(Chess)
!!! A+ COMPILATION !!!
A heart-beatin’ rhythm and my soul keeps singin’ the blues.
I hate to start this out with a bunch of shit about ME, but recently it occurred to me that I’ve barely written about Chuck Berry anywhere. I actually know why this is; I find it intimidating to even try to address his music. But there’s no real excuse. I’ve talked plenty about R.E.M., a great group for sure, but not fit to mow Berry’s yard. The truth is that if there’s anyone whose work defines what I love in music it is Berry. His songs are short bursts of rhythm and energy, tough-minded but warm, melodic but raw, and goddamn if the motherfucker can’t play the guitar. At any rate, I’ve wanted to write a whole bunch of stuff about Berry for at least seven years, just like I’ve wanted to write about Ray Charles and Buddy Holly and etc etc etc., but in all of these cases I feel simply inadequate. I can handle the Beatles because I’ve grown up reading everything I could get my hands on about them and attaining a blob of useless knowledge about them, like did you know “I Feel Fine” is preceded by mysterious whispering on the American version of the Red Album but not the British one? Now you do.
Obviously a lot of people who didn’t hear much Berry growing up — and he is mysteriously sidelined on oldies stations — became aware of him through the Beatles and the Beach Boys and I’m no exception. I will go ahead and cop by telling you that I often prefer the Beatles' versions of Berry's songs they covered in the studio (not for the BBC) and there are days when I even prefer Eddie Cochran’s live performance of “Sweet Little Sixteen” to Berry’s original. But this has become less true as I've grown older, and anyway it would mean nothing without his barbed, brilliant songwriting. The Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun” is a masterful rock & roll record, but there is simply no way it would ever have been written if not for Chuck Berry, and I would argue, there is no way that the Beach Boys or the Beatles, or the Rolling Stones or the Who or blah blah etc., would ever have existed without him. Rock & roll might exist without him, those seeds were planted before he was born (Oct. 18 1926) but it would not matter, certainly not today.
And what is rock & roll, anyway? These sorts of questions grab you at the Ground Zero of these 28 songs. If you’re my age or a bit older, you’ve had everyone from Jack Black to Adam Curry to Fred Durst telling you that rock music is about aggression, partying, drugs, hookers, what the hell ever. Berry for sure was aggressive, he partied, he did drugs, and probably hired about a million hookers. And I’m sure he’s got an ego, and he pretty much deserves it. But what intrigues me is that none of this comes through in the music, which has something that most celebrated classic rock does not: human intelligence, minimalism, even, in a sense, privacy. Berry’s vocals and guitar work have no pretension to godlike self-aggrandizement that has been the trademark of the form from Clapton onward. They are complex ideas simply expressed; if you want to add community to the equation, that’s great, but you actually don’t have to.
Maybe lyrics matter in all this, and maybe they don’t. For sure they’re not the point and never were. When Berry’s popularity was renewed (following his prison sentence for “transferring a minor across state lines”) after the credit he received for the sound of the British Invasion, his response was an album called St. Louis to Liverpool and a single called “No Particular Place to Go” very similar to his older “School Day.” For a long time I dismissed the song as a cash-in, then the more I heard it the more remarkable I found the character, charm, humility in the words… really not even the words so much as the way Berry brought them to life, but they are worth repeating nevertheless:
Ridin’ along in my automobile
My baby beside me at the wheel
I stole a kiss at the turn of a mile
My curiosity runnin’ wild
Cruisin’ and playin’ the radio
With no particular place to go.
Ridin’ along in my automobile
I’m anxious to tell her the way I feel,
So I told her softly and sincere,
And she leaned and whispered in my ear
Cuddlin’ more and drivin’ slow,
With no particular place to go.
No particular place to go,
So we parked way out on the Kokomo
The night was young and the moon was bold
So we both decided to take a stroll
Can you imagine the way I felt?
I couldn’t unfasten her safety belt!
Ridin’ along in my calaboose [he lets some anger slip here at the perfect moment]
Still tryin’ to get her belt unloose
All the way home I held a grudge,
But the safety belt, it wouldn’t budge
Arguably, well before Bob Dylan was even heard of, certainly well before he “went electric,” Berry cared more about lyrics than anyone else. Actually I don’t even know if he cared. It just sounds like he did. The stunning storytelling in “Memphis” has never been improved upon by anybody; Berry sings of the estranged father attempting contact with his faraway daughter in an unsentimental, moving manner that makes the Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home” sound even more melodramatic, forced, and maudlin than it actually is:
Help me, information, get in touch with my Marie
She’s the only one who’d phone me here from Memphis Tennessee
Her home is on the south side, high up on a ridge
Just a half a mile from the Mississippi Bridge
Help me, information, more than that I cannot add
Only that I miss her and all the fun we had
But we were pulled apart because her mom did not agree
And tore apart our happy home in Memphis Tennessee
Last time I saw Marie she’s waving me good-bye
With hurry home drops on her cheek that trickled from her eye
Marie is only six years old, information please
Try to put me through to her in Memphis Tennessee
I hate to distill Berry’s career down to a single compilation at the moment, I know he has far more music than I’ve even touched yet, but there is a certain ingenious simplicity to the way this one is put together that is quite apt. Unadorned, simple, flat even, its artwork and tracklist are almost obvious in a sense, almost suggesting you don’t need anything except this music, these recordings, this is all the historical context you really require: a photo of Berry duckwalking and the song titles.
