JOHN LENNON Rock ‘N’ Roll (Apple)

I’m a sucker for favorite-oldies albums; I always look forward to them once I’ve heard they’re in the works, and the guarantee of dissatisfaction that comes stamped in the grooves of virtually every one of them (exceptions: the Band’s Moondog Matinee, Bowie’s marvelous Pinups) hasn’t dimmed my hopes. The formula is all too obvious: established singer (rarely group) has reached a plateau, wants a rest, but has record due (possible) or has fallen flat on his face and has nothing to say (more likely - one revered English legend is planning a set called I’m Dry); solution -duck into the studio with The Regulars (the people who really make careers out of Mad Dogs & Englishmen) plus whoever’s hot and expensive (Willie Weeks this week), lay it down, put it out. If you’re lucky it’ll carry you for six months. By that time you’ll be ready to act like a genius again.

As John Lennon has proved beyond a doubt, it looks easy but it isn’t. He picked famous songs by ’50s rockers (Vincent, Holly, Berry, Domino), added a couple of hits by non-giants (Lloyd Price, Lee Dorsey), and whipped through them - after all, he had the music in his blood, and everyone knows it was simple stuff. With the exception of Price’s “Just Because,” a powerful, saddening, deeply felt performance, not one cut on the album would have been considered worth releasing by Sam Phillips, Bumps Blackwell, Phil Chess, Jerry Wexler, or any of the other founding producers of the ’50s, because the cuts have no groove, no flair, no novelty, no distinction, no attack.

What is truly odd is that the oldies included on Lennon’s Rock ‘N’ Roll are inferior to the demos the Beatles made for Decca in ’62 (as are the song selections - there they picked tunes not fully absorbed by audiences, so it was easy to make them seem new), inferior to the oldies on the ’69 Toronto LP, inferior to the casuals put down during the Let It Be sessions, and most of all inferior to the oldies that showed up on the Beatles’ first few discs -“Long Tall Sally,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” and most of all, “Money,” which might be the best recording the Beatles ever made.

The reason might be that when the Beatles played these tunes they did not think they were

playing “oldies.” They simply played music they liked, cared about, and understood. It was merely “their music” - what could be more natural? They weren’t creating sterile homages, like a John Ford movie poster in the background of a Peter Bogdanovich set-up. There must have been, in the beginning, some sense of “What the fuck, we can do that better than Barrett Strong” - a basic pop impulse - and a fear that maybe they couldn’t, so they’d damn well better.

Those are affectionate impulses, but just below the surface, they’re very hard. Lennon’s is an album of soft impulses. The songs John worshipped (and still loves), he takes for granted. The choices are “personal,” which sounds nice (on the promo sheet he tells us his mother taught him “Ain’t That a Shame,” that “Be Bop A Lu La” was the first song his mother saw him sing), but choices that involve the making of music that comes across, that makes demands, were not even at issue.

The version of the fifties Lennon carries inside himself is not as sterile as this album - his whole career is proof of that. For every automatic classic he glides through here there are a dozen we’ve forgotten - or never heard - that he knows all about. And yet lacking some indefinable, unpredictable magic moment in the studio, to draw that music out requires care, thought, work; and, perhaps, friends. Instead of the requiste studio crew, this album should have been made with Ringo on drums, a bassman, and Lennon on lead, piano, and harp. And they should have stayed in the studio until they had something they would not have been ashamed to show to the men whose songs they sang. Elvis took twenty takes to get “Hound Dog” right - to get the feeling he wanted. If, nearjy twenty years later, it took John Lennon a hundred, it would be worth it.

Greil Marcus