When you are a proud music geek, you sit and think about things like who is the ultimate rock star. There are a number of choices for a variety of reasons. For global impact it could very easily be Bob Marley. Elvis Presley was of course the first real rock star (not that he originated rock, but the first true rock star). With their mystique and charisma Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison have enthralled fans for generations. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have embodied rock and roll for decades. When it comes to the idea of rock gods no one surpasses Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.
Then when you look at all the traits that define a rock star — the talent that transcends generations; an uncompromising approach to their art; a voice for good; influence on other musicians; a willingness to evolve and a charisma that speaks to all languages and all cultures — you could make a damn strong case for David Bowie, who might be number two.
But when thinking about it as a whole, especially the social consciousness, the completely unyielding steely resolve and the powerful influence, the name that comes to mind most often is John Lennon (who Bowie once called “his greatest mentor”).
Talk to other musicians and they’ll certainly speak of his transcendent influence. In my thousands of interviews, Lennon’s enormous role in shaping rock comes up again and again.
“If we’re talking about protest songs the first man I fell in love with was John Lennon,” Garbage’s Shirley Manson once told me. “To me, he’s always the coolest Beatle because he made a stand and arguably paid the big price for it. He was the original protestor and he has stayed with me and his example has stayed with me my whole life and probably always will.”
Lennon’s passion for social change also echoed with Sinead O’Connor. “John Lennon obviously I admire because he used his platform as much as he could for things he believed in,” she once told me.
The number of artists who cite Lennon’s “Imagine” as the greatest protest song of all time, though it might not even be his best, is staggering. And as with so much of his work, it transcends generations and genres from Carlos Santana to Imagine Dragons’ Dan Reynolds.
“That’s the most protest song I ever heard because it takes a lot of courage, actually balls, when people can get really angry when you say, ‘Imagine no religion,’” Santana eloquently and passionately told me. “‘Imagine,’ every time you hear that song, all the nations stand at attention and they just celebrate the possibility of living in this planet without the trappings of organized religion or politics. It’s not an organized money-making thing, making people feel dumb, your ass is grass because you’re a racist sinner and you’re not worthy of god’s grace and you have to go to them to get to heaven. So when you say ‘Imagine’ as a protest song, that’s not protest just for hippies, it’s a protest on all the principles.”
Reynolds shared a similar view. “I base my life on my principles more off ‘Imagine,’ by John Lennon, than probably any song I’ve ever heard in my whole life,” he told me. “The whole feeling of that song and how it comes across has never been preachy to me. But the idea of imagine a world of equality and setting aside the frailty and corruption of mankind and just seeing each other as humans existing, John Lennon, for me, has definitely inspired me more than any artist as far as that goes.”
Look at the artists who have covered just that song. It’s stunning. Neil Young, Chris Cornell, Lady Gaga, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Bowie, Pink, Madonna, Etta James, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, Diana Ross, Eddie Vedder, Dolly Parton, Joan Baez.
Part of what makes the song so profound and enables it to reach across language barriers is the simplicity of the song. As Sheryl Crow told me once of the song: “A song like ‘Imagine,’ by John Lennon, that sounds almost like a nursery rhyme, so simple that we almost laugh it off as being anybody could have written that. Songs like that are such gifts.”
Indeed, I have discussed for years my favorite Beatles song, the Lennon composition, “In My Life.” It’s a song that, as a writer, you think to yourself, “I could have written that. Why didn’t I write that?”
“Though I’ll never lose affection/For people and things that went before/I know I’ll often stop and think about them/In my life I love you more,” he sings in the song’s final verse.
It is a song anyone feels they could have written, but only Lennon thought to write it. That is so much of the magic of John Lennon as a songwriter. He spoke as directly and from the heart as any rock writer ever.
Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan explained it to me beautifully. “What he did quite simply with just ‘Imagine,’ for instance, was deeply political. That was a deeply political song, and at the same time, the most simplistic,” Gahan said. “You listen to it and you go, ‘I should have just wrote that. I should have taken away all this bulls**t and just put it down honestly from my heart, what I would like to happen.’ Because that’s what people really identify with, a true feeling.”
Speaking of Lennon’s powerful “Working Class Hero,” Courtney Love told me, “I’m so envious of ‘Working Class Hero.’ It’s one of those songs that’s so simple.”
“Working Class Hero” comes from Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band, an album that is a marvel on so many levels.
