The day Little Richard left John Lennon speechless: “So much better”
John Lennon was always best at being the stone-faced leader of The Beatles. Even if he put up a rough exterior, he could always be the most vulnerable artist that ever was when the time called for it, but when it came to great rock and roll, there were always people who left him with his jaw on the floor.
But Lennon was never one to complicate rock and roll for the hell of it. Some of his favourite Chuck Berry songs only had a couple of chords to them, and the greatest moments of his career came when he took the basis of rock and roll and twisted it slightly to make the kind of song that no one had thought of yet. It was still adventurous, but it didn’t need to have a billion chords behind it, either.
Compared to Paul McCartney, though, Lennon wanted to be a little bit more blunt whenever he made his music. In a world where rock and roll was still dominating the pop market, Lennon could still find ways to challenge people with the way that he sang. He knew that he wanted to play up his Elvis moves whenever he got onstage, but not even Presley was able to wail like Lennon could when he got to the bridge of ‘This Boy’.
Presley was the prime influence, but even he could have a few songs that got too sentimental for Lennon’s taste. He needed to hear songs that hit people like a smack in the mouth, and while Macca was a far greater imitator of Little Richard, Lennon was transfixed the minute that he heard what the piano-playing madman was doing.
There had been gritty blues singers for years since rock and roll was born, but Little Richard brought a new level of excitement to everything. People simply weren’t ready for this approach to singing at the time, and compared to everybody else on the hit parade, Richard was setting the example for what every heavy metal singer was going to sound like further down the road when he sang tracks like ‘Keep A Knockin”.
Lennon already had his fair share of favourite singers, but he knew that he was witnessing something even bigger in front of his eyes whenever listening to ‘Long Tall Sally’, saying, “When I heard ‘Long Tall Sally’, it was so great I couldn’t speak. I didn’t want to leave Elvis, but this was so much better.” And when looking at Berry and Richard next to each other, there’s no contest who was more excitable.
There were a lot of great stories to be found in Berry’s songs, but even if Little Richard’s songs could blend together after a while, it was always thrilling to hear him put his voice through hell. There might not have been much left of his larynx when he was finished singing his songs, but the sheer insanity of those songs in the 1950s is what made rock and roll either sound taboo for people or like some higher calling.
Presley will forever be known as ‘The King’ of the genre, but for people like Lennon, Little Richard was more than simply another rock and roll prophet. He wrote the rulebook in many ways, and he wanted to make sure that whenever he sang, he had the same intensity as his musical hero.
