SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SPRING/SUMMER, 2015
VOLUME ONE NUMBER THREE
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SPRING/SUMMER, 2015
VOLUME ONE NUMBER THREE
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
DUKE ELLINGTON
April 25-May 1
ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO
May 2-May 8
ELLA FITZGERALD
May 9-15
DEE DEE BRIDGEWATER
May 16-May 22
MILES DAVIS
May 23-29
JILL SCOTT
May 30-June 5
REGINA CARTER
June 6-June 12
BETTY DAVIS
June 13-19
ERYKAH BADU
June 20-June 26
AL GREEN
June 27-July 3
CHUCK BERRY
July 4-July 10
SLY STONE
July 11-July 17
"If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'."
--John Lennon
Chuck Berry Wins Prestigious Polar Music Prize
Rock pioneer joins past winners Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen
Chuck Berry
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Chuck Berry
will be honored with the Polar Music Prize this year at a ceremony in
Stockholm in late August. The rock pioneer, whose hits "Johnny B.
Goode," "Maybelline" and "Roll Over Beethoven," among others, defined
guitar playing for a generation, will receive £100,000 (a little more
than $169,600) at the ceremony, which Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf will
attend, the U.K.'s Telegraph reports.
The award was founded by late Abba manager, lyricist and publisher Stig
Anderson, who wanted it to "break down musical boundaries by bringing
together people from all the different worlds of music." As such, 2014's
other Polar recipient is opera and theater director Peter Sellars.
Past recipients have included Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon,
BB King, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Bruce Springsteen and Quincy Jones,
among others. Paul McCartney was the first Polar Music Prize recipient
in 1992; the other recipient in its inaugural year was the Baltic
States, in honor of the region's national music culture. "The difference
with this one for me is that I've presumably been chosen from everyone
in the world," McCartney said at the ceremony. "You can't knock that,
that's a high honor. They could have chosen all sorts of other people, I
can think of a few people who you could choose for a music honor like
this."
Part of Berry's Polar Music Award citation reads, "Every
riff and solo played by rock guitarists over the last 60 years contains
DNA that can be traced right back to Chuck Berry. The Rolling Stones,
the Beatles and a million other groups began to learn their craft by
playing Chuck Berry songs."
CHUCK BERRY
Biography
Chuck Berry melded the blues, country, and a witty,
defiant teen outlook into songs that have influenced virtually every
rock musician in his wake. In his best work — about 40 songs (including
"Round and Round," "Carol," "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," "Roll Over
Beethoven," "Back in the U.S.A.," "Little Queenie"), recorded mostly in
the mid- to late 1950s — Berry matched some of the most resonant and
witty lyrics in pop to music with a blues bottom and a country top,
trademarking the results with his signature double-string guitar lick.
Presenting Berry the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors Award in 2000,
President Bill Clinton hailed him as "one of the 20th Century's most
influential musicians."
- Born Charles Edward Anderson Berry on October 18, 1926, in a
middle-class black neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri, he learned to
play guitar as a teenager and performed publicly for the first time at
Summer High School covering Jay McShann's "Confessin' the Blues." From
1944 to 1947 Berry was in reform school for attempted robbery; upon
release he worked on the assembly line at a General Motors Fisher body
plant and studied hairdressing and cosmetology at night school. In 1952
he formed a trio with drummer Ebby Harding and pianist Johnnie Johnson,
his keyboardist on and off for the next three decades. By 1955 the trio
had become a top St. Louis-area club band, and Berry was supplementing
his salary as a beautician with regular gigs. He met Muddy Waters in
Chicago in May 1955, and Waters introduced him to Leonard Chess. Berry
played Chess a demo tape that included "Ida Red"; Chess renamed it
"Maybellene," and sent it to disc jockey Alan Freed (who got a cowriting
credit in the deal), and Berry had his first Top 10 hit.
Through 1958 Berry had a string of hits. "School Day" (Number Three pop, Number One R&B, 1957), "Rock & Roll Music" (Number Eight pop, Number Six R&B, 1957), "Sweet Little Sixteen" (Number Two pop, Number One R&B, 1958), and "Johnny B. Goode" (Number Eight pop, Number Five R&B, 1958) were the biggest. With his famous duck walk, Berry was a mainstay on the mid-Fifties concert circuit. He also appeared in such films as Rock, Rock, Rock (1956), Mister Rock and Roll (1957), and Go, Johnny, Go (1959).
Late in 1959 Berry was charged with violating the Mann Act: He had brought a 14-year-old Spanish-speaking Apache waitress and prostitute from Texas to check hats in his St. Louis nightclub, and after he fired her she complained to the police. Following a blatantly racist first trial, he was found guilty at a second. Berry spent two years in federal prison in Indiana, leaving him embittered.
By the time he was released in 1964, the British Invasion was underway, replete with Berry's songs on early albums by the Beatles and Rolling Stones. He recorded a few more classics — including "Nadine" and "No Particular Place to Go" — although it has been speculated that they were written before his jail term. Since then he has written and recorded only sporadically, although he had a million-seller with the novelty song "My Ding-a-Ling" (Number One, 1972), and his last album of new material, 1979's Rockit was a creditable effort. He also appeared in a 1979 film, American Hot Wax. Through it all, Berry continued to perform concerts internationally, often with pickup bands. In the first decade of the 2000s, Hip-O Select released Berry's entire Chess studio output from his prime Fifties and Sixties years as Johnny B. Goode: His Complete '50s Chess Recordings (2007) and You Never Can Tell: The Complete Chess Recordings 1960-1966 (2009). The latter set includes one of his best recorded live shows, a previously unreleased performance captured at a Detroit casino in 1963.
In January 1986 Berry was among the first round of inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The following year he published the at-times sexually and scatalogically explicit Chuck Berry: The Autobiography and was the subject of a documentary/tribute film, Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, for which his best-known disciple, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, organized a backing band.
Berry has continued to tour the world, sometimes with fellow classic rockers such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, and moved to Ladue, Missouri, near St. Louis, where he performs regularly at the Blueberry Hill bar and restaurant.
Portions of this biography appeared in The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001). Mark Kemp contributed to this article.
Chuck Berry
American musician
by George Lipsitz
Chuck Berry
Also known as
Charles Edward Anderson Berry
born October 18, 1926
Saint Louis, Missouri
Chuck Berry, aka Charles Edward Anderson Berry (born Oct. 18, 1926, St. Louis, Mo., U.S.), is a singer, songwriter, and guitarist who was one of the most popular and influential performers in rhythm-and-blues and rock-and-roll music in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.
Raised in a working-class African-American neighbourhood on the north side of the highly segregated city of St. Louis, Berry grew up in a family proud of its African-American and Native-American ancestry. He gained early exposure to music through his family’s participation in the choir of the Antioch Baptist Church, through the blues and country-western music he heard on the radio, and through music classes, especially at Sumner High School. Berry was still attending high school when he was sent to serve three years for armed robbery at a Missouri prison for young offenders. After his release and return to St. Louis, he worked at an auto plant, studied hairdressing, and played music in small nightclubs. Berry traveled to Chicago in search of a recording contract; Muddy Waters directed him to the Chess brothers. Leonard and Phil Chess signed him for their Chess label, and in 1955 his first recording session produced “Maybellene” (a country-and-western-influenced song that Berry had originally titled “Ida Red”), which stayed on the pop charts for 11 weeks, cresting at number five. Berry followed this success with extensive tours and hit after hit, including “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956), “School Day” (1957), “Rock and Roll Music” (1957), “Sweet Little Sixteen” (1958), “Johnny B. Goode” (1958), and “Reelin’ and Rockin’” (1958). His vivid descriptions of consumer culture and teenage life, the distinctive sounds he coaxed from his guitar, and the rhythmic and melodic virtuosity of his piano player (Johnny Johnson) made Berry’s songs staples in the repertoire of almost every rock-and-roll band.
At the peak of his popularity, federal authorities prosecuted Berry for violating the Mann Act, alleging that he transported an underage female across state lines “for immoral purposes.” After two trials tainted by racist overtones, Berry was convicted and remanded to prison. Upon his release he placed new hits on the pop charts, including “No Particular Place to Go” in 1964, at the height of the British Invasion, whose prime movers, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, were hugely influenced by Berry (as were the Beach Boys). In 1972 Berry achieved his first number one hit, “My Ding-A-Ling.” Although he recorded more sporadically in the 1970s and ’80s, he continued to appear in concert, most often performing with backing bands comprising local musicians. Berry’s public visibility increased in 1987 with the publication of his book Chuck Berry: The Autobiography and the release of the documentary film Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, featuring footage from his 60th birthday concert and guest appearances by Keith Richards and Bruce Springsteen.
Berry is undeniably one of the most influential figures in the history of rock music. In helping to create rock and roll from the crucible of rhythm and blues, he combined clever lyrics, distinctive guitar sounds, boogie-woogie rhythms, precise diction, an astounding stage show, and musical devices characteristic of country-western music and the blues in his many best-selling single records and albums. A distinctive if not technically dazzling guitarist, Berry used electronic effects to replicate the ringing sounds of bottleneck blues guitarists in his recordings. He drew upon a broad range of musical genres in his compositions, displaying an especially strong interest in Caribbean music on “Havana Moon” (1957) and “Man and the Donkey” (1963), among others. Influenced by a wide variety of artists—including guitar players Carl Hogan, Charlie Christian, and T-Bone Walker and vocalists Nat King Cole, Louis Jordan, and Charles Brown—Berry played a major role in broadening the appeal of rhythm-and-blues music during the 1950s. He fashioned his lyrics to appeal to the growing teenage market by presenting vivid and humorous descriptions of high-school life, teen dances, and consumer culture. His recordings serve as a rich repository of the core lyrical and musical building blocks of rock and roll. In addition to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Linda Ronstadt, and a multitude of significant popular-music performers have recorded Berry’s songs.
American musician
by George Lipsitz
Chuck Berry
Also known as
Charles Edward Anderson Berry
born October 18, 1926
Saint Louis, Missouri
Chuck Berry, aka Charles Edward Anderson Berry (born Oct. 18, 1926, St. Louis, Mo., U.S.), is a singer, songwriter, and guitarist who was one of the most popular and influential performers in rhythm-and-blues and rock-and-roll music in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.
Raised in a working-class African-American neighbourhood on the north side of the highly segregated city of St. Louis, Berry grew up in a family proud of its African-American and Native-American ancestry. He gained early exposure to music through his family’s participation in the choir of the Antioch Baptist Church, through the blues and country-western music he heard on the radio, and through music classes, especially at Sumner High School. Berry was still attending high school when he was sent to serve three years for armed robbery at a Missouri prison for young offenders. After his release and return to St. Louis, he worked at an auto plant, studied hairdressing, and played music in small nightclubs. Berry traveled to Chicago in search of a recording contract; Muddy Waters directed him to the Chess brothers. Leonard and Phil Chess signed him for their Chess label, and in 1955 his first recording session produced “Maybellene” (a country-and-western-influenced song that Berry had originally titled “Ida Red”), which stayed on the pop charts for 11 weeks, cresting at number five. Berry followed this success with extensive tours and hit after hit, including “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956), “School Day” (1957), “Rock and Roll Music” (1957), “Sweet Little Sixteen” (1958), “Johnny B. Goode” (1958), and “Reelin’ and Rockin’” (1958). His vivid descriptions of consumer culture and teenage life, the distinctive sounds he coaxed from his guitar, and the rhythmic and melodic virtuosity of his piano player (Johnny Johnson) made Berry’s songs staples in the repertoire of almost every rock-and-roll band.
At the peak of his popularity, federal authorities prosecuted Berry for violating the Mann Act, alleging that he transported an underage female across state lines “for immoral purposes.” After two trials tainted by racist overtones, Berry was convicted and remanded to prison. Upon his release he placed new hits on the pop charts, including “No Particular Place to Go” in 1964, at the height of the British Invasion, whose prime movers, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, were hugely influenced by Berry (as were the Beach Boys). In 1972 Berry achieved his first number one hit, “My Ding-A-Ling.” Although he recorded more sporadically in the 1970s and ’80s, he continued to appear in concert, most often performing with backing bands comprising local musicians. Berry’s public visibility increased in 1987 with the publication of his book Chuck Berry: The Autobiography and the release of the documentary film Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, featuring footage from his 60th birthday concert and guest appearances by Keith Richards and Bruce Springsteen.
Berry is undeniably one of the most influential figures in the history of rock music. In helping to create rock and roll from the crucible of rhythm and blues, he combined clever lyrics, distinctive guitar sounds, boogie-woogie rhythms, precise diction, an astounding stage show, and musical devices characteristic of country-western music and the blues in his many best-selling single records and albums. A distinctive if not technically dazzling guitarist, Berry used electronic effects to replicate the ringing sounds of bottleneck blues guitarists in his recordings. He drew upon a broad range of musical genres in his compositions, displaying an especially strong interest in Caribbean music on “Havana Moon” (1957) and “Man and the Donkey” (1963), among others. Influenced by a wide variety of artists—including guitar players Carl Hogan, Charlie Christian, and T-Bone Walker and vocalists Nat King Cole, Louis Jordan, and Charles Brown—Berry played a major role in broadening the appeal of rhythm-and-blues music during the 1950s. He fashioned his lyrics to appeal to the growing teenage market by presenting vivid and humorous descriptions of high-school life, teen dances, and consumer culture. His recordings serve as a rich repository of the core lyrical and musical building blocks of rock and roll. In addition to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Linda Ronstadt, and a multitude of significant popular-music performers have recorded Berry’s songs.
Chuck Berry performing at the inauguration of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., on September 2, 1995.
An appropriate tribute to Berry’s centrality to rock and roll came when his song “Johnny B. Goode” was among the pieces of music placed on a copper phonograph record attached to the side of the Voyager 1 satellite, hurtling through outer space, in order to give distant or future civilizations a chance to acquaint themselves with the culture of the planet Earth in the 20th century. In 1984 he was presented with a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/chuck-berry-mn0000120521/biography
Artist Biography by Cub Koda
Of all the early breakthrough rock & roll
artists, none is more important to the development of the music than Chuck Berry.
He is its greatest songwriter, the main shaper of its instrumental
voice, one of its greatest guitarists, and one of its greatest
performers. Quite simply, without him there would be no Beatles, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, nor a myriad others. There would be no standard "Chuck Berry
guitar intro," the instrument's clarion call to get the joint rockin'
in any setting. The clippety-clop rhythms of rockabilly would not have
been mainstreamed into the now standard 4/4 rock & roll beat. There
would be no obsessive wordplay by modern-day tunesmiths; in fact, the
whole history (and artistic level) of rock & roll songwriting would
have been much poorer without him. Like Brian Wilson
said, he wrote "all of the great songs and came up with all the rock
& roll beats." Those who do not claim him as a seminal influence or
profess a liking for his music and showmanship show their ignorance of
rock's development as well as his place as the music's first great
creator. Elvis may have fueled rock & roll's imagery, but Chuck Berry was its heartbeat and original mindset.
He was born Charles Edward Anderson Berry to a large family in St. Louis. A bright pupil, Berry developed a love for poetry and hard blues early on, winning a high school talent contest with a guitar-and-vocal rendition of Jay McShann's big band number, "Confessin' the Blues." With some local tutelage from the neighborhood barber, Berry progressed from a four-string tenor guitar up to an official six-string model and was soon working the local East St. Louis club scene, sitting in everywhere he could. He quickly found out that black audiences liked a wide variety of music and set himself to the task of being able to reproduce as much of it as possible. What he found they really liked -- besides the blues and Nat King Cole tunes -- was the sight and sound of a black man playing white hillbilly music, and Berry's showmanlike flair, coupled with his seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh verses to old favorites, quickly made him a name on the circuit. In 1954, he ended up taking over pianist Johnny Johnson's small combo and a residency at the Cosmopolitan Club soon made the Chuck Berry Trio the top attraction in the black community, with Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm their only real competition.
But Berry had bigger ideas; he yearned to make records, and a trip to Chicago netted a two-minute conversation with his idol Muddy Waters, who encouraged him to approach Chess Records. Upon listening to Berry's homemade demo tape, label president Leonard Chess professed a liking for a hillbilly tune on it named "Ida Red" and quickly scheduled a session for May 21, 1955. During the session the title was changed to "Maybellene" and rock & roll history was born. Although the record only made it to the mid-20s on the Billboard pop chart, its overall influence was massive and groundbreaking in its scope. Here was finally a black rock & roll record with across-the-board appeal, embraced by white teenagers and Southern hillbilly musicians (a young Elvis Presley, still a full year from national stardom, quickly added it to his stage show), that for once couldn't be successfully covered by a pop singer like Snooky Lanson on Your Hit Parade. Part of the secret to its originality was Berry's blazing 24-bar guitar solo in the middle of it, the imaginative rhyme schemes in the lyrics, and the sheer thump of the record, all signaling that rock & roll had arrived and it was no fad. Helping to put the record over to a white teenage audience was the highly influential New York disc jockey Alan Freed, who had been given part of the writers' credit by Chess in return for his spins and plugs. But to his credit, Freed was also the first white DJ/promoter to consistently use Berry on his rock & roll stage show extravaganzas at the Brooklyn Fox and Paramount theaters (playing to predominately white audiences); and when Hollywood came calling a year or so later, also made sure that Chuck appeared with him in Rock! Rock! Rock!, Go, Johnny, Go!, and Mister Rock'n'Roll. Within a years' time, Chuck had gone from a local St. Louis blues picker making 15 dollars a night to an overnight sensation commanding over a hundred times that, arriving at the dawn of a new strain of popular music called rock & roll.
