Description

John Lennon’s album “Rock ‘n’ Roll is one of those records with a story almost as good as the music itself. Released in February 1975, it’s basically John covering his favorite rock and roll songs from the late fifties and early sixties—the stuff he grew up on, the music that made him want to be a musician in the first place. But getting this album made was an absolute nightmare that took over a year and involved lawsuits, Phil Spector’s insanity, car crashes, and more drama than anyone really needed.

Looking back on it, Lennon said: “It started in ‘73 with Phil and fell apart. I ended up as part of mad, drunk scenes in Los Angeles and I finally finished it off on me own. And there was still problems with it up to the minute it came out. I can’t begin to say, it’s just barmy, there’s a jinx on that album.” (The Beatles Bible)

🎤 The Raw Voice

One of the most striking things about Rock ‘n’ Roll is how unprocessed Lennon’s voice sounds. During the late Beatles years, John had insisted on heavy processing—echo, double-tracking, ADT (automatic double tracking)—because he couldn’t stand hearing his bare voice on tape. He famously told engineer Geoff Emerick to make him sound like he was singing from the top of a mountain or the bottom of a well, anything but straight and naked. But on Rock ‘n’ Roll, there’s almost none of that. His voice is right there, direct and unadorned, singing these songs he’d loved since he was a teenager. Maybe going back to his roots meant stripping away all the studio tricks he’d hidden behind. Or maybe, for once, he was comfortable enough with what he was doing that he didn’t need the protection. Either way, it’s John Lennon’s voice as raw and real as he ever let it be on record. 🎙️

To nitpick, there are echo effects applied on this album, particularly reverb, to give the vocals and some instruments a sense of space. But it’s used sparingly and conventionally, unlike the heavy, often experimental echo and slap-back delay Lennon insisted on previously.

⚖️ How It All Started: The Lawsuit

The whole thing began because of a Beatles song, “Come Together.” Lennon wrote the song for Abbey Road, and he borrowed pretty heavily from Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me”—not just the vibe, but actual lyrics. The line “Here come old flat-top” came straight from Berry’s song. Lennon described it as “me, writing obscurely around an old Chuck Berry thing.” (The Beatles Bible)

Chuck Berry’s publisher, Morris Levy, noticed the similarity and sued Lennon for copyright infringement. The case was heading to court in December 1973, but they settled out of court with a weird agreement: Lennon had to record three songs owned by Levy’s publishing company, Big Seven Music, on his next album. The songs were “You Can’t Catch Me,” “Angel Baby,” and “Ya Ya,” though Lennon could swap out the last two if he wanted.

Instead of being annoyed about it, Lennon apparently thought this was a great opportunity. He was separated from Yoko Ono at the time and living in Los Angeles with his assistant May Pang—this was his “lost weekend” period, though it lasted way longer than a weekend. Nostalgia was huge in the early seventies; American Graffiti had just come out, and Happy Days was about to launch on TV. Lennon even visited the Happy Days set with May and his son Julian. So rather than writing new material for his next album after Mind Games, he decided to lean into the nostalgia trend and record a whole album of oldies.

🎸 The Phil Spector Disaster

Lennon brought in Phil Spector to produce the album, which seemed reasonable since Spector had produced some Beatles tracks and Lennon’s Imagine album. But Spector was already deep into his eccentric-bordering-on-unhinged phase. About working with Spector this time around, Lennon explained: “On the Rock ‘N’ Roll it took me three weeks to convince him that I wasn’t going to co-produce with him, and I wasn’t going to go in the control room, I was only... I said I just want to be the singer, just treat me like Ronnie [Spector]. We’ll pick the material, I just want to sing, I don’t want anything to do with production or writing or creation, I just want to sing.”

Lennon gave Spector total control—Spector picked songs, booked studios, hired musicians. When word got around that Lennon was recording in Hollywood, everyone wanted in, and some sessions had over thirty musicians crammed into the studio.

The sessions, which started in mid-October 1973 at A&M Studios, quickly devolved into chaos. Everyone was drinking heavily. Spector showed up to one session dressed as a surgeon and fired a gun into the ceiling, which hurt Lennon’s ears. At another session, someone spilled whiskey all over A&M’s mixing console, and they got banned from the facility. But the really crazy part was that Spector was secretly taking the master tapes home every night without telling Lennon. Then Spector disappeared completely with all the tapes.

Spector made one cryptic phone call claiming he had “the John Dean tapes”—a reference to the Watergate scandal. Lennon figured out that Spector meant he had the album’s master recordings and was holding them hostage. Then on March 31, 1974, Spector got into a serious car accident and ended up in a coma. The whole project just stopped dead. The album seemed cursed.

🔄 Starting Over

By mid-1974, Lennon had moved back to New York with May Pang and started writing new material for what became Walls and Bridges. Just before those sessions began, Capitol Records’ Al Coury managed to retrieve the Spector tapes, but Lennon didn’t want to break his momentum on the new album, so he shelved them and finished Walls and Bridges first.

