The bespectacled Beatle, John Lennon, was less likely to hold his tongue than a football pundit after a couple of pints.
Sometimes, his pronouncements were caustic, like his spat with the “darling” Todd Rundgren, but other times, he was just being frank. That frankness certainly applies to the moment he accused Rod Stewart of a spot of pop plagiarism back in the 1970s.
As it happens, Lennon was never overly guarded about originality. Much like any British band in the early 1960s, The Beatles gained their initial fame through a series of cover versions released to vast fanfare. The Fab Four, in a similar fashion to The Rolling Stones, leaned heavily on the rock ‘n’ roll spewing out from the United States as they rattled off multiple sets a night in Hamburg. Then, they later regurgitated Stateside staples into a perfectly formed pop hit for the British customer.
Unlike the Stones, however, The Beatles quickly moved on to writing their own songs in a bid for originality. As it happens, they even wrote the Stones’ own breakthrough hit. However, despite switching towards self-written ditties, this new outlook wouldn’t stop them from paying homage to some of their rock music icons like Chuck Berry.
McCartney once admitted that he had lifted Berry’s bassline for ‘I’m Talking About You’ and used it for The Beatles’ own track ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, for example. As he confessed, “I played exactly the same notes as he did, and it fit our number perfectly. When I tell people about it, I find few of them believe me.”
That disbelief stems from the shimmering originality that the group displayed. On paper, it seems like too much of a dichotomy to be simultaneously the most unique band in history and the biggest thieves of the counterculture age, but both are gleefully true. In fact, one informs the other. Rock ‘n’ roll is all about taking what’s good and making it sincerely your own. A well-dressed man doesn’t have to have made his own clothes.
As Nick Cave put it, “The great beauty of contemporary music, and what gives it its edge and vitality, is its devil-may-care attitude toward appropriation — everybody is grabbing stuff from everybody else, all the time. It’s a feeding frenzy of borrowed ideas that goes toward the advancement of rock music — the great artistic experiment of our era.”
Seemingly, Lennon would’ve agreed. His remarks about Rod’s transposition of a Beatles classic are wry, but far from his most cutting. After all, he’d been on the receiving end of an unfortunate allegation himself.
You see, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ wouldn’t be the last time Chuck Berry and The Beatles would cross paths. After the Fab Four shared their song ‘Come Together’, Lennon was forced to change a lyric following legal battering from Berry’s publishers. This perhaps informed his outlook when his work, allegedly, was used by none other than Rod Stewart in 1976.
By Lennon’s reckoning, the singer adapted one of The Beatles’ final tracks into his own iconic song ‘Killing of Georgie’ – undoubtedly one of Stewart’s finest anthems. When talking about the classic track ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, Lennon wasn’t shy about sharing his thoughts on Stewart’s potential pilfering.
“By the way,” Lennon later said to David Sheff, “Rod Stewart turned that into ‘[Georgie] don’t go-o-o.’ That’s one the publishers never noticed.” Indeed, while the chords don’t line up too neatly, the melodic phrasing is certainly very similar.
It didn’t seem to bother Lennon, though, who seemingly understood where Stewart was coming from. “Why didn’t he just sing ‘Don’t Let Me Down’? The same reason I don’t sing other people’s stuff,” he explained, “because you don’t get paid.” It’s a smart assessment from a man who had made a career from the pinching of other people’s material and turning it into a deeply personal expression.
In 2016, Stewart responded to the claims via The Guardian, using his cheeky, happy persona – and perhaps the fact that it was now 40 years down the road from the song’s release – to offer a wry assessment: “It does sound like it,” he said. “Nothing wrong with a good steal.” It’s a flippant remark, but one we imagine Lennon would have let Stewart get away with.
“I’m sure if you look back to the ’60s, you’d find other songs with those three chords and that melody line,” Stewart added duly added. In truth, you could look at any era, both sides of ‘Don’t Let Down’ and see plenty of binding ties. But the world is richer for them.