The hits started coming thick and fast over the next few years, every one of them about to become a classic of the genre: "Roll Over Beethoven," "Thirty Days," "Too Much Monkey Business," "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," "You Can't Catch Me," "School Day," "Carol," "Back in the U.S.A.," "Little Queenie," "Memphis, Tennessee," "Johnny B. Goode," and the tune that defined the moment perfectly, "Rock and Roll Music." Berry was not only in constant demand, touring the country on mixed package shows and appearing on television and in movies, but smart enough to know exactly what to do with the spoils of a suddenly successful show business career. He started investing heavily in St. Louis area real estate and, ever one to push the envelope, opened up a racially mixed nightspot called the Club Bandstand in 1958 to the consternation of uptight locals. These were not the plans of your average R&B singers who contented themselves with a wardrobe of flashy suits, a new Cadillac, and the nicest house in the black section. Berry was smart with plenty of business savvy and was already making plans to open an amusement park in nearby Wentzville. When the St. Louis hierarchy found out that an underage hat-check girl Berry hired had also set up shop as a prostitute at a nearby hotel, trouble came down on Berry like a sledgehammer on a fly. Charged with transporting a minor over state lines (the Mann Act), Berry endured two trials and was sentenced to federal prison for two years as a result.
He emerged from prison a moody, embittered man. But two very important things had happened in his absence. First, British teenagers had discovered his music and were making his old songs hits all over again. Second, and perhaps most important, America had discovered the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, both of whom based their music on Berry's style, with the Stones' early albums looking like a Berry song list. Rather than being resigned to the has-been circuit, Berry found himself in the midst of a worldwide beat boom with his music as the centerpiece. He came back with a clutch of hits ("Nadine," "No Particular Place to Go," "You Never Can Tell"), toured Britain in triumph, and appeared on the big screen with his British disciples in the groundbreaking T.A.M.I. Show in 1964.
Berry had moved with the times and found a new audience in the bargain and when the cries of "yeah-yeah-yeah" were replaced with peace signs, Berry altered his live act to include a passel of slow blues and quickly became a fixture on the festival and hippie ballroom circuit. After a disastrous stint with Mercury Records, he returned to Chess in the early '70s and scored his last hit with a live version of the salacious nursery rhyme, "My Ding a Ling," yielding Berry his first official gold record. By decade's end, he was as in demand as ever, working every oldies revival show, TV special, and festival that was thrown his way. But once again, troubles with the law reared their ugly head and 1979 saw Berry headed back to prison, this time for income tax evasion. Upon release this time, the creative days of Chuck Berry seemed to have come to an end. He appeared as himself in the Alan Freed bio-pic, American Hot Wax, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but steadfastly refused to record any new material or even issue a live album. His live performances became increasingly erratic, with Berry working with terrible backup bands and turning in sloppy, out-of-tune performances that did much to tarnish his reputation with younger fans and oldtimers alike. In 1987, he published his first book, Chuck Berry: The Autobiography, and the same year saw the film release of what will likely be his lasting legacy, the rockumentary Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll, which included live footage from a 60th-birthday concert with Keith Richards as musical director and the usual bevy of superstars coming out for guest turns. But for all of his off-stage exploits and seemingly ongoing troubles with the law, Chuck Berry remains the epitome of rock & roll, and his music will endure long after his private escapades have faded from memory. Because when it comes down to his music, perhaps John Lennon said it best, "If you were going to give rock & roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'."
He was born Charles Edward Anderson Berry to a large family in St. Louis. A bright pupil, Berry developed a love for poetry and hard blues early on, winning a high school talent contest with a guitar-and-vocal rendition of Jay McShann's big band number, "Confessin' the Blues." With some local tutelage from the neighborhood barber, Berry progressed from a four-string tenor guitar up to an official six-string model and was soon working the local East St. Louis club scene, sitting in everywhere he could. He quickly found out that black audiences liked a wide variety of music and set himself to the task of being able to reproduce as much of it as possible. What he found they really liked -- besides the blues and Nat King Cole tunes -- was the sight and sound of a black man playing white hillbilly music, and Berry's showmanlike flair, coupled with his seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh verses to old favorites, quickly made him a name on the circuit. In 1954, he ended up taking over pianist Johnny Johnson's small combo and a residency at the Cosmopolitan Club soon made the Chuck Berry Trio the top attraction in the black community, with Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm their only real competition.
But Berry had bigger ideas; he yearned to make records, and a trip to Chicago netted a two-minute conversation with his idol Muddy Waters, who encouraged him to approach Chess Records. Upon listening to Berry's homemade demo tape, label president Leonard Chess professed a liking for a hillbilly tune on it named "Ida Red" and quickly scheduled a session for May 21, 1955. During the session the title was changed to "Maybellene" and rock & roll history was born. Although the record only made it to the mid-20s on the Billboard pop chart, its overall influence was massive and groundbreaking in its scope. Here was finally a black rock & roll record with across-the-board appeal, embraced by white teenagers and Southern hillbilly musicians (a young Elvis Presley, still a full year from national stardom, quickly added it to his stage show), that for once couldn't be successfully covered by a pop singer like Snooky Lanson on Your Hit Parade. Part of the secret to its originality was Berry's blazing 24-bar guitar solo in the middle of it, the imaginative rhyme schemes in the lyrics, and the sheer thump of the record, all signaling that rock & roll had arrived and it was no fad. Helping to put the record over to a white teenage audience was the highly influential New York disc jockey Alan Freed, who had been given part of the writers' credit by Chess in return for his spins and plugs. But to his credit, Freed was also the first white DJ/promoter to consistently use Berry on his rock & roll stage show extravaganzas at the Brooklyn Fox and Paramount theaters (playing to predominately white audiences); and when Hollywood came calling a year or so later, also made sure that Chuck appeared with him in Rock! Rock! Rock!, Go, Johnny, Go!, and Mister Rock'n'Roll. Within a years' time, Chuck had gone from a local St. Louis blues picker making 15 dollars a night to an overnight sensation commanding over a hundred times that, arriving at the dawn of a new strain of popular music called rock & roll.
The hits started coming thick and fast over the next few years, every one of them about to become a classic of the genre: "Roll Over Beethoven," "Thirty Days," "Too Much Monkey Business," "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," "You Can't Catch Me," "School Day," "Carol," "Back in the U.S.A.," "Little Queenie," "Memphis, Tennessee," "Johnny B. Goode," and the tune that defined the moment perfectly, "Rock and Roll Music." Berry was not only in constant demand, touring the country on mixed package shows and appearing on television and in movies, but smart enough to know exactly what to do with the spoils of a suddenly successful show business career. He started investing heavily in St. Louis area real estate and, ever one to push the envelope, opened up a racially mixed nightspot called the Club Bandstand in 1958 to the consternation of uptight locals. These were not the plans of your average R&B singers who contented themselves with a wardrobe of flashy suits, a new Cadillac, and the nicest house in the black section. Berry was smart with plenty of business savvy and was already making plans to open an amusement park in nearby Wentzville. When the St. Louis hierarchy found out that an underage hat-check girl Berry hired had also set up shop as a prostitute at a nearby hotel, trouble came down on Berry like a sledgehammer on a fly. Charged with transporting a minor over state lines (the Mann Act), Berry endured two trials and was sentenced to federal prison for two years as a result.
He emerged from prison a moody, embittered man. But two very important things had happened in his absence. First, British teenagers had discovered his music and were making his old songs hits all over again. Second, and perhaps most important, America had discovered the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, both of whom based their music on Berry's style, with the Stones' early albums looking like a Berry song list. Rather than being resigned to the has-been circuit, Berry found himself in the midst of a worldwide beat boom with his music as the centerpiece. He came back with a clutch of hits ("Nadine," "No Particular Place to Go," "You Never Can Tell"), toured Britain in triumph, and appeared on the big screen with his British disciples in the groundbreaking T.A.M.I. Show in 1964.
Berry had moved with the times and found a new audience in the bargain and when the cries of "yeah-yeah-yeah" were replaced with peace signs, Berry altered his live act to include a passel of slow blues and quickly became a fixture on the festival and hippie ballroom circuit. After a disastrous stint with Mercury Records, he returned to Chess in the early '70s and scored his last hit with a live version of the salacious nursery rhyme, "My Ding a Ling," yielding Berry his first official gold record. By decade's end, he was as in demand as ever, working every oldies revival show, TV special, and festival that was thrown his way. But once again, troubles with the law reared their ugly head and 1979 saw Berry headed back to prison, this time for income tax evasion. Upon release this time, the creative days of Chuck Berry seemed to have come to an end. He appeared as himself in the Alan Freed bio-pic, American Hot Wax, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but steadfastly refused to record any new material or even issue a live album. His live performances became increasingly erratic, with Berry working with terrible backup bands and turning in sloppy, out-of-tune performances that did much to tarnish his reputation with younger fans and oldtimers alike. In 1987, he published his first book, Chuck Berry: The Autobiography, and the same year saw the film release of what will likely be his lasting legacy, the rockumentary Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll, which included live footage from a 60th-birthday concert with Keith Richards as musical director and the usual bevy of superstars coming out for guest turns. But for all of his off-stage exploits and seemingly ongoing troubles with the law, Chuck Berry remains the epitome of rock & roll, and his music will endure long after his private escapades have faded from memory. Because when it comes down to his music, perhaps John Lennon said it best, "If you were going to give rock & roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'."
CHUCK BERRY
Why is Chuck Berry often considered the most important of the early Rock and Rollers?
OVERVIEW
“If you tried to give Rock and Roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry.'”
-- John Lennon
Chuck Berry burst onto the Rock and Roll scene in 1955 with the
release of “Maybellene” on Chess Records. It shot to No. 1 on
Billboard’s R&B chart and No. 5 on the Pop chart, establishing Berry
as an artist with appeal to black and white audiences alike. By the end
of the decade, Berry had released a string of iconic songs – “Roll
Over, Beethoven,” “Schools Days,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Sweet Little
Sixteen,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Back in the U.S.A." – that would be
covered by everyone from the Beach Boys to the Grateful Dead.
Distinct from Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Fats Domino – all
piano players – Berry was a guitar player whose guitar was a central
component of his recordings. Gone were the horns, central to much
R&B, and gone was the piano as focal point. Guitar-based Rock and
Roll had its founding father.
In this lesson, students will analyze several of the elements that
combined to make Berry such an important and influential artist. They
will examine his pioneering guitar riffs, his carefully crafted lyrics
that spoke directly to the emerging market of white, middle-class
teen listeners, his blend of R&B and Country and Western
influences, and his energetic performance style, which helped pave the
way for a generation of guitar-playing showmen.
Chuck Berry, 1957 Credit: Universal Attractions
Chuck Berry
by Robert Christgau
by Robert Christgau
Chuck Berry is the greatest of the rock and rollers. Elvis competes with Frank Sinatra, Little Richard camps his way to self-negation, Fats Domino looks old, and Jerry Lee Lewis looks down his noble honker at all those who refuse to understand that Jerry Lee has chosen to become a great country singer. But for a fee--which went up markedly after the freak success of "My Ding-a-Ling," his first certified million-seller, in 1972, and has now diminished again--Chuck Berry will hop on a plane with his guitar and go play some rock and roll. He is the symbol of the music--the first man elected to a Rock Music Hall of Fame that exists thus far only in the projections of television profiteers; the man invited to come steal the show at the 1975 Grammys, although he has never been nominated for one himself, not even in the rock and roll or rhythm and blues categories. More important, he is also the music's substance--he taught George Harrison and Keith Richard to play guitar long before he met either, and his songs are still claimed as encores by everyone from folkies to heavy-metal kids. But Chuck Berry isn't merely the greatest of the rock and rollers, or rather, there's nothing mere about it. Say rather that unless we can somehow recycle the concept of the great artist so that it supports Chuck Berry as well as it does Marcel Proust, we might as well trash it altogether.
As with Charlie Chaplin or Walt Kelly or the Beatles, Chuck Berry's greatness doesn't depend entirely on the greatness or originality of his oeuvre. The body of his top-quality work isn't exactly vast, comprising three or perhaps four dozen songs that synthesize two related traditions: blues, and country and western. Although in some respects Berry's rock and roll is simpler and more vulgar than either of its musical sources, its simplicity and vulgarity are defensible in the snootiest high-art terms--how about "instinctive minimalism" or "demotic voice"? But his case doesn't rest on such defenses. It would be as perverse to argue that his songs are in themselves as rich as, say, Remembrance of Things Past. Their richness is rather a function of their active relationship with an audience--a complex relationship that shifts every time a song enters a new context, club or album or radio or mass singalong. Where Proust wrote about a dying subculture from a cork-lined room, Berry helped give life to a subculture, and both he and it change every time they confront each other. Even "My Ding-a-Ling," a fourth-grade wee-wee joke that used to mortify true believers at college concerts, permitted a lot of 12-year-olds new insight into the moribund concept of "dirty" when it hit the airwaves; the song changed again when an oldies crowd became as children to shout along with Uncle Chuck the night he received his gold record at Madison Square Garden. And what happened to "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," never a hit among whites, when Berry sang it at interracial rock and roll concerts in Northern cities in the Fifties? How many black kids took "eyed" as code for "skinned"? How many whites? How did that make them feel about each other, and about the song? And did any of that change the song itself?
Berry's own intentions, of course, remain a mystery. Typically, this public artist is an obsessively private person who has been known to drive reporters from his own amusement park, and the sketches of his life overlap and contradict each other. The way I tell it, Berry was born into a lower middle-class colored family in St. Louis in 1926. He was so quick and ambitious that he both served time in reform school on a robbery conviction and acquired a degree in hairdressing and cosmetology before taking a job on an auto assembly line to support a wife and kids. Yet his speed and ambition persisted. By 1953 he was working as a beautician and leading a three-piece blues group on a regular weekend gig. His gimmick was to cut the blues with country-influenced humorous narrative songs. These were rare in the black music of the time, although they had been common enough before phonograph records crystallized the blues form, and although Louis Jordan, a hero of Berry's, had been doing something vaguely similar in front of white audiences for years.
In 1955, Berry recorded two of his songs on a borrowed machine--"Wee Wee Hours," a blues that he and his pianist, Johnnie Johnson, hoped to sell, and an adapted country tune called "Ida Red." He traveled to Chicago and met Muddy Waters, the uncle of the blues, who sent him on to Leonard Chess of Chess Records. Chess liked "Wee Wee Hours" but flipped for "Ida Red," which was renamed "Maybellene," a hairdresser's dream, and forwarded to Allan Freed. Having mysteriously acquired one-third of the writer's credit with another DJ, Freed played "Maybellene" quite a lot, and it became one of the first nationwide rock 'n' roll hits.
At that time, any fair-minded person would have judged this process exploitative and pecuniary. A blues musician comes to a blues label to promote a blues song--"It was `Wee Wee Hours' we was proud of, that was our music," says Johnnie Johnson--but the owner of the label decides he wants to push a novelty: "The big beat, cars, and young love. It was a trend and we jumped on it," Chess has said. The owner then trades away a third of the blues singer's creative sweat to the symbol of payola, who hypes the novelty song into commercial success and leaves the artist in a quandry. Does he stick with his art, thus forgoing the first real recognition he's ever had, or does he pander to popular taste?
The question is loaded, of course. "Ida Red" was Chuck Berry's music as much as "Wee Wee Hours," which in retrospect seems rather uninspired. In fact, maybe the integrity problem went the other way. Maybe Johnson was afraid that the innovations of "Ida Red"--country guitar lines adapted to blues-style picking, with the ceaseless legato of his own piano adding rhythmic excitement to the steady backbeat--were too far out to sell. What happened instead was that Berry's limited but brilliant vocabulary of guitar riffs quickly came to epitomize rock 'n' roll. Ultimately, every great white guitar group of the early Sixties imitated Berry's style, and Johnson's piano technique was almost as influential. In other words, it turned out that Berry and Johnson weren't basically bluesmen at all. Through some magic combination of inspiration and cultural destiny, they had hit upon something more contemporary than blues, and a young audience, for whom the Depression was one more thing that bugged their parents, understood this better than the musicians themselves. Leonard Chess simply functioned as a music businessman should, though only rarely does one combine the courage and insight (and opportunity) to pull it off, even once. Chess became a surrogate audience, picking up on new music and making sure that it received enough exposure for everyone else to pick up on it, too.
Obviously, Chuck Berry wasn't racked with doubt about artistic compromise. A good blues single usually sold around 10,000 copies and a big rhythm and blues hit might go into the hundreds of thousands, but "Maybellene" probably moved a million, even if Chess never sponsored the audit to prove it. Berry had achieved a grip on the white audience and the solid future it could promise, and, remarkably, he had in no way diluted his genius to do it. On the contrary, that was his genius. He would never have fulfilled himself if he hadn't explored his relationship to the white world--a relationship which was much different for him, an urban black man who was used to machines and had never known brutal poverty, than it was for, say, Muddy Waters.
Berry was the first blues-based performer to successfully reclaim guitar tricks that country and western innovators had appropriated from black people and adapted to their own uses 25 or 50 years before. By adding blues tone to some fast country runs, and yoking them to a rhythm and blues beat and some unembarrassed electrification, he created an instrumental style with biracial appeal. Alternating guitar chords augmented the beat while Berry sang in an insouciant tenor that, while recognizably Afro-American in accent, stayed clear of the melisma and blurred overtones of blues singing, both of which enter only at carefully premeditated moments. His few detractors still complain about the repetitiveness of this style, but they miss the point. Repetition without tedium is the backbone of rock and roll, and the components of Berry's music proved so durable that they still provoke instant excitement at concerts durable that they still provoke instant excitement at concerts two decades later. And in any case, the instrumental repetition was counterbalanced by unprecedented and virtually unduplicated verbal variety.
