invented the lead guitar lick as we know it, and while a lot of his songs kicked off with the exact same motif every single time he played, it’s easy to forgive when he was the same guy who wrote ‘Johnny B Goode’.
So when Berry passed away, McCartney needed to pay his respects for someone he considered to be a living rock and roll god, saying, “Chuck was and is forever more one of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest legends all over the world. I was privileged to meet him in his home town St Louis when I played there on tour and it’s a memory I will cherish forever. It’s not really possible to sum up what he meant to all us young guys growing up in Liverpool but I can give it a try.”
Then again, out of all the members of The Beatles, John Lennon was probably the biggest Berry fanatic out of all of them. He had already co-opted the main riff of ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ for ‘Come Together’, but going through all of the covers that they played during their heyday, Lennon was the one sounded like he was having the time of his life whenever he started singing songs like ‘Rock and Roll Music’.
But the biggest advantage that McCartney had was being able to take influences from everyone else in Berry’s world as well. Almost half of Berry’s best licks came from the blues, and while the band were never going to get away with playing tunes by Sleepy John Estes or anything, they could at least try to get a little bit rootsier when they made their own songs, like turning the blues into the beginnings of heavy metal on ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’.
And if Lennon was taking the energy of Chuck Berry songs and putting them into his own tunes, Macca was doing the same thing with his lyrics. Lennon could only be himself whenever he wrote one of his masterpieces, but since every other Berry song was another teenage fantasy, McCartney practically took that entire sentiment and applied it to his more whimsical tales like ‘Penny Lane’.
He wasn’t afraid of making up a story to suit his song, and while that did inevitably lead to his ‘granny music’ later on in life, it’s not like McCartney was ever embarrassed of what he learned from Berry. The father of rock and roll was the starting point for so many of his generation, and the idea of following in his footsteps is the kind of thing that most of the Fab Four only dreamed of when they started playing in Liverpool.
