John Lennon always had a competitive streak when making his tunes. Although he may have had his own standards to live up to, it was hard to really slip up when Paul McCartney was right next to him, trying to one-up him with what he could write. However, in terms of raw rock and roll, one of the staples of The Beatles’ Cavern days was still something that he tried to crack for years.
But looking at all of The Beatles’ greatest hits, Lennon was always the straight-ahead rock and roller at the start of their career. Looking at how he’s been portrayed in every version of their story, Lennon seemed like the kind of person who would never play on anything too syrupy and listened exclusively to Chuck Berry throughout the first half of his career.
And why not? After all, Berry was the one who introduced rock and roll overseas to a lot of potential rock stars, and while Lennon was far from the first to be wowed by songs like ‘Johnny B Goode’, his shows at the Cavern were about more than making people dance. It was about living out the kind of fantasy that his Aunt Mimi would never let him have once he got back home.
Then again, The Beatles were never snobs about what they put together live onstage. There would be the occasional rock and roll potboiler, but then there would be McCartney adopting show tunes like ‘A Taste of Honey’ or Lennon and Harrison playing Carl Perkins tunes or making instrumentals like ‘Cry for a Shadow’.
Out of all of the rockers in their catalogue, though, it’s a wonder why ‘Some Other Guy’ never became one of the cover tunes on any of their albums. It had all the trappings of the bluesy tunes that had come before, and considering how animated they came off on record, the scant live recording of them playing ‘Some Other Guy’ in the Cavern is miles above tunes like ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ and ‘Bad Boy’ that would come later.
Despite Lennon moving miles away from standard rock and roll, he still thought that ‘Some Other Guy’ was the kind of song that he was still trying to match by the time they were working on The White Album, saying, “I’d like to make a record like ‘Some Other Guy’. I haven’t done one that satisfies me as much as that satisfies me.”
Looking at his solo career, though, Lennon was never that concerned with equalling the tune to cover it. It was about expressing what was in his heart, and when it was outright anger, it would usually come out sounding a lot more like what turned up on ‘Well Well Well’ on Plastic Ono Band or the snide delivery he gave on ‘How Do You Sleep’ off of Imagine.
Still, his cover album, Rock ‘n’ Roll, was at least a sign that he still knew how to make something that called back to that early 1950s style of rock and roll. Who knows? Maybe if we could have seen his music get fleshed out a bit more after Double Fantasy, he could have made something with that same kind of energy as what turned him on back in the day.
