In the grand history of rock and roll, there has never been someone more willing to take the piss out of their own work than John Lennon.
As much as The Beatles were looked at as gods among men half the time they played, Lennon was the one always telling the fans that he wasn’t the perfect artist that everyone thought he was and even went out of his way to insult the way that he sang most of his tunes. He didn’t think that he was exactly like Pavarotti behind the microphone, but all of his greatest heroes normally had a different kind of tone in their voice than everyone else.
After all, the early rock and rollers were never supposed to sound completely clean whenever they sang. Little Richard’s entire gimmick was being able to scream to the heavens on all of his tunes, and while Chuck Berry had a smoother voice than everyone else, he still wasn’t going to be the same clean singer that someone like Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra was in their prime. He was singing from the gut, and Lennon figured he would follow suit when he wrote his own classics.
And in terms of his range, Plastic Ono Band really has everything that he’s capable of under one roof. The whole album was about him deconstructing his own fragile mind, and with nothing else to hide behind, you get everything from the softer Lennon on ‘Love’ to the screaming at the end of ‘Mother’ to the primal freakout that’s going on in the middle of ‘Well Well Well’ when the band really starts grooving.
But in terms of vocal tone, Lennon wasn’t only a rock and roll fan. Jerry Lee Lewis and Berry were still among his all-time heroes, but the Fab Four needed to know more than a few rock and roll numbers to get them through their early Hamburg circuits. That meant listening to everything, and while McCartney convinced them to start playing some more nostalgic showtunes now and again, Lennon couldn’t get enough of what he heard coming out of Motown.
The R&B groove was already there in a lot of early rock and roll songs, but everyone from The Supremes to The Temptations were setting a new standard for what pop stars could sound like. There were also musical legends like Stevie Wonder, but everything that Lennon ever wanted to hear out of a vocalist could be found in Smokey Robinson.
That gritty croon was absolutely fantastic at the time, and even when Lennon was going down the avant-garde rabbit hole, he still found time to compliment Robinson’s pipes, saying, “There’s just one line in this Miracles’ record – ‘I’ve Been Good to You’ – where it goes ‘You got me Cry-y-y-yeying’ – no breath, a beautiful little piece, I always love to hear it. I think he’s [Smokey Robinson] got the most perfect voice, you know, I just think the group’s got into such a same-y groove that it spoils it really.”
And it doesn’t take a musical scholar to hear Lennon’s admiration for him in practice. Even if you didn’t know that ‘You Really Got a Hold on Me’ was originally a Miracles song, Lennon’s powerhouse performance of ‘This Boy’ back in the day only comes from someone who’s heard more than their fair share of Motown classics. That influence never stopped, either, since Lennon was still calling back to Robinson when making Double Fantasy shortly before his death.
He had been through many different musical eras and gone down the experiment rabbit hole more than a few times, but the fact that Lennon always found time for Robinson really is a testament to his voice. Not every song had to be an absolute barnburner or anything, but you can feel your heart aching whenever you hear the rest of the band coming in behind him on ‘Ooh Baby Baby’.