Chuck Berry is the greatest rock lyricist this side of Bob Dylan, and sometimes I prefer him to Dylan. Both communicate an abundance of the childlike delight in linguistic discovery that page poets are supposed to convey and too often don't, but Berry's most ambitious lyrics, unlike Dylan's, never seem pretentious or forced. True, his language is ersatz and barbaric, full of mispronounced foreignisms and advertising coinages, but then, so was Whitman's. Like Whitman, Berry is excessive because he is totally immersed in America--the America of Melville and the Edsel, burlesque and installment-plan funerals, pemmican and pomade. Unlike Whitman, though, he doesn't quite permit you to take him seriously--he can't really think it's pronounced "a la carty," can he? He is a little surreal. How else can a black man as sensitive as Chuck Berry respond to the affluence of white America--an affluence suddenly his for the taking.
Chuck Berry is not only a little surreal but also a little schizy; even after he committed himself to rock 'n' roll story songs, relegating the bluesman in him to B sides and album fillers, he found his persona split in two. In three of the four singles that followed "Maybellene," he amplified the black half of his artistic personality, the brown-eyed handsome man who always came up short in his quest for the small-time hedonism American promises everyone. By implication, Brown Eyes' sharp sense of life's nettlesome and even oppressive details provided a kind of salvation by humor, especially in "Too Much Monkey Business," a catalog of hassles that included work, school and the army. But the white teenagers who were the only audience with the cultural experience to respond to Berry's art weren't buying this kind of salvation, not en masse. They wanted something more optimistic and more specific to themselves; of the four singles that followed "Maybellene," only "Roll Over Beethoven," which introduced Berry's other half, the rock 'n' roller, achieved any real success. Chuck got the message. His next release, "School Day," was another complaint song, but this time the complaints were explicitly adolescent and were relieved by the direct action of the rock 'n' roller. In fact, the song has been construed as a prophecy of the Free Speech Movement: "Close your books, get out of your seat/Down the halls and into the street."
It has become a cliché to attribute the rise of rock and roll to a new parallelism between white teenagers and black Americans; a common "alienation" and even "suffering" are often cited. As with most clichés, this one has its basis in fact--teenagers in the Fifties certainly showed an unprecedented consciousness of themselves as a circumscribed group, though how much that had to do with marketing refinements and how much with the Bomb remains unresolved. In any case, Chuck Berry's history points up the limits of this notion. For Berry was closer to white teenagers both economically (that reform school stint suggests a JD exploit, albeit combined with a racist judicial system) and in spirit (he shares his penchant for youthfulness with Satchel Paige but not Henry Aaron, with Leslie Fiedler but not Norman Podhoretz) than the average black man. And even at that, he had to make a conscious (not to say calculated) leap of the imagination to reach them, and sometimes fell short.
Although he scored lots of minor hits, Chuck Berry made only three additional Billboard Top Ten singles in the Fifties--"Rock and Roll Music," "Sweet Little Sixteen," and "Johnny B. Goode"--and every one of them ignored Brown Eyes for the assertive, optimistic, and somewhat simpleminded rock 'n' roller. In a pattern common among popular artists, his truest and most personal work didn't flop, but it wasn't overwhelmingly popular either. For such artists, the audience can be like a drug. A little of it is so good for them that they assume a lot of it would be even better, but instead the big dose saps their autonomy, often so subtly that they don't notice it. For Chuck Berry, the craving for overwhelming popularity proved slightly dangerous. At the same time that he was enlivening his best songs with faintly Latin rhythms, which he was convinced were the coming thing, he was also writing silly exercises with titles like "Hey Pedro." Nevertheless, his pursuit of the market also worked a communion with his audience, with whom he continued to have an instinctive rapport remarkable in a 30-year-old black man. For there is also a sense in which the popular artist is a drug for the audience, and a doctor, too--he has to know how much of his vital essence he can administer at one time, and in what compound.
The reason Berry's rock 'n' roller was capable of such insightful excursions into the teen psyche--"Sweet Little Sixteen," a celebration of everything lovely about fanhood; or "Almost Grown," a basically unalianated first-person expression of teen rebellion that Sixties youth-cult pundits should have taken seriously--was that he shared a crucial American value with the humorous Brown Eyes. That value was fun. Even among rock critics, who ought to know better, fun doesn't have much of a rep, so that they commiserate with someone like LaVern Baker, a second-rate blues and gospel singer who felt she was selling her soul every time she launched into a first-rate whoop of nonsense like "Jim Dandy" or "Bumble Bee." But fun was what adolescent revolt had to be about--inebriated affluence versus the hangover of the work ethic. It was the only practicable value in the Peter Pan utopia of the American dream. Because black music had always thrived on exuberance--not just the otherworldly transport of gospel, but the candidly physical good times of great pop blues singers like Washboard Sam, who is most often dismissed as a lightweight by the heavy blues critics--it turned into the perfect vehicle for generational convulsion. Black musicians, however, had rarely achieved an optimism that was cultural as well as personal--those few who did, like Louis Armstrong, left themselves open to charges of Tomming. Chuck Berry never Tommed. The trouble he'd seen just made his sly, bad-boy voice and the splits and waddles of his stage show that much more credible.
Then, late in 1959, fun turned into trouble. Berry had imported a Spanish-speaking Apache prostitute he'd picked up in El Paso to check hats in his St. Louis nightclub, and then fired her. She went to the police, and Berry was indicted under the Mann Act. After two trials, the first so blatantly racist that it was disallowed, he went to prison for two years. When he got out, in 1964, he and his wife had separated, apparently a major tragedy for him. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones had paid him such explicit and appropriate tribute that his career was probably in better shape after his jail term than before, but he couldn't capitalize. He had a few hits--"Nadine" and "No Particular Place to Go" (John Lennon is one of the many who believe they were written before he went in)--but the well was dry. Between 1965 and 1970 he didn't release one-even passable new song, and he died as a recording artist.
In late 1966, Berry left Chess for a big advance from Mercury Records. The legends of his money woes at Chess are numerous, but apparently the Chess brothers knew how to record him--the stuff he produced himself for Mercury was terrible. Working alone with pickup bands, he still performed a great deal, mostly to make money for Berry Park, a recreation haven 30 miles from St. Louis. And as he toured, he found that something had happened to his old audience--it was getting older, with troubles of its own, and it dug blues. At auditoriums like the Fillmore, where he did a disappointing live LP with the Steve Miller Blues Band, Chuck was more than willing to stretch out on a blues. One of his favorites was from Elmore James: "When things go wrong, wrong with you, it hurts me too."
By 1970, he was back home at Chess, and suddenly his new audience called forth a miracle. Berry was a natural head--no drugs, no alcohol--and most of his attempts to cash in on hippie talk had been embarrassments. But "Tulane," one of his greatest story songs, was the perfect fantasy. It was about two dope dealers: "Tulane and Johnny opened a novelty shop/ Back under the counter was the cream of the crop." Johnny is nabbed by narcs, but Tulane, his girlfriend, escapes, and Johnny confidently predicts that she will buy off the judge. Apparently she does, for there is a sequel, a blues. In "Have Mercy Judge," Johnny has been caught again, and this time he expects to be sent to "some stony mansion." Berry devotes the last stanza to Tulane, who is "too alive to live alone." The last line makes me wonder just how he felt about his own wife when he went to prison: "Just tell her to live, and I'll forgive her, and even love her more when I come back home."
Taken together, the two songs are Berry's peak, although Leonard Chess would no doubt have vetoed the vocal double-track on "Tulane" that blurs its impact a bit. Remarkably, "Have Mercy Judge" is the first important blues Berry ever wrote, and like all his best work it isn't quite traditional, utilizing an abc line structure instead of the usual aab. Where did it come from? Is it unreasonable to suspect that part of Berry really was a bluesman all along, and that this time, instead of him going to his audience, his audience came to him and provided the juice for one last masterpiece?
Berry's career would appear closed. He is a rock and roll monument at 50, a pleasing performer whose days of inspiration are over. Sometime in the next 30 years he will probably die, and while his songs have already stuck in the public memory a lot longer than Washboard Sam's, it's likely that most of them will fade away too. So is he, was he, will he be a great artist? It won't be we judging, but perhaps we can think of it this way. Maybe the true measure of his greatness was not whether his songs "lasted"--a term which as of now means persisted through centuries instead of decades--but that he was one of the ones to make us understand that the greatest thing about art is the way it happens between people. I am grateful for aesthetic artifacts, and I suspect that a few of Berry's songs, a few of his recordings, will live on in that way. I only hope that they prove too alive to live alone. If they do, and if by some mishap Berry's name itself is forgotten, that will nevertheless be an entirely apposite kind of triumph for him.
Discography
"Maybellene" (Chess 1604; * 5, r* 1, 1955).
"Thirty Days" (Chess 1610; r* 8, 1955).
"No Money Down" (Chess 1615; r* 11, 1956).
"Roll Over Beethoven" (Chess 1626; r* 7, *29, 1956).
"Too Much Monkey Business" b/w "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" (Chess 1635; r* 7, 1956).
"School Day" (Chess 1653; r* 1, *5, 1957).
"Oh Baby Doll" (Chess 1664; * 57, 1957).
"Rock and Roll Music" (Chess 1671; * 8, r* 6, 1957).
"Sweet Little Sixteen" (Chess 1683; r* 1, *2, 1958).
"Johnny B. Goode" (Chess 1691; r* 5, * 8, 1958).
"Carol" (Chess 1700; r* 12, * 18, 1958).
"Sweet Little Rock and Roll" (Chess 1709; r* 13, * 47, 1958).
"Anthony Boy" (Chess 1716; * 60, 1959).
"Almost Grown" (Chess 1722; r* 3, * 32, 1959).
"Back in the U.S.A." (Chess 1729; r* 16, * 37, 1959).
"Too Pooped to Pop" (Chess 1747; r* 18, * 42, 1960).
"Nadine" (Chess 1883; * 23, 1964).
"No Particular Place to Go" (Chess 1898; * 10, 1964).
"You Never Can Tell" (Chess 1906; * 14, 1964).
"Little Marie" (Chess 1912; * 54, 1964).
"Promised Land" (Chess 1916; * 41, 1964).
"My Ding-a-Ling" (Chess 2131; * 1, 1972).
"Reelin' and Rockin'" (Chess 2136; * 27, 1972).
(Chart positions compiled from Joel Whitburn's Record Research, based on Billboard Pop chart, unless otherwise indicated; r* = position on Billboard Rhythm and Blues chart.)
The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, 1976
As with Charlie Chaplin or Walt Kelly or the Beatles, Chuck Berry's greatness doesn't depend entirely on the greatness or originality of his oeuvre. The body of his top-quality work isn't exactly vast, comprising three or perhaps four dozen songs that synthesize two related traditions: blues, and country and western. Although in some respects Berry's rock and roll is simpler and more vulgar than either of its musical sources, its simplicity and vulgarity are defensible in the snootiest high-art terms--how about "instinctive minimalism" or "demotic voice"? But his case doesn't rest on such defenses. It would be as perverse to argue that his songs are in themselves as rich as, say, Remembrance of Things Past. Their richness is rather a function of their active relationship with an audience--a complex relationship that shifts every time a song enters a new context, club or album or radio or mass singalong. Where Proust wrote about a dying subculture from a cork-lined room, Berry helped give life to a subculture, and both he and it change every time they confront each other. Even "My Ding-a-Ling," a fourth-grade wee-wee joke that used to mortify true believers at college concerts, permitted a lot of 12-year-olds new insight into the moribund concept of "dirty" when it hit the airwaves; the song changed again when an oldies crowd became as children to shout along with Uncle Chuck the night he received his gold record at Madison Square Garden. And what happened to "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," never a hit among whites, when Berry sang it at interracial rock and roll concerts in Northern cities in the Fifties? How many black kids took "eyed" as code for "skinned"? How many whites? How did that make them feel about each other, and about the song? And did any of that change the song itself?
Berry's own intentions, of course, remain a mystery. Typically, this public artist is an obsessively private person who has been known to drive reporters from his own amusement park, and the sketches of his life overlap and contradict each other. The way I tell it, Berry was born into a lower middle-class colored family in St. Louis in 1926. He was so quick and ambitious that he both served time in reform school on a robbery conviction and acquired a degree in hairdressing and cosmetology before taking a job on an auto assembly line to support a wife and kids. Yet his speed and ambition persisted. By 1953 he was working as a beautician and leading a three-piece blues group on a regular weekend gig. His gimmick was to cut the blues with country-influenced humorous narrative songs. These were rare in the black music of the time, although they had been common enough before phonograph records crystallized the blues form, and although Louis Jordan, a hero of Berry's, had been doing something vaguely similar in front of white audiences for years.
In 1955, Berry recorded two of his songs on a borrowed machine--"Wee Wee Hours," a blues that he and his pianist, Johnnie Johnson, hoped to sell, and an adapted country tune called "Ida Red." He traveled to Chicago and met Muddy Waters, the uncle of the blues, who sent him on to Leonard Chess of Chess Records. Chess liked "Wee Wee Hours" but flipped for "Ida Red," which was renamed "Maybellene," a hairdresser's dream, and forwarded to Allan Freed. Having mysteriously acquired one-third of the writer's credit with another DJ, Freed played "Maybellene" quite a lot, and it became one of the first nationwide rock 'n' roll hits.
At that time, any fair-minded person would have judged this process exploitative and pecuniary. A blues musician comes to a blues label to promote a blues song--"It was `Wee Wee Hours' we was proud of, that was our music," says Johnnie Johnson--but the owner of the label decides he wants to push a novelty: "The big beat, cars, and young love. It was a trend and we jumped on it," Chess has said. The owner then trades away a third of the blues singer's creative sweat to the symbol of payola, who hypes the novelty song into commercial success and leaves the artist in a quandry. Does he stick with his art, thus forgoing the first real recognition he's ever had, or does he pander to popular taste?
The question is loaded, of course. "Ida Red" was Chuck Berry's music as much as "Wee Wee Hours," which in retrospect seems rather uninspired. In fact, maybe the integrity problem went the other way. Maybe Johnson was afraid that the innovations of "Ida Red"--country guitar lines adapted to blues-style picking, with the ceaseless legato of his own piano adding rhythmic excitement to the steady backbeat--were too far out to sell. What happened instead was that Berry's limited but brilliant vocabulary of guitar riffs quickly came to epitomize rock 'n' roll. Ultimately, every great white guitar group of the early Sixties imitated Berry's style, and Johnson's piano technique was almost as influential. In other words, it turned out that Berry and Johnson weren't basically bluesmen at all. Through some magic combination of inspiration and cultural destiny, they had hit upon something more contemporary than blues, and a young audience, for whom the Depression was one more thing that bugged their parents, understood this better than the musicians themselves. Leonard Chess simply functioned as a music businessman should, though only rarely does one combine the courage and insight (and opportunity) to pull it off, even once. Chess became a surrogate audience, picking up on new music and making sure that it received enough exposure for everyone else to pick up on it, too.
Obviously, Chuck Berry wasn't racked with doubt about artistic compromise. A good blues single usually sold around 10,000 copies and a big rhythm and blues hit might go into the hundreds of thousands, but "Maybellene" probably moved a million, even if Chess never sponsored the audit to prove it. Berry had achieved a grip on the white audience and the solid future it could promise, and, remarkably, he had in no way diluted his genius to do it. On the contrary, that was his genius. He would never have fulfilled himself if he hadn't explored his relationship to the white world--a relationship which was much different for him, an urban black man who was used to machines and had never known brutal poverty, than it was for, say, Muddy Waters.
Berry was the first blues-based performer to successfully reclaim guitar tricks that country and western innovators had appropriated from black people and adapted to their own uses 25 or 50 years before. By adding blues tone to some fast country runs, and yoking them to a rhythm and blues beat and some unembarrassed electrification, he created an instrumental style with biracial appeal. Alternating guitar chords augmented the beat while Berry sang in an insouciant tenor that, while recognizably Afro-American in accent, stayed clear of the melisma and blurred overtones of blues singing, both of which enter only at carefully premeditated moments. His few detractors still complain about the repetitiveness of this style, but they miss the point. Repetition without tedium is the backbone of rock and roll, and the components of Berry's music proved so durable that they still provoke instant excitement at concerts durable that they still provoke instant excitement at concerts two decades later. And in any case, the instrumental repetition was counterbalanced by unprecedented and virtually unduplicated verbal variety.
Chuck Berry is the greatest rock lyricist this side of Bob Dylan, and sometimes I prefer him to Dylan. Both communicate an abundance of the childlike delight in linguistic discovery that page poets are supposed to convey and too often don't, but Berry's most ambitious lyrics, unlike Dylan's, never seem pretentious or forced. True, his language is ersatz and barbaric, full of mispronounced foreignisms and advertising coinages, but then, so was Whitman's. Like Whitman, Berry is excessive because he is totally immersed in America--the America of Melville and the Edsel, burlesque and installment-plan funerals, pemmican and pomade. Unlike Whitman, though, he doesn't quite permit you to take him seriously--he can't really think it's pronounced "a la carty," can he? He is a little surreal. How else can a black man as sensitive as Chuck Berry respond to the affluence of white America--an affluence suddenly his for the taking.
Chuck Berry is not only a little surreal but also a little schizy; even after he committed himself to rock 'n' roll story songs, relegating the bluesman in him to B sides and album fillers, he found his persona split in two. In three of the four singles that followed "Maybellene," he amplified the black half of his artistic personality, the brown-eyed handsome man who always came up short in his quest for the small-time hedonism American promises everyone. By implication, Brown Eyes' sharp sense of life's nettlesome and even oppressive details provided a kind of salvation by humor, especially in "Too Much Monkey Business," a catalog of hassles that included work, school and the army. But the white teenagers who were the only audience with the cultural experience to respond to Berry's art weren't buying this kind of salvation, not en masse. They wanted something more optimistic and more specific to themselves; of the four singles that followed "Maybellene," only "Roll Over Beethoven," which introduced Berry's other half, the rock 'n' roller, achieved any real success. Chuck got the message. His next release, "School Day," was another complaint song, but this time the complaints were explicitly adolescent and were relieved by the direct action of the rock 'n' roller. In fact, the song has been construed as a prophecy of the Free Speech Movement: "Close your books, get out of your seat/Down the halls and into the street."
