The album John Lennon made as a love letter to rock and roll
There isn’t a soul on this Earth that wouldn’t be at least a little bit intimidated if someone like John Lennon walked into the room.
Any musician might dream of being able to play with one of The Beatles, but the idea of adding anything to one of the Fab Four’s tunes feels impossible half the time. Every good idea that pop music ever spat out has already been done by them on their records, and even when Lennon was flying solo, it was staggering to think that all of those lyrics and melodies came out of one person.
While Paul McCartney usually gets branded as the real tunesmith of the group who wrote whimsical ditties, Lennon could match him when it came to making beautiful tunes. You have to remember that ‘If I Fell’ was a silly love song just as much as ‘And I Love Her’ was on A Hard Day’s Night, and even when Lennon started to go for some weirder material in the band’s later years, he never sacrificed the integrity of the song for getting weird ideas through the door. Say what you will about ‘I Am the Walrus’, but Lennon’s vocal performance is still one of the best he ever did.
But when the band decided to call it quits, Lennon knew that he wasn’t going to make a record unless it was for the right reasons. Plastic Ono Band was his opportunity to officially close the book on The Beatles’ glory years, and while Imagine did give him some traction as a pop star, the rest of his records were about detailing his state of mind. Some Time in New York City was a political cry out into the world, and while Walls and Bridges is by far his most pop-centric album up to that point, it was also an emotional plea for Yoko Ono to take him back after months apart.
Everything had to have some kind of passion behind it, but when he got to settle down with Yoko again, he felt that it was finally time to take a breath. He had given his life away to making the best music he possibly could, and after his son Sean was born, he felt that it was time for him to stop worrying about what his next record would sound like and focus on being a good husband and father.
Then again, the muse never left any of the Fab Four, and after an experience at sea in the late 1970s, Lennon had awoken his creative side and began writing again. All the songs were centred around the domestic bliss he had in New York City and finally feeling at peace, but he still wanted to remind people that he was the same rocker that had started The Beatles back in the day.
Paul McCartney may have been riding high with Wings at the time, but Lennon knew that the album needed to reflect the kind of roots that he had grown up with, saying, “I went right back to my roots. Every time I was doing it I was going to Elvis, and it wasn’t back to being Beatle John back in the 1960s. It was being John Lennon, whose life was changed by listening to American rock and roll.”
It might not have the same kind of bite that he had on some of his rocking tunes like ‘Cold Turkey’, but you can hear a bit of that 1950s influence creep back in every so often. ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ feels like the domestic bliss song that Roy Orbison never actually got around to writing, and even when making more uptempo material like ‘Dear Yoko’, there’s that subtle hiccup that was reminiscent of what Buddy Holly was doing on tracks like ‘Peggy Sue’.
Making the cover album Rock ‘n’ Roll may have helped remind him of his roots, but this was the moment where Lennon felt truly at home playing the music he loved again. His time on this Earth may have been running out without anyone realising it, but it’s nice to know that he hadn’t lost a single ounce of shine when it came to songwriting.
