CHUCK BERRY
Chuck Berry - who died on March 18, aged 90 - didn't only play the guitar just like ringing a bell. He invented a vocabulary that ignited the youth of the globe and shook popular music to its toes - a revolution that resounds today. David Fricke salutes r
No one did more than he to mint the music and attitude that would define rock’n’roll. David Fricke on a pioneering genius; Keith Richards on “an amazing piece of work”.
The lingo was strictly record-bizhipster cheese. the editors misspelled the song title. and the review, published in the July 23, 1955 issue of billboard, appeared in the american music-trade bible’s rhythm-andblues pages, briefly noted under “best buy” raves for Muddy waters’ latest blast on chess records, Mannish boy, and a new, posthumous single by the recently-late crooner Johnny ace. “berry socks across an unassuming novelty with ace showmanship and expressive good humor,” the unbylined writer promised. “the tune has a catchy rhythm and a solid, driving beat. Fine jockey and juke wax.” it was chuck berry’s first appearance in national print, on the occasion of his own chess debut – and it was not a promising entrance. success, of course, was right around the corner, with histor y on its heels. a number 1 r&b hit for 11 weeks that summer and fall, Maybellene went top 5 on billboard’s pop chart and sold over a million. the single immediately changed berry’s life, and then the world around him forever. it was a rock’n’roll year already reeling with teenage upheaval – bill haley’s 24 weeks in the Us chart with rock around the clock – and the crossover precedent of r&b smashes by laVerne baker, Fats domino and bo diddley. yet billboard’s capsule praise for Maybellene did not mention pop-radio possibility, white kids with extra lunch money or the name of the composer: berry himself, whose “unassuming novelty” was a witty, narrative surprise of frustrated lust and serial betrayal rendered in the brand-name specs of a neck-and-neck car chase. also missing was any reference to the dynamic, illustrative force in berry’s guitar playing. his sharp auto-horn blasts of bent-note treble and urgent, decisive riffing, fired in a chugging hard-rubber twang, were imminent revolution in a nutshell. two months earlier, on May 21, berry – a modestly successful bandleader in his native st louis, Missouri – had entered Universal studios in chicago to make good on a recommendation from waters, one of his idols, to the bluesman’s producer, leonard chess. berry arrived with his thorough rewrite of ida red, a traditional country song that he had performed in st louis clubs, putting an r&b momentum to the 1938 western swing arrangement by bob wills and his texas Playboys. the new title was at leonard’s insistence and either his idea (as in the cosmetics brand, with altered spelling to avoid lawyers) or berry’s (a cartoon cow from his childhood reading). in any case, the memoir in the lyrics was all berry; as a young buck, he had chased the ladies in a V8 Ford, like his lovestruck cat in Maybellene. “we struggled through the song,” berry wrote of the session, in his 1988 book the autobiography, “taking 35 tries before completing a track that proved satisfactory to leonard.” that is hard to believe. berry’s nimble, flinty band that day included chess records’ in-house sage willie dixon on upright bass and a crucial st louis sidekick: pianist Johnnie Johnson, previously berry’s boss in the st John’s trio and an undersung pillar in berry’s recording and performing life un- til Johnson’s death in 2005. in fact, as berry noted in his book, “several of those completions, in my opinion, were perfect” – a telling aside from a man who, in time, was running his own affairs with iron will and a sharp eye on every dollar in play. berry actually cut Maybellene and its slow-blues flip, wee wee hours, before signing with chess. that night, after the session, berry went to leonard’s office and sat down with the double-talk paperwork, reading it “word for word… knowing full well i’d sign the damn thing anyway.” but the guitarist had something more pressing on his mind. as he, Johnson and drummer ebby hardy drove back to st louis “through the black night,” berry recalled, “more songs were sprouting in my head. as easy as it seemed now that the session was over, another four were bound to come forth.” that was an understatement. Maybellene was the explosive entrance of a self-assured, comprehensive genius in songwriting, lyric craftsmanship and jet-age electricguitar vocabulary. chuck berry was rock’n’roll’s first auteur-star. and he was just getting started.
