The one musician that John Lennon happily knelt down to
In the earliest days of The Beatles, most people knew not to mess with John Lennon whenever he started playing.
He may have been one of the more charming members of the band once they hit it big, but when looking at their early days struggling to make ends meet, he was the kind of rocker that would back down to no one, even if it meant resorting to fisticuffs when the set was over. But even if there was a firm sense of competition between him and Paul McCartney whenever they wrote, there was always going to be more than a few artists that Lennon knew could wipe the floor with the band any day of the week.
Then again, that mentality was all but gone when Lennon decided to leave the Fab Four. They had conquered the world multiple times over whenever they started making their classics, and by the time that they split up, most people wouldn’t have blamed them if they decided to not make music ever again. They had done everything they could do as pop stars, but Lennon wanted to redefine what it meant to be an artist at the time.
There was much more to him than a few rock and roll songs, and the rest of his solo career was about making the best songs that he could. Some of them would be him quoting his own frail mind like on Plastic Ono Band or even Mind Games, but he never forgot the importance of serving the song, either. Walls and Bridges remains one of his most accessible albums, and half the reason it works is because of how much he relies on going back to the raw fun of rock and roll.
But when you listen to his records, not all of them necessarily sound like the same Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry songs that he listened to when he was a kid. They were a grown-up version of what pop tunes could be, but it held onto the same sense of excitement that those old rock and roll records did. Still, there was never anyone that could compete with Jerry Lee Lewis whenever he played piano.
Despite being known as one of the founders of rock and roll, Lewis fit the model of a rock and roll wild man better than Presley ever did. Aside from the distasteful female company he kept behind the scenes, seeing him beat the life out of his piano was enough to give Little Richard a run for his money, especially when he started kicking his piano bench across the room when playing ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’.
So when Lennon got the chance to meet his hero, his longtime friend Elliot Mintz remembered him reverting back to being a little kid, saying, “He was playing ‘Great Balls of Fire’ and ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ and playing the piano with his feet. This was one of the guys that John listened to as a kid. He was looking at him the way a child would look at a Christmas present. After the last song, we snuck downstairs. Jerry Lee walked out of the dressing room and I said, ‘I’d like to introduce you to John Lennon’. And I looked over and John was on his knees kissing Jerry Lee Lewis’s boots.”
But when looking at the kind of impact that Lewis had on Lennon, that kind of adulation may have still not been enough. The kind of excitement that those early records had were the gold standard for what rock and roll could have been at the time, and you can bet that Lennon would have probably done the same thing had he seen Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly up close for the first time.
You also have to remember the kind of guy that Lennon could be. There was a lot of passion that could come out as anger on many different occasions, but the minute that he was put next to one of his idols, you could still see the twinkle in his eye that he had when he first heard rock and roll from across the pond.
