Chuck Berry: C or D?

since the invention of the phonograph?

What has always amazed me about Chuck Berry is his elegance- sure, there's the rockers like "Johnny B Goode", but on the whole he always seems so much more subtle, so much less savage, so much more sophisticated than any of his contemporaries: there isn't a single song of his that goes as way out of control as Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent and even Elvis Presley frequently did. And his latter stuff- I'm thinking of "You Never Can Tell" and "Baby Doll", fer instance- almost has a Pre-Rock, showbiz aura about it.

Anyway, he's classic, of course. Just a great all-rounder: great live performances, those godly riffs, and of course the songwriting; he brought "Saturday Night Fish Fry" to the Rock & Roll era.

Everything "rock n' roll" can, and should be.

A few years ago I went to see one of those 'Legends of rock'n'roll' gigs at Wembley Arena. Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. Wasn't expecting much but made the decision to go on the day cos I thought, well, one of them's going to die soon so last chance probably (Jerry Lee being on his third triple-bypass operation or something). I thought Little Richard would be good value cos he's a bit loopy and even if Jerry Lee Lewis might be a little subdued at least his country stuff's half-decent as well.

But I'd heard all the tales about how Chuck Berry was always terrible live, about how his stinginess meant he'd always use a crappy local pick-up group wherever he went rather than paying for a full-time band. And about how he was a miserable fucker.

But he blew me away.

The audience, as you'd expect, was full of every ridiculously-dressed, stuck in some weird version of the fifties, teddy boy and girl in the country. Probably not renowned for their broadness of musical taste. And when Chuck dared to stray from the likes of Johnny B Goode and play a bit of blues there were boos and heckling to play more of the hits. Which Chuck, understandably didn't like. But rather than throw a fit and storm off stage as I might've expected, he chose to have a go in song.

So he started improvising on the lyrics of 'Rock and roll music', changing it from an attack on other forms of music ("I've got no kick against modern jazz, except they play it too darn fast") to a subtle and witty dig at the conservative nature of the audience. And he went on for what seemed like several verses, keeping it perfectly in time with the melody line of the song, basically making it up as he went along. Probably going right over their heads. And it was fucking great.

This man (79 years old?) was supposed to be dead artistically, repeating his old songs ad nauseum for cold hard nostalgia cash. But he was sharp as a fucking tack. I like to think i caught a glimpse of what made him great in the first place.

I seem to have at least become my own stereotype! I will let that wander freely in the woods on a rampage.

But if no one else mentions it, I gotta say: Berry's piano player Johnnie Johnson wrote all those classic riffs.

I'm just finally cracking Father of Rock & Roll, which has the details... While I'm at it, I heartily recommend Backbeat: Earl Palmer's Story, by Tony Scherman--kickass New Orleans rocknroll bio told entirely by the father of the backbeat into a tape recorder...

Chuck was too smart for his own good, methinks. Pull out an album or two and the deftness of his lyrics and the offhanded charm of his singing is still going to surprise you. I think his being taken up by the Brits was definitely a good thing, but his swift canonization has done his legacy a disservice. It closed off many opportunities for artistic growth (see James's story about the aging teddies clamoring for "Johnny B. Goode) and has reduced his achievement to "major influence on [x]" as two or three of his hits are recycled endlessly on dreaded "oldies" radio. (Actually not anymore I don't think; oldies radio here in Chicago has pretty much cut the 1950s out of their programming.)

I am not really sure about the Johnnie Johnson thing--that JJ wrote a lot of those songs. Need to read more about it.

Lots of "minor" Berry is great, too. "Rockin' at the Philharmonic" is a really good instrumental. I like the weird stuff on his earlier LPs, too, like "Berry Pickin'" and "Drifting Heart." And the insane "13 Question Method." "Deep Feeling" is very good too.

I enjoy him lots more than I do Bob Dylan, too. "Talkin' About You" is one song that never fails to amaze me. Chuck Berry is rock and roll, period, far more than Elvis or anyone else. And it's NOT rockabilly...

http://www.hip-oselect.com/scr.public.product.asp?product_id=B7A49F2E-8468-4D4A-89E2-68E8BBC66368

: - O

yeah this looks good! about time this stuff was upgraded -- that 3 cd chess set came out like in 1988. wish it was a tad bit cheaper, but what the hey ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Berry

we should celebrate this King of Rock & Roll while he's still alive + still playing!

He's 82!

totally love the great 28 compilation, but have no idea why 'you never can tell' wasn't featured. still it's all a pretty joyous ride.