In May 1957, chess released berry’s first lP. the label called it After School Session, a cash-in on their star’s latest hit. school day (ring! ring! goes the bell) – an even bigger record than Maybellene, going to number 3 on the pop chart – was supercharged comic observation: a dissection of classroom ennui with the crisp, tumble-forward syntax of 1965 bob dylan, a decade ahead of schedule, and fast, sly allusions to black underclass life (“soon as three o’clock rolls around/ you finally lay your burden down”).
The song was, along with that album title, fiction on multiple counts. When Berry signed to Chess, he was on the far side of adolescence – 28, married and a father. He was also a highschool dropout with a criminal record. Berry was finishing a three-year stint in reform school for car theft and armed robbery when R&B singer Roy Brown cut his 1947 single Good Rockin’ Tonight, a brawny prophecy of urban swing and black-church hosanna. And Berry had only recently started playing electric guitar with serious intent – under the spell of Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker – when Jackie Brenston laid down his 1951 solid sender Rocket 88 for Sam Phillips at his Sun studio in Memphis, with guitarist Willie Kizart’s accidental game-changing distortion. Maybellene was not Berry’s first record. In August 1954, he played nondescript guitar as a sideman on Oh Maria, a faux-calypso single by the St Louis singer Joe Alexander on the tiny Ballad label. By comparison, a few weeks earlier, Elvis Presley impulsively turned to the Arthur Crudup blues That’s Alright Mama during a stalled session for Phillips at Sun, unleashing rock’n’roll’s first truly original voice. But Presley – who covered Maybellene in the summer of ’55, on the Louisiana Hayride radio show – would not become a phenomenon for nearly two years, until his 1956 RCA debut, Heartbreak Hotel. By that spring, Berry had followed his breakthrough with another half-dozen torpedoes of whip-crack wordplay and immortal riffing, including another drag-race classic You Can’t Catch Me; the outright sexual bragging and racial innuendo of Brown Eyed Handsome Man; and the Top 30 single Roll Over Beethoven, Berry’s definitive announcement that there was a new generation of long-hairs in town. The guitarist came late to his greatness and destiny but stayed quick and consistent in his innovation through the last half of the ’50s. “The commercial value in songs is a great instigator,” Berry said bluntly in explanation of his ’50s work rate in one of his best interviews – actually a lunchtime question-and-answer exchange with college students before a May 1969 show in Berkeley, California. “A song, to me, could come from a group [of notes],” Berry went on, according to Greil Marcus’s report in Rolling Stone. “The riff might say words to me… I might incorporate that riff into a pattern and go from there musically.” The important thing, the guitarist said, was “to keep my music simple, so that I could preach it in two or three minutes. A lot of the songs are alike,” he confessed. The invention and enduring resonance, he might have added, were in the details. Like, for instance, Berry’s hands. “They are big, with long nails and thick fingers,” writer Neil Strauss observed when the guitarist gave one of his last real interviews to Rolling Stone in 2010. “They seem built not for subtle picking but for the loud, overdriven, spilling-over-theedges riffs that made Berry’s music seem so much younger, wilder and more dangerous than the rhythm and blues of his predecessors.” Addressing those Berkeley students in 1969, Berry freely admitted the formula in his guitar playing, citing a St Louis hero, Carl Hogan, who played with Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five. “Much of my material begins with [his] familiar riffs, like ‘ba doo doo dah, ba doo doo dah.’” Berry’s departure was in the physical attack and pictorial echo of his hooks: the mocking dance of the guitar running through You Can’t Catch Me; the erotic skid, like a stripper’s shimmy, amplifying the precocious seduction in Sweet Little Sixteen; the cascading freedom ring of the bell in School Day. That taut, propulsive integration of lick and rhythm bloomed abroad in Keith Richards and
Pete Townshend. But Berry could be a dextrous, elegant player. His soloing in a breakneck 1957 take of How High The Moon, left by Chess in the can until 1963, is fleet and spearing. And you can clearly hear a longdistance homage to Deep Feeling, Berry’s unique ’57 outing on Hawaiian-flavoured steel guitar, in Peter Green’s 1968 instrumental beauty for Fleetwood Mac, Albatross.
