The greatest rock song ever, according to Elton John
There are hardly any other musicians today who are bigger students of rock and roll than Elton John.
While he has amassed some of the greatest hits that anyone else could have asked for, there are more than a few times where he has waxed poetic about every single person in his record collection, whether it’s talking about seeing Elvis Presley for the first time or keeping track of what was going on in the charts every single week when he was a kid. He was interested in the mechanics of pop music for a long time, but he could also see when the tide started to turn for teenage music.
Because one thing that tends to get forgotten in the story of rock and roll is where it all came from. Sure, there is no shortage of people who will tell you that the genre descended from the blues, but even if you hear Little Richard songs and pick up on the I-IV-V progression, it’s not like blues was the only way for people to become rock and rollers. There was a certain energy to this music, and that came from being kept down for so many years.
Teenagers might not have had as much to worry about back in the day, but coming out of the Great Depression, the pop music market was going through one of the biggest droughts in the industry. Oh, there were still legends if you were willing to look for them, but even if Frank Sinatra was serving up some of the sweetest melodies the pop charts had ever heard, nothing had the same kind of teeth that you would have heard in Presley’s recordings.
John did have more than a few crooners that he had a soft spot for, but everything started to change when songs like ‘Rock Around the Clock’ became the biggest song in the world. Teenagers had finally discovered the music that was theirs to own, but if Bill Haley managed to knock down that door, Chuck Berry was the first one to build a career off of making rock and roll stories.
Which is strange considering what Berry grew up hearing. He still had a firm love of the blues, but even when he had a soft spot for people like Nat King Cole, something electric happened the minute he kicked off tunes like ‘Rock and Roll Music’. This kind of energy hadn’t been heard before, and while every parent in the world wanted to condemn it, John was transfixed when he heard ‘Johnny B Goode’.
Despite getting hooked with Presley and seeing bands like The Beatles for the first time, John felt that ‘Johnny B Goode’ was the ultimate rock and roll song, saying, “This is, of course, from 1958 and ‘Johnny B. Goode!’ I mean, how many times has this been recorded by people and played by people? The greatest rock and roll guitarist forever. It doesn’t get any better than that! From a rock and roll point of view.”
Then again, it’s not like John knocked it out of the park when he took a swing at it back in the 1970s. John is a man of many talents, but when he was out of his mind on drugs in the middle of making a record like Victim of Love, adding a half-hearted cover of one of the great hymns of rock and roll and extending it for eight minutes wasn’t exactly going to get any party moving at Studio 54.
Still, it’s hard to really blame John for wanting to go back to his rock and roll roots at some point in his career. There are plenty of artists out there that would consider ‘Johnny B Goode’ to be too cliché, but the reason why it works so well is that it’s the essence of what rock and roll is. If aliens came down to Earth and demanded to hear about this strange loud music people made with electric guitars, that opening guitar lick says far more than a thousand words ever could.