I'm kind of hooked on Tulane these days. It feels like a movie. Such a great story with so much going on - it kind of reminds me of the that amazing sequence in Goodfellas leading up to the bust.

holy shit dudes i found this one in a garbage can and am floored
http://static.rateyourmusic.com/album_images/s1452681.jpg
first i was put off by it cuz its a compilation then i listened to it and was like damn
then i considered the album cover and was like fukin a man a young girl in nothing but a leather jacket
man that is rock n roll dude

I think my impressions of Chuck Berry have always been so clouded that I never sat down and just listened to Johnny B. Goode, like really LISTENED TO IT man. Such great guitar work. I get it now.

Yeah, very influential iirc.

Yeah I guess I had always thought of it as "yeah that guy invented rock and roll" like as in "steve jobs invented the personal computer -- that's awesome but it doesn't mean I actually want to use an original apple computer"

Short uptempo guitar-based songs were the worst thing to ever happen to music

yeah i had big breakthroughs on berry and buddy holly last year

not that i didn't like them, i just never really sat down and listened to them before, just knew em from oldies etc

you should get on Little Richard next

My Epiphany About Chuck Berry

kind of wish chuck had a whole album that was like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7XWfNVTEQ8
mesmerizing

JOHHNY B. POLLED: chuck berry's great twenty-eight

^^^ best chuck thread IMO

yeah i had big breakthroughs on berry and buddy holly last year

not that i didn't like them, i just never really sat down and listened to them before, just knew em from oldies etc

Me too! I picked up "Chuck Rocks" and "The Definitive Buddy Holly" and, while I expected to like them, I was really surprised at how much I totally loved it all. Not played out at all.

Perhaps it is time for Whiney to shine a fresh light on these forgotten acts lest they be forgotten by the new generation.

Short uptempo guitar-based songs were the worst thing to ever happen to music

this is the dumbest post to ever happen to ILX

little richard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3ELjAfhs2M

this is the dumbest post to ever happen to ILX

I think he might have been kidding, but it is impossible to tell. Like Andy Kaufman reading The Great Gatsby or something.

yeah i never got his deal, he was funny sometimes, i think he was mostly gone by time i started posting a lot. he's like this weird ghost in the machine now.

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.

lily I love that song & your post

Seconded.

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

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, December 28, 2023 12:35 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

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

― BrianB, Thursday, December 28, 2023 12:43 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

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

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, December 28, 2023 12:56 PM

Wait -- which version of "Promised Land"?

had never looked into the "bypassed Rock Hill" line!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_Nine

i agree that LD's post is great and that "Promised Land" is a towering masterpiece

just thinking about it gives me chills!

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

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, December 28, 2023 11:56 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

his almost clipped delivery and the efficiency with which he gets out most of lyrics make it all the more rewarding when he lingers on "swing low chariot, come down eeeeee-asy"; one of many small details that really make the song

Elijah Wald with help from New York Rocker’s Andy Schwartz re Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land” and lyrical references to the civil rights Freedom Riders. As an aside ,Wald’s playing of song in his video there is too folky

https://www.elijahwald.com/songblog/promised-land/?fbclid=IwAR3kqa1tOdHzex-5FqpvtB9OM7ZJdvEKf0I37GA39mrvzyDpRQvuUqM8Xew_aem_AcqFkEBw7IEBpxkyPKgWQwhEwCrZ1BfFV6zIzmlZWyqKz300hnHydDMyRCfzgWaJwXg

damn. the video he posted of himself performing "promised land" is kind of brutal and has sort of altered how i see him fundamentally

Can you elaborate on that?

i just mean that it's terrible and makes me wonder why he'd post something like that. what the fuck is this shit

it's an older guy who enjoys a song playing it to boost engagement, and having a good time playing it. one can see how a person would get really aggro and weird about that, and how it would "alter how [they] see him fundamentally," I mean that's just really rational and sensible

You'll never earn yr top Grateful Dead fan badge if you keep on objecting to shitty Chuck Berry covers.

hi can we all just please calm down and have a rational and sensible discussion about chuck berry? thanks

lol, Ward

Also, “they’ll hear it the way Elijah Ward played it!”

(xp) Elijah or Fowler? Or both?

Heh, meant Fowler but realized the problem after posting

I feel like I am an outlier, but I have never totally bought or wanted to dig into EW’s übercontrarian shtick which from where I sit looks like endless iterations of “actually, Robert Johnson wasn’t a blues singer at all, and if he was, he was terrible, he was really just a creation of John Hammond’s febrile mind” or “actually Beatlemania wasn’t really a thing” shockas.

And then this Maxwell’s Demon of authenticity games goes and does a super-corny oldbro Chuck Berry cover without any Peter Stampfel Wollheim weirdness to skew it and add interest.

lol. that's interesting. he has always seemed okay to me, even astute, but on reflection i think that might just come down to the recommendations of others i esteem who have read and enjoyed EW, because i've never read one of his books.

but have read little things here and there, like the blog post linked about "promised land." which i think is great. the video's another story.