Looking back on it, Lennon said: \u201cIt started in \u201873 with Phil and fell apart. I ended up as part of mad, drunk scenes in Los Angeles and I finally finished it off on me own. And there was still problems with it up to the minute it came out. I can\u2019t begin to say, it\u2019s just barmy, there\u2019s a jinx on that album.\u201d (The Beatles Bible)<\/em><\/p> One of the most striking things about Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll is how unprocessed Lennon\u2019s voice sounds. During the late Beatles years, John had insisted on heavy processing\u2014echo, double-tracking, ADT (automatic double tracking)\u2014because he couldn\u2019t stand hearing his bare voice on tape. He famously told engineer Geoff Emerick<\/strong> to make him sound like he was singing from the top of a mountain or the bottom of a well, anything but straight and naked. But on Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll, there\u2019s almost none of that. His voice is right there, direct and unadorned, singing these songs he\u2019d loved since he was a teenager. Maybe going back to his roots meant stripping away all the studio tricks he\u2019d hidden behind. Or maybe, for once, he was comfortable enough with what he was doing that he didn\u2019t need the protection. Either way, it\u2019s John Lennon\u2019s voice as raw and real as he ever let it be on record. 🎙️<\/p> To nitpick, there are echo effects applied on this album, particularly reverb, to give the vocals and some instruments a sense of space. But it\u2019s used sparingly and conventionally, unlike the heavy, often experimental echo and slap-back delay Lennon insisted on previously.<\/p> The whole thing began because of a Beatles song, \u201cCome Together.\u201d Lennon wrote the song for Abbey Road, and he borrowed pretty heavily from Chuck Berry\u2019s \u201cYou Can\u2019t Catch Me\u201d\u2014not just the vibe, but actual lyrics. The line \u201cHere come old flat-top\u201d came straight from Berry\u2019s song. Lennon described it as \u201cme, writing obscurely around an old Chuck Berry thing.\u201d (The Beatles Bible)<\/em><\/p> Chuck Berry\u2019s publisher, Morris Levy, noticed the similarity and sued Lennon for copyright infringement. The case was heading to court in December 1973, but they settled out of court with a weird agreement: Lennon had to record three songs owned by Levy\u2019s publishing company, Big Seven Music, on his next album. The songs were \u201cYou Can\u2019t Catch Me,\u201d \u201cAngel Baby,\u201d and \u201cYa Ya,\u201d though Lennon could swap out the last two if he wanted.<\/p> Instead of being annoyed about it, Lennon apparently thought this was a great opportunity. He was separated from Yoko Ono at the time and living in Los Angeles with his assistant May Pang\u2014this was his \u201clost weekend\u201d period, though it lasted way longer than a weekend. Nostalgia was huge in the early seventies; American Graffiti had just come out, and Happy Days was about to launch on TV. Lennon even visited the Happy Days set with May and his son Julian. So rather than writing new material for his next album after Mind Games, he decided to lean into the nostalgia trend and record a whole album of oldies.<\/p> Lennon brought in Phil Spector to produce the album, which seemed reasonable since Spector had produced some Beatles tracks and Lennon\u2019s Imagine album. But Spector was already deep into his eccentric-bordering-on-unhinged phase. About working with Spector this time around, Lennon explained: \u201cOn the Rock \u2018N\u2019 Roll it took me three weeks to convince him that I wasn\u2019t going to co-produce with him, and I wasn\u2019t going to go in the control room, I was only… I said I just want to be the singer, just treat me like Ronnie [Spector]. We\u2019ll pick the material, I just want to sing, I don\u2019t want anything to do with production or writing or creation, I just want to sing.\u201d<\/p> Lennon gave Spector total control\u2014Spector picked songs, booked studios, hired musicians. When word got around that Lennon was recording in Hollywood, everyone wanted in, and some sessions had over thirty musicians crammed into the studio.<\/p> The sessions, which started in mid-October 1973 at A&M Studios, quickly devolved into chaos. Everyone was drinking heavily. Spector showed up to one session dressed as a surgeon and fired a gun into the ceiling, which hurt Lennon\u2019s ears. At another session, someone spilled whiskey all over A&M\u2019s mixing console, and they got banned from the facility. But the really crazy part was that Spector was secretly taking the master tapes home every night without telling Lennon. Then Spector disappeared completely with all the tapes.