‘Shakespeare’ of the world of rock’n’roll

Some of the greatest tributes paid to Chuck Berry came long before he was found dead last Saturday at the ripe old age of 90, on the cusp of releasing his first album of original material in 38 years.

John Lennon famously declared long ago: “If you tried to give rock’n’roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry”. And it was more than five years ago that Leonard Cohen, the fellow recipient of an award for lyricists from PEN New England, said that “all of us are footnotes to the words of Chuck Berry”, adding: “If Beethoven hadn’t rolled over, there’d be no room for any of us.” In a message on the same occasion, Bob Dylan sanctified Berry as “the Shakespeare of rock’n’roll” (and Cohen as “the Kafka of the blues”).

The context for Cohen’s acclamation was one of Berry’s best-known songs, in which he commands Beethoven to roll over “and tell Tchaikovsky the news” and, ultimately, “to dig these rhythm and blues”. The origins of the song may well lie in the fact that young Chuck had to wait for his sister to finish practising Beethoven on the family piano before he got to hone his rhythm and blues.

Roll Over Beethoven was also a declaration of intent, a pronouncement to the effect that the times were changing. “Whenever I’m asked to put together a top 10 of political songs, this number is always first on the list”, Billy Bragg declared in a Facebook post a couple of days ago. “A black man with an electric guitar loudly proclaiming to white America that the music that will dominate youth culture in the coming decades will be African-American. Who was making such revolutionary pop music in 1956?”

Bragg wasn’t born until the following year, but the budding musicians who would spearhead the socalled British invasion of the United States a few years later borrowed a great deal of their inspiration from Chuck Berry. The Beatles had several of his songs in their repertoire, and The Rolling Stones’ very first single was a Berry number.

On the other side of the Atlantic, The Beach Boys adapted Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen for one of their biggest hits, Surfin’ USA. Further, not many cultural commentators would dispute the notion that almost every rock guitarist owes a tremendous debt to Berry.

Somewhat ironically, Berry was in prison in the early 1960s while his fame exploded, jailed on the charge of transporting an underage teenager across state lines for immoral purposes. It wasn’t the first time he had been incarcerated. As a teenager he was jailed for armed robbery.

And it wasn’t his last brush with the law. There were tax evasion charges in later years as well as others based on marijuana possession and, particularly damningly, evidence of a hidden camera in the female toilet of a restaurant he owned. Berry denied the latter charge but settled out of court for a million-plus dollars. These are by no means the only indications that he wasn’t by any means a particularly nice guy. There can be little controversy, though, about his incredible talent for packing cleverly worded tales of teenage angst, dreams and rebellion, encased in guitar riffs, into two minutes and 30 seconds of pop perfection.

Poetry and music were both precious in the Berry household during Chuck’s formative years, and among the many influences that were imbibed, consciously or otherwise, was the clear diction of Nat King Cole. Chuck Berry was steeped in the blues and familiar with folk when he was introduced by Muddy Waters to Chess Records back in 1955. It was at the ripe old age of 29 that he scored his first hit with a song called Maybellene, and soon enough qualified for pride of place at rock’n’roll’s Mount Rushmore alongside wilder men such as Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, as well as a truck driver by the name of Elvis Presley.

The 1960s were not particularly kind to any of them. Elvis joined the Army, Chuck Berry went to jail, and other leading lights of rock from the previous decade were overwhelmed by arrogant youngsters from both sides of the Atlantic who were more tuned into the zeitgeist. There’s considerable irony in the fact that Berry scored his first number one hit in 1972 with a salacious novelty song, My Ding-a-Ling.

But by then his position in the rock stratosphere was already secure, even without the semiautobiographical masterpiece Johnny B. Goode being blasted into outer space as a resounding and timeless testament to artistic innovation and human creativity.