Was John Lennon ever a good guitarist?
John Lennon is undoubtedly one of the most celebrated musicians of all time. As the founding member of The Beatles, he helped usher in a new age of popular music when Britain really did rule the airwaves. And yet, despite our enduring reverence for John, we very rarely talk about his ability as an actual musician.
The question remains: was John actually a good guitarist? Well, that depends on what you mean by ‘good’. If what you mean is ‘technically gifted’, then the answer is clear. John was no virtuoso. Anyway, The Beatles had George Harrison for that. If, however, you define good guitar playing by how well a musician works with their bandmates, their dexterity and their inventiveness, then you’re looking at a very different answer.
John was very good at blending rhythm and lead lines. Consider the opening riff for ‘Norwegian Wood’, which he composed from a hotel room while nursing a broken foot. It’s an impressive arrangement, even more so when you remember that Lennon had spent most of The Beatles’ early career using chords informed by banjo chord shapes, which he’d learned from his mother Julia. Lennon’s familiarity with the banjo may well have helped him to keep up that constant right-hand motion on tracks like ‘All My Loving’ and ‘I Just Want To Dance With You’, the latter of which sees John showcasing the choppy riffage that would come to define Nile Rodgers style decades later.
Lennon rarely played lead with The Beatles; that was George’s responsibility. It’s understandable, then, that he lacked confidence when it came to playing anything other than rhythm. “I was never in the London scenes in the 1960s, whereas George and Paul would be going around everyone’s sessions all the time playing with everybody,” Lennon recalled shortly before his death. “I never played with anybody but The Beatles. I never jammed around with people at all.” Lennon would go on to blame this on a “shyness” and “insecurity” about his skills as a guitarist. “I couldn’t go into a session and play like George Plays,” he continued. “I have a limited vocabulary on the guitar and the piano, so what could I do going in with Cream.”
Given that insecurity, it’s no wonder Lennon’s most impressive lead line comes from a song recorded out of necessity after George Harrison walked out of the Let It Be sessions. With ‘Get Back’, he was required to combine rhythm and lead guitar, blending a chugging 12-bar blues riff with neat licks and disco-infused strumming. With so much going on, it’s a wonder the arrangement is still so melodic. Lennon also had a talent for nailing his effects and guitar tone. Take his work on Revolver, for example. The Beatles wanted a huge sound for Lennon’s guitar part, but the traditional amp-to-mic technique just wasn’t working. George and Paul were growing increasingly frustrated, so engineer Geoff Emerick suggested they run Lennon’s guitar directly into the desk and try overloading the channels. It worked a treat.
Let’s not forget that Lennon was an incredibly gifted songwriter on the guitar. He was underselling himself when he said he had a “limited vocabulary” on the instrument. If that had been the case, I doubt he would have come up with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, which includes some very unusual chord voicings which follow one another in rapid succession. In the first two lines of the first verse, for example, Lennon movies from an E to an Emaj7 to an E7 to an F#m to an E and then to a D. That’s a chord change every other word, pretty much.
Compared to Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon is obviously going to look like a distinctly average guitarist. But that’s just not the kind of guitarist he was. Clapton and Hendrix were stars in their own right; Lennon was part of a band in which everyone had a defined role. In that context, surely being a good guitarist is about leaving room for one’s fellow musicians and serving the song. Lennon did both wonderfully. He also managed to use his “limited vocabulary” to craft some of the most beloved songs in the British pop canon. Now, if that’s not worth something, I don’t know what is.
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