<\/p> Spector made one cryptic phone call claiming he had \u201cthe John Dean tapes\u201d\u2014a reference to the Watergate scandal. Lennon figured out that Spector meant he had the album\u2019s master recordings and was holding them hostage. Then on March 31, 1974, Spector got into a serious car accident and ended up in a coma. The whole project just stopped dead. The album seemed cursed.<\/p> By mid-1974, Lennon had moved back to New York with May Pang and started writing new material for what became Walls and Bridges. Just before those sessions began, Capitol Records\u2019 Al Coury managed to retrieve the Spector tapes, but Lennon didn\u2019t want to break his momentum on the new album, so he shelved them and finished Walls and Bridges first.<\/p> This created a problem: Walls and Bridges came out first, and while it included one song from Levy\u2019s catalog, it wasn\u2019t the covers album Lennon had promised. Levy threatened to refile his lawsuit. Lennon explained what had happened with Spector, assured Levy the album was still coming, and Levy actually let him use his upstate New York farm to rehearse. In October 1974, Lennon went into the Record Plant East studio and knocked out the tracks in just a few days. He told the musicians to stick close to the original arrangements\u2014no reinventing the wheel.<\/p> To show Levy that progress was happening, Lennon gave him a rough mix of the sessions\u2014basically a work tape, not a finished product. Big mistake. Levy took that rough tape, pressed his own version of the album, calling it \u201cRoots: John Lennon Sings the Great Rock & Roll Hits,\u201d and started selling it through TV mail-order ads. Then he sued Lennon, EMI, and Capitol for $42 million for breach of contract.<\/p> Capitol immediately got an injunction to stop Levy\u2019s bootleg album. There were two trials where Lennon had to explain to the court the difference between a rough mix and a finished recording. Eventually Levy won $6,795 in damages, but Lennon won $144,700, so it worked out in John\u2019s favor. To counter the bootleg, Capitol rush-released the official Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll album in February 1975, even pricing it as a budget release to compete.<\/p> Lennon had originally planned to use some of his childhood drawings for the cover, but switched those to Walls and Bridges instead. May Pang attended the first Beatlefest convention in September 1974 and met J\u00fcrgen Vollmer, an old friend of the Beatles from their Hamburg days who used to photograph them. She called Lennon immediately when she saw Vollmer\u2019s striking portraits. Lennon picked one showing him standing in a doorway with three blurry figures walking past in the foreground\u2014George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe, and Paul McCartney. It was taken in Hamburg at 22 Wohlwillstra\u00dfe, back when they were all young and hungry and playing rough clubs in Germany.<\/p> The album didn\u2019t even have a title until the last minute. It had been called Oldies But Mouldies as a working title. Then Lennon saw the neon sign art prepared by John Uomoto with his name and the words \u201cROCK \u2018N\u2019 ROLL\u201d beneath it, and it just clicked. That became the title.<\/p> When Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll finally came out in February 1975, the reception from critics was mixed. Some dismissed it as \u201ca step backward\u201d\u2014just an oldies covers album from someone who should be writing original material. But others got what Lennon was doing. The Rolling Stone Album Guide praised how \u201cJohn lends dignity to these classics; his singing is tender, convincing, and fond.\u201d AllMusic later described it \u201cas a peak in [Lennon\u2019s] post-Imagine catalog: an album that catches him with nothing to prove and no need to try.\u201d<\/p> The album hit number 6 in both the US and UK and went gold in both countries. \u201cStand by Me\u201d was released as a single and peaked at number 20 in the US and number 30 in the UK. Lennon promoted it with live appearances on the BBC\u2019s Old Grey Whistle Test and Salute to Sir Lew, singing over backing tracks. They even planned a second single\u2014\u201dSlippin\u2019 and Slidin\u2019\u201d backed with \u201cAin\u2019t That a Shame\u201d\u2014and pressed promotional copies, but it never got released.