Nadine! Nadine! Nadine! Nadine! Every Time I See Ya Darling You're Up To Something New!

Thank you Doug and Jan for this beauty!



I've always said, it's never quite the same.  Here (17 years earlier) he picks up the pace and volume a bit.



Back when the song was released they thought the girls were more interesting.  (But that ain't Nadine back there!  Nadine, I'd look at!)



In his eighties he's virtually rapping!

Sidemen Up Front! Bob Baldori

Baldori played harmonica on "Back Home," and he and his band The Woolies backed Berry several of the "San Francisco Dues" pieces. That means he helped make some of my favorite Chuck Berry songs:  "Tulane," "Have Mercy Judge," "Flying Home," and "Oh, Louisiana."  Those four songs would make for a songwriting career, by the way.

New London Sessions!

Chuck Berry has always had a strong connection to England. He toured there in the early 1960s. The musicians of the British Invasion championed his music. He recorded two of his albums for Chess in England—Chuck Berry in London (about half of which was recorded there) and The London Sessions. Some of my favorite live performances were captured in London by BBC in 1972 and fill these pages via youtube. There are pictures of him in the new Geffen set from the 1960s surrounded by adoring English boys. At least three recent books about Chuck Berry were written by English fans—Bruce Pegg (who evidently lives in the U.S.), John Collis and Fred Rothwell.

And he can still do a good tour there, with a bunch of theaters, and excited fans.

I’m jealous of those fans. I figure if I were in England, I could see two, maybe even three of the shows. A train ride here, a short drive there. And what seems especially cool, is that Chuck Berry is going to get some practice in during those weeks in England.

Here in the states the shows are becoming more and more rare, and when I saw Chuck Berry perform last January at Blueberry Hill it was a great, fun show—but the guitar work? A little rusty.

But then I see tapes of him playing there last September, coincidentally after playing B. B. Kings in New York just a few days earlier, and what a difference. The licks were flying pretty high. It didn’t sound exactly like the guy in those BBC tapes, but it sure sounded good.

So I’m betting that some of the crowds in England are going to be treated to something pretty special—a Chuck Berry show with his own band and with that little extra something you get by playing every day.

Buy those tickets, boys and girls. Reward him with your love and applause you lucky &$^%(5es.

You really are lucky as hell.

P.S. to Charles, Sr. Since you’ll be in a groove, this might be a good time to stop in at a London studio and record something new with the band and your two band mate children. A nice family style album, with Charles Jr. on guitar, Ingrid on harp and vocals, piano by Bob Lohr, and bass by Mr. Marsala and rhythm supplied by Keith Robinson.

And YOU. One last time. At least!

Sidemen Up Front! (Billy Peek)

You'll catch a moment or two of Chuck Berry on this one. And Ike Turner.

Billy Peek toured and recorded with Chuck Berry in the 1970s. Chuck used to teach him licks, and Ike played at his high school prom! Lordy! (Like I said-- history is everywhere!)

Where Chuck Berry Blues Burgers Sizzle On An Open Grill Night And Day!

Read about here .

MORE than a Sideman (But Not the Songwriter)

Sing these two lines:

“As I was motorvating over a hill”

“She remembered taking money earned from gatherin’ crops.”

It just occurred to me that the main verses of “Maybellene” and “Bye Bye Johnny” have the same melody. Who’d have thought—especially when the basic feel of the two songs are so different? “Bye Bye” chugs along like a freight train, “Maybellene” bounces along on an alternating bass line, and they both take different routes on their distinctive choruses—but those main verses are nearly note for note identical.

It’s just an interesting observation.

I discovered this while thinking about Chuck Berry and “melodies” and the somewhat crazy claim that Johnnie Johnson was a co-author of Chuck Berry’s hits. Bruce Pegg does a good job addressing the “controversy” in chapter 15 of his book “Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry.” As usual he’s a thorough scholar, a gentleman, and fair.

I guess that Keith Richards is the one who first suggested that Johnnie Johnson was the real author of Chuck Berry’s music, or at least the prime mover. Richards’ comment came during the aftermath of the 60th birthday concerts. He seemed exhausted and a little drunk and the idea—something he’d probably hatched during his time with Berry and Johnson at the rehearsals—just came out. He based it in part on Berry’s songs being recorded in what he called piano chords—“Johnnie’s keys!” The idea took root, however shallow, and even Johnnie Johnson seemed to buy in for a while. He wound up filing suit against Berry.  It was dismissed.