It has become a cliché to attribute the rise of rock and roll to a new parallelism between white teenagers and black Americans; a common "alienation" and even "suffering" are often cited. As with most clichés, this one has its basis in fact--teenagers in the Fifties certainly showed an unprecedented consciousness of themselves as a circumscribed group, though how much that had to do with marketing refinements and how much with the Bomb remains unresolved. In any case, Chuck Berry's history points up the limits of this notion. For Berry was closer to white teenagers both economically (that reform school stint suggests a JD exploit, albeit combined with a racist judicial system) and in spirit (he shares his penchant for youthfulness with Satchel Paige but not Henry Aaron, with Leslie Fiedler but not Norman Podhoretz) than the average black man. And even at that, he had to make a conscious (not to say calculated) leap of the imagination to reach them, and sometimes fell short.
Although he scored lots of minor hits, Chuck Berry made only three additional Billboard Top Ten singles in the Fifties--"Rock and Roll Music," "Sweet Little Sixteen," and "Johnny B. Goode"--and every one of them ignored Brown Eyes for the assertive, optimistic, and somewhat simpleminded rock 'n' roller. In a pattern common among popular artists, his truest and most personal work didn't flop, but it wasn't overwhelmingly popular either. For such artists, the audience can be like a drug. A little of it is so good for them that they assume a lot of it would be even better, but instead the big dose saps their autonomy, often so subtly that they don't notice it. For Chuck Berry, the craving for overwhelming popularity proved slightly dangerous. At the same time that he was enlivening his best songs with faintly Latin rhythms, which he was convinced were the coming thing, he was also writing silly exercises with titles like "Hey Pedro." Nevertheless, his pursuit of the market also worked a communion with his audience, with whom he continued to have an instinctive rapport remarkable in a 30-year-old black man. For there is also a sense in which the popular artist is a drug for the audience, and a doctor, too--he has to know how much of his vital essence he can administer at one time, and in what compound.
The reason Berry's rock 'n' roller was capable of such insightful excursions into the teen psyche--"Sweet Little Sixteen," a celebration of everything lovely about fanhood; or "Almost Grown," a basically unalianated first-person expression of teen rebellion that Sixties youth-cult pundits should have taken seriously--was that he shared a crucial American value with the humorous Brown Eyes. That value was fun. Even among rock critics, who ought to know better, fun doesn't have much of a rep, so that they commiserate with someone like LaVern Baker, a second-rate blues and gospel singer who felt she was selling her soul every time she launched into a first-rate whoop of nonsense like "Jim Dandy" or "Bumble Bee." But fun was what adolescent revolt had to be about--inebriated affluence versus the hangover of the work ethic. It was the only practicable value in the Peter Pan utopia of the American dream. Because black music had always thrived on exuberance--not just the otherworldly transport of gospel, but the candidly physical good times of great pop blues singers like Washboard Sam, who is most often dismissed as a lightweight by the heavy blues critics--it turned into the perfect vehicle for generational convulsion. Black musicians, however, had rarely achieved an optimism that was cultural as well as personal--those few who did, like Louis Armstrong, left themselves open to charges of Tomming. Chuck Berry never Tommed. The trouble he'd seen just made his sly, bad-boy voice and the splits and waddles of his stage show that much more credible.
Then, late in 1959, fun turned into trouble. Berry had imported a Spanish-speaking Apache prostitute he'd picked up in El Paso to check hats in his St. Louis nightclub, and then fired her. She went to the police, and Berry was indicted under the Mann Act. After two trials, the first so blatantly racist that it was disallowed, he went to prison for two years. When he got out, in 1964, he and his wife had separated, apparently a major tragedy for him. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones had paid him such explicit and appropriate tribute that his career was probably in better shape after his jail term than before, but he couldn't capitalize. He had a few hits--"Nadine" and "No Particular Place to Go" (John Lennon is one of the many who believe they were written before he went in)--but the well was dry. Between 1965 and 1970 he didn't release one-even passable new song, and he died as a recording artist.
In late 1966, Berry left Chess for a big advance from Mercury Records. The legends of his money woes at Chess are numerous, but apparently the Chess brothers knew how to record him--the stuff he produced himself for Mercury was terrible. Working alone with pickup bands, he still performed a great deal, mostly to make money for Berry Park, a recreation haven 30 miles from St. Louis. And as he toured, he found that something had happened to his old audience--it was getting older, with troubles of its own, and it dug blues. At auditoriums like the Fillmore, where he did a disappointing live LP with the Steve Miller Blues Band, Chuck was more than willing to stretch out on a blues. One of his favorites was from Elmore James: "When things go wrong, wrong with you, it hurts me too."
By 1970, he was back home at Chess, and suddenly his new audience called forth a miracle. Berry was a natural head--no drugs, no alcohol--and most of his attempts to cash in on hippie talk had been embarrassments. But "Tulane," one of his greatest story songs, was the perfect fantasy. It was about two dope dealers: "Tulane and Johnny opened a novelty shop/ Back under the counter was the cream of the crop." Johnny is nabbed by narcs, but Tulane, his girlfriend, escapes, and Johnny confidently predicts that she will buy off the judge. Apparently she does, for there is a sequel, a blues. In "Have Mercy Judge," Johnny has been caught again, and this time he expects to be sent to "some stony mansion." Berry devotes the last stanza to Tulane, who is "too alive to live alone." The last line makes me wonder just how he felt about his own wife when he went to prison: "Just tell her to live, and I'll forgive her, and even love her more when I come back home."
Taken together, the two songs are Berry's peak, although Leonard Chess would no doubt have vetoed the vocal double-track on "Tulane" that blurs its impact a bit. Remarkably, "Have Mercy Judge" is the first important blues Berry ever wrote, and like all his best work it isn't quite traditional, utilizing an abc line structure instead of the usual aab. Where did it come from? Is it unreasonable to suspect that part of Berry really was a bluesman all along, and that this time, instead of him going to his audience, his audience came to him and provided the juice for one last masterpiece?
Berry's career would appear closed. He is a rock and roll monument at 50, a pleasing performer whose days of inspiration are over. Sometime in the next 30 years he will probably die, and while his songs have already stuck in the public memory a lot longer than Washboard Sam's, it's likely that most of them will fade away too. So is he, was he, will he be a great artist? It won't be we judging, but perhaps we can think of it this way. Maybe the true measure of his greatness was not whether his songs "lasted"--a term which as of now means persisted through centuries instead of decades--but that he was one of the ones to make us understand that the greatest thing about art is the way it happens between people. I am grateful for aesthetic artifacts, and I suspect that a few of Berry's songs, a few of his recordings, will live on in that way. I only hope that they prove too alive to live alone. If they do, and if by some mishap Berry's name itself is forgotten, that will nevertheless be an entirely apposite kind of triumph for him.
Discography
"Maybellene" (Chess 1604; * 5, r* 1, 1955).
"Thirty Days" (Chess 1610; r* 8, 1955).
"No Money Down" (Chess 1615; r* 11, 1956).
"Roll Over Beethoven" (Chess 1626; r* 7, *29, 1956).
"Too Much Monkey Business" b/w "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" (Chess 1635; r* 7, 1956).
"School Day" (Chess 1653; r* 1, *5, 1957).
"Oh Baby Doll" (Chess 1664; * 57, 1957).
"Rock and Roll Music" (Chess 1671; * 8, r* 6, 1957).
"Sweet Little Sixteen" (Chess 1683; r* 1, *2, 1958).
"Johnny B. Goode" (Chess 1691; r* 5, * 8, 1958).
"Carol" (Chess 1700; r* 12, * 18, 1958).
"Sweet Little Rock and Roll" (Chess 1709; r* 13, * 47, 1958).
"Anthony Boy" (Chess 1716; * 60, 1959).
"Almost Grown" (Chess 1722; r* 3, * 32, 1959).
"Back in the U.S.A." (Chess 1729; r* 16, * 37, 1959).
"Too Pooped to Pop" (Chess 1747; r* 18, * 42, 1960).
"Nadine" (Chess 1883; * 23, 1964).
"No Particular Place to Go" (Chess 1898; * 10, 1964).
"You Never Can Tell" (Chess 1906; * 14, 1964).
"Little Marie" (Chess 1912; * 54, 1964).
"Promised Land" (Chess 1916; * 41, 1964).
"My Ding-a-Ling" (Chess 2131; * 1, 1972).
"Reelin' and Rockin'" (Chess 2136; * 27, 1972).
(Chart positions compiled from Joel Whitburn's Record Research, based on Billboard Pop chart, unless otherwise indicated; r* = position on Billboard Rhythm and Blues chart.)
The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, 1976
From his songwriting and lyrics, to his guitar playing and stage antics, perhaps nobody else short of Elvis Presley was as influential on the young Beatles as Chuck Berry. As John Lennon once put it, "When I hear rock, good rock, the calibre of Chuck Berry, I just fall apart and I have no other interest in life. The world could be ending if rock 'n' roll is playing" (Anthology, page 11). Where Presley's strength was as a performer, as an interpretive artist, Berry was more creative and multi-dimensional: He wrote, performed, and recorded his own words and music.
Throughout the Quarrymen/Beatles' existence, they played a total of at least 15 Chuck Berry songs in their live shows (as dictated in Lewisohn, page 361-65), listed here in chronological order.
- "Roll Over Beethoven", 1957-64
- "Sweet Little Sixteen", 1957-62
- "Johnny B. Goode", 1958-62
- "Maybellene", 1959-61
- "Rock and Roll Music", 1959-66
- "Almost Grown", 1960-62
- "Carol", 1960-62
- "Little Queenie", 1960-63
- "Reelin' and Rockin'", 1960-61
- "Thirty Days", 1960-61
- "Vacation Time", 1960-61
- "Memphis, Tennessee", 1960-62
- "Too Much Monkey Business", 1960-62
- "I Got to Find my Baby", 1961-62
- "I'm Talking About You", 1962
Unusually in this series of American Rock 'n' Roll and its influence on the Beatles, Beatles recordings survive of all but one of those 15 tunes.
In addition to 8 years' of stage performances, the Beatles also officially recorded and released "Roll Over Beethoven" on With the Beatles.
A
live recording of the same song (with Lennon singing lead) was also
made on an unknown date (it must have been no later than 1961 because
that's when Harrison took over lead vocals) and later released on the
album The Beatles Live at the BBC...
...
and a different version (with Harrison singing lead) was recorded on an
unknown date (must have been no earlier than 1961) and later released
on the album On Air – Live At The BBC Volume 2, heard in the YouTube video below from 30:07-32:29.
The
Beatles also played two sets at Carnegie Hall in New York City on 12
February 1964, opening both with "Roll Over Beethoven". Unfortunately,
neither was recorded.
"Sweet Little Sixteen" was recorded twice by the Beatles. First at the Star Club in Hamburg in 1962 and released on the album Live! At the Star Club...
"Sweet Little Sixteen" was recorded twice by the Beatles. First at the Star Club in Hamburg in 1962 and released on the album Live! At the Star Club...
... and second on 10 July 1963 at the Aeolian Hall in London for the radio show Pop Goes the Beatles. This latter recording was included on the album The Beatles Live at the BBC.
Lennon also recorded and released the song on his 1975 album Rock 'n' Roll.
Many Berry tunes were included on the 1994 album The Beatles Live at the BBC, including "Johnny B Goode", "Roll Over Beethoven", "Carol", "Too Much Monkey Business" , "I Got to Find my Baby", and "Memphis, Tennessee".
This last number was recorded by the Beatles on New Year's Day 1962, as part of their ill-fated Decca audition.
Many Berry tunes were included on the 1994 album The Beatles Live at the BBC, including "Johnny B Goode", "Roll Over Beethoven", "Carol", "Too Much Monkey Business" , "I Got to Find my Baby", and "Memphis, Tennessee".
This last number was recorded by the Beatles on New Year's Day 1962, as part of their ill-fated Decca audition.
After
"Roll Over Beethoven", the only other Berry song to be released on an
official studio album was "Rock 'n' Roll Music", included on Beatles for Sale.
Two Berry songs were also recorded in December 1962 and featured on the album Live! At the Star Club: "Little Queenie" and "I'm Talking About You".
Although the Beatles never recorded a cover of "Thirty Days", a bootleg series from the Get Back sessions (January 1969) was given that title. Similarly, although the Beatles never released an official recording of "Vacation Time", they did play through it on 29 January 1969 during the Get Back sessions, the recording of which may be found on bootlegged releases. Likewise, a recording of the Beatles playing "Almost Grown" only exists from 8 and 24 January 1969, which was released only on bootleg. The latter day also saw the recording of a cover of "Maybellene".
Although the Beatles never recorded a cover of "Thirty Days", a bootleg series from the Get Back sessions (January 1969) was given that title. Similarly, although the Beatles never released an official recording of "Vacation Time", they did play through it on 29 January 1969 during the Get Back sessions, the recording of which may be found on bootlegged releases. Likewise, a recording of the Beatles playing "Almost Grown" only exists from 8 and 24 January 1969, which was released only on bootleg. The latter day also saw the recording of a cover of "Maybellene".
All
of this shows very clearly that the young Beatles not only appreciated
Berry's output, but also knew it intimately from covering the songs.
But, it does not necessarily mean that Berry influenced the band. That
can only be seen in comparing the Beatles' originals (rather than covers) to Berry's recordings.
Chuck Berry inspired the Beatles through both his lyrics and his music. Paul McCartney tipped his hat to Berry when writing "Back in the USSR", which is clearly modeled after Berry's "Back in the USA". In addition to the obvious similarities in the titles, they both also open with international flights:
Chuck Berry inspired the Beatles through both his lyrics and his music. Paul McCartney tipped his hat to Berry when writing "Back in the USSR", which is clearly modeled after Berry's "Back in the USA". In addition to the obvious similarities in the titles, they both also open with international flights:
Berry: "Back in the USA" Oh well, oh well, I feel so good today We just touched ground on an international runway Jet propelled back home from over seas to the U.S.A. |
Beatles: “Back in the U.S.S.R.”
Flew in from Miami Beach B.O.A.C. Didn't get to bed last night On the way the paper bag was on my knee Man I had a dreadful flight I'm back in the U.S.S.R. |
Similarly, the opening lyrics of "I Saw Her Standing There"
are strongly reminiscent of Berry's "Little Queenie".
are strongly reminiscent of Berry's "Little Queenie".
Berry: "Little Queenie" There she is again Standin' over by the record machine, Lookin' like a model On the cover of a magazine. She's too cute To be a minute over seventeen. |
Beatles: "I Saw Her Standing There"
Well she was just seventeen, You know what I mean, And the way she looked Was way beyond compare. So how could I dance with another Since I saw her standin' there? |
McCartney borrowed not only lyrics, but also music from Berry. The bass line in "I Saw Her Standing There" is borrowed verbatim from Berry's "I'm Talking About You". Paul himself never attempted to hide the similarity: “I used the bass riff from ‘Talkin’ About You’ by Chuck Berry in ‘I Saw Her Standing There.’ I played exactly the same notes as he did and it fitted our number perfectly” (Flippo, page 181). Although the Beatles' cover of "I'm Talking About You" was in a different key (E major, where the Berry original was in C major), the notes are indeed identical, as the graphic below illustrates.
Lennon was also heavily influenced by Berry, admitting to interviewer Jan Wenner, "Chuck Berry is one of the all-time great poets, a rock poet you could call him. He was well advanced of his time lyric-wise. In the Fifties, when people were virtually singing about nothing, Chuck Berry was writing social-comment songs, with incredible metre to the lyrics. We all owe a lot to him." (Wenner, page 140; Anthology, page 11).
Lennon borrowed Berry's lyrics and music from "You Can't Catch Me" (1956), which featured the lyrics "Here come old flat top, He come groovin' up slowly", which Lennon borrowed verbatim for use as the opening lines of "Come Together" (Abbey Road, 1969). Morris Levy, the legal owners of the original, eventually sued Lennon over the pilfered lyrics, and won. Part of the settlement was for Lennon to include "You Can't Catch Me" on his 1975 album Rock 'n' Roll.
Chuck Berry also pioneered a distinctive style of lead guitar playing that mixed single notes with double-stops (see "Johnny B. Goode" or "Roll Over Beethoven") that would prove hugely influential on countless up-and-coming musicians at the time - the Beatles included. Although they never wrote anything in that same style, the Beatles did occasionally employ something similar. Lennon's opening of "Revolution" is a good example, as is the exuberant guitar duet heard on "And Your Bird Can Sing".
Lastly, although Little Richard's stage antics are more flamboyant and thus demand more attention, Berry is quite well-known in his own right for his "duck walk". Although I've never found any quote or book that confirms the Beatles ever duck walked on stage, I would be very surprised if it never happened - especially during their long hours on stage in Hamburg, where the more ridiculous and gaudy the stage antics, the better.
Chuck Berry's influence on the Beatles, then, can be seen from the many covers the band played, but also by emulating and imitating his lyrics and music and stage presence. When introducing Chuck Berry on The Mike Douglas Show in February 1972, Lennon said, "If you had to give Rock 'n' Roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry." And that quote sums up how the Beatles idolized Berry as well as anything possibly could.
CITATIONS
Beatles. The Beatles Anthology. Chronicle Books LLC, San Francisco, CA, 2000.
Flippo, Chet. Yesterday: The Unauthorized Biography of Paul McCartney. Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc, New York, NY, 1988.
Wenner, Jan S. Lennon Remembers. Verso, New York, NY, 2000.