<\/p> Lennon\u2019s philosophical take on rock and roll itself remained consistent throughout his career. He once said: \u201cThere is nothing conceptually better than rock \u2018n\u2019 roll. No group, be it Beatles, Dylan or Stones, have ever improved on Whole Lot of Shaking for my money. Or maybe I\u2019m like our parents: that\u2019s my period and I dig it and I\u2019ll never leave it.\u201d (Most Quoted) <\/em>And about Chuck Berry specifically: \u201cIf you were going to give Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll another name you might as well call it Chuck Berry.\u201d <\/p> Not long after the album came out, Lennon reconciled with Yoko, and she got pregnant. After three miscarriages, John was determined not to lose another baby, so he basically retired from music to focus on family. Yoko later remembered: \u201cThe day before he was born, in other words on October 8th, we got the notice that John got the immigration Green Card.\u201d Sean Lennon was born in October 1975\u2014on John\u2019s 35th birthday\u2014and Lennon didn\u2019t release another album until Double Fantasy in 1980, just weeks before he was killed.<\/p> Rock \u2018n\u2019 Roll is often overlooked in Lennon\u2019s catalog, probably because it\u2019s covers rather than originals. But it\u2019s actually a really solid album that shows his deep love and respect for the music that shaped him. Yoko summed it up beautifully: \u201cThe album Rock \u2019n\u2019 Roll is amazing. He was not just somebody who came in from the cold to the rock world… His musical roots were Fats Domino, Gene Vincent and Chuck Berry\u2014while mine were Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven. Nobody can sing classic rock like John did. With this album, especially, he showed that he was one of the kings of rock\u2019n\u2019roll.\u201d<\/p> These weren\u2019t just throwaway oldies\u2014they were the songs that made John Lennon want to be John Lennon. And despite all the chaos, lawsuits, and insanity that went into making it, the album captures something genuine: a musician paying tribute to his roots while going through one of the most turbulent periods of his life.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 🥃 How Whiskey and Craziness almost Sank an Album of Classics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"amazonpipp_noncename":"","amazon-product-isactive":"","amazon-product-single-asin":"","amazon-product-content-location":"","amazon-product-content-hook-override":"","amazon-product-excerpt-hook-override":"","amazon-product-singular-only":"","amazon-product-amazon-desc":"","amazon-product-show-gallery":"","amazon-product-show-features":"","amazon-product-newwindow":"","amazon-product-show-list-price":"","amazon-product-show-used-price":"","amazon-product-show-saved-amt":"","amazon-product-timestamp":"","amazon-product-new-title":"","amazon-product-use-cartURL":"","amazon_featured_post_meta_key":"","_amazon_featured_alt":"","amazon-product-template":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[33,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2x2Mt-cfEFu","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181047284"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181047284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181047284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":194564278,"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181047284\/revisions\/194564278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181047284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181047284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weberbooks.com\/kindle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181047284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}🎤 The Raw Voice<\/h2>
⚖️ How It All Started: The Lawsuit<\/h2>
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/33af6075-4702-4108-bb97-eb2e492bad2d_1478x1158.png?w=640&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>🎸 The Phil Spector Disaster<\/h2>
🔄 Starting Over<\/h2>
💰 Morris Levy Strikes Back<\/h2>
📸 The Album Cover and Title<\/h2>
This essay continues below. Click on the title of this product to view on Amazon. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.<\/em><\/h6>
Rock \u2018N\u2019 Roll<\/a><\/h1>
![\"Buy](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/ed59f312-1332-4d91-b4bf-ab5b6ff916d7_500x500.jpeg?w=640&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>🎵 Reception and Legacy<\/h2>
👶 Family First<\/h2>