Of the four members of The Beatles, John Lennon was probably the most original songwriting creative, an artist who came up with dozens of brilliantly inventive melodies through sheer instinct while exploring a guitar or keyboard. However, he was also arguably the band’s weakest musician.
Lennon certainly improved his guitar-playing from the band’s early days touring Merseyside and Hamburg. Still, as he improved, so did George Harrison, who began as the group’s most capable solo guitarist, and Paul McCartney, who was a natural multi-instrumentalist.
That’s not to say Lennon didn’t have his standout moments as a Beatles guitarist, though. He spent a decade singing and playing rhythm guitar at the same time on most of the band’s songs, which is much harder than he made it look. It was typically Harrison, though, who was tasked with lead guitar parts since they required more dexterity. And when Harrison didn’t play lead, McCartney stepped in more often than not.
It might come as a surprise, then, that Lennon racked up lead guitar parts on a variety of Beatles songs during the band’s seven years making records together. Some of them were for songs he composed himself in the later years of their time as a band, when each member tended to write their own songs separately from the others and assign themselves multiple instrumental roles. Yet others feature on earlier Beatles numbers, too, suggesting that Lennon had something of his own to bring to the table as a lead guitarist.
So, how many times did he play lead?
In total Lennon played lead guitar on 16 different songs recorded by The Beatles. We can see his value to the group as a lead guitarist on the very last instrumental contribution he recorded with the band, his dirty blues solos on ‘The End’. His very first lead guitar part for the group is almost a mirror image of that contribution, as he begins his solo on their 1964 Little Richard cover ‘Long Tall Sally’ with a blues-infused, string-bending repetition of a diminished seventh chord.
In between recording this track and the band’s final studio sessions together, Lennon dovetailed with Harrison on the complex riff borrowed from Bobby Parker’s ‘Watch Your Step’ for ‘I Feel Fine’. He was front and centre for the iconic dual lead guitar parts on ‘Day Tripper’. Incredibly, he even played lead on the McCartney-penned Christmas number one ‘Hello, Goodbye’, which he claimed to despise in subsequent years. He played the intricate acoustic introduction to ‘Across the Universe’ in 1968. And, in one of the heaviest songs The Beatles ever released, he shredded his way through the slow-burning epic ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’.
Lennon was a far more capable guitarist than people often give him credit for. The range of harmonic patterns and sounds covered in this collection of songs proves his proficiency and versatility as a lead player. What’s more, every part he played was imbued with his own distinctive style. In many other bands, he would have been the go-to guitarist. But The Beatles were not only unrivalled as songwriters. Each member had the musicianship to back it up.
Every song by The Beatles featuring John Lennon on lead guitar:
‘Across the Universe’
‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’
‘Day Tripper’ (together with George Harrison)
‘The End’ (together with Paul McCartney and George Harrison)
‘For You Blue’
‘Get Back’
‘Hello Goodbye’ (together with George Harrison)
‘Hey Bulldog’
‘I Feel Fine’ (together with George Harrison)
‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’
‘I’m So Tired’
‘It’s All Too Much’
‘Long Tall Sally’ (first solo)
‘Nowhere Man’ (together with George Harrison)
‘Slow Down’
‘Yer Blues’ (first solo)