This created a problem: Walls and Bridges came out first, and while it included one song from Levy’s catalog, it wasn’t the covers album Lennon had promised. Levy threatened to refile his lawsuit. Lennon explained what had happened with Spector, assured Levy the album was still coming, and Levy actually let him use his upstate New York farm to rehearse. In October 1974, Lennon went into the Record Plant East studio and knocked out the tracks in just a few days. He told the musicians to stick close to the original arrangements—no reinventing the wheel.

💰 Morris Levy Strikes Back

To show Levy that progress was happening, Lennon gave him a rough mix of the sessions—basically a work tape, not a finished product. Big mistake. Levy took that rough tape, pressed his own version of the album, calling it “Roots: John Lennon Sings the Great Rock & Roll Hits,” and started selling it through TV mail-order ads. Then he sued Lennon, EMI, and Capitol for $42 million for breach of contract.

Capitol immediately got an injunction to stop Levy’s bootleg album. There were two trials where Lennon had to explain to the court the difference between a rough mix and a finished recording. Eventually Levy won $6,795 in damages, but Lennon won $144,700, so it worked out in John’s favor. To counter the bootleg, Capitol rush-released the official Rock ‘n’ Roll album in February 1975, even pricing it as a budget release to compete.

📸 The Album Cover and Title

Lennon had originally planned to use some of his childhood drawings for the cover, but switched those to Walls and Bridges instead. May Pang attended the first Beatlefest convention in September 1974 and met Jürgen Vollmer, an old friend of the Beatles from their Hamburg days who used to photograph them. She called Lennon immediately when she saw Vollmer’s striking portraits. Lennon picked one showing him standing in a doorway with three blurry figures walking past in the foreground—George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe, and Paul McCartney. It was taken in Hamburg at 22 Wohlwillstraße, back when they were all young and hungry and playing rough clubs in Germany.

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Rock ‘N’ Roll

The album didn’t even have a title until the last minute. It had been called Oldies But Mouldies as a working title. Then Lennon saw the neon sign art prepared by John Uomoto with his name and the words “ROCK ‘N’ ROLL” beneath it, and it just clicked. That became the title.

🎵 Reception and Legacy

When Rock ‘n’ Roll finally came out in February 1975, the reception from critics was mixed. Some dismissed it as “a step backward”—just an oldies covers album from someone who should be writing original material. But others got what Lennon was doing. The Rolling Stone Album Guide praised how “John lends dignity to these classics; his singing is tender, convincing, and fond.” AllMusic later described it “as a peak in [Lennon’s] post-Imagine catalog: an album that catches him with nothing to prove and no need to try.”

The album hit number 6 in both the US and UK and went gold in both countries. “Stand by Me” was released as a single and peaked at number 20 in the US and number 30 in the UK. Lennon promoted it with live appearances on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test and Salute to Sir Lew, singing over backing tracks. They even planned a second single—”Slippin’ and Slidin’” backed with “Ain’t That a Shame”—and pressed promotional copies, but it never got released.

Lennon’s philosophical take on rock and roll itself remained consistent throughout his career. He once said: “There is nothing conceptually better than rock ‘n’ roll. No group, be it Beatles, Dylan or Stones, have ever improved on Whole Lot of Shaking for my money. Or maybe I’m like our parents: that’s my period and I dig it and I’ll never leave it.” (Most Quoted) And about Chuck Berry specifically: “If you were going to give Rock ‘n’ Roll another name you might as well call it Chuck Berry.”

👶 Family First

Not long after the album came out, Lennon reconciled with Yoko, and she got pregnant. After three miscarriages, John was determined not to lose another baby, so he basically retired from music to focus on family. Yoko later remembered: “The day before he was born, in other words on October 8th, we got the notice that John got the immigration Green Card.” Sean Lennon was born in October 1975—on John’s 35th birthday—and Lennon didn’t release another album until Double Fantasy in 1980, just weeks before he was killed.

Rock ‘n’ Roll is often overlooked in Lennon’s catalog, probably because it’s covers rather than originals. But it’s actually a really solid album that shows his deep love and respect for the music that shaped him. Yoko summed it up beautifully: “The album Rock ’n’ Roll is amazing. He was not just somebody who came in from the cold to the rock world... His musical roots were Fats Domino, Gene Vincent and Chuck Berry—while mine were Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven. Nobody can sing classic rock like John did. With this album, especially, he showed that he was one of the kings of rock’n’roll.”

These weren’t just throwaway oldies—they were the songs that made John Lennon want to be John Lennon. And despite all the chaos, lawsuits, and insanity that went into making it, the album captures something genuine: a musician paying tribute to his roots while going through one of the most turbulent periods of his life.