THE
MUSIC OF CHUCK BERRY: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF
RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS
WITH MR. BERRY:
Chuck Berry - "Johnny B. Goode" (Live 1958):
"Roll Over Beethoven" Chuck Berry performing in a French TV show Live:
Chuck Berry "Sweet Little Sixteen"
"Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show"on ABC-TV (hosted by Dick Clark) February 22, 1958:
Chuck Berry - "LITTLE QUEENIE" - 1959 HQ!:
Stripped out low-fi movie sound, and blended the high quality recording into a scene from the film
'Go, Johnny, Go!' (1959)
Pretending to be musicians in this scene from the film are Alan Freed on drums, Dave Brubeck on piano, Jean Reinhart on guitar, and Charlie Hayden on bass. Ritchie Valens is the guy sitting with the girls at the table.
The actual musicians were Johnnie Johnson on piano, Willie Dixon on bass, and Fred Below on drums.
Chuck Berry - "Maybellene" 1955:
CHUCK BERRY & KEITH RICHARDS performing "Nadine"
composition by Chuck Berry
From the film: "Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll" (Chuck Berry) 1987:
Chuck Berry & John Lennon-- "Johnny B Good"
A very rare version of "Johnny B Good", performed live on television in 1971 by John Lennon and Chuck Berry:
Chuck Berry live concert London 1972:
Best Songs Of Chuck Berry
1 Maybellene
http://www.themillions.com/2012/07/chuck-berry-neoclassicist.html
There’s
no triteness to be disguised in “Rock and Roll Music.” It is what
“Where the Streets Have No Name” manifestly is not: poetry, or at least a
variety of folk poetry that delights in language and its own
expressiveness. Not that “Rock and Roll Music” will ever be mistaken for
“Sailing to Byzantium” or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In the
first place, it’s a song, with lyrics not intended to be experienced
apart from the music. Secondly, it derives from and relates to pop
culture, not high art; as he cheerfully admits in his Autobiography,
Chuck Berry has read a total of six books in his life. Yet who would
disdain the wit and ingenuity of a typical Chuck Berry lyric merely
because it lacks the density of Yeats’s Byzantium poems? Good and great
poetry lies all around us. Whether it comes to us over a car radio or in
a heavily annotated textbook, it’s still poetry.
In a long-ago television interview I half remember, Berry described his songwriting method as entirely commercial. He studied the market and hit upon three common denominators for the mass (mostly white) teenage audience he aspired to reach: school, because school was the locus of teenage social life; cars, because teenagers in the car-crazy fifties and early sixties couldn’t wait to get the keys to the ignition in their hands; and love, because “everybody falls in love, or wants to fall in love.” Two things struck me about that interview – that Berry conceived of songwriting in terms more collective than subjective (the opposite tendency – I hurt! I suffer! I’m famous! – tends to be the norm in rock and roll); and that he had the delicacy to understand that while everybody wants to fall in love, some people never will. So in addition to his acuity and catholicity, I’d add another attribute to the list of Chuck Berry’s compositional distinctions: his humanity. That he himself, according to Keith Richards and others who have worked with him, has all the charm of a rattlesnake only adds to the poignancy of his lyrics. When I consider what Chuck Berry the man might have wanted to do with a sweet little sixteen-year-old girl (he says almost as much in his Autobiography, a book that does nothing to allay his reputation for sleaziness), the tender solicitude of that song seems even more remarkable:
Note also that Sweet Little Sixteen isn’t “wearing” high-heeled shoes; she’s “sportin’” them. You could say that “sportin” is to “wearing” what poetry is to prose. Or you could say that it’s the right verb for the right line, providing the necessary linkage, as it were, between vehicle and tenor. Or you could say nothing at all and just dig it. I could no more define poetry than I could play guitar like Chuck Berry (I’ve tried – it’s harder than it looks), but I do know that the one thing all poetry must have is a love for language that ultimately transcends instrumentality. Words mean things, and the better the poem, the more meanings attach to the words, but in the way that painters fall in love with paint itself – pushing it, pulling it, scumbling it, scraping it – poets fall in love with words. Like any true poet, Berry has what James Schuyler, in “The Morning of the Poem,” called the “innate love of words,” the “sense of / How the thing said / Is in the words, how / The words are themselves / The thing said.” Given the poverty of the standard rock and roll lexicon, where words like “baby,” “love,” “run,” “hide,” “want,” “need,” “live,” “die,” and “bodacious” circulate with depressing regularity, the key words in Berry’s songs stand out as poems in themselves: “calaboose” for car in “No Particular Place To Go” or “hound” for Greyhound bus in “The Promised Land” or “motivatin’” for what might be described as “motoring joyfully but with determined purpose” in “Maybellene.” Those six books he read more than sufficed. Berry’s idiomatic exuberance derives not from the written word but from oral traditions in African American and even Southern white culture. No surprise that a black musician would draw on the structural template of the blues, but that the same musician would see the compatibility of blues structures with the narrative sense of country music – that sounds a bit like the birth of rock and roll, actually. (Elvis Presley made a similar discovery coming from the opposite direction.) The catalog of place names in the first verse of “Sweet Little Sixteen,” for instance, is echt-country, yet the song itself is as stolid a twelve-bar blues as any composition by, say, Willie Dixon, who, as a matter of fact, played bass on it. So where are they rockin’?
Although the right word is ideally a poem in itself, you still have to put one next to another. This too Berry does with masterly efficiency. The way his words roll off the tongue in “Tulane” and “Downbound Train” and so many others turns language into music – a useful quality for a body of songs not known for their melodic invention. (Let’s face it, Chuck’s thing is rhythm, not melody.) Most pop song lyrics don’t scan on the page and don’t need to, but sometimes Berry’s compositional regularity requires the assistance of some classical versification, as in the giddy triple meters of “School Days”:
Chuck Berry has had a hard life: reform school, two prison terms, financial exploitation, bankruptcy, racial discrimination, and much else. It is not his manner to rehearse his private grief in public, though the sly braggadocio of “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” and the crypto-autobiography of “Johnny B. Goode” trade playfully on his public image. Whether the pathos of “Memphis, Tennessee” derives from his own domestic sorrows is, strictly speaking, beside the point, though in a song this tender and touching, no supposition seems entirely extraneous. At any rate, “Memphis, Tennessee” is one of the greatest story songs in American music, all the more affecting for being so offhand and bouncy. (Berry himself, so he says in his Autobiography, played the swooping bass and “the ticky-tack drums that trot along in the background.”) What appears on first listening to be just another comic ditty about frustrated pedophilia (or so I used to interpret the top-forty version by Johnny Rivers that I knew as a child) turns out to be the desperate plea of a divorced father barred from any contact with his six-year-old daughter. The narrative builds to its final revelation piece by piece, with incidental details carrying an emotional load too freighted to be acknowledged outright: that the girl is furtively trying to reach her father; that the father has taken refuge with relatives; that although he now lives in the sort of place where messages are written on the wall, he once lived in a house high on a ridge overlooking the river; that the girl’s mother, not he, has broken up the family. And all of this – the heartbreak, the loss, the wit – by way of a conversation with a telephone operator:
Blues, country and western, Johnsonian neoclassicism: these are the traditions that nurture Chuck Berry’s lyrical art. But really, who gives a damn about the categories when you’re listening to something as smoking as “Brown Eyed Handsome Man”? Many critics have taken this song to be a pointed avowal of black pride (not exactly a safe career move in 1956), and since the songwriter himself is unquestionably a brown eyed handsome man, blackness (or brownness) is very much to the point. In fact, the opening lines – “Arrested on charges of unemployment / He was sitting in the witness stand” – call to mind all too clearly the sort of harassment that black Americans have had to endure. But there’s that classicism again – all women, everywhere, have been falling for a certain kind of handsomeness “Way back in history three thousand years / In fact ever since the world began.” This would include the Venus de Milo (here reimagined as a modern girl named Milo Venus) who, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is “No more, but e’en a woman.” Why should it be any different for her than for the judge’s wife in the first verse who “called up the district attorney / She said you free that brown eyed man / If you want your job you better free that brown eyed man”? Never, it seems to me, has the universalizing tendency of classicism been more cogently expressed:
Robert Christgau, in Grown Up All Wrong,
wrote that Chuck Berry “was one of the ones to make us understand that
the greatest thing about art is the way it happens among people.” Berry
himself makes no such claims. He really seems to believe that compared
to a transcendent “artist” like Joan Crawford, who
“will go down in the history books of even Russia, China, and Arabia,”
he is a mere satellite, “circl[ing] a few years in the foreign magazines
and then fad[ing] away in the next conventional war.” Far from being a
“star,” he merely has a job to do and a check to pick up. Although
Berry’s underestimation of his own talent seems incomprehensible, it did
save him (and us) from the windy grandiloquence of songs like “Where
the Streets Have No Name.” Anyway, it’s a refreshing twist – the rock
auteur who, for once, doesn’t think he’s a genius.
For people of my parents’ generation, rock songwriting seemed a paltry thing, and they certainly would have believed that Chuck Berry lacked anything like the sophistication of Ira Gershwin or Cole Porter. That may be. But I didn’t grow up with Broadway musicals, I grew up with rock and roll, and it is to that happily debased art form that I owe my first exposure to poetry. Before rock and pop lyrics in the late sixties and early seventies turned to the outer reaches of narcissism (gloriously exemplified by Joni Mitchell and John Lennon, among others), they tended to follow in the more impersonal and commercial lines laid down by Berry and that he too was following from lines laid down by Nat King Cole, Louis Jordan, and others. I will concede that, lyrically, Brian Wilson was no match for Lorenz Hart, but the Beach Boys got to me first, and when I was ten years old the perfect couplets of “I Get Around” conjured up a world as glamorously ritualized and unreal as the Arthurian romances, which I read avidly in those days but found a tad pale by comparison:
I’m getting’ bugged driving up and down this same old strip
I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip
My buddies and me are getting real well known
Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone.
It was like first looking into Chapman’s Homer. Language (and not just Wilson’s superb compositions and the band’s gorgeous harmonies) had revealed to me a world more beautiful and desirable than the one I lived in, even if I dimly perceived that no such world could possibly exist. (It sure didn’t exist for Brian Wilson and his brothers, whose hellish upbringing in what looked like a picture perfect California household went unmentioned in their songs.) Not every song, not even every Beach Boy song, held such wonders. Even then a catchy chorus and flashy guitar break served to deflect attention from the nullity of the lyrics. Anyway, if the song was as great as “Be My Baby” or “Louie Louie,” who could complain? Yet as an unprecocious child I had heard enough real poetry in the songs of the Beach Boys and Smokey Robinson and Chuck Berry (usually in cover versions by later bands) to know that words could be more than functional. When, a few years later, pop musicians were suddenly writing lines like “Half of what I say is meaningless / But I say it just to reach you, Julia,” I was ready. If this more inward approach sacrificed some of the charm and playfulness of the Chuck Berry/Beach Boys/Smokey Robinson manner, it offered instead audacious explorations of the self and the permutations of consciousness. I’d call that a pretty fair trade-off.
So I owe a lot to rock and roll lyricists. I wouldn’t necessarily say no John Milton without Chuck Berry, but in my case the great songwriters like Berry helped me do some of the necessary prep work. They helped me to love language. And if there were more sophisticated lyricists before Berry, there have been more sophisticated lyricists since Berry. By now the proposition that certain rock and pop songwriters have achieved depths of feeling comparable to the best poetry isn’t even controversial. Ray Davies, Shane MacGowan, Randy Newman, Lucinda Williams, Tom Waits, Warren Zevon, Morrissey, and many others – some working in a more confessional, others in a more impersonal tradition, and others making any such distinction ultimately meaningless – have all written songs that do what all good poetry does: moves, enlightens, disturbs, delights. Yet it all had to start somewhere, and in rock and roll, much of the greatest lyric writing started with Chuck Berry. (As for the basic musical D.N.A. of rock and roll, Berry pretty much created that too.) He could have said, as many rockers would have, knowing that the music would do most of the work, “Let’s go for a ride in my car, baby.” He didn’t. He said, “Climb into my machine so we can cruise on out.”
Chuck Berry's Greatest Hits Full Album:
Chuck Berry--20th Century Masters [full album]:
Tracklist:
1 Maybellene
2 Roll over Beethoven
3 Brown Eyed Handsome Man
4 School Days
5 Rock & Roll Music
6 Sweet Little Sixteen
7 Johnny B. Goode
8 Carol
9 You Never Can Tell
10 My Ding-A-Ling [Single Edit][Live]
11 No Particular Place to Go
CHUCK BERRY "HONOREE"-(COMPLETE) 23rd KENNEDY CENTER HONORS, 2000:
Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
Chuck Berry, Neoclassicist
By Stephen Akey
July 24, 2012 16
Compare:
I want to run, I want to hide
I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside
I want to reach out and touch the flame
Where the streets have no name.
(U2, “Where the Streets Have No Name”)
Way down South they gave a jubileeNow, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, and because I’m one myself I know how devoted rock and roll fans are to their favorite bands, but it must be seen that compared to the Chuck Berry lyric, the U2 lyric is, well, shit. I say this as a fervent admirer of U2 and one who was lucky enough to witness the band perform “Where the Streets Have No Name” in 1987 or so, when to hear it for the first time was to be swept up in a tide of communal idealism. Who could argue with such lofty sentiments, especially when accompanied by the surge of the Edge’s ringing guitar and the most propulsive rhythm section in all of rock? Alas, there isn’t a word, phrase, or image in the whole song not utterly staled by cliché. As in much of the best rock and roll, the majesty of the music disguises the triteness of the lyrics.
Them Georgia folks they had a jamboree
They’re drinking home brew from a wooden cup
The folks dancing there got all shook up.
(Chuck Berry, “Rock and Roll Music”)
There’s
no triteness to be disguised in “Rock and Roll Music.” It is what
“Where the Streets Have No Name” manifestly is not: poetry, or at least a
variety of folk poetry that delights in language and its own
expressiveness. Not that “Rock and Roll Music” will ever be mistaken for
“Sailing to Byzantium” or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In the
first place, it’s a song, with lyrics not intended to be experienced
apart from the music. Secondly, it derives from and relates to pop
culture, not high art; as he cheerfully admits in his Autobiography,
Chuck Berry has read a total of six books in his life. Yet who would
disdain the wit and ingenuity of a typical Chuck Berry lyric merely
because it lacks the density of Yeats’s Byzantium poems? Good and great
poetry lies all around us. Whether it comes to us over a car radio or in
a heavily annotated textbook, it’s still poetry.In a long-ago television interview I half remember, Berry described his songwriting method as entirely commercial. He studied the market and hit upon three common denominators for the mass (mostly white) teenage audience he aspired to reach: school, because school was the locus of teenage social life; cars, because teenagers in the car-crazy fifties and early sixties couldn’t wait to get the keys to the ignition in their hands; and love, because “everybody falls in love, or wants to fall in love.” Two things struck me about that interview – that Berry conceived of songwriting in terms more collective than subjective (the opposite tendency – I hurt! I suffer! I’m famous! – tends to be the norm in rock and roll); and that he had the delicacy to understand that while everybody wants to fall in love, some people never will. So in addition to his acuity and catholicity, I’d add another attribute to the list of Chuck Berry’s compositional distinctions: his humanity. That he himself, according to Keith Richards and others who have worked with him, has all the charm of a rattlesnake only adds to the poignancy of his lyrics. When I consider what Chuck Berry the man might have wanted to do with a sweet little sixteen-year-old girl (he says almost as much in his Autobiography, a book that does nothing to allay his reputation for sleaziness), the tender solicitude of that song seems even more remarkable:
Sweet Little SixteenExactly: a sixteen-year-old girl is at once an innocent child and a sexual agent. This doubleness so disturbs us that we (meaning middle-aged men like me) tend to conceive of such a creature as childlike or provocative but not both. Well, sorry – this sixteen-year-old girl is hot as a volcano but still elicits all the paternal protectiveness the song bestows on her.
She’s got the grownup blues
Tight dresses and lipstick
She’s sportin’ high-heeled shoes
Oh but tomorrow morning
She’ll have to change her trend
And be sweet sixteen
And back in class again.
Note also that Sweet Little Sixteen isn’t “wearing” high-heeled shoes; she’s “sportin’” them. You could say that “sportin” is to “wearing” what poetry is to prose. Or you could say that it’s the right verb for the right line, providing the necessary linkage, as it were, between vehicle and tenor. Or you could say nothing at all and just dig it. I could no more define poetry than I could play guitar like Chuck Berry (I’ve tried – it’s harder than it looks), but I do know that the one thing all poetry must have is a love for language that ultimately transcends instrumentality. Words mean things, and the better the poem, the more meanings attach to the words, but in the way that painters fall in love with paint itself – pushing it, pulling it, scumbling it, scraping it – poets fall in love with words. Like any true poet, Berry has what James Schuyler, in “The Morning of the Poem,” called the “innate love of words,” the “sense of / How the thing said / Is in the words, how / The words are themselves / The thing said.” Given the poverty of the standard rock and roll lexicon, where words like “baby,” “love,” “run,” “hide,” “want,” “need,” “live,” “die,” and “bodacious” circulate with depressing regularity, the key words in Berry’s songs stand out as poems in themselves: “calaboose” for car in “No Particular Place To Go” or “hound” for Greyhound bus in “The Promised Land” or “motivatin’” for what might be described as “motoring joyfully but with determined purpose” in “Maybellene.” Those six books he read more than sufficed. Berry’s idiomatic exuberance derives not from the written word but from oral traditions in African American and even Southern white culture. No surprise that a black musician would draw on the structural template of the blues, but that the same musician would see the compatibility of blues structures with the narrative sense of country music – that sounds a bit like the birth of rock and roll, actually. (Elvis Presley made a similar discovery coming from the opposite direction.) The catalog of place names in the first verse of “Sweet Little Sixteen,” for instance, is echt-country, yet the song itself is as stolid a twelve-bar blues as any composition by, say, Willie Dixon, who, as a matter of fact, played bass on it. So where are they rockin’?