Everyone you hear talking about the matter has a different version of who actually spearheaded rock & roll. Some cynical people will tell you it was Alan Freed. Some sentimental ones say Fats Domino. Some naive ones stand by Elvis Presley. Some geeky ones insist on Robert Johnson. George Harrison I think argued in favor of Carl Perkins. I can’t offer anything like authority on the issue, nor can anyone (Robert Palmer, in his 1976 essay “Rock Begins,” came probably closest), but we all know pop and rock music are mutating forms, and we are at the advantage of knowing everything it has come to entail since the whole game started in 1956 or so.
1956 was the year that “Maybellene,” Berry’s first single and first massive success and the first track on this record, was released. One thing for certain, and I can’t see much of a debate on this. You can listen to Explosion The First, “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Halley and His Comets, or to “Heartbreak Hotel,” which everyone alleges as an earth-shattering revelation. But “Maybellene” alone among competiting titles for The First Actual Rock & Roll Song sounds as if it could have been recorded yesterday, sounds as youthful and vibrant and "now" as it ever did. Not that the production isn’t primitive — it’s all the better for it, actually — but the self-contained energy, pointed intensity, raw emotion countered by wit, and streetwise self-deprecation are all modern and universal. There is no Lou Reed and no Kanye West without “Maybellene” and “Thirty Days” and on and on. Which I will concur would mean nothing if Berry didn’t still connect on an impossibly visceral level, but he does. Play “Maybellene” anywhere today and I dare you not to get a reaction as strong as ever, as much insatiable movement as the world has to boot upwards.
It would still matter without the lyrics. But the lyrics are still wonderful, and yet again, you can hear the future in them:
Maybellene, why can’t you be true
Oh Maybellene , why can’t you be true
You’ve started back doin’ the things you used to do
As I was motivatin’ over the hill
I saw Mabellene in a Coup de Ville
A Cadillac arollin’ on the open road
Nothin’ will outrun my V8 Ford
The Cadillac doin’ about ninety-five
She’s bumper to bumper, rollin’ side by side
Maybellene
The Cadillac pulled up ahead of the Ford
The Ford got hot and wouldn’t do no more
It then got cloudy and started to rain
I tooted my horn for a passin’ lane
The rainwater blowin’ all under my hood
I know that I was doin’ my motor good
Maybellene
The motor cooled down the heat went down
And that’s when I heard that highway sound
The Cadillac asittin’ like a ton of lead
A hundred and ten half a mile ahead
The Cadillac lookin’ like it’s sittin’ still
And I caught Maybellene at the top of the hill
Maybellene
It is sometimes common to bemoan the temptation today to make one’s music as accessible as possible to the broadest audience that can be imagined, but there is certainly something to be said for the technique. Nearly all of the great rock & roll records of the ’50s careened across pop, R&B, and country charts, regardless of racial division. Whether the Everly Brothers, Ray Charles, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and Johnny Cash envisioned this kind of explosion long before “rock radio” could distill them is hard to figure (at the very least, one assumes Charles had such amibitions). But it is known for a fact that Chuck Berry wrote and perhaps initially recorded “Maybellene” as a country & western number. Even in its present form, it carries no typical genre tag. In fact, a freedom of those early rock & roll records — from pure country to doo wop to rockabilly — is that genre is acknowleded practically in the text as irrelevant. Each chart today is a separate industry. Ask yourself which arrangement fosters more creativity, but also keep in mind a lingering question: could Chuck Berry at his peak today inspire and accomplish everything he did then, dying music industry or not? I would say, unquestionably, yes.
Berry was always primed to explode but only allowed himself the luxury very occasionally, and that is one reason why he is so important to the genre and the culture. He exemplified every strange tendency and subgenre clutter we’ve seen since the beginning, sometimes all at once. He’s as much Tom Verlaine’s spiritual precedent as he is Stevie Wonder’s or John Lennon’s or, why the hell not, Joe Strummer’s. He is a model of precision but also of the kind of fire and passion, tempered by his own articulate perception, that is difficult to record without passing over into something overbearing. He is funny but not a comedian, he’s angry but not hateful, he’s the greatest guitar hero in the world but he’s not a Guitar Hero. Basically every great balancing act you can teeter on, he did it. When he is ninety-nine years old, and I hope he gets to be there, he’ll still be the fucking man.
I can see I don’t have time or space right now to say everything I’d like to. We only made it through one song really (not mentioned: the quotable flair for drama amid all the barbs in “School Day” and “Johnny B. Goode,” the erotic charge in “I Wanna Be Your Driver,” the rhyming perfection of “Rock & Roll Music,” the ability in “Carol” to make a propulsive rhythm downright mournful, and on from there). Maybe someday. Bear with me. But Chuck Berry is really, really, really awesome and I should talk about him more and if anything my obsession is pretty mild, but I probably could go on until you’re bored out of your mind. He’s just the greatest. That’s all I’m saying.
[Editorial Note: This is a slight reconfiguration of an essay I posted at my old weblog in 2008. I planned to rewrite it but I dunno, it seems OK to me, so I'm adding it to the blogspot canon.]
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