Love or loathe them, there’s no doubt that The Beatles are the most significant band of all time, changing music and culture in ways that range from the overt to the subtle. From making rock music the zeitgeist to the boundary-pushing nature of their later work, their decade of existence saw them affect the world in a way that a musical artist will never do again, with their bravery and originality two key aspects underpinning this.
However, to say that The Beatles were completely original would be a fallacy. While them taking inspiration from others would become less explicit as the years wore on and their prowess and musicians grew, in the early days, their deference to their heroes clear. Their first two albums, 1963’s Please Please Me and With the Beatles, contained many covers, with several of these renditions being of rock ‘n’ roll staples, including Chuck Berry’s influential ‘Roll Over Beethoven’.
Like every artist of their generation, The Beatles were greatly indebted to Berry, the man who confirmed that rock ‘n’ roll was here to stay, and was the definitive sound of the Baby Boomer generation. In fact, Beatles frontman John Lennon once said of the American’s significance: “If you had to give Rock ‘n’ Roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry.”
Perhaps the most famous instance of the Fab Four’s influences appearing in more subtle ways came in the 1969 Abbey Road classic, ‘Come Together’. A line in the song was directly lifted from Berry’s 1956 number ‘You Can’t Catch Me’.
READ MORE: Chuck Berry on his favourite Beatles song
Lennon explained all to David Sheff in 1980 for All We Are Saying: “‘Come Together’ is me, writing obscurely around an old Chuck Berry thing. I left the line in, ‘Here comes old flat-top’. It is nothing like the Chuck Berry song, but they took me to court because I admitted the influence once years ago. I could have changed it to ‘Here comes old iron face,’ but the song remains independent of Chuck Berry or anybody else on Earth.”
Unfortunately for Lennon, his pilfering wasn’t subtle enough. The similarity between the two songs led to music publisher Morris Levy, whose company Big Seven Music Corporation owned the rights to ‘You Can’t Catch Me’, taking Lennon to court. He argued that “Here come old flat top”, plagiarised Berry’s song.
Wanting to avoid a court case, Lennon acquiesced to recording at least three songs owned by Levy’s company on his next release. So, in the Autumn of 1973 he recorded several rock ‘n’ roll classics with the producer Phil Spector, however, due to their relationship deteriorating, the project never came to fruition. Yet, at that point, they had recorded two songs that Levy owned, ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ and ‘Angel Baby’.
Lennon gave the master tape of the two songs to Levy, which was then released as Roots: John Lennon Sings The Great Rock & Roll Hits, a mail order album. In a display of how much power labels had at the time, the record was swiftly pulled from the market when Lennon and Capitol Records threatened Morris with a lawsuit.
The legal dispute ended in July 1976, when Big Seven Music was given $6,795 due to a breach of an oral agreement. This was not the end of the story, as Lennon filed a countersuit concerning the unauthorised release of Roots, and that saw him, Capitol and EMI records, receive $109,700 for lost income. Furthermore, Lennon was awarded $35,000 in punitive damages.
Editors’ Picks
- 1960s rock
- Abbey Road
- Chuck Berry
- classic rock history
- Come Together
- John Lennon
- music lawsuits
- The Beatles
