The Chuck Berry song that inspired The Beatles’ ‘Come Together’
John Lennon once remarked: “If you were to give rock ‘n’ roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry.” That’s the height of all praise from a man who figured that the medium was as good as a religion, in some ways rendering Berry the omnipresent god of the ever-unfurling cultural boom. But beyond that, it also showcases how The Beatles always celebrated their influences openly.
“We learned so many things from him which led us into a dream world of rock ‘n’ roll music,” Paul McCartney told Rolling Stone. As a working-class lad from the north, Berry illuminated that there might be an alternative to the dock life that was originally forecast for Macca. With that in mind, he said that it’s “not really possible to sum up what he meant to all us young guys growing up in Liverpool.”
“From the first minute we heard the great guitar intro to ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, we became fans of the great Chuck Berry,” continued McCartney. “His stories were more like poems than lyrics – the likes of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ or ‘Maybellene’.” He urged the young lads to tell their own tales with his vibrancy and wit. Berry was hugely himself, and this notion stayed with them when they got playing.
And music doesn’t get much more idiosyncratic than John Lennon’s defining anthem, ‘Come Together’. This assortment of nonsense poetry and visceral riffing typifies what the bespectacled Beatle was all about, so it seems fitting that Berry’s legacy was woven into the hit.
In fact, The Beatles’ love of Chuck Berry was so profound that they were even accused of taking their influence too far. When it comes to ‘Come Together’ and Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’, there are some who claim they paid him the greatest compliment of all: imitation.
As Paul McCartney once said, “[John] originally brought [Come Together] over as a very perky little song, and I pointed out to him that it was very similar to Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’, John acknowledged it was rather close to it.” He told Miles B. in Many Years From Now, “I suggested that we tried it ‘swampy’ [and] we took [the tempo] right down.”
The shared line that gives the game away is “Here come a flat-top, he was, moving up”. Chuck Berry’s publishers filed a lawsuit, and it was sorted out of court on the proviso that John Lennon recorded a cover of ‘You Can’t Catch Me’. The debt was figuratively paid, but the legacy of appropriation still lingers to some extent. Aside from the nettlesome issue, one thing is patently clear — just how much they loved the duck-walking progenitor.
