“More stupid than rock and roll”: The genre John Lennon hated with a passion
Rock and roll has always been a fairly self-contained genre. Some of the biggest artists in the world have never been afraid to dip their toes into other styles of music every now and again, but when it comes to the meat and potatoes of rock and roll, all anyone needs is a couple of power chords and the right attitude to get any of their songs going. And while John Lennon was more than happy to push the boundaries of what The Beatles could do, he knew that there were a handful of styles that were outside his grasp.
When the Fab Four were starting out on the mean streets of Hamburg, they were going to play virtually anything they could get under their fingers. These were the kind of trial-by-fire gigs that most people didn’t survive intact, so it wasn’t out of the question for them to stretch a song out for ten minutes at a time or do their homework by learning every single B-side they could from their favourite artists so they could throw them into the set as well.
Once Lennon started writing his own tunes, though, he knew the formula that could work for people. Most people had heard of what acts like Chuck Berry and Little Richard could do with the format, but once Lennon and Paul McCartney moved out of the twelve-bar blues format, there was no limit to what they could do when writing imitations of everyone from Motown artists to Buddy Holly.
As the band grew up, though, they were always fighting against the music of the time: jazz. Many people were still trying to do their homework and emulate the blues heroes of yesteryear, like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, but if anyone wanted to be taken seriously in the rock realm, it was up to them to brush up on their chops and make the same kind of runs that Miles Davis and Charlie Parker could.
Then again, people certainly chose the wrong band if they were coming to The Beatles for sophistication. They were still a scruffy bar band when they started out, and since they were meant to be the tougher take on popular music, there was no way that Lennon was going to be caught dead playing the same kind of show tunes and standards that the biggest names in jazz could.
Even as far back as the band’s early days, Lennon remembered having an unquenchable hatred for the easy-listening jazz format, saying, “We were anti-jazz. I think it is shit music, even more stupid than rock and roll. Jazz never gets anywhere, never does anything, it’s always the same, and all they do is drink pints of beer. We hated it because in those early days, they wouldn’t let us play at those clubs.”
If the band weren’t too fond of that brand of music, though, the next best thing was to beat it at its own game. As “anti-jazz” as Lennon claimed them to be, there are always those few “Beatle” chords that were actually taken from certain jazz vocabularies, like the descending figure in the middle of ‘Michelle’ or listening to them adding the strange chords into the bridge of ‘It Won’t Be Long’.
But Lennon’s problem with jazz probably had more to do with what it was trying to say rather than the note choices. That was music reserved for the upstanding members of society, and even if Lennon claimed to be working class, he could use those same chords and make them sound fantastic.
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