You could spend weeks analysing the work of John Lennon. He has written so much in The Beatles, as a solo artist and for other musicians, that there is enough material to ponder over and pine through to put together a clear picture of the person behind the pieces. However, if you ever wanted to condense the work of John Lennon into one word, it would have to be “honest”.
Many people claim that Yoko Ono was responsible for changing John Lennon and that his long hair, activism, and songs containing social commentary were all a by-product of her. Ono always rejected this idea, saying Lennon was always that man; she just met him during a period when he was ready to express it more. When you look back at Lennon’s comments throughout his career, it becomes clear that Ono is right.
Before The Beatles had even landed in America, John Lennon was worried that he would be shunned by the proudly capitalist nation because he had made his comments in favour of communism known just before. Equally, he and the rest of the band had to dress differently and cut their hair in a bid to be accepted by the mainstream.
One of the main reasons The Beatles broke up was that Lennon and McCartney’s ideas about what made a good song were beginning to vary too much. McCartney liked writing pop songs and tracks that people could sing along and dance to. Meanwhile, Lennon wanted to write music that was a better reflection of himself, something unwaveringly honest and that gave people insight into who he was.
This is evident as once he started writing solo music and working in bands outside of The Beatles, honesty was at the forefront of everything he released, even if it meant upsetting his fans. “Many, many people will not like ‘Mother’; it hurts them,” said Lennon, discussing the track from the album Plastic Ono Band, “The first thing that happens to you when you get the album is you can’t take it. Everybody reacted exactly the same. They think, ‘fuck!’ That’s how everybody is. And the second time, they start saying, ‘Oh, well, there’s a little…’ So I can’t lay ‘Mother’ on them. It confirms the suspicions that something nasty’s going on with that John Lennon and his broad again.”
However, even though Lennon was an activist and an otherworldly songwriter who dreamed of being more open with his listeners, he was still human, which meant his influences in early music and that which prompted him to write songs in the first place was comparable to everyone else’s taste. Lennon was as much of a sucker for the draw of rock ‘n’ roll as the next person, and a lot of those early songs stayed with him throughout his career.
He loved rock ‘n’ roll so much that, as a solo artist, he released a plethora of exciting rock ‘n’ roll covers with his own unique twist on them. These were all homages to tracks that he loved, and two songs on the record in particular always appealed to him and stayed with him for very personal reasons.
“‘Bony Moronie’ was one of the very earliest songs – along with ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ – and I remember singing it the only time my mother saw me perform before she died,” recalled Lennon when discussing why the songs meant so much to him, “So I was hot on ‘Bony Moronie’.”