Chuck Berry: C or D?

A few Chuck Berry threads, so this might have been posted elsewhere.

http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/chuck_zps50a3e4e8.jpg

I could start a ceremonial "Chuck Berry is still alive" thread, but then again the last one ended (ended?) badly...

http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/rftmusic/2014/06/chuck_berry_reviews_classic_punk_records_in_unearthed_jet_lag_zine_from_1980.php

The Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen":
What's this guy so angry about anyway? Guitar work and progression is like mine. Good backbeat. Can't understand most of the vocals. If you're going to be mad at least let the people know what you're mad about.

The Clash's "Complete Control":
Sounds like the first one. The rhythm and chording work well together. Did this guy have a sore throat when he sang the vocals?

The Ramones' "Sheena is a Punk Rocker":
A good little jump number. These guys remind me of myself when I first started, I only knew three chords too.

The Romantics' "What I Like About You":
Finally something you can dance to. Sounds a lot like the sixties with some of my riffs thrown in for good measure. You say this is new? I've heard this stuff plenty of times. I can't understand the big fuss.

Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer":
A funky little number, that's for sure. I like the bass a lot. Good mixture and a real good flow. The singer sounds like he has a bad case of stage fright.

Wire's "I Am the Fly" and Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures:
So this is the so-called new stuff. It's nothing I ain't heard before. It sounds like an old blues jam that BB and Muddy would carry on backstage at the old amphitheatre in Chicago. The instruments may be different but the experiment's the same.

The idea of BB and Muddy jamming on "I Am The Fly" is killing me right now.

ST. LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 18, 2016 -- Chuck Berry, the artist who codified the sound, rhythm and language of rock and roll, celebrated his 90th birthday today with the surprise announcement that he will release a new album - titled simply 'CHUCK' - in 2017 on Dualtone Records (an Entertainment One Company). Comprised primarily of new, original songs written, recorded and produced by the founding rock and roll legend, 'CHUCK' is Berry's first new album in thirty-eight years. It was recorded in various studios around St. Louis and features Berry's longtime hometown backing group - including his children Charles Berry Jr. (guitar) and Ingrid Berry (harmonica), plus Jimmy Marsala (Berry's bassist of forty years), Robert Lohr (piano), and Keith Robinson (drums) - which has supported him for over two decades on over two hundred residency shows at the famed Blueberry Hill club. More details about 'CHUCK' and other Berry-related events will be revealed in the coming weeks.

"This record is dedicated to my beloved Toddy," said Berry, referring to his wife of 68 years, Themetta Berry. "My darlin' I'm growing old! I've worked on this record for a long time. Now I can hang up my shoes!"

"What an honor to be part of this new music," says Charles Berry Jr. "The St. Louis band, or as dad called us 'The Blueberry Hill Band,' fell right into the groove and followed his lead. These songs cover the spectrum from hard driving rockers to soulful thought provoking time capsules of a life's work."

Dualtone president Paul Roper adds: "It is a great honor to be a part of this record and the broader legacy of Chuck Berry. This body of work stands with the best of his career and will further cement Chuck as one of the greatest icons of rock and roll."

http://www.trbimg.com/img-580560ff/turbine/la-1476747727-snap-photo/450/450x450

I get why he's just calling the album Chuck, but calling it Almost Grown would have been hilarious.

Anyway, as I said on Facebook, there is no album I will not turn off in a second if somebody suggests listening to Chuck Berry instead. Happy 90th birthday to the man without whom probably about 2/3 of my record collection would not exist.

want this to be good so much

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUb3QM39QeA

so God damned great

yeah! cool that he's just using his regular band (as opposed to getting Flea on bass or something).

the way he changes up the pronunciation of "here" when it's his mother speaking...just so good

(as opposed to getting Flea on bass or something).

I would actually be in favor of this for the reason that, during the sessions, Flea would undoubtedly play something moronic, for which Chuck would not hesitate to punch his lights out.

haha, yeah that is true.

Don't you guys remember what Iggy said to Mike Watt?

Or what he said about Chuck Berry for that matter

i don't remember!
this is good: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/peter-guralnick-on-why-chuck-berry-is-greater-than-you-think-w443396

It's in Paul Trynka's Open Up And Bleed right after Shakey's brother talking about Coachella.

