John Lennon’s 10 best guitar moments with The Beatles
John Lennon never claimed to be the greatest guitarist in the world. He may have been a fantastic songwriter, but his prowess on the six-string would always be limited to how much he wanted to put into whatever song he was working on at the time. While it would be easy just to have George Harrison do most of the heavy lifting, Lennon has many more guitar pyrotechnics in his arsenal if you know where to look for them.
When talking about basic skill level, though, chances are Harrison mops the floor with his bandleader. They both have their share of highlights in their repertoire, but compared to the brilliant use of phrasing in a song like ‘Something’, Lennon wasn’t exactly going to rewrite Beethoven whenever he decided to solo.
Throughout his days with the Fab Four, he did have more than a few times where his guitar playing was the star of the show. Although he may have put most of his time into writing phenomenal lyrics, there are occasionally those few songs where Lennon is just as capable as a lead guitarist or is doing some insane rhythm that would take people some time actually to pull off.
Do all of these have to necessarily be on a Van Halen level of complexity? Absolutely not, Lennon wasn’t that kind of artist. What he was good at was making a great song, and if that meant breaking out his guitar chops every now and again, he was going to make sure every single note counted.
John Lennon’s best guitar moments:
10. ‘Long Tall Sally’ – single
How are you supposed to leave your stamp on a cover song? The entire point behind a track is to just do justice to the artist that came before, and there was a good chance that not even The Beatles could keep up with the insane stamina of someone like Little Richard. Whereas most of the rock pioneer’s lead breaks would normally come down to him banging away on the piano, Lennon knew how to keep things exciting once he took the solo on ‘Long Tall Sally’.
Because this is practically a rock solo on a rhythm player’s terms. Sticking mainly to inverted chords for the first part of his lead break, Lennon plays off of Ringo Starr half the time, almost working off the various snare hits as he keeps sliding into each lick. Once you start thinking he’s doing something intricate, never fear guitar players. This is Pentatonic City.
Although the entire solo just stays in one little box shape throughout most of Lennon’s break, he possessed the kind of swagger of a guitarist twice his age, keeping everything swinging and maintaining a tight groove while playing some fairly intermediate guitar figures. Harrison may have found himself stumbling over a few of his guitar licks now and again, but most guitarists can only dream of creating something that sounds this fluid.
9. ‘I Feel Fine’ – Single
There’s always been a certain debate surrounding the creation of ‘I Feel Fine’. It may have just been another tune for Beatles fans then, but there’s also a Bobby Parker blues tune called ‘Watch Your Step’ that Lennon ripped off almost verbatim to create the song. No matter who actually came up with the lick, part of Lennon’s genius is being able to play it and sing at the same time.
While Lennon still sticks to his traditional bar chords, getting everything to sound decent is a little bit tricky. Outside of hanging on the suspended fourth, Lennon also has to hit a ninth halfway through the lick, which only gets harder as you move further down the neck and the frets get further apart.
By the time he gets to the start of the verse and is reaching for the ninth on the G chord, you’d swear that he had some superhuman hand to reach that far without Harrison covering for him. And let’s not forget the feedback at the top of the tune, which Lennon would later claim for The Beatles as one of the first innovations they made. It may have been a prelude to punks using distortion, but the greater feat is just how well Lennon’s stretching technique is.
8. ‘Revolution’ – single
As the 1960s came to a close, Lennon became a lot more outspoken about his political views. He didn’t have to worry about people telling him to shut his mouth about the Vietnam War anymore, and ‘Revolution’ was his way of breaking into the mainstream and talking about the contentious topics that were going on in the world. If ‘Hey Jude’ was the soft single to lead people in, Lennon woke you right the hell up the minute that his blaring guitar started.
His playing isn’t flashy on a song like this, but the real magic behind it is how it was recorded. Lennon always wanted to get the nastiest tones out of his guitar, so rather than just plugging it into an amplifier, he plugged it directly into the console, completely overloading the channel and creating that distinctive snarl at the beginning of the tune.
