Classic Album Review: John Lennon - Rock N Roll (1975)

With a new John Lennon solo career retrospective released last week, and fresh consideration being given to his post-Beatles work, I thought I'd publish an album review I wrote years ago for another site ... 

Rock N Roll was John Lennon’s sixth post-Beatles “solo” offering - recorded prior to Walls And Bridges but released after it - and it finds the New York-based fabster returning to his earliest roots and influences with an entire album of covers from an even earlier prehistoric era. The iconic album cover photography, an early Sixties shot of John Lennon loitering in a Hamburg doorway, is probably more widely celebrated than any of the recorded material found on the album itself, but that’s not to suggest Rock N Roll is anything other than a fairly decent collection of songs. Given that it was essentially something of a contractual obligation release for the semi-comatose and soon to be semi-retired Lennon, some of it is surprisingly good.

The album was recorded and co-produced by Phil Spector during the second half of 1973, but due to a series of major legal wrangles and some initial mystery over the whereabouts of the master tapes (!), it wasn’t actually released until early 1975 - subsequently going on to make the top 10 in both the UK and the US album charts. Of course, Lennon was enduring his infamous “lost weekend” period and was separated from Yoko Ono (see the inlay production credit to May Pang … “production coordinator and mother superior”) at the time this work was produced, so we perhaps shouldn’t be too surprised that its release was delayed to the extent that it was. 

From all accounts the recording sessions for Rock N Roll were a fairly debauched alcohol-infused process, with the reputedly bad atmosphere in the studio more than partly attributable to Lennon’s own aggression and prevailing sense of angst (all you needed was love, John). In saying that, the presence of Spector doubtlessly added further fuel to the flames if revelations about Spector’s own work habits have any element of truth to them. Let’s be honest - Lennon and Spector present a pretty explosive combination. In fact, after completing the similarly ordinary Walls And Bridges album in 1974, Lennon would return to the Rock N Roll master tapes (eventually secured off Spector) to touch up the less than impressive (read: drunken) vocals, fix some of Spector’s more obvious technical failings, and according to reports – Lennon even went so far as to record nine new tracks. 

Personally, I find the raw non-manufactured nature of classic Rock in general, and early Rock‘n’Roll specifically, completely contrary to the production excesses of Spector and his ilk, so he probably wouldn’t have been my choice to produce an album like this in the first place, and I’ve always felt it was an oddity that Spector is often associated with Rock’s most primitive era. For me, Lennon needed this album to embrace that stripped back, raw, almost-DIY-like ethic for it to have fulfilled its true potential. It is decent enough, just not all it could have been. What we get is something of a compromise. An in-betweener. Yet another great idea spoiled by flawed execution. It would be Lennon’s penultimate solo album - excepting the excellent compilation Shaved Fish (released later in 1975) - and we’d have to wait another five years for Double Fantasy to emerge following the birth of son Sean. 

My CD version is the Yoko-inspired 2004 reissue containing four bonus tracks, including Spector’s own ‘To Know Her Is To Love Her’, and Arthur Crudup’s ‘My Baby Left Me’. 

Best tracks: ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ (some classics are timeless regardless), ‘Stand By Me’ (a top 20 single), a compelling take on the controversial Chuck Berry gem ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ (previously ripped off by The Beatles as ‘Come Together’ and supposedly part of the reason for this album’s very existence), plus an especially fine version of Fats Domino’s ‘Ain’t That A Shame’.