Any artist is going to have a bit of a love-hate relationship with their voice at some point. Regardless of how many times people talk someone up as being the next Freddie Mercury, no one can tolerate their own voice for that long, and even the biggest names in music have found themselves frustrated when not getting the sound that they wanted out of their monitors. While John Lennon usually had a problem with his singing voice on principle, he admitted that the song ‘Just Because’ from his album Rock ‘n’ Roll was never captured properly.
If Lennon would have stayed out of trouble, though, he may not have had to record the song at all. Since Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ sounded a little too close to what he came up with for The Beatles’ ‘Come Together’, this was his way of splitting the difference by cutting an album of old rock standards.
And it’s not like he couldn’t pull them off effectively. This was the kind of music that he had been jamming on since his days before being Fab, so hearing him take a swing at everyone from Little Richard to Buddy Holly is a treat for anyone who loved that early era of The Beatles as a scrappy bar band.
But as much as Lennon could pull off his own ballads, he wasn’t nearly as comfortable singing some of the more disposable rock tunes. He could still deliver them effectively like their cover of Buddy Holly’s ‘Words of Love’ or The Miracles’ ‘You Really Got a Hold On Me’, but it always made more sense for him to tear through ‘Twist and Shout’ while Paul McCartney sang ‘Till There Was You’.
Still, ‘Just Because’ at least gives fans a little taste of what he was like in his early days. We’re almost in full-on doo-wop territory for this song as Lennon sings about wanting to dance with his other half. Compared to every other Lennon love song, there’s something much more pure about this kind of puppy love song. It’s just a shame that Lennon never learned it properly.
When talking about recording the album for Rolling Stone, Lennon remembered just how much of a hassle it was trying to get the song absolutely right, saying, “At the end of making that record, I was finishing up a track that Phil Spector had made me sing called ‘Just Because,’ which I really didn’t know — all the rest I’d done as a teenager, so I knew them backward — and I couldn’t get the hang of it.”
Granted, any substandard John Lennon vocal is still a candidate for one of the greatest performances in rock and roll. He admittedly does do a lot better tearing through a track like ‘Slippin’ and Slidin’, for instance, but given the fact that he could still run through a sentimental ballad like this in one pass and still make it work is a testament to the kind of voice that he had.
He was never one to mince any of his words, even if he was making a cover tune, and on ‘Just Because’, fans aren’t hearing the emotionally frail side of Lennon. They’re hearing him as the same smooth Teddy Boy adorned on the album’s cover, with both a heart of gold and a chip on his shoulder.