There’s no doubt that Johnnie Johnson was a prime force in the early recordings and in Chuck Berry’s early sound. He was a great piano player. But Richard’s statements were mostly nonsense.

Chuck Berry seemed to get a chuckle over the notion of “piano chords” in an interview in Guitar Player magazine back around the time that the movie “Hail! Hail!” came out.

Berry:  He, about these keys-- did you catch want Keith was talking about?  Piano keys, and all that?

GP:  He observes thatseveral of your classics are in E flat or B flat or other "unusual" keys for guitar.

Berry:  I wonder if he knows what he's saying!  Man, the symphonies are in B flat or E flat!  Those keys, they've been around!  He said, well rock guitar players play in A!  Come on, baby!  You can tell that Keith must be a modern rock player [laughs].

The Rolling Stones were basically a guitar band, and only a guitar band guitar player could be as insistent as Richards about “guitar keys” like E and A. Berry himself grew up listening to standards and big band jazz, which were played in all sorts of keys. He wasn’t afraid of B flat or E flat. (Neither is anyone else, as far as I can tell.)

I noticed that lots of B. B. King’s songs on a recent album were in A flat. Who’s key is that?

I suspect Chuck Berry put songs into the keys that 1) he was used to, and that 2) fit his voice and the melody. If anything, call them singer’s keys! And he was enough of a guitarist not to care much which key he used.

But beyond the chords, there’s the “melodies.”

Chuck Berry has number of songs with very distinct melodies—“You Never Can Tell” comes to mind. But a lot of his songs are built on old blues licks and blues tunes that are old as the Mississippi Delta. “School Day” has riffs (and therefore a melody) that Robert Johnson might have played, and probably did. Blues musicians slice and dice and mix and match words and notes and licks and lyrics and even names of songs until it’s virtually impossible to know who originated what.

(Recently I was read a simple but brilliant observation in the book “Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters.” A young blues musicians is asked if he “wrote” the melodies of a song. His response: “Hey, it’s blues, all the melodies were written before I was born.”)

On many of the 12 bar blues based songs that Berry sings the “melody” seems almost insignificant to him. These days he practically speaks the songs. In old outtakes you can hear him experiment with minor variations of the “melody” throughout the day as the song takes shape. In live versions there are often subtle variations. It’s the same with the guitar breaks and intros. The blues, at its best, is alive with improvisation, and improvisation is something that Chuck Berry has always insisted on. The versions of his hits that we accept as gospel are simply the ones that were put out as a single or that made it onto the records we own. We’ve gotten used to them, and copied them, and tried to duplicate them—but Chuck Berry has moved on, playing each song a little bit differently every time.

If I were to single out any aspect of Chuck Berry’s tunes as unique to Chuck Berry it would be those elements of the songs that don’t come from the blues—and specifically the country tunes like “Maybellene,” “Thirty Days,” or even “Johnny B. Goode,” a “country song” written over 12 bar blues chords. But I call that unique to Berry only because I don’t know country well enough. Here’s “Ida Red” by Bob Wills—song with the same name Berry wanted to use for “Maybellene.”



The truth is that Chuck Berry wrote his own songs, doing what every musician has always done, borrowing bits of what came before and throwing in sounds and influences from his own world, including the sound and influence of Johnnie Johnson.

Then he did what only a few artists are able to do: he took these old things and created something brand new that changed our lives.

None of which is to minimize the contribution of Johnnie Johnson. What he put on those records, and into Chuck Berry’s professional musical education is huge. You can’t catch him.

And Berry has always been the first to credit him. Author John Collis quotes a 1997 letter Berry wrote supporting Johnson’s nomination to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Watch Berry sidle up to Johnson during various jams presented in “Hail! Hail!,” or their easy musical communication when a contemplative Berry starts strumming old standards. Berry clearly loves the guy, and kept working and collaborating with him throughout Johnson’s lifetime.

Johnnie Johnson was a big part of it—but Chuck Berry wrote the songs.

Sidemen Up Front! Matt Murphey

Matt Murphey played with Chuck Berry on a couple of sessions in mid-1960.

Sidemen Up Front! (Odie Payne, in a tiny club)

Odie Payne played drums on a bunch of later 1960s Chuck Berry songs including "Nadine," "Promised Land," and "No Particular Place to Go." Imagine meeting him in a place like this! (I wish I'd been there.) History's all around us.



