The first great guitar record, according to John Lennon
When John Lennon was growing up in Liverpool, getting an electric guitar was practically his salvation.
He was never going to fit into the normal societal jobs when he first listened to rock and roll, and even when he was jaded with every minute of being in The Beatles, he was more than happy to sing out his problems rather than talk away his troubles every single time he made a record. The guitar was his outlet and his muse whenever the world shut him out, but he wouldn’t have fallen in love with it if not for the right records coming first.
Because before rock and roll, the electric guitar wasn’t necessarily considered the most important instrument in the world. They were a big thing in jazz and blues, but when looking at the big band arrangements that were clogging up the charts like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, the guitar usually took a back seat and basically coloured the sound rather than being the driving force behind everything.
But what really set everything in motion? Well, if you want to get granular, ‘Rocket 88’ would have been the first time that people heard rock and roll guitar with distortion, but that wasn’t exactly intentional. The amplifier Ike Turner was using was damaged after falling off a truck, which made it sound distorted, but when Lennon’s generation saw artists like Chuck Berry, that was the real beginning of what the guitar hero was supposed to be.
Berry was the epitome of what a rebellious guitar figure was supposed to be, and even though a lot of his songs sounded the same, no one was really complaining when he managed to make some of the most beautiful stories in rock and roll history out of three chords and the right attitude. Elvis Presley used it as a prop, but even Berry’s licks were secondhand from the greatest blues musicians.
In fact, Lennon’s definition of what rock and roll sounded like didn’t even need to come out of a guitar. The biggest names alongside Berry were people like Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard banging the crap out of every single piano that they could find, but when it came to pure swagger, there was no one else who could touch someone like Ray Charles playing an electric piano on ‘What’d I Say’.
Lennon may have adopted the guitar as his main instrument, but he felt that every kid from his generation was chasing after the kind of sound that Charles had on ‘What’d I Say’, saying, “‘What’d I Say’ seemed to be the start of all the guitar-lick records, because none of us had electric pianos, so we all did it on guitar, to try and get that low sound. And before that, everything was mainly licks like you get on the Little Richard rock ’n’ roll records. ‘What’d I Say’ started a whole ball game, which is still going now.”
The song also managed to come in handy when solidifying the Fab Four’s lineup later down the line. Every other band tried their hand at tunes like ‘What’d I Say’, but when Ringo Starr got behind the drum kit, The Beatles went from being a decent little combo with Pete Best to the musical freight train that they would become later.
So while most of Lennon’s early career involved him faking the kind of sounds he heard on old Ray Charles records, it wasn’t for a lack of ability that he landed on the style that he did. All great rock and roll was about finding one’s own voice on their instrument, and even if Charles was a starting point, all Lennon needed was a few more twists and turns to become one of the greatest songwriters that anyone had ever heard.