There had, in fact, been a little last-minute argument behind the scenes. Pete Marshall had been expecting to play bass with the new Stooges ever since Ron had started sending Iggy tapes in the late ’90s; Iggy had pushed for him too, on the basis that he wanted someone familiar standing beside him, but he finally backed down and agreed to Watt taking the job, on condition that there was “no slapping, no triads … and no Flea-ing around on stage,” alluding to his friendship with the Chili Peppers’ funky bassist, Flea.

Also “if someone told us we had to play Chuck Berry or die, we would have to die.”

lol at "Almost Grown," that would pretty much be the all-time winner for the Old Sock award.

Whoa, I just found out my friend Rachel did the art for the new album's cover. She's understandably over the moon to reveal that fact.

Canada 1987. Chuck Berry is playing some dismal outdoor show. Four songs in, Chuck fires his band in the middle of “School Days”and does most of the remaining set solo, but then reluctantly lets them back on at the end because the good folks paid to see four musicians on stage

https://ijwthstd.blogspot.com/2023/04/chuck-berry-bramalea-ontario-1987-08-08.html

My friend grew up in St Louis and Chuck Berry performed at his grade school not long after the show posted above. He only played “My Ding-a-Ling”
for like 20 minutes, which is a perversely funny choice of a song to play in front of children.

And I’m pretty sure that the concert at the grade school was to fulfill a community service order from a court, which makes his song choice even wilder. Chuck got weird in the 80’s.

I saw a Chuck show in the 80s. The local backers warmed up the stage for a few minutes, he duckwalked in and played eight songs in fifteen minutes and left. Then another 20 minutes of ovations chanting "what the fuck, Chuck" but he'd left the building. Apparently this was not uncommon at the time. No one else on the bill!

that seems to have been his pattern everywhere. I guess at this point he was more interested in other things than working with other musicians and developing his sound a bit

why on earth did anyone think having him go to schools was a good idea? I know it was a different time but that's still shocking to me

Believe he had a song or two with the word “school” in the lyric or even the title iirc.

1987? I believe at that point he represented that old time rock and roll. That kind of music just soothes the soul. I reminisce about the days of old, with that old time rock and roll.

working with other musicians and developing his sound a bit

Massive lols at the thought of Chuck Berry being at all interested in "developing his sound"

I know someone whose parents saw Bo Diddley fucking around with a synthesizer on stage sometime in the 80s

lol ET

Yeah, Bo made some primitive synth-and-drum machine tracks in the late 80s. They sucked, at least the stuff I heard did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d15kdzY-vAo

That’s the album. It’s bad.

"Bo Diddley Isn't A Synth Wizard"

i saw chuck's 60th birthday show at the felt forum with a stellar backup band (john entwistle, dave edmunds, terry williams, chuck leavell) which, it soon became apparent, had never rehearsed with him.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/why-chuck-berry-snubbed-60th-birthday-tribute-rock-210458345.html

That Bo Diddley album.... I'm not going to say it's good, but it could be a lot worse.

At band practice the other night the guitar player said, "No, more of a Chuck Berry rhythm" and the drummer and I instantly understood what he meant. Besides Bo Diddley, does anyone else have a rhythm they can call their own?

Klaus Dinger?

Did Chuck Berry ever use Buckcherry as a backing band?

I've been listening to Andrew Hickey's 500 songs podcast, starting from the beginning, and last week I got to the episode on Maybellene, and I feel very dumb that I am only now realizing what an amazing lyricist Chuck Berry was and what an extraordinary evolutionary leap happened in rock music when he arrived on the scene.

So I listened to the Great Twenty-Eight a bunch of times, and was kicking myself for not having known about it before. Like, I vaguely knew that he was influential, and I knew Nadine because Springsteen told me about it on his radio show, and I knew a few of the big hits, but listening to these amazing lyrics and realizing how much Dylan and the Beatles and the Stones and Springsteen were mining them for phrases the way novelists mine Shakespeare and the King James Bible for titles, I realized how much I had completely taken Chuck Berry for granted. So I was telling my dad this - like, one part holy shit this dude's lyrics, one part WHY DID YOU NOT TELL ME ABOUT THIS EARLIER - and he said the Chuck Berry song he's always loved was "Promised Land."