My brother Stevo was in a bar once listening to some old man talk on and on about his piano playing days.  Stevo assumed it was all ^%$#&.  Then the guy sat down at a piano.

Countdown: Go Head On Out

I started this blog more or less by accident in March 2009, during a temporary breakdown at the www.chuckberry.com/forum. I had posted three or four things there in the winter and realized that I enjoyed spouting off about my old hero. (I enjoy spouting off about lots of things, whether I know about them or not.) Then one day the forum conked out, locked some of us out, and my old posts disappeared. It turned out that the forum was being targeted by spammers, and the first effort to block them ended up knocking off lots of other people and jettisoning hundreds of posts, including mine.

You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry. I had the rolling arthritis-- so I started this blog. And somehow I just kept blogging, even after the forum got going again and my old posts returned. Whenever I’d run out of ideas, I’d head towards youtube and type something like “Odie Payne,” and the rest took care of itself.

Which is a typically long-winded way of saying that I started this thing, and it’s here, and now I have to figure out how to end it.

So, as is my practice, I’m drawing a line in the sands of time. I’ve put it in February. I’ll aim for one full calendar year of heading on, and then head out.

(Mr. Berry--- that gives you less than four months to get your next record onto the market, because I want to celebrate it here. [I’m sure you study my advice carefully and will act on it with due diligence and haste.] I say make it a box to end all the boxes—everything you’ve got left in that vault of yours from “Rockit” onward. And by all means, if you haven’t recorded with your St. Louis band yet, do that, too. They’ve earned it. And we all want to hear it.)



Now can anyone beat that?  And what's there to write about?

Sidemen Up Front! Fred Below, as close to the front as you'll find him.

Man-- you want to hear good drumming carried to it's simplest, most impossible form...

Here's Fred Below, who backed Chuck Berry on a bunch of his records, lined up side by side with J. B. Lenoir, as close to the fore as you'll probably find him. (This is one haunting performance of the blues!)

It's a Family Affair (Part Three)

Photo by Kevin Reynolds.  (For more great photos see Kevin's website and look under "Music.")

This site celebrates Chuck Berry-- his music, his influence and his influences. I don’t want to dwell on aspects of his story that get covered ad nauseum elsewhere-- especially his legal troubles.  But Berry’s legal problems have been a big enough part of his story that I can’t ignore them completely.  I sometimes think about them when I think about why I'm such a fan.  I'll admit: most of his criminal troubles don't bother me at all-- except for the one that was so patently unfair.  That one bothers me because it was unfair-- a racist attempt to silence him and knock him off stride.  But there's at least one alleged incident that bothers me, assuming there's truth to it.  How does a fan deal with that (and still nominate him for a medal of honor!?)

His troubles with the law hurt him badly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, knocking him completely off the charts for a time despite releases like “Bye Bye Johnny,” “Come On,” “I’m Talking About You” and “Jaguar and the Thunderbird.” But there's a yang to every yin.  Later in the 1960s I think the same incarceration had the opposite effect, giving him “street cred” as a survivor of hard, unfair knocks. I’m sure that the first time I heard about Chuck Berry I also heard about his prison time, because my informant was Stevo, who’d spent some time behind bars himself and had some respect for a good ex-con. In the late 1960s and early 1970s everybody knew that Chuck Berry had been shafted by a racist legal system and had come out rocking and playing the blues even harder. It was part of his legend, and by that time no one had a problem with it.

He says himself that “every 15 years, in fact, it seems I make a big mistake,” and that it’s “the naughty-naughties” that get most of the coverage in articles and interviews. Most of the mistakes are pretty well known, and honestly covered in his Autobiography.

It started with a youthful armed robbery and car-jacking (he and his friends politely left his victim near a phone booth and then took off down the two-lane blacktop; guess who the poor guy called?) He went to reform school. Autobiography, Chapters 4 and 5.

The next legal problem was bogus and racially motivated—two arrests, three trials (one overtly and triumphantly racist), a successful appeal, and ultimately one conviction for violating the most bogus law ever devised by man to put away a man considered uppity. He went to prison, at the height of his success. It says something big about the man that he went on a recording rampage prior to his lockup; that in prison he wrote some of his greatest songs, practiced guitar, studied business and accounting; that he was released on his birthday, and made one of his best and most energetic live recordings (with the Motown session players) just a few weeks later. Then he left the country. (Carl Perkins said he was a changed man after that term. So, later, did Johnny Johnson.  Then, who wouldn’t be?) He revitalized his career with some of his greatest hits—“Nadine,” “No Particular Place to Go,” and some of his greatest songs: “Promised Land,” and “You Never Can Tell.” Autobiography, Chapters 11 and 12.