They’re really rockin’ in BostonYou could draw a pretty comprehensive map of America from the poetry of place names in Chuck Berry’s songs. Norfolk Virginia, downtown Birmingham, Houston town, Albuquerque, Los Angeles: they’re all there in “The Promised Land,” inventoried with great good humor even when the traveler encounters, as we all do from time to time, “motor trouble that turned into a struggle.” Wouldn’t “The Promised Land” make a better national anthem than that unsingable and bellicose dirge we’re stuck with?
In Pittsburgh, PA
Deep in the heart of Texas
And round the ‘Frisco Bay
All over St. Louis
And down in New Orleans
All the cats want to dance with
Sweet Little Sixteen.
I left my home in Norfolk VirginiaNow, some people might suspect the motive of a songwriter who could write such a paean to place when the place in question subjected him to constant racial harassment. But Berry never concealed his motive – to make as much money as possible. How American is that? That a man who had every reason to begrudge his country could write “The Promised Land” or the even more besotted “Living in the USA” (“Looking hard for a drive-in, searching for a corner café . . . / Yeah, and the juke box jumping with records like in the USA”) is, for me, cause for the profoundest patriotism. Furthermore, unlike “This Land Is Your Land,” Woody Guthrie’s national anthem of Depression-era populism, “The Promised Land” doesn’t ask that you hate the rich or share the singer’s sectarian politics. (Listen to the rarely sung verses four and five if you don’t believe me.) I do hate the rich, but that’s because I’m not as generous of spirit as Chuck Berry is. All that “The Promised Land” and “Living in the USA” ask of you is that you love American place names, not be a complete stiff, and maybe appreciate a “rare hamburger sizzling on an open grill night and day.”
California on my mind
I straddled that Greyhound and rode him into Raleigh
And on across Caroline . . .
Workin’ on a T-bone steak a la carte
Flying’ over to the Golden State
When the pilot told us in thirteen minutes
He would set us at the terminal gate.
Swing low chariot, come down easy
Taxi to the terminal zone
Cut your engines and cool your wings
And let me make it to the telephone.
Los Angeles give me Norfolk Virginia
Tidewater 4-10-0-9
Tell the folks back home this is the promised land callin’
And the poor boy’s on the line.
Although the right word is ideally a poem in itself, you still have to put one next to another. This too Berry does with masterly efficiency. The way his words roll off the tongue in “Tulane” and “Downbound Train” and so many others turns language into music – a useful quality for a body of songs not known for their melodic invention. (Let’s face it, Chuck’s thing is rhythm, not melody.) Most pop song lyrics don’t scan on the page and don’t need to, but sometimes Berry’s compositional regularity requires the assistance of some classical versification, as in the giddy triple meters of “School Days”:
Up in the /morning and / out to schoolNo, Berry probably didn’t know he was using anapestic, dactylic, and amphibrachic feet, but neither, I suspect, did the anonymous author of “There Once Was a Man from Nantucket,” and he (or she) was a genius too.
The teacher / is teaching / the golden / rule
Ameri/can his’try / and practi/cal math
You study / ‘em hard and / hopin’ to / pass
Workin’ your / fingers right / down to the / bone
The guy / behind you / won’t leave you / alone
Ring ring / goes the bell
The cook in / the lunch room’s / ready to / sell
You’re lucky / if you / can find / a seat
You’re for/tunate if / you have time / to eat
Back in the / classroom op/en your books
Gee but the / teacher don’t / know
How mean / she looks.
Chuck Berry has had a hard life: reform school, two prison terms, financial exploitation, bankruptcy, racial discrimination, and much else. It is not his manner to rehearse his private grief in public, though the sly braggadocio of “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” and the crypto-autobiography of “Johnny B. Goode” trade playfully on his public image. Whether the pathos of “Memphis, Tennessee” derives from his own domestic sorrows is, strictly speaking, beside the point, though in a song this tender and touching, no supposition seems entirely extraneous. At any rate, “Memphis, Tennessee” is one of the greatest story songs in American music, all the more affecting for being so offhand and bouncy. (Berry himself, so he says in his Autobiography, played the swooping bass and “the ticky-tack drums that trot along in the background.”) What appears on first listening to be just another comic ditty about frustrated pedophilia (or so I used to interpret the top-forty version by Johnny Rivers that I knew as a child) turns out to be the desperate plea of a divorced father barred from any contact with his six-year-old daughter. The narrative builds to its final revelation piece by piece, with incidental details carrying an emotional load too freighted to be acknowledged outright: that the girl is furtively trying to reach her father; that the father has taken refuge with relatives; that although he now lives in the sort of place where messages are written on the wall, he once lived in a house high on a ridge overlooking the river; that the girl’s mother, not he, has broken up the family. And all of this – the heartbreak, the loss, the wit – by way of a conversation with a telephone operator:
Long distance information, give me Memphis TennesseeBerry’s take on the song in his Autobiography may seem naïve, but to me it sounds like the very definition of classicism: “The situation in the story was intended to have a wide scope of interest to the general public rather than a rare or particular incidental occurrence that would entreat the memory of only a few. Such a portrayal of popular or general situations and conditions in lyrics has always been my greatest objective in writing.” Add a “sir” and complicate the syntax a bit, and this could be Dr. Johnson speaking to Boswell or Sir Joshua Reynolds. Although “Memphis, Tennessee” addresses a more adult audience than Berry’s more typical ballads of teenage life, even the ballads of teenage life are classicist: we were all teenagers once and we have all fallen, or (to observe Berry’s astute qualification) want to fall, in love.
Help me find the party trying to get in touch with me
She could not leave her number but I know who placed the call
‘Cause my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall . . .
Last time I saw Marie she’s waving me goodbye
With hurry home drops on her cheeks that trickled from her eye
Marie is only six years old, information please
Try to put me through to her in Memphis Tennessee.
Blues, country and western, Johnsonian neoclassicism: these are the traditions that nurture Chuck Berry’s lyrical art. But really, who gives a damn about the categories when you’re listening to something as smoking as “Brown Eyed Handsome Man”? Many critics have taken this song to be a pointed avowal of black pride (not exactly a safe career move in 1956), and since the songwriter himself is unquestionably a brown eyed handsome man, blackness (or brownness) is very much to the point. In fact, the opening lines – “Arrested on charges of unemployment / He was sitting in the witness stand” – call to mind all too clearly the sort of harassment that black Americans have had to endure. But there’s that classicism again – all women, everywhere, have been falling for a certain kind of handsomeness “Way back in history three thousand years / In fact ever since the world began.” This would include the Venus de Milo (here reimagined as a modern girl named Milo Venus) who, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is “No more, but e’en a woman.” Why should it be any different for her than for the judge’s wife in the first verse who “called up the district attorney / She said you free that brown eyed man / If you want your job you better free that brown eyed man”? Never, it seems to me, has the universalizing tendency of classicism been more cogently expressed:
Milo Venus was a beautiful lass
She had the world in the palm of her hand
She lost both her arms in a wrasslin’ match
To get a brown eyed handsome man
She fought and won herself a brown eyed handsome man.
Robert Christgau, in Grown Up All Wrong,
wrote that Chuck Berry “was one of the ones to make us understand that
the greatest thing about art is the way it happens among people.” Berry
himself makes no such claims. He really seems to believe that compared
to a transcendent “artist” like Joan Crawford, who
“will go down in the history books of even Russia, China, and Arabia,”
he is a mere satellite, “circl[ing] a few years in the foreign magazines
and then fad[ing] away in the next conventional war.” Far from being a
“star,” he merely has a job to do and a check to pick up. Although
Berry’s underestimation of his own talent seems incomprehensible, it did
save him (and us) from the windy grandiloquence of songs like “Where
the Streets Have No Name.” Anyway, it’s a refreshing twist – the rock
auteur who, for once, doesn’t think he’s a genius.For people of my parents’ generation, rock songwriting seemed a paltry thing, and they certainly would have believed that Chuck Berry lacked anything like the sophistication of Ira Gershwin or Cole Porter. That may be. But I didn’t grow up with Broadway musicals, I grew up with rock and roll, and it is to that happily debased art form that I owe my first exposure to poetry. Before rock and pop lyrics in the late sixties and early seventies turned to the outer reaches of narcissism (gloriously exemplified by Joni Mitchell and John Lennon, among others), they tended to follow in the more impersonal and commercial lines laid down by Berry and that he too was following from lines laid down by Nat King Cole, Louis Jordan, and others. I will concede that, lyrically, Brian Wilson was no match for Lorenz Hart, but the Beach Boys got to me first, and when I was ten years old the perfect couplets of “I Get Around” conjured up a world as glamorously ritualized and unreal as the Arthurian romances, which I read avidly in those days but found a tad pale by comparison:
I’m getting’ bugged driving up and down this same old strip
I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip
My buddies and me are getting real well known
Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone.
It was like first looking into Chapman’s Homer. Language (and not just Wilson’s superb compositions and the band’s gorgeous harmonies) had revealed to me a world more beautiful and desirable than the one I lived in, even if I dimly perceived that no such world could possibly exist. (It sure didn’t exist for Brian Wilson and his brothers, whose hellish upbringing in what looked like a picture perfect California household went unmentioned in their songs.) Not every song, not even every Beach Boy song, held such wonders. Even then a catchy chorus and flashy guitar break served to deflect attention from the nullity of the lyrics. Anyway, if the song was as great as “Be My Baby” or “Louie Louie,” who could complain? Yet as an unprecocious child I had heard enough real poetry in the songs of the Beach Boys and Smokey Robinson and Chuck Berry (usually in cover versions by later bands) to know that words could be more than functional. When, a few years later, pop musicians were suddenly writing lines like “Half of what I say is meaningless / But I say it just to reach you, Julia,” I was ready. If this more inward approach sacrificed some of the charm and playfulness of the Chuck Berry/Beach Boys/Smokey Robinson manner, it offered instead audacious explorations of the self and the permutations of consciousness. I’d call that a pretty fair trade-off.
So I owe a lot to rock and roll lyricists. I wouldn’t necessarily say no John Milton without Chuck Berry, but in my case the great songwriters like Berry helped me do some of the necessary prep work. They helped me to love language. And if there were more sophisticated lyricists before Berry, there have been more sophisticated lyricists since Berry. By now the proposition that certain rock and pop songwriters have achieved depths of feeling comparable to the best poetry isn’t even controversial. Ray Davies, Shane MacGowan, Randy Newman, Lucinda Williams, Tom Waits, Warren Zevon, Morrissey, and many others – some working in a more confessional, others in a more impersonal tradition, and others making any such distinction ultimately meaningless – have all written songs that do what all good poetry does: moves, enlightens, disturbs, delights. Yet it all had to start somewhere, and in rock and roll, much of the greatest lyric writing started with Chuck Berry. (As for the basic musical D.N.A. of rock and roll, Berry pretty much created that too.) He could have said, as many rockers would have, knowing that the music would do most of the work, “Let’s go for a ride in my car, baby.” He didn’t. He said, “Climb into my machine so we can cruise on out.”
VIDEO: Rock Hall Honors Chuck Berry:
http://www.americansongwriter.com/2008/01/chuck-berry-a-legend-in-exile/
Another http://www.CoolCleveland.com video exclusive.
Cool Cleveland talks with Dr. Lauren Onkey, VP of Education and Public Programs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as they prepare to welcome rock legend Chuck Berry to Cleveland to be honored at this year's American Music Masters program 10/22-27.
Listen as Dr. Onkey shares her passion for this rock and roll pioneer and how she put together some of the many programs featured during the 2012 American Music Masters event:
Mon 10/22: Rock and Roll Night School spotlights Chuck Berry
Tue 10/23: An evening with author Nadine Cohodas
Wed 10/24: Educational program using spoken word and poetry with Teachers Rock, plus a screening of the classic film: "Chuck Berry: Hail, Hail, Rock and Roll"
Thu 10/25: Keynote lecture by Greg Tate on "Chuck Berry and the History of our Future"
Fri 10/26: Live concert by Rick Derringer Trio on the Rock Hall Stage
Sat 10/27: PlayhouseSquare's State Theatre features American Music Masters Tribute Concert featuring inductees Ernie Isley and Darryl DMC McDaniels, Joe Bonamassa, Rick Derringer, Rosie Flores, John Fullbright, David Johansen, Ronnie Hawkins, Steve Jordan, Malina Moye, JD McPherson, Lemmy Kilmister, Merle Haggard, Chuck Prophet, Vernon Reid, Duke Robillard, Ray Sharpe, Earl Slick and M. Ward.
Another http://www.CoolCleveland.com video exclusive.
Cool Cleveland talks with Dr. Lauren Onkey, VP of Education and Public Programs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as they prepare to welcome rock legend Chuck Berry to Cleveland to be honored at this year's American Music Masters program 10/22-27.
Listen as Dr. Onkey shares her passion for this rock and roll pioneer and how she put together some of the many programs featured during the 2012 American Music Masters event:
Mon 10/22: Rock and Roll Night School spotlights Chuck Berry
Tue 10/23: An evening with author Nadine Cohodas
Wed 10/24: Educational program using spoken word and poetry with Teachers Rock, plus a screening of the classic film: "Chuck Berry: Hail, Hail, Rock and Roll"
Thu 10/25: Keynote lecture by Greg Tate on "Chuck Berry and the History of our Future"
Fri 10/26: Live concert by Rick Derringer Trio on the Rock Hall Stage
Sat 10/27: PlayhouseSquare's State Theatre features American Music Masters Tribute Concert featuring inductees Ernie Isley and Darryl DMC McDaniels, Joe Bonamassa, Rick Derringer, Rosie Flores, John Fullbright, David Johansen, Ronnie Hawkins, Steve Jordan, Malina Moye, JD McPherson, Lemmy Kilmister, Merle Haggard, Chuck Prophet, Vernon Reid, Duke Robillard, Ray Sharpe, Earl Slick and M. Ward.
CHUCK BERRY: A Legend in Exile
Somewhere
outside of St. Louis, living in an estate beside an amusement park
long since closed, sits a legend. At 81, he’s not physically ailing,
he’s not mentally infirm and he still has a sizable audience on both
sides of the Atlantic, but he has long ceased to be a creative force of
any sort. Still tall and lean, Chuck Berry is a living statue of the man
who largely forged the vocabulary of rock music’s language, and his
legacy still echoes through every 14-year-old who plugs in an electric
guitar. Elvis might be called the King, but Berry is rock music’s prime
architect, the pop poet laureate who established the primacy of the
guitar solo in Western pop music-the man who seemingly has little
interest in reminding us how great he really is.
Today, Berry is a lost legend, apparently content to let 1987′s Hail! Hail! Rock ‘N Roll-the documentary of his star-studded 60th
birthday-be his epitaph. In that film, Berry was in fine form,
swaggeringly charming one minute, angry and argumentative the next, and
seeming altogether disinterested in his status as rock’s elder
statesman. As the credits rolled, Berry was shown in shadow, playing a
mournful lap steel melody by himself in his home rehearsal space. Still
young and virile, it wasn’t hard to imagine that he would pen at least a
few more classics before he hung up his Gibson ES-350T for good, but
that image is the one that we’re left with-an artist content to sit
alone as the credits roll.
For the former auto assembly line
worker who eventually cranked out rock standards one after another
(often about cars, appropriately enough), it seems that the pen that
produced “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and “Rock and Roll
Music” has gone dry. How could a songwriter who so effortlessly and
voraciously produced songs that expressed the innocence and idealism of
youth simply stop working? Did he grow too old to inhabit the teenage
mind convincingly? Or, being the consummately shrewd businessman, did he
simply decide that his days would be wasted in the studios when he
could make $35,000 a night on the road?
On that front, Berry has
been far from inactive, continuing the same pattern as he has for the
past 30 years, still performing 75 to 100 shows a year, many in Europe.
He still holds rigidly to his standard contract: a Lincoln Town Car for
him at the airport, a Fender Bassman amp on the stage and a backing band
provided by the venue. He still plays 55-minute sets, not a minute more
or less. Stop in to St. Louis’ Blueberry Hill restaurant where he plays
one Wednesday each month, and you might see the man who virtually
invented the rock and roll guitar solo sitting on the cramped stage, but
otherwise, you’ll have a hard time finding him.
Still, Chuck
Berry is never far away; we hear him every time we turn on the radio.
Keith Richards, George Harrison, Bruce Springsteen-nearly everyone
working in the rock idiom in the 1960s and 1970s cut their teeth on
Chuck’s songs and readily admitted it when asked. But while he’s not
exactly the J.D. Salinger of rock music, Berry has done precious little
to update his body of work. Since a bawdy novelty song titled “My
Ding-a-Ling” became his one and only Top 40 pop hit in 1972, Berry has
made only a handful of albums, the last arriving with 1979′s decent, but
forgotten, Rock It. Rumors of an imminent comeback release
have circulated for more than a decade-he was reported to have entered
the studio with as many as six cardboard boxes of demos as recently as
2002-but Chuck’s second coming remains perpetually on hold.
The
great artists of his generation have all cashed in on (or at least
acknowledged) their legacies, from Jerry Lee Lewis’ spirited all-star
duets album on 2006′s Last Man Standing to Fats Domino’s
lovingly compiled 2007 tribute and Little Richard’s appropriately silly
appearance in a Geico commercial. Yet Chuck Berry has never been one to
embrace a caricature of himself, and he probably has far too much pride
to play the fool to sell car insurance. What isn’t clear is just why he
has been so reticent to promote himself like the living rock and roll
ambassador he could be. Guarded and aloof, he has always been an uneasy
fit for whatever category you placed him in.