While doing this again could have been insanely dangerous, it’s actually just right when working in the context of this song, almost acting as an air horn to get everyone’s attention before Lennon starts spouting his lyrics about knowing what happens when everything gets knocked down. The experimental ninth iteration of ‘Revolution’ may still live in infamy for some Fab fans, but the single is the perfect balance between the experimental and pop-flavoured sides of Lennon’s personality.
7. ‘Norwegian Wood’ – Rubber Soul
John Lennon was always better suited to coming up with licks rather than guitar solos. If he could play a decent jam for a few bars, great, but a great cluster of notes he could base a song around was much better than just making a random blues jam for no reason. Lennon was only as powerful as his voice most of the time, and when working on ‘Norwegian Wood’, he managed to shoehorn his entire vocal melody into one lick.
While most people know this song as the moment where sitars enter the picture, the riff that Harrison plays throughout the song belongs to Lennon, who starts off the lick on his guitar before singing about his amusing evening with a woman who left him to sleep in the bathtub. It’s almost ingenious how well Lennon weaves the lick around the chords, constantly holding down a D chord as his fretting fingers do the rest of the dance, trying to fill out the tune.
Compared to the other songs in his lick library, this almost feels like something Harrison would do instead of Lennon, but that’s why ‘The Intellectual Beatle’ was the way he was. Just when you think you have him in a box, he changes up his usual songwriting model to keep everyone on their toes.
6. ‘Dear Prudence’ – The White Album
It could be argued that the most that Lennon got out of his experience in India was a decent guitar lesson. Everyone was supposed to be on good behaviour when in the presence of a spiritual guru, but it would only be a matter of months before Lennon started saying that he didn’t believe in anything having to do with Hare Krsna on solo songs like ‘I Found Out’. One thing he did learn there was how to fingerpick like Donavon, and it became one of the longest lasting weapons in his arsenal.
From the first time The White Album started, Lennon’s finger-picking was front and centre on ‘Dear Prudence’, slowly sliding down the guitar neck and plucking its way through the entire song. Even though McCartney nearly steals the show with one of the greatest basslines of his career, this might be the best tone that Lennon got on his acoustic, sounding like an Indian drone instrument since it’s tuned to drop-D.
It turns out that this fingerpicking style was pretty much a cheat code for Lennon to write several of his other ballads, including it in solo numbers like ‘Oh My Love’ and ‘Look At Me’. It’s nowhere near Joni Mitchell’s level of fingerpicking or anything, but whenever Lennon latched onto a technique, he could usually squeeze at least half a dozen great songs out of it.
5. ‘Get Back’ – Let It Be
The entire road to making Let It Be is pretty much a hot mess. As depicted in the documentary Get Back, the Fab Four were at the lowest they had ever been and trying to make something indicative of their roots was not going to work if no one could get on the same page. With Harrison going MIA halfway through the sessions, it was up to Lennon to think of a lead guitar part for ‘Get Back’, and we were about to take a trip back into the blues.
Let’s face it: Without Lennon’s lead guitar and Billy Preston’s piano playing, ‘Get Back’ wouldn’t be that much of a song. The entire premise of the track is based on just two chords, but Lennon’s heavy lifting with bluesy chords and solo is some of the tastiest playing that he ever laid down on record, almost evoking BB King in the way he phrases some of his licks.
Even though Harrison could have easily just laid down a proper lead track once he eventually returned, he knew Lennon’s lick was too good to pass up, just sticking to the rhythm as Lennon led the charge on his signature Epiphone. Lennon is far from someone to toot his own horn when it came to his guitar playing, but if this is what it sounds like with no one else around to play guitar, maybe the band should have left Lennon to his own devices a bit more often.
4. ‘Day Tripper’ – single
The midpoint of The Beatles meant they had to play catch-up with the rest of the groups rising up in their wake. No one gets four versions of Elvis in one band and doesn’t want four others who sound just like them, so the influx of everyone from The Rolling Stones to The Animals meant things jumped up a notch. Lennon was more than ready to rise to the challenge, and when he wrote ‘Day Tripper’, he created his own warped version of ‘Satisfaction’.