Berry's third encounter with the legal system was more legit. He took pay under the table.  He didn’t pay taxes. They figured it out. He went to prison again. He took a typewriter and wrote a book that revitalized his career yet again. And he admits it all in his Autobiography, Chapters 17 and 18.  (The photo of him at Lompoc putting on a show for and with his fellow inmates is courtesy of Sky.)

Then comes the stuff that actually bothers people.

It’s sort of funny that the tribute song I wrote about Chuck Berry when I was 15 was called “Bathroom Rockstar,” because Chuck Berry’s most recent (though now ancient) legal problems allegedly involve bathrooms and bathroom acts. They came after the Autobiography. The allegations are all over the internet and are in two recent biographies. One seems to be a personal issue that became public because it was videotaped. The other involved allegations of hidden cameras in the women’s room of his old restaurant, The Southern Air.

I have no idea if either of these stories are true, or to what extent. I don’t care about the first. It seemed to involve two people, not including me, hopefully consenting. I therefore refuse to investigate further. But the story of the women’s room, if true, was a sad violation of other people’s rights. (Somewhere way back there—and certainly before 1973-- I remember reading an interview with Chuck Berry where he said the key was “not to infringe.” He used Berry Park as an example. He said something like: “If you’re alone in Berry Park, you can do no wrong. But if you are there with other people, you have to be more careful. The key is not to infringe on other people.”) But to the extent I understood the retellings, it seemed bound up in other false accusations, and the whole thing was such a convoluted mess that it’s impossible to know what happened, and hard to really care. All I know for sure is some form of the story comes up once in a while when Chuck Berry gets mentioned.

My response to his messes?

That he’s family.

All of us, in our smaller families, have screwed up, or have watched helplessly as our loved ones have done so. It doesn’t change how we feel.

Chuck Berry isn’t part of our blood family, of course—at least not mine-- but he’s definitely part of our spiritual and cultural family. He’s the Father of Rock and Roll, the son of Henry William Berry and Martha Banks Berry, the father of devoted kids, married 60 plus years, a man surrounded by his family at home, on records, and on stage, and who generously includes all of us in his larger family.

I remember well him walking rapidly back and forth across a stage, feigning shocked double takes as the crowd sang “Go, Johnny Go, Go!,” and beaming kindly as he said: “All my children! Listen to all my wonderful children!”

And as Sly says, "Blood's thicker than the mud." 

Even when it ain't really blood, it's family.

Sidemen Up Front! (Allstars!)

According to my Golden Decade records, Volumes 1 and 2, Otis Spann played piano on Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me," "No Money Down," and 'Downbownd Train," back in 1955, but author John Collis and Berry himself both say no-- that it was probably Johnny Johnson at that session, along with Chess stalwarts Fred Below and Willie Dixon. Ah well.  If it was Spann, then the trio had already played together on Muddy Waters' "Hootchie Cootchie Man" (the musical ancestor of "No Money Down.") Here Muddy stands back and strums rhythm while Spann takes a starring role.



Read more about Spann right here.

More Whole Body Synching From Way Back

Chuck Berry may not have liked to "lip synch," but when he was forced to, he put himself into it body and soul.

With Hurry Home Drops In Her Eyes

Here's a nice little article in the New York Times... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/opinion/02mon4.html

Riding Along in his Automobile!

A couple months ago I wrote a piece that included a bit from Fred Rothwell's book, "Long Distance Information," where he describes his brief encounter with Chuck Berry. When I wrote that post, I thought of this picture, which I'd seen months before on myspace, but I couldn't find it.

Rothwell had just missed getting a ticket to a show in London. Then:

“[I]n the corner of my eye I spotted a long cherry red Mercedes hidden in the shadows of the flyover. The limo had dark glass but the side window was down and through it the familiar face of Chuck Berry could be seen busy videoing the façade, no doubt very pleased with the ‘Sold Out’ sign.”

Rothwell ponders what to do or say, (“I got my chance, I ought to take it”) when suddenly “the glass slid down noiselessly to reveal a smiling Mr. Berry. ‘How come you are in the right place at the right time?”’ he asked.