Of all of rock’s
originators, he’s the only one who grew up outside of the South. Raised
in a middle class African-American family before the era of civil
rights, he faced all of the stereotypes of being a young black man, but
couldn’t claim the same poverty that was shared by the majority of his
peers. To that end, he considered himself too privileged to sing the
blues like his hero Muddy Waters, and his adoption of supercharged
country guitar licks pushed him away from the seminal r&b bands of
the pre-rock era. He aimed his music at white teenagers when he,
himself, was already nearing 30. And while his peers were busy making
movies, falling into addiction, and dying young, he was a teetotaler who
started touring alone because he didn’t want to deal with drug dabbling
band members. He was then and remains now his own man. But for an
artist who was once accused of building his success upon pandering to
white audiences, Berry has been downright obstinate about doing things
on his own terms, not willing to change his working habits for anyone.
No
doubt, there have been disappointments along the way, and it’s easy to
understand why Berry would have a chip on his shoulder. Berry Park,
conceived by Berry as a Rock and Roll Disneyland of sorts, had to be
closed because of destructive concertgoers. He has run afoul of the law
and done three separate jail sentences (for tax evasion and transporting
a minor over state lines), and he still considers himself a victim of
racial profiling and sensationalized press. Prickly with promoters and
not interested in doing interviews, he shows no signs of sitting down
for his Larry King close-up or enlisting Rick Rubin to produce his
return album any time soon. He’s a character no less full of
contradiction and redemption than Johnny Cash, but it’s a story he isn’t
interesting in telling.
Maybe it’s to Chuck’s credit that he has
chosen to slip off into the twilight without an awkward last step. With
no misguided genre experiments, no unnecessary re-recordings of old
hits, no awkward attempts to modernize his music for a new generation,
Chuck’s take-it-or-leave-it stance has ensured that he remains firmly
planted in an earlier era of music. But you can’t help but feel a bit
cheated that he never fully explored his prodigious gifts as a
songwriter. What if Picasso had stopped right before cubism? What if
Dylan had never gone electric? Berry never got to reinvent himself,
never issued a commentary on the death of ‘50s innocence, never made a
meditation on middle age, never got to grow up and turn his eye for
detail to more mature themes. For an artist who could have done just
about anything, his choosing to do nothing is nothing short of a
disappointment.
Of course, given the often awkward and
unsatisfying comeback efforts of many artists from his generation, maybe
it is best that Chuck just leaves us with our memories, allowing him to
duck walk into eternity without ever tripping over his own feet. Like
James Dean or Buddy Holly, Berry is forever frozen as the handsomely
grinning icon of a simpler era of American life, belonging as completely
to the ‘50s as hula-hoops and fallout shelters. Maybe Berry himself
said it best. “In a way, I feel it might be ill-mannered to try and top
myself,” he told The London Independent in 2002. “The music I
play, it is a ritual. Something that matters to people in a special way.
I wouldn’t want to interfere with that.”
What I've Learned: Chuck Berry
Musician, 75, St. Louis
I'll be doing just fine if you turn off that tape recorder.
This isn't a performance. If you want to hear me perform, buy one of my records.
I would sing the blues if I had the blues.
I've always liked words. I even like some words that aren't in the dictionary.
One word: variety.
Of
the five most important things in life, health is first, education or
knowledge is second, and wealth is third. I forget the other two.
You don't just go to the studio and say, "I'm going to write a hit." It becomes a hit when people like your compositions.
I didn't connect with the kids. I was in the studio. I never saw the kids.
I hoped they liked it, of course. And then I'd go write some more. And then I'd go buy me a home. Very American.
It
amazes me when I hear people say, "I want to go out and find out who I
am." I always knew who I was. I was going to be famous if it killed me.
I wouldn't buy one of my records to save my life.
Global warming does not affect my life at all. I'm going to walk right along and drink plenty of cool water.
I haven't been to church in thirteen years, but I'm better prepared for heaven than most of those that haven't missed a day.
Music is about one tenth of my day. Computers are about a quarter. Sleep -- another quarter. The other quarter is of no consequence.
I like computers. It's like being a mathematician that finally comes upon an adding machine.
Respect isn't enough. You've got to have a proprietary interest.
If the people in the audience are talking, you're being ignored. If the people are gazing at you, you've got something they want to hear.
I don't get nervous before I play. Oh, I did the first time -- wondering whether I was going to be good or not. But after about four or five songs it went away and never came back.
Play the songs they want to hear. That makes them feel they're getting what they came for.
Like I say, I'm Mr. Variety.
When you're writing a song, nouns and verbs will carry you right through.
I love poetry. I love rhyming. Do you know there are poets who don't rhyme? Shakespeare did not rhyme most of the time, and that's why I do not like him. Imagine: a man with that much...I'm looking for a word that begins with the letter f. Do you know it? I forget it. Well, Shakespeare had a lot of it, anyway. He had a lot of f. He had too much f not to rhyme.
You can say what you want, but for all these years, I've been robbing people.
I've been having fun and they've been paying and it just don't seem right.
Finesse: That's the word I was looking for. Shakespeare had a lot of finesse.
If I wasn't a musician, I'd take up the law. They are the rottenest, wealthiest people in America.
Prejudice doesn't make me mad. It just -- I guess "pisses me off" is the word.
What do I like about women? Their gender.
First time I heard that word was from an English interviewer. He asked me something about gender. I had to ask him what he meant. Now I use the word all the time.
I stopped writing songs for seventeen years. Every so often I just stopped. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes for seventeen years.
I've written songs on everything. Menus. Napkins. Little pieces of paper. I started writing one song in 1952. I added some words last Monday. So I've been writing that song straight through for forty-eight years.
I eat meat daily. I'm not Jewish. I'm not Arabic. What's the kind of person that doesn't eat meat? That's right -- I'm not a vegetarian. I'm not a McCarthyite. What's that fella's name? Paul McCartney? That's right. I'm not him.
Women want what you've got. They want what they don't have.
Music is science. Everything is science. Because science is truth.
What do I think about today's music? I don't think about it. I listen to it. It's there whether I think about it or not.
Chuck Berry
Charles Edward Anderson "Chuck" Berry (born October 18, 1926) is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter, and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music. With songs such as "Maybellene" (1955), "Roll Over Beethoven" (1956), "Rock and Roll Music" (1957) and "Johnny B. Goode" (1958), Berry refined and developed rhythm and blues into the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive, with lyrics focusing on teen life and consumerism and utilizing guitar solos and showmanship that would be a major influence on subsequent rock music.[1]
Born into a middle-class family in St. Louis, Missouri, Berry had an interest in music from an early age and gave his first public performance at Sumner High School. While still a high school student he was arrested, and served a prison sentence for armed robbery from 1944 to 1947. After his release, Berry settled into married life and worked at an automobile assembly plant. By early 1953, influenced by the guitar riffs and showmanship techniques of blues player T-Bone Walker, Berry began performing with the Johnnie Johnson Trio.[2] His break came when he traveled to Chicago in May 1955, and met Muddy Waters, who suggested he contact Leonard Chess of Chess Records. With Chess he recorded "Maybellene"—Berry's adaptation of the country song "Ida Red"—which sold over a million copies, reaching number one on Billboard's Rhythm and Blues chart. By the end of the 1950s, Berry was an established star with several hit records and film appearances to his name as well as a lucrative touring career. He had also established his own St. Louis-based nightclub, called Berry's Club Bandstand. But in January 1962, Berry was sentenced to three years in prison for offenses under the Mann Act—he had transported a 14-year-old girl across state lines.[2][3][4]
After his release in 1963, Berry had more hits in the mid 60's, including "No Particular Place to Go," "You Never Can Tell," and "Nadine." By the mid-1970s, he was more in demand as a nostalgic live performer, playing his past hits with local backup bands of variable quality.[2] In 1979 he served 120 days in prison for tax evasion.
Berry was among the first musicians to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on its opening in 1986, with the comment that he "laid the groundwork for not only a rock and roll sound but a rock and roll stance."[5] Berry is included in several Rolling Stone "Greatest of All Time" lists, including being ranked fifth on their 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.[6] The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll included three of Berry's songs: "Johnny B. Goode," "Maybellene," and "Rock and Roll Music."[7]
By the early 1950s, Berry was working with local bands in the clubs of St. Louis as an extra source of income.[16] He had been playing the blues since his teens, and he borrowed both guitar riffs and showmanship techniques from blues player T-Bone Walker,[19] as well as taking guitar lessons from his friend Ira Harris that laid the foundation for his guitar style.[20]
Berry's calculated showmanship, along with mixing country tunes with R&B tunes, and singing in the style of Nat King Cole to the music of Muddy Waters, brought in a wider audience, particularly affluent white people.[2][22]
At the end of June 1956, his song "Roll Over Beethoven" reached number 29 on the Billboard Top 100 chart, and Berry toured as one of the "Top Acts of '56." He and Carl Perkins became friends. Perkins said that "I knew when I first heard Chuck that he'd been affected by country music. I respected his writing; his records were very, very great." As they toured, Perkins discovered that Berry not only liked country music, but knew about as many songs as he did. Jimmie Rodgers was one of his favorites. "Chuck knew every Blue Yodel and most of Bill Monroe's songs as well," Perkins remembered. "He told me about how he was raised very poor, very tough. He had a hard life. He was a good guy. I really liked him."[25]
In late 1957, Berry took part in Alan Freed's "Biggest Show of Stars for 1957" United States tour with the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, and others.[26] He also guest starred on ABC's The Guy Mitchell Show, having sung his hit song "Rock 'n' Roll Music." The hits continued from 1957 to 1959, with Berry scoring over a dozen chart singles during this period, including the top 10 US hits "School Days," "Rock and Roll Music," "Sweet Little Sixteen," and "Johnny B. Goode". He appeared in two early rock and roll movies. The first was Rock Rock Rock, (1956) in which he sings "You Can't Catch Me." He had a speaking role as himself in Go, Johnny, Go! (1959) along with Alan Freed, and performs his songs "Johnny B. Goode," "Memphis, Tennessee," and "Little Queenie." His performance of "Sweet Little Sixteen" at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958 is captured in the motion picture Jazz on a Summer's Day.[27]
By the end of the 1950s, Berry was a high-profile established star with several hit records and film appearances to his name, as well as a lucrative touring career. He had opened a racially integrated St. Louis-based nightclub, called Berry's Club Bandstand, and was investing in real estate.[28] But in December 1959, Berry was arrested under the Mann Act after questionable allegations that he had sexual intercourse with a 14-year-old Apache waitress, Janice Escalante,[29] whom he had transported over state lines to work as a hat check girl at his club.[30] After an initial two-week trial in March 1960, Berry was convicted, fined $5,000, and sentenced to five years in prison.[31] Berry's appeal that the judge's comments and attitude were racist and prejudiced the jury against him was upheld,[3][32] and a second trial was heard in May and June 1961,[33] which resulted in Berry being given a three-year prison sentence.[12] After another appeal failed, Berry served one and one half years in prison from February 1962 to October 1963.[34] Berry had continued recording and performing during the trials, though his output had slowed down as his popularity declined; his final single released before being imprisoned was "Come On".[35]
While this was not a successful period for studio work,[43] Berry was still a top concert draw. In May 1964, he did a successful tour of the UK,[39] but when he returned in January 1965 his behavior was erratic and moody, and his touring style of using unrehearsed local backing bands and a strict non-negotiable contract was earning him a reputation as a difficult yet unexciting performer.[44] He also played at large events in North America, such as the Schaefer Music Festival in New York City's Central Park in July 1969, and the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival in October.[45]
Berry returned to Chess from 1970 to 1973. There were no hit singles from the 1970 album Back Home, then in 1972 Chess released a live recording of "My Ding-a-Ling," a novelty song which Berry had recorded in a different version on his 1968 LP From St. Louie to Frisco as "My Tambourine".[47]
The track became Berry's only number one single. A live recording of
"Reelin' And Rockin'" was also issued as a follow-up single that same
year and would prove to be Berry's final top-40 hit in both the US and
the UK. Both singles were featured on the part-live/part-studio album The London Chuck Berry Sessions which was one of a series of London Sessions albums which included other Chess mainstay artists Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. Berry's second tenure with Chess ended with the 1975 album Chuck Berry, after which he did not make a studio record until 1979's Rock It for Atco Records, his last studio album to date.[48]
In the 1970s Berry toured on the basis of his earlier successes. He was on the road for many years, carrying only his Gibson guitar, confident that he could hire a band that already knew his music no matter where he went. AllMusic has said that in this period his "live performances became increasingly erratic, ... working with terrible backup bands and turning in sloppy, out-of-tune performances" which "tarnished his reputation with younger fans and oldtimers" alike.[49] Among the many bandleaders performing a backup role with Berry were Bruce Springsteen and Steve Miller when each was just starting his career. Springsteen related in the video Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll that Berry did not even give the band a set list and just expected the musicians to follow his lead after each guitar intro. Berry neither spoke to nor thanked the band after the show. Nevertheless, Springsteen backed Berry again when he appeared at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. At the request of Jimmy Carter, Berry performed at the White House on June 1, 1979.[42]
Berry's type of touring style, traveling the "oldies" circuit in the 1970s (where he was often paid in cash by local promoters) added ammunition to the Internal Revenue Service's accusations that Berry was a chronic income tax evader. Facing criminal sanction for the third time, Berry pleaded guilty to tax evasion and was sentenced to four months in prison and 1,000 hours of community service—doing benefit concerts—in 1979.[50]
Berry continued to play 70 to 100 one-nighters per year in the 1980s,
still traveling solo and requiring a local band to back him at each
stop. In 1986, Taylor Hackford made a documentary film, Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, of a celebration concert for Berry's sixtieth birthday, organized by Keith Richards.[51] Eric Clapton, Etta James, Julian Lennon, Robert Cray and Linda Ronstadt, among others, appeared with Berry on stage and film. During the concert, Berry played a Gibson ES-355, the luxury version of the ES-335 that he favored on his 1970s tours. Richards played a black Fender Telecaster Custom, Cray a Fender Stratocaster and Clapton a Gibson ES 350T, the same guitar Berry used on his early recordings.[52]
In the late 1980s, Berry bought a restaurant in Wentzville, Missouri, called The Southern Air,[53] and in 1990 he was sued by several women who claimed that he had installed a video camera in the ladies' bathroom. Berry claimed that he had the camera installed to catch red-handed a worker who was suspected of stealing from the restaurant. Though his guilt was never proven in court, Berry opted for a class action settlement with 59 women. Berry's biographer, Bruce Pegg, estimated that it cost Berry over $1.2 million plus legal fees.[54] It was during this time that he began using Wayne T. Schoeneberg as his legal counsel. Reportedly, a police raid on his house did find videotapes of women using the restroom, and one of the women was a minor. Also found in the raid were 62 grams of marijuana. Felony drug and child-abuse charges were filed. In order to avoid the child-abuse charges, Berry agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor possession of marijuana. He was given a six-month suspended jail sentence, two years' unsupervised probation, and ordered to donate $5,000 to a local hospital.[55]
In November 2000, Berry again faced legal charges when he was sued by his former pianist Johnnie Johnson, who claimed that he co-wrote over 50 songs, including "No Particular Place to Go", "Sweet Little Sixteen" and "Roll Over Beethoven", that credit Berry alone. The case was dismissed when the judge ruled that too much time had passed since the songs were written.[56]
In 2008, Berry toured Europe, with stops in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Poland and Spain. In mid-2008, he played at Virgin Festival in Baltimore, Maryland.[57] He presently lives in Ladue, Missouri, approximately 10 miles west of St. Louis.[58] During a New Year's Day 2011 concert in Chicago, Berry, suffering from exhaustion, passed out and had to be helped off stage.[59] Berry usually performs one Wednesday each month at Blueberry Hill, a restaurant and bar located in the Delmar Loop neighborhood in St. Louis.
A pioneer of rock music, Berry was a significant influence on the
development of both the music and the attitude associated with the rock
music lifestyle. With songs such as "Maybellene" (1955), "Roll Over Beethoven" (1956), "Rock and Roll Music" (1957) and "Johnny B. Goode" (1958), Berry refined and developed rhythm and blues
into the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive, with
lyrics successfully aimed to appeal to the early teenage market by using
graphic and humorous descriptions of teen dances, fast cars,
high-school life, and consumer culture,[2] and utilizing guitar solos and showmanship that would be a major influence on subsequent rock music.[1]
His records are a rich storehouse of the essential lyrical, showmanship
and musical components of rock and roll; and, in addition to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, a large number of significant popular-music performers have recorded Berry's songs.[2]
Though not technically accomplished, his guitar style is distinctive—he
incorporated electronic effects to mimic the sound of bottleneck blues
guitarists, and drew on the influence of guitar players such as Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker[2]
to produce a clear and exciting sound that many later guitar musicians
would acknowledge as a major influence in their own style.[55] Berry's showmanship has been influential on other rock guitar players,[61] particularly his one-legged hop routine,[62] and the "duck walk",[63]
which he first used as a child when he walked "stooping with
full-bended knees, but with my back and head vertical" under a table to
retrieve a ball and his family found it entertaining; he used it when
"performing in New York for the first time and some journalist branded
it the duck walk."[64][65]
The rock critic Robert Christgau considers him "the greatest of the rock and rollers,"[66] while John Lennon said, "if you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'."[67] Ted Nugent said "If you don't know every Chuck Berry lick, you can't play rock guitar."[68]
Among the honors Berry has received, have been the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984,[69] the Kennedy Center Honors in 2000,[70] and being named seventh on Time magazine's 2009 list of the 10 best electric guitar players of all-time.[71] On May 14, 2002, Berry was honored as one of the first BMI Icons at the 50th annual BMI Pop Awards. He was presented the award along with BMI affiliates Bo Diddley and Little Richard.[72] In August 2014, Berry was made a laureate of the Polar Music Prize.[73]
Berry is included in several Rolling Stone "Greatest of All Time" lists. In September 2003, the magazine named him number 6 in their list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".[74] This was followed in November of the same year by his compilation album The Great Twenty-Eight being ranked 21st in the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.[75] The following year, in March 2004, Berry was ranked fifth out of "The Immortals – The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time".[6][76] In December 2004, six of his songs were included in the "Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time", namely "Johnny B. Goode" (#7), "Maybellene" (#18), "Roll Over Beethoven" (#97), "Rock and Roll Music" (#128), "Sweet Little Sixteen" (#272) and "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" (#374).[77] In June 2008, his song "Johnny B. Goode" ranked first place in the "100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time".[78]
M. Campbell, ed., Popular Music in America: And the Beat Goes on (Cengage Learning, 3rd edn., 2008), pp. 168–9.
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Chuck Berry: The Autobiography
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"News about Chuck Berry's House in Greater Ville, St. Louis, MO". outside.in. Retrieved June 16, 2010.
