To plenty of people, The Beatles are the pinnacle of music. When they broke out and Beatlemania took hold, they were the biggest band in the world. In the decades since, they’ve barely slipped from that post, and their legacy holds strong and keeps them as one of if not the most beloved band in musical history. However, if it was up to John Lennon to hand out the trophy for the best rock and roll track, he’d be giving it to someone else.
While we often talk about The Beatles as one of the most innovative troupes in music history due to their vast experimentation in their later years, it’s also true that they did a lot of copying. Back at the start, they were doing what every other rock and roll act in the UK was doing, which was stealing inspiration from across the pond. Realistically, the British Invasion was simply new acts singing the same songs back to American crowds, only in a different accent, as the likes of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones borrowed heavily from artists from the US.
It’s a strong lineage. There would be no rock and roll without the American masters of blues music that came before it. Then, there would be no British rock and roll and certainly no Beatles without the records of early American rock and roll acts making their way across the Atlantic, with the sounds of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and more being endlessly inspiring to English acts.
But for Lennon, it was another name that inspired him most, standing as another vital figure in the lineage that birthed his own band. And to him, no one since ever beat the man that first influenced him. Lennon said, “No group, be it Beatles. Dylan or Stones have ever improved on (Jerry Lee Lewis’) ‘Whole Lot of Shaking’ for my money,” counting his own band amongst the inferior ranks.
To Lennon, Jerry Lee Lewis was the ultimate rock and roller. He couldn’t be cool about his love for the American pianist as during the one time they met, he embarrassed both of them. “I had only three childhood idols, Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee, and I haven’t seen any live,” he told a friend, per the book Lennon: The Definitive Biography by Ray Coleman. So in the early 1970s, during his ‘Lost Weekend’ period, the ex-Beatle attended one of Lewis’ shows.
At the end of the gig, Lennon was so in awe of his idol that he dropped to his knees and began kissing the musician’s feet. “That’s all right, son,” Lewis said. “You just get up now.”
“I was a bit embarrassed,” Lewis later told The Guardian, but the act shows just how much he meant to Lennon. For a man who once claimed that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, Jerry Lee Lewis seemed to be like a god to him.
He was the man who started it all, as Lennon told Rolling Stone, “That’s the music that inspired me to play music. There is nothing conceptually better than rock and roll.” Lewis was the artist who first introduced Lennon to the sound and first moved him to make his own music. So after making his dreams come true and becoming one of the most famous artists in the world, it’s no longer Lennon was overwhelmed as he tried to pay his respects to his hero.
