Kiss my ass, <\/em>But nothing irritated him more than hearing Little Richard sing “Long Tall Sally.” But if it weren’t for Chuck Berry, none of the Beatles would be doing what they did in the Hamburg clubs in their early days.<\/p>\nBerry never advocated reinventing the wheel, but if we’re talking about pure rock and roll guitar playing, all roads lead back to him. It was he who practically invented the lead guitar lick as we know it, and many of his songs started with the exact same motif every time he played it, which is easily forgivable considering he’s the same guy who wrote “Johnny B. Goode.”<\/p>\n
So when Berry passed away, McCartney had to pay tribute to the man he considered a living god of rock and roll, saying, “Chuck was and still is one of the greatest rock and roll legends in the world. It was an honor to meet him in his hometown of St. Louis and it’s a memory I’ll always have. I can’t really sum up what he meant to all of us young people growing up in Liverpool, but I can tell you this: Try it. \u201d<\/p>\n
Then again, of all the members of the Beatles, John Lennon was probably the biggest Belly fanatic. He had already incorporated the main riff from “You Can’t Catch Me” into “Come Together,” but listening to all the covers he played in his heyday, Lennon sounded like he was having the time of his life every time he started singing something like “Rock ‘n’ Roll Music.”<\/p>\n
But McCartney’s biggest advantage was that he was able to draw influence from everyone else in Berry’s world as well. Almost half of Berry’s best songs come from the blues, and while the band was never going to shy away from playing songs by the likes of Sleepy John Estes, they could at least try to be a little more rootsy when writing their own songs, such as turning the blues into a heavy metal opening on “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).”<\/p>\n
And if Lennon channeled the energy of Chuck Berry songs into his own songs, Macca was doing the same with his lyrics. John Lennon was always just being himself when writing his masterpieces, but since all of Berry’s other songs were teenage fantasies, McCartney effectively took that sentiment in its entirety and applied it to more outlandish stories like “Penny Lane.”<\/p>\n
He wasn’t afraid to concoct stories to suit his songs, and although it inevitably led to his “grandma music” in later years, McCartney wasn’t shy about what he learned from Berry. The father of rock and roll was a starting point for many of his generation, and the idea of \u200b\u200bfollowing in his footsteps is something most of the Fab Four could only dream of when they started playing in Liverpool.<\/p>\n\n