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Leonard Chess interviewed on the Pop Chronicles (1969)
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Go, Cat, Go! by Carl Perkins and David McGee 1996, pages 215, 216. Hyperion Press ISBN 0-7868-6073-1
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Chuck Berry goes on trial for the second time
"The Long, Colorful History of the Mann Act". NPR. Retrieved February 18, 2010.
Collis, John (October 30, 2002). Chuck Berry: The Biography. Aurum. p. 102. ISBN 9781854108739. Retrieved February 6, 2014.
Higginbotham, Aloysius Leon (1998). Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process. Oxford University Press. p. 150. ISBN 978-0-19-512288-6.
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Bruce Pegg, Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry, page 262. Routledge. 2005. ISBN 0-415-93751-5. Retrieved March 16, 2010.
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Christgau, Robert (1988). "Chuck Berry". In Anthony DeCurtis and James Henke (Eds.). The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll: The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists and Their Music. New York: Random House. pp. 60–66. ISBN 0-679-73728-6.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Chuck Berry | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Chuck Berry in 1957
|
|||||||||
| Background information | |||||||||
| Birth name | Charles Edward Anderson Berry | ||||||||
| Born | October 18, 1926 St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. | ||||||||
| Genres | Rock and roll, rockabilly, rhythm and blues | ||||||||
| Occupation(s) | Musician, singer, songwriter | ||||||||
| Instruments | Guitar, vocals | ||||||||
| Years active | 1953–present | ||||||||
| Labels | Chess, Mercury, Atco | ||||||||
| Website | www.chuckberry.com | ||||||||
| Notable instruments | |||||||||
| Gibson ES-350, Gibson ES-355 | |||||||||
Chuck Berry, You can't catch me, 1956.
Born into a middle-class family in St. Louis, Missouri, Berry had an interest in music from an early age and gave his first public performance at Sumner High School. While still a high school student he was arrested, and served a prison sentence for armed robbery from 1944 to 1947. After his release, Berry settled into married life and worked at an automobile assembly plant. By early 1953, influenced by the guitar riffs and showmanship techniques of blues player T-Bone Walker, Berry began performing with the Johnnie Johnson Trio.[2] His break came when he traveled to Chicago in May 1955, and met Muddy Waters, who suggested he contact Leonard Chess of Chess Records. With Chess he recorded "Maybellene"—Berry's adaptation of the country song "Ida Red"—which sold over a million copies, reaching number one on Billboard's Rhythm and Blues chart. By the end of the 1950s, Berry was an established star with several hit records and film appearances to his name as well as a lucrative touring career. He had also established his own St. Louis-based nightclub, called Berry's Club Bandstand. But in January 1962, Berry was sentenced to three years in prison for offenses under the Mann Act—he had transported a 14-year-old girl across state lines.[2][3][4]
After his release in 1963, Berry had more hits in the mid 60's, including "No Particular Place to Go," "You Never Can Tell," and "Nadine." By the mid-1970s, he was more in demand as a nostalgic live performer, playing his past hits with local backup bands of variable quality.[2] In 1979 he served 120 days in prison for tax evasion.
Berry was among the first musicians to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on its opening in 1986, with the comment that he "laid the groundwork for not only a rock and roll sound but a rock and roll stance."[5] Berry is included in several Rolling Stone "Greatest of All Time" lists, including being ranked fifth on their 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.[6] The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll included three of Berry's songs: "Johnny B. Goode," "Maybellene," and "Rock and Roll Music."[7]
Contents
Early life (1926–54)
Born in St. Louis, Missouri,[8] Berry was the fourth child in a family of six. He grew up in the north St. Louis neighborhood known as The Ville, an area where many middle class St. Louis people lived at the time. His father, Henry, was a contractor and deacon of a nearby Baptist church, his mother Martha a certified public school principal. His middle class upbringing allowed him to pursue his interest in music from an early age and he gave his first public performance in 1941 while still at Sumner High School.[9] Just three years later, in 1944, while still at Sumner High School, he was arrested and convicted of armed robbery after robbing three shops in Kansas City and then stealing a car at gunpoint with some friends.[10][11] Berry's own account in his autobiography is that his car broke down and he then flagged down a passing car and stole it at gunpoint with a non-functional pistol.[12][13] Berry was sent to the Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men at Algoa, near Jefferson City, Missouri,[8] where he formed a singing quartet and did some boxing.[10] The singing group became competent enough that the authorities allowed it to perform outside the detention facility.[14] After his release from prison on his 21st birthday in 1947, Berry married Themetta "Toddy" Suggs on October 28, 1948, who gave birth to Darlin Ingrid Berry on October 3, 1950.[15] Berry supported his family doing a number of jobs in St. Louis: working briefly as a factory worker at two automobile assembly plants, as well as being janitor for the apartment building where he and his wife lived. Afterwards he trained as a beautician at the Poro College of Cosmetology, founded by Annie Turnbo Malone.[16] He was doing well enough by 1950 to buy a "small three room brick cottage with a bath" in Whittier Street,[17] which is now listed as the Chuck Berry House on the National Register of Historic Places.[18]By the early 1950s, Berry was working with local bands in the clubs of St. Louis as an extra source of income.[16] He had been playing the blues since his teens, and he borrowed both guitar riffs and showmanship techniques from blues player T-Bone Walker,[19] as well as taking guitar lessons from his friend Ira Harris that laid the foundation for his guitar style.[20]
Apprenticeship with Johnnie Johnson
By early 1953 Berry was performing with Johnnie Johnson's trio, starting a long-time collaboration with the pianist.[21] Although the band played mostly blues and ballads, the most popular music among whites in the area was country. Berry wrote, "Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black audience began whispering 'who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?' After they laughed at me a few times they began requesting the hillbilly stuff and enjoyed dancing to it."[8]Berry's calculated showmanship, along with mixing country tunes with R&B tunes, and singing in the style of Nat King Cole to the music of Muddy Waters, brought in a wider audience, particularly affluent white people.[2][22]
Signing with Chess: "Maybellene" to "Come On" (1955–62)
In May 1955, Berry traveled to Chicago where he met Muddy Waters, who suggested he contact Leonard Chess of Chess Records. Berry thought his blues material would be of most interest to Chess, but to his surprise it was an old country and western recording by Bob Wills,[23] entitled "Ida Red" that got Chess's attention. Chess had seen the rhythm and blues market shrink and was looking to move beyond it, and he thought Berry might be the artist for that purpose. So on May 21, 1955 Berry recorded an adaptation of "Ida Red"—"Maybellene"—which featured Johnnie Johnson on piano, Jerome Green (from Bo Diddley's band) on the maracas, Jasper Thomas on the drums and Willie Dixon on the bass. "Maybellene" sold over a million copies, reaching number one on Billboard's Rhythm and Blues chart and number five on the September 10, 1955 Billboard Best Sellers in Stores chart.[8][24]At the end of June 1956, his song "Roll Over Beethoven" reached number 29 on the Billboard Top 100 chart, and Berry toured as one of the "Top Acts of '56." He and Carl Perkins became friends. Perkins said that "I knew when I first heard Chuck that he'd been affected by country music. I respected his writing; his records were very, very great." As they toured, Perkins discovered that Berry not only liked country music, but knew about as many songs as he did. Jimmie Rodgers was one of his favorites. "Chuck knew every Blue Yodel and most of Bill Monroe's songs as well," Perkins remembered. "He told me about how he was raised very poor, very tough. He had a hard life. He was a good guy. I really liked him."[25]
Berry in The CasinoDeauville, France, July 13, 1987
In late 1957, Berry took part in Alan Freed's "Biggest Show of Stars for 1957" United States tour with the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, and others.[26] He also guest starred on ABC's The Guy Mitchell Show, having sung his hit song "Rock 'n' Roll Music." The hits continued from 1957 to 1959, with Berry scoring over a dozen chart singles during this period, including the top 10 US hits "School Days," "Rock and Roll Music," "Sweet Little Sixteen," and "Johnny B. Goode". He appeared in two early rock and roll movies. The first was Rock Rock Rock, (1956) in which he sings "You Can't Catch Me." He had a speaking role as himself in Go, Johnny, Go! (1959) along with Alan Freed, and performs his songs "Johnny B. Goode," "Memphis, Tennessee," and "Little Queenie." His performance of "Sweet Little Sixteen" at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958 is captured in the motion picture Jazz on a Summer's Day.[27]
By the end of the 1950s, Berry was a high-profile established star with several hit records and film appearances to his name, as well as a lucrative touring career. He had opened a racially integrated St. Louis-based nightclub, called Berry's Club Bandstand, and was investing in real estate.[28] But in December 1959, Berry was arrested under the Mann Act after questionable allegations that he had sexual intercourse with a 14-year-old Apache waitress, Janice Escalante,[29] whom he had transported over state lines to work as a hat check girl at his club.[30] After an initial two-week trial in March 1960, Berry was convicted, fined $5,000, and sentenced to five years in prison.[31] Berry's appeal that the judge's comments and attitude were racist and prejudiced the jury against him was upheld,[3][32] and a second trial was heard in May and June 1961,[33] which resulted in Berry being given a three-year prison sentence.[12] After another appeal failed, Berry served one and one half years in prison from February 1962 to October 1963.[34] Berry had continued recording and performing during the trials, though his output had slowed down as his popularity declined; his final single released before being imprisoned was "Come On".[35]
"Nadine" and move to Mercury (1963–69)
When Berry was released from prison in 1963, he was able to return to recording and performing due to the British invasion acts of the 1960s—most notably the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—having kept up an interest in his music by releasing cover versions of his songs;[36][37] along with other bands reworking his songs, such as the Beach Boys 1963 hit "Surfin' U.S.A." based on Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen".[38] In 1964–65 Berry released eight singles, including three, "No Particular Place to Go" (a humorous reworking of "School Days" concerning the introduction of car seat belts),[39] "You Never Can Tell", and the rocking "Nadine,"[40] which achieved commercial success, reaching the top 20 of the Billboard 100. Between 1966 and 1969 Berry released five albums on the Mercury label, including his first live album Live at Fillmore Auditorium in which he was backed by the Steve Miller Band.[41][42]While this was not a successful period for studio work,[43] Berry was still a top concert draw. In May 1964, he did a successful tour of the UK,[39] but when he returned in January 1965 his behavior was erratic and moody, and his touring style of using unrehearsed local backing bands and a strict non-negotiable contract was earning him a reputation as a difficult yet unexciting performer.[44] He also played at large events in North America, such as the Schaefer Music Festival in New York City's Central Park in July 1969, and the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival in October.[45]
Back to Chess: "My Ding-a-Ling" to White House concert (1970–79)
Berry helped give life to a subculture ... Even "My Ding-a-Ling", a
fourth-grade wee-wee joke that used to mortify true believers at college
concerts, permitted a lot of twelve-year-olds new insight into the
moribund concept of "dirty" when it hit the airwaves ...
Robert Christgau[46]
In the 1970s Berry toured on the basis of his earlier successes. He was on the road for many years, carrying only his Gibson guitar, confident that he could hire a band that already knew his music no matter where he went. AllMusic has said that in this period his "live performances became increasingly erratic, ... working with terrible backup bands and turning in sloppy, out-of-tune performances" which "tarnished his reputation with younger fans and oldtimers" alike.[49] Among the many bandleaders performing a backup role with Berry were Bruce Springsteen and Steve Miller when each was just starting his career. Springsteen related in the video Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll that Berry did not even give the band a set list and just expected the musicians to follow his lead after each guitar intro. Berry neither spoke to nor thanked the band after the show. Nevertheless, Springsteen backed Berry again when he appeared at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. At the request of Jimmy Carter, Berry performed at the White House on June 1, 1979.[42]
Berry's type of touring style, traveling the "oldies" circuit in the 1970s (where he was often paid in cash by local promoters) added ammunition to the Internal Revenue Service's accusations that Berry was a chronic income tax evader. Facing criminal sanction for the third time, Berry pleaded guilty to tax evasion and was sentenced to four months in prison and 1,000 hours of community service—doing benefit concerts—in 1979.[50]
Still on the road (1980–present)
Berry performing live in 1997
In the late 1980s, Berry bought a restaurant in Wentzville, Missouri, called The Southern Air,[53] and in 1990 he was sued by several women who claimed that he had installed a video camera in the ladies' bathroom. Berry claimed that he had the camera installed to catch red-handed a worker who was suspected of stealing from the restaurant. Though his guilt was never proven in court, Berry opted for a class action settlement with 59 women. Berry's biographer, Bruce Pegg, estimated that it cost Berry over $1.2 million plus legal fees.[54] It was during this time that he began using Wayne T. Schoeneberg as his legal counsel. Reportedly, a police raid on his house did find videotapes of women using the restroom, and one of the women was a minor. Also found in the raid were 62 grams of marijuana. Felony drug and child-abuse charges were filed. In order to avoid the child-abuse charges, Berry agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor possession of marijuana. He was given a six-month suspended jail sentence, two years' unsupervised probation, and ordered to donate $5,000 to a local hospital.[55]
In November 2000, Berry again faced legal charges when he was sued by his former pianist Johnnie Johnson, who claimed that he co-wrote over 50 songs, including "No Particular Place to Go", "Sweet Little Sixteen" and "Roll Over Beethoven", that credit Berry alone. The case was dismissed when the judge ruled that too much time had passed since the songs were written.[56]
In 2008, Berry toured Europe, with stops in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Poland and Spain. In mid-2008, he played at Virgin Festival in Baltimore, Maryland.[57] He presently lives in Ladue, Missouri, approximately 10 miles west of St. Louis.[58] During a New Year's Day 2011 concert in Chicago, Berry, suffering from exhaustion, passed out and had to be helped off stage.[59] Berry usually performs one Wednesday each month at Blueberry Hill, a restaurant and bar located in the Delmar Loop neighborhood in St. Louis.
Legacy
While no individual can be said to have invented rock and roll, Chuck
Berry comes the closest of any single figure to being the one who put
all the essential pieces together. It was his particular genius to graft
country & western guitar licks onto a rhythm & blues chassis in his very first single, "Maybellene."
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame[60]
The rock critic Robert Christgau considers him "the greatest of the rock and rollers,"[66] while John Lennon said, "if you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'."[67] Ted Nugent said "If you don't know every Chuck Berry lick, you can't play rock guitar."[68]
Among the honors Berry has received, have been the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984,[69] the Kennedy Center Honors in 2000,[70] and being named seventh on Time magazine's 2009 list of the 10 best electric guitar players of all-time.[71] On May 14, 2002, Berry was honored as one of the first BMI Icons at the 50th annual BMI Pop Awards. He was presented the award along with BMI affiliates Bo Diddley and Little Richard.[72] In August 2014, Berry was made a laureate of the Polar Music Prize.[73]
Berry is included in several Rolling Stone "Greatest of All Time" lists. In September 2003, the magazine named him number 6 in their list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".[74] This was followed in November of the same year by his compilation album The Great Twenty-Eight being ranked 21st in the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.[75] The following year, in March 2004, Berry was ranked fifth out of "The Immortals – The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time".[6][76] In December 2004, six of his songs were included in the "Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time", namely "Johnny B. Goode" (#7), "Maybellene" (#18), "Roll Over Beethoven" (#97), "Rock and Roll Music" (#128), "Sweet Little Sixteen" (#272) and "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" (#374).[77] In June 2008, his song "Johnny B. Goode" ranked first place in the "100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time".[78]
Discography
Main article: Chuck Berry discography
Studio albums
- After School Session (May 1957)
- One Dozen Berrys (March 1958)
- Chuck Berry Is on Top (July 1959)
- Rockin' at the Hops (July 1960)
- New Juke Box Hits (March 1961)
- Chuck Berry On Stage (August 1963)
- Two Great Guitars (August 1964)
- St. Louis to Liverpool (November 1964)
- Chuck Berry in London (April 1965)
- Fresh Berry's (November 1965)
- Chuck Berry's Golden Hits (March 1967)
- Chuck Berry in Memphis (September 1967)
- From St. Louie to Frisco (November 1968)
- Concerto in B. Goode (June 1969)
- Back Home (November 1970)
- San Francisco Dues (September 1971)
- The London Chuck Berry Sessions (October 1972)
- Bio (August 1973)
- Chuck Berry (February 1975)
- Rock It (1979)
References
A significant moment in his early life was a musical performance in 1941 at Sumner High School, which had a middle-class black student body.
Chuck Berry felt ill on stage in Chicago 01.01.2011. YouTube. January 1, 2011.
Chuck Berry after collapse in Chicago 01.01.2011 – on Stage explaining What Happened. YouTube. January 1, 2011.
- "The 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time : Rolling Stone". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on June 5, 2008. Retrieved June 4, 2010.
External links
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