When Rock And Roll Rocked The Known World-John Lennon’s Rock And 

Roll-A CD Review

CD Review 

By Josh Breslin

Rock And Roll, John Lennon, 1974-5

I really wish my long departed old friend, Peter Paul Markin, met in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 could have reviewed this CD. He was just enough older than me at the time to have been able to appreciate the influence that the classic age of rock and roll, what he calculated as between 1955 and 1965, had on a poor street tough (just look at the cover and you will see what I mean) from the depths of Liverpool had on John Lennon. Made me appreciate this stuff that growing up in Podunk Maine I was not really that familiar with at the time. See Markin (everybody called him the Scribe when he was growing up poor on the tough streets of America but I knew him first under the moniker the Be-Bop Kid on that first long ago meeting) came to his blessed rock and roll music the same way. Let the beat seep into his brain just like Lennon.

While Markin had no particular musical skills he had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what rocked his kindred on those mean streets (and not just the denizens of the mean streets either). What Markin also knew was that along with the quintessential American black-centered blues that rock and roll was being revered and played in the back alleys of England long after those genre were being by-passed by what Markin called the musical counter-revolution that got sprung on the teenage world in the late 1960s and would not be broken through until guys like John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards crossed the Atlantic in the British invasion of the mid-1960s.       

So what you have with this production is John Lennon, post-Beatle John Lennon, going back to the roots. Going back to what kick started his young street tough brain. Are the individual songs performed here the best covers ever done on the classics from the 1950s. No. Does this production even in remastered form give uniformly quality values. No. Does this thing make you want to get up and dance even in your shadowed AARP-worthy life. You bet. Yeah, Markin would have given you why and what for on individual covers like Be-Bop-A-Lula, Stand Be Me, and Sweet Little Sixteen and told you to grab this thing with all your hands as a prime example of what it was like when people played rock and roll for keeps. I agree.