While that claim comes with many qualifiers, let me elaborate. There’s no arguing that Keith Richards is one of the greatest rhythm guitarists to ever live, and ‘Satisfaction’ is the definition of what a guitar riff should sound like. Then again, that was still trying to simulate a horn line, whereas Lennon’s is a guitar song to its core, taking the blues walkup and turning it into a monster riff that would take some novice guitar players a little while to get under their fingers.
It might be simple once you get the pattern down, but when Lennon moves it up to the key of B, you’re left without the open strings of the main hook, meaning that you have to do some sort of finger gymnastics trying to keep everything on the right track. Lennon made it look easy, though, and with all due respect to Keef, this might be the one riff where Lennon surpassed him just a little bit. Feel free to file your complaints of rock blasphemy elsewhere.
3. ‘All My Loving’ – With the Beatles
When The Beatles first broke out, that scruffy bar band they used to be hadn’t fully disappeared. For all of the cute makeovers that they got when they started making waves in America, the band were still the rough-and-tumble group of boys that could play for hours at a time in Hamburg and lit up the Cavern Club night after night. No one gets to play that much without having a solid right hand, and Lennon was one of the best in the business from the first time they set foot on The Ed Sullivan Show.
‘All My Loving’ might be one of McCartney’s greatest early songs, but Lennon’s guitar part is the real engine of the song. Taking his cues from the doo-wop chord changes he heard on girl-group records, Lennon plays in triplets while changing chords every couple of seconds, which is a lot harder than it probably looks.
He may be smiling for the fans in the footage, but it takes a long time for a song like this to sound fluid, usually involving guitarists carefully getting the chord in shape and making sure that every note is ringing within a few milliseconds. This may be attributed to Lennon’s use of banjo chords from when he first started on guitar, but no one gets anything sounding that tight without years of experience with the guitar across their torso.
2. ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ – Abbey Road
By the end of The Beatles’ tenure, Lennon was looking to move past the typical sounds of rock and roll. The Buddy Hollys and Chuck Berrys of the world already existed, and it was time for him to make a more artistic statement than the people he grew up listening to. That didn’t mean he always needed words, and ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ let the music do the talking half the time.
While this is the last official song that all of The Beatles worked on together, the lead work comes from Lennon copying the vocal melody on guitar. Lennon was never known for playing the same thing twice all the time, and when he harmonises with his voice on guitar, it sounds like he’s playing his instrument like a wild animal, constantly trying to reel himself in before McCartney’s fabulous bass break.
Granted, we can’t get around this song without talking about that ending riff. Fitting partway between classical progressions and a blues dirge, the menacing riff towards the end of the song is one of the most ominous sounds that the band ever made, especially with the noise of a synthesiser plodding away in the background to make everything sound chaotic. When the end times eventually hit, and we are somehow granted the choice to listen to one song, this is probably the most accurate thing to listen to as the Earth is being reduced to rubble.
1. ‘The End’ – Abbey Road
It’s hard to listen to any of Abbey Road without feeling a bit bittersweet. No one could have known it at the time, but they were listening to one of the last Beatles albums they would ever release, and these four lovable musicians that we came to know as personal friends wouldn’t be performing together anymore. There was only one way to go out: an epic guitar battle for the ages.
While Starr had to be coaxed into doing a drum solo, the lead guitar trade-off in ‘The End’ is one of the last pieces of camaraderie the band captured on record, with McCartney, Harrison, and Lennon each taking turns bringing their best licks to the table. McCartney may have been flashy and Harrison may have had a better lead tone, but there’s a good case to be made that Lennon won this guitar duel.
With his amp cranked as loud as it can go, most of his licks are just rhythm fills that had mountains of attitude poured into them. The best riff in the song is Lennon’s second time around, where he plays the lowest strings of his guitar and ends up sounding like a dinosaur trying to speak for the first time. Considering how much tension was in the studio, it’s saying something that Lennon specifically told Yoko Ono not to come onto the recording floor as they were playing this. This was going to be his last time to be one of the guys in the band, and he was going to make this count.