The rock staple John Lennon was “in heaven” listening to
John Lennon was always a man of contradictions. Aside from the personal escapades that he would get into, his feelings about music were always like night and day half the time, leading to some interviews where he was open about his love for his heroes and others that made you question whether or not he actually liked music. For all the vitriol that Lennon had in the cannon for his old hits, he admitted that the sound of heavenly bliss came from him throwing on Elvis Presley’s ‘I Want You, I Need You, I Love You’.
At the same time, Lennon has always had a touch-and-go relationship with Presley’s music. No one will forget the person who made them want to pick up a guitar, and Lennon remembered being transfixed when he saw one of Presley’s movies for the first time as if he embodied everything great about rock and roll.
Once Presley started making a comeback, though, Lennon was highly critical of the softer sides of his sound, thinking that he had gone far away from his roots as a rocker. Then again, Lennon, of all people, should have known that people were bound to change as they got older, as evidenced by his own exile from music.
After being reunited with Yoko Ono after months apart, Lennon’s “lost weekend” made him re-evaluate what gave his life meaning, including going back to writing songs once he found domestic happiness. Double Fantasy was poised to be the return of the Lennon that fans knew back in 1972, but the Liverpudlian wanted to reach further back.
When working on tracks like ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’, Lennon was known for channelling people like Elvis Presley and Smokey Robinson just as much as The B-52s, whom he thought were catching up to what Ono had been doing for years. In an interview from around that time, Lennon said it never got better than Presley’s balladeer side.
While making Double Fantasy, Lennon remembered getting an inspirational high from hearing Presley, saying, “I heard ‘I Want You I Need You I Love You’ the other day. I mean, I was just in heaven. Of course, I was going back to my youth and remembering the date and what was going on when I heard that music. So I don’t think the AC wanna hear Barry Manilow. They just as well might enjoy hearing Little Richard.”
‘The King’ had definitely moved far away from the likes of ‘Hound Dog’ with this kind of slinky groove, but it didn’t matter as long as his voice was still intact. In fact, are we sure that some of these slower songs weren’t the first whiff of what The Beatles would be doing a few short years later?
It’s by no means a one-to-one comparison, but when you look at how Lennon and Paul McCartney constructed their melodies and lyrics, Presley was still one of the biggest influences for them. Even when looking at Lennon’s solo material, ‘Woman’ may as well have been his own version of a Presley-style ballad, albeit with an extra focus on the connection between him and Yoko rather than the superficial side of love. Presley got Lennon to think about the sentimental side of rock and roll, but the former Beatle knew how to make it much more grounded for the masses.
