(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 7 September 2025 16:00, UK
John Lennon was far from a snob when it came to pop music.
It was never out of the question to see him listening to everything that he could get his hands on in The Beatles, but he knew that even some of the musical giants couldn’t compare to the mainstays in his record collection.
Then again, that’s how every rock and roll star tends to approach their favourite artists. Even if there are bands doing great things in the modern age or have released masterpieces well after the audience’s prime, they’re always going to have those sentimental moments when they were a teenager and first falling in love with music, and that came from Lennon getting excited over the early days of rock and roll.
Because when you think about it, the earliest rock stars felt like a musical bolt of lightning compared to everything else on the charts. Outside of the legends like Chuck Berry, the only people that the mainstream had to deal with were the likes of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. That’s not to say that ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ didn’t have some great tunes every now and again, but there’s no comparison which singer had more energy when looking at him compared to Little Richard or Chuck Berry.
But given that racial tension was still high at this point, it wasn’t hard to see when some major labels were having white stars sing the biggest hits by black artists and making a fortune off of it. Pat Boone was more than welcome to sing a song like ‘Tutti Frutti’, but looking at his version and Little Richard’s version felt like listening to the sanitised version of rock and roll that even the most devout Catholic pastor would approve of.
Although Lennon could see through most of the copycats, he felt that the surf movement that was happening around the same time couldn’t hold a candle to the original rock and rollers, saying, “We didn’t know anything about the race records business then. Music to us was music. We were talking about all these Black people and the questioners’ faces fell. They said, ‘Oh, you don’t go for The Beach Boys, Jan & Dean?’ And we said, ‘C’mon man, that’s rubbish’. In fact, when we arrived (in the US) in 1964, we had a total of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Little Richard as musical idols. It hurt my heart that they were not as big as they were in the 1950s.”
It’s not hard to see why The Beach Boys weren’t resonating as strongly back in the day, either. Brian Wilson could create beautiful vocal harmonies to put on top of ‘Surfin USA’, for instance, but his strong suit was always better utilised when he started making his own symphonies rather than throwing his surf lyrics on top of a Chuck Berry chord progression.
And not every white artist was exactly trying to make a quick buck off of the black artists that came before them. As much as Elvis Presley’s managers could get into shady business dealings with the owners of the songs he covered, ‘The King’ always seemed to have a high reverence for those who came before him, even managing to cop a few of the dance moves that he saw in the clubs when he was younger.
Saying a band like The Beach Boys were “rubbish” might seem a little harsh given their legendary status, but Lennon was only speaking on a small piece of their discography. He knew that they needed to start working in different areas if they wanted to succeed, and while the winning formula wasn’t hurting anyone, their longevity is a lot more secure thanks to tunes like ‘God Only Knows’.
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