ERRY WAS HARDLY TEENAGEidol material. He was tall, lean and forbidding even when he smiled, as if being photographed at gunpoint. His showmanship betrayed his years. The duckwalk – a crowd-pleasing signature that he dated to a 1956 Alan Freed revue where he tried to hide the wrinkles in his suit – was part-Groucho Marx stride, part T-Bone Walker riding a unicycle. His writing, for all the late-model car and jet-plane references, invoked more austere circumstances, like the message scrawled on the wall next to the phone in Memphis, Tennessee. But Berry was an astute editor too. In a December 1956 demo of Rock & Roll Music, he sings, “If you want to rock with me”, in the final chorus. By the 1957 single, that became, “If you want to dance with me” – a better vocal flow with enhanced come-hither effect. Berry had been crossing over – between eras, genres and social barriers – from the start, in St Louis clubs where he played Hank Williams and Bob Wills songs for black crowds and emulated Nat King Cole’s clarity in his own diction, even at the high speeds of Too Much Monkey Business and Reelin’ And Rockin’. Unlike Diddley, Domino, Little Richard and even Presley, who all grew up poor and Southern, Berry came from both struggle and advantage – a black middle-class
family in the Midwest – and aspired to economic independence before Maybellene, training as a beautician , doing well enough to buy his own home. Trading up to something bigger and better – in wheels, comfort, pleasure – was a core theme in Berry’s best songs. Recorded a couple of months after his Maybellene windfall, No Money Down – written over the rhythm and chord structure of Diddley’s ’55 B-side I’m A Man – was pure negotiation, Berry turning in that “broken down, raggedy Ford” (presumably after losing the Maybellene race) for a Coupe de Ville so hot “I’m burnin’ aviation fuel.” Berry experienced American racism at its most blatant: a 1959 arrest on a Mann Act charge, an openly prejudicial judge, two trials and 20 months in federal prison. Yet on the verge of that furore, during a dispiriting tour of Australia, Berry wrote Back In The U.S.A., a national anthem of pure joy for a place “where hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day.” And in Promised Land, written in jail near the end of his term, Berry imagined a 1st Class escape (silk suit, T-bone steak) and likened a cross-country jet to religious salvation: “Swing low, sweet chariot, come down easy/Taxi to the terminal zone.”
ERRY DIDN’T BEGIN WRITING ABOUT TEENAGERS until they started buying his records (that commercial “instigator” again). But he responded to their enthusiasm and frustrations – with routine and puritanism in school, work and especially sex – with an empathy and snappy patter that seemed to come straight from the malt shop (the reference to American Bandstand in Sweet Little Sixteen plugged one of his teen audience’s favourite TV shows, and cleverly ensured that Bandstand’s Dick Clark supported the song). But Berry also illuminated darker corners in contemporary black life. The police raid that breaks up the party in 1958’s Around And Around (“Both doors blew back”) could have happened on either side of the tracks. Berry never fully recovered commercially from his first stay in prison, although he had two of his biggest singles in the spring of ’64, as soon as he hit fresh air: Nadine (Is It You?) and another car song, No Particular Place To go, about the beauty of having no fixed stop ahead. But Berry’s bitterness and suspicion were set as he left Chess in 1966 for bigger money at Mercury, returned after a few pallid albums and established a touring routine that lasted the rest of his life: pick-up bands, the bread upfront, hit-and-miss gigs depending on his mood. with the fluke exception and embarrassment of his only Number 1 single – My Ding-A-Ling topping the charts in the US and UK in 1972 – Berry became trapped in his own fiercely guarded twilight: a compelling, if ornery and complicated, legend who retreated entirely from the studio after 1979’s Rockit; alternating between greatest-hits shows and defensive seclusion at his nightclub-compound, Berry Park, in wentzville, Missouri, where he completed Chuck, his first album in 38 years, just before his death [see panel, left]. It will forever be a matter of dispute: what was the first rock’n’roll record? This is certain: after establishing the art of rock’n’roll songwriting and rock guitar’s foundation sound on Maybellene, Berry created the first and best original songs about the immediate charge and lasting, transformative power of the music itself – Roll over Beethoven, Rock & Roll Music, the plainly autobiographical Johnny B. goode. During that 1969 Q&A in Berkeley, Berry was asked to describe what rock’n’roll “has done to the kids in America”. “It brings you together,” he said, “because if two people like the same music, they can be standing beside each other shaking and they wind up dancing, and that’s a matter of communication… without words, they’ll join hands… And sometimes some of the dancers, they don’t even look. You don’t even touch your partner, you just dance.” Berry got there in 1955, just as the party went into full swing. He made sure that it never stopped.