So I listened to "Promised Land" and it's so freaking beautiful the last line makes me tear up without fail, and everything about it is just so astonishing. The three or more layers of storytelling happening simultaneously, so that it's at once a road trip song and a story of individual struggle and triumph and the story of the collective fight for desegregation, and you can hear it as taking place over the course of a few days or as a journey that spans years. The sense of motion, propulsion, so that even when he's stalled out in Alabama it still feels like - idk, like a secular version of the Lord being with him, this unshakeable sense that he's the right person at the right time and the universe wants him to get where he's going. The warmth and sense of community - like, how did someone as cold and out for himself as Chuck Berry manage to write a song so brimming over with human connection, so that the poor boy's triumph is explicitly a product of people helping him, caring for him, and the journey isn't complete until he can call home to Norfolk and tell them he's made it? And then all of these startling little word choices that give the song its momentum - "straddled that Greyhound and rode him into Raleigh" "smoking into New Orleans" and of course that invocation to the plane at the end - not just "Swing low, chariot, come down easy, taxi to the terminal zone," though that's amazing in itself, but the way he keeps talking to the plane: "Cut your engines and cool your wings," so that as I listen I'm hit by this rush of affection not just for the narrator and all the people who got him there but even for the plane itself.

Anyway, Chuck Berry is Classic all the way and I may be late to the party but at least I got here.

The next line always makes me think of this
https://makeagif.com/i/TftMzO

https://makeagif.com/i/TftMzO

It took me forever to hear the original version of "Promised Land" but I had loved Elvis's version for years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGULJTnV6QI

and it's kinda fascinating how different they are. Elvis omits some lines that make the song's hidden meaning clearer, but I don't get the feeling there's any sinister intent behind that — he just wants to turn it into a celebratory rock 'n' roll party.

Anyway, Chuck Berry was fucking incredible. Not only a brilliant lyricist like you said — like, every one of his big hits has a line in it that'll go off in your brain like sparklers (my favorites are "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" and "Thirty Days"), and the music has so much bite.

I reviewed The Great Twenty-Eight at the beginning of the year:

This is it, the Big Bang. Chuck Berry’s music was part jump blues, part R&B, part country and a tiny bit of jazz; you can hear the influence of Nat “King” Cole, Muddy Waters, Louis Jordan and T-Bone Walker, but it was his urbane-hillbilly personality and his wily lyrical brilliance that changed the world. “Too Much Monkey Business,” “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” “Maybellene,” “Thirty Days,” and “You Can’t Catch Me,” among others, were witty broadsides from a keen observer of American life, and when he began to aim explicitly at the teenage market with “School Day,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Johnny B. Goode,” and more, he created a global audience that was conscious of itself, which is how gods are made. What’s astonishing, nearly 70 years later, is how much bite this music has. Backed by pianist Johnnie Johnson, bassist Willie Dixon, and various drummers, Berry’s bluesy guitar leads slash at the listener like a switchblade. (Berry-indebted punk rock guitarists like Billy Zoom and Steve Jones actually sound cleaner than the man himself.) This is immortal music; it’ll leave you giddy and gaping at its power the first time you hear it, and the thousandth.

^A+

This Poison Ivy quote is really fascinating:

The Cramps guitar sound came naturally. “I had one thing as a kind of criteria,” she says. “We loved Chuck Berry, but we had a rule that we wouldn’t do Chuck Berry licks. All rock ’n’ roll from the '60s, going into the '70s, was based on Chuck Berry, at the exclusion of any other influence. So even though we loved Chuck, we decided to do all we could to not have that influence. There was too much, y’know?”

Even the Sex Pistols had Chuck Berry licks. “Yeah. And it’s astounding; you never would hear Link Wray influences or Duane Eddy. We couldn’t figure it out because it was pure rock ’n’ roll. It’s as monumental as Chuck Berry, and for it to be ignored seemed strange. So to this day, it’s a rule: we will not throw in a Chuck Berry riff.”

(from https://www.guitarworld.com/features/poison-ivy-the-cramps)

the way he purposely mispronounces a la carte "workin' on a t-bond steak alla cart-y flyin' over to the Golden State" is pure genuis

The verb "working" is perfect too, you can almost picture him with plastic utensils hacking a tough airline steak on his tray.

totally, also he's conscious of exactly how many syllables he needs to make the syncopation of the line work perfectly

Indeed

excellent revive!

Y’all should have been there when I did “Run Rudolph Run” at karaoke last week.