Speaking to me about the album, Lenny Kravitz once said to me, “Plastic Ono Band was a major album for me and you can hear it on Let Love Rule. I hadn’t really heard Plastic Ono Band until I’d already made two or three songs for Let Love Rule and I remember I was meeting with a manager. He heard a couple of tracks and he said, ‘Are you a big fan of Plastic Ono Band?’ I went and got it. I heard the similarities he was talking about, but it also then taught me a lot. It just took me to another level and that record during that time for me was really big.”
That was and still is the power of that album. Recorded during a period Lennon was undergoing primal scream therapy after the end of the Beatles, the album remains one of the prototype records for candor and rawness in the annals of rock.
It was a stunner for fans. This was Lennon’s first post-Beatles solo album, his first full statement on who he was going to be as a solo artist.
Think about the song “God.” Against a minimal arrangement, Lennon lists a litany of things he doesn’t believe in, disavowing cultural institutions from the Bible and Elvis to kings and Kennedy.
The song reaches a crescendo as Lennon sings, “I don’t believe in Elvis/I don’t believe in Zimmerman/I don’t believe in Beatles.” Then the music drops again as Lennon sings, “I just believe in me/Yoko and me, that’s reality/The dream is over/What can I say?/The dream is over yesterday/I was the dream weaver/But now I’m reborn/I was the walrus/But now I am John/And so, dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on/The dream is over.”
There is no contemporary equivalent to measure the boldness of a Beatle, the biggest band in history, coming out in his first solo album and disavowing the group. There is nothing in contemporary music that can come close to compare, so it’s impossible to fathom now the courage and honesty it took to say that in song.
Speaking of Lennon, Serj Tankian said to me, “All he was doing is following his vision and being true to himself, which hopefully all artists are.”
But of course not all artists are. As bold a statement as Plastic Ono Band it wasn’t even the most courageous thing Lennon did in following his vision. Following the birth of his son Sean in 1975, Lennon took a hiatus from the music industry, he walked away to be a husband and father.
This was the voice of a generation, arguably the most famous rock star in the world, coming off a No 1 song on his own with “Whatever Gets You Thru The Night” and with David Bowie (“Fame”) as well as a legendary guest appearance at Madison Square Garden with Elton John, with whom he also hit the top of the charts playing guitar and singing back-up on Elton John’s cover of “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.”
Though he appeared with Ringo Starr on a track in 1976, Lennon wouldn’t fully return to music until October 1980. And in typical Lennon fashion, he answered all those critics who thought he was crazy to step away in the stunning “Watching The Wheels.”
The song starts with Lennon singing, “People say I’m crazy/Doing what I’m doing.”
To them he later responds: ” I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round/I really love to watch them roll/No longer riding on the merry-go-round/I just had to let it go.”
Lennon’s greatest gift as a songwriter was how he could work effectively in both the intensely personal and the political and often intertwine them into one. The Eagles’ Don Henley once told me that was what made Lennon a hero to his band. “John Lennon was great at it because he put it on such a human level and he’s certainly been one of our role models,” Henley said.
In calling Lennon, along with the Clash’s Joe Strummer, his favorite political songwriter, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong echoed that sentiment with me. “They have so much conviction in their voice, the way they sing it,” Armstrong told me of Lennon and Strummer. “I’ve always liked the kind of songwriter that can make a statement, but also have a sappy song about a girl too.”
Maybe Lennon’s sweetest song though was for his son Sean on the 1980 comeback album, Double Fantasy. In the song’s most famous passage, Lennon sings, “Before you cross the street/Take my hand/Life is what happens to you/While you’re busy making other plans.”
It’s hard to think of another writer who was that open. There are a few who’ve achieved those moments of vulnerability, but not as consistently as Lennon and certainly they didn’t deliver the same social message.
Strictly as a songwriter who else, besides arguably Bob Dylan, could’ve written songs as idealistic as “Imagine” and “All You Need Is Love”; songs as powerful as “God” and “Working Class Hero” and songs as intimate as “Watching The Wheels” and “In My Life”?
As a songwriter, Lennon, on his own and with Paul McCartney, left a catalog that is simply unrivaled in rock’s history. And that he combined that talent with such a passionate voice and an influence that is as strong or stronger today than it’s ever been makes him as compelling a figure as rock has ever seen.
But it’s the courage and the way he followed his own path that defines Lennon’s stature as the ultimate rock star. If, rock stars are those that we want to be for their mystique and integrity who has embodied that better than John Lennon?
There are two quotes from Lennon himself that sum up why he represents all that the rock star should be.
“Nobody controls me. I’m uncontrollable. The only one who controls me is me, and that’s just barely possible,” he once said.
The other: “My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.”
