It used to be a cardinal sin for any rock fan to say they liked disco. Despite being one of the most carefree genres of music known to man, just as many so-called connoisseurs of music treated the Donna Summers of the world like they were going to bring about the coming apocalypse. John Lennon never really had a problem with disco, though, and when he heard ‘Shame Shame Shame’ by Shirley and Company, he couldn’t say no to the groove.
Because that’s what disco was all about. Even though a track might stretch out for much longer than a traditional pop single, the point was to get listeners in a trance whenever they hit the dance floor, almost like they were trying to make a song that could play on nonstop rotation in a sweaty nightclub.
Then again, that kind of mindset was the exact opposite of where Lennon was circa disco’s golden age. As his contemporaries like The Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart were trying to shake their groove thing, Lennon was more than happy to hang back at the Dakota, raising his son Sean and hanging up the guitar for years before re-entering the fold.
But ‘Shame Shame Shame’ was enough to get Lennon dancing, telling Rolling Stone, “Even as a rock ‘n’ roll fan of 15, there were very few albums I could sit through. There were always a couple of tracks to miss and go on to the next ones. So I don’t sit ’round and listen to artists’ albums. Unless they’re friends of mine. I like records. I like ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’. Shirley and the gang. Some of this disco stuff [is] great.”
At the same time, why this song? I mean, it has a decent groove, but it’s no match for the more animated funk out of an old James Brown record. The answer? That guitar line. Even though there are a lot of great funk breaks on early Chic records, that nonstop chugging energy on this song is the main engine, which isn’t all that dissimilar from what other classic rock acts like The Doobie Brothers were doing on tracks like ‘Listen to the Music’.
Lennon was always a child of rhythm guitar, and that kind of insistent percussion is probably what looped his ear in first. Since The Beatles’ days, he was always looking to make the band jump whenever he could, so hearing a track like this was not very far away from when the Fab Four used to play with rhythm on tracks like ‘She’s A Woman’ or ‘I Feel Fine’.
In fact, maybe Lennon liked it a little too well. Because when you listen to the song ‘Dear Yoko’ from his comeback album Double Fantasy, he pretty much copped the exact same riff, albeit in a different key and changing the words around. Then again, the way Lennon plays it is more akin to what Buddy Holly would have played had he lived past ‘The Day The Music Died’.
You could call it a guilty pleasure of Lennon’s if you wanted to, but he never believed in slagging off a genre on principle. It was just good music to him, and as long as it managed to get a reaction out of the audience, then it had done its job right.
