The rock song John Lennon called his “all-time favourite”
John Lennon was always the first to tell someone whether he thought one of his songs was crap. He was usually proud of most of his more adventurous songs, but he thought that some of the more meaningless pieces of The Beatles catalogue never struck a nerve like they were supposed to. And when looking back on the music of his youth, he was always looking for something that could hit him in the same way that this classic did.
Because no matter how many twists and turns the Fab Four went down throughout their career, there was usually nothing that got in the way of them falling back on their favourites. They still pushed music forward, but in ‘Helter Skelter’, you can still hear the building blocks from Little Richard the same way you can hear the Fats Domino influence on ‘Lady Madonna’.
But rock and roll was only a small facsimile of what the group could do. As much as they loved to listen to their old Elvis Presley records, some of their finest work came from them dipping their toes into genres that they weren’t aware of or hadn’t even been invented yet, like the surreal images in ‘I Am the Walrus’ or the smooth jazz stylings of ‘Honey Pie’.
When Lennon was tasked with going back to his roots, though, Rock ‘n’ Roll may have been a bit too wild for what he had bargained for. The sessions were the kind of rock and roll debauchery that people write books of smut about, but in the middle of everything, ‘Bring It On Home To Me’ still stood out as one of the greatest tunes he could have included on the record.
And while Lennon does a serviceable job at doing justice to the soulful anthem, what Sam Cooke brought to the tune couldn’t be eclipsed. Whereas Lennon sang it with his signature gusto, every piece of Cooke’s performance sounds like it’s coming straight from his heart whenever he opens his mouth.
Still, Lennon was at least proud that he got the chance to do a version of the tune while his voice was in good enough shape to do it, saying, “‘Bring It On Home To Me’ is one of my all-time favourite songs and, in fact, I have been quoted as saying I wish I had written it. I love it that much, and I was glad to be able to do it.”
Then again, this medley of the Cooke classic alongside Little Richard’s ‘Send Me Some Lovin’ is only a small sample of what the rest of the album had in store. Even though Lennon is a master of every rock song he could get his hands on, the album fluctuates in quality depending on what kind of tune you’re listening to. While ‘Stand By Me’ and ‘Slippin and Slidin’ go over incredibly well, tracks like ‘Just Because’ sound like his arm got twisted into recording the song or he had a bit too much to drink before he got behind the glass.
Even though it’s nowhere near the heights of any of the original material that he made, ‘Bring It On Home To Me’ is more than worth the headache that Lennon had to go through to make the album. No great album comes together without some hard labour, and while Lennon had to deal with something ripped out of a nightmare, the soul in his voice was a far better change of pace than the raw emotion on Walls and Bridges.
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