My thanks to Jan, in Germany, for searching his files for this great shot of what looks like a very Euoropean car. I hope that all of you in Europe see some great shows later this month (and that you tell us all about them!) (I know those fingers are going to limber up over the course of the tour-- you're very lucky, you know.)  And I hope that for some of you the window slides down and that you meet the maker of rock and roll as we know it!  (But please-- use your seatbelt Mr. Berry!) (They unlatch pretty well nowadays.)

Bathroom Rockstar

I am a lawyer (sort of) and sometimes I give talks to other lawyers and legal staff members.  And I often begin by saying (truthfully):

“I never wanted to be a lawyer. What I wanted to be was Chuck Berry-- but that didn’t work out.”

Then I show a really cool slide with a picture of Chuck Berry in a white suit on the cover of Smithsonian.

I only missed by a little bit. If I had had the looks, the talent, the musical ability, the poetry, the showmanship, the dancing, the comic timing, the genius and the nerve, I could have given it a good run for the money.

But as it stands, I’m a lawyer, and quite fuddy-duddy.

But when I was still a kid it hadn’t yet occurred to me that I couldn’t 1) sing, 2) dance, or 3) play any instrument worth a damn. When I heard Chuck Berry, I pretty much decided to be him.

At the time I was trying my hands at being a drummer. I was a pretty bad drummer, but I could keep a beat as long as it wasn’t a fast one. I sure as hell couldn’t keep a Chuck Berry beat! Chuck Berry had a back beat that left me in the dust, lost as can be. I “boom-boom chuck, boom- boom chucklebuckled” all day long, every once in a while slamming a broken, dented cymbal that sounded like the lid of a garbage can.

When I was about 14 I discovered Chuck Berry, first live, then on his double record set “Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade,” and then on the refined and wonderful “Back Home.” The latter gave me the name of this blog and my user name on chuckberry.com—“Tulane.”

Since I wanted to be a rock star it became incumbent on me to write a song. My first effort, at age 14 or 15, was written to the tune of “Tulane.” It was about a kid who stole a B-52 and realized too late that the prank would be taken seriously. I still have a copy that I managed to find in a trunk in my basement. The second verse is probably the “best.”

I stole it from an air show, see I keep what I find
I didn’t tell the officers, I didn’t think they’d mind
But you never know with soldiers—boy, they make such a fuss
I’d barely hopped inside it when they started to cuss
So I rumbled up the engines and I stepped on the gas
And we tore right down that runway (we was really shaking ass!)

I say, please my friends, that ain’t no stick I see
Come on guys, don’t point that gun at me!
Listen here, I was just fooling ‘round
Leave me be, I promise I’ll bring it down
Here I come, I’m ready to land
But why you got those tanks there?
(This is getting out of hand!)

My second song was more original, but just as indebted to Chuck Berry. I wasn't completely delusional.  I obviously already knew my place in the world of rock and roll. The song was called “Bathroom Rockstar.”

I’m a bathroom rock star
Chickenwalk in front of the mirror
Yes I’m a bathroom rock star
Chickenwalk in front of the mirror
You know my music’s so good
That it’s inaudible to the human ear.

(Chickenwalk was my name for the duckwalk or the scoot. Since I have the physical grace of a chicken, it was a fitting name for whatever move I was referring to.)

The second verse was brown-nosed boasting at its best.

I’ve taken lessons from the greatest
I mean the Berry, Berry best.
I’ve taken lessons from the greatest
Good, better, Berry, I mean best.
And if you like that red hot rhythm guitar
I’ve got the Diddliest.

Strong words from a guy who didn't have diddley squat and had never played more than G and D on the guitar. But when I finally went off to college I took an old garage sale electric and began to teach myself. The guitar was a truly bad one that I made worse. I sanded off the red and black finish to find some sort of aromatic wood that smelled like and old import store. I took off all the hardware and stained it brown. (This was the early 1970s, and aesthetics had reached absolute rock bottom.) The guitar had a stainless steel slightly dented finger guard (or whatever you call the plastic below the strings on a guitar.) It was crap reduced by my refinishing to utter, ugly, total and unrefined crap. But it served its purpose. Somewhere I found a drawing of “the blues scale.” I started plucking. And I understood. The blues scale fit Bathroom Rock Star. It fit all the music I knew. Within a few days I could play simple leads and rhythm. (It has never gotten any better.)

The closest I ever came to performing as a guitarist was during the following summer at a swim party for a bunch of nine year olds. My band, (the worst band that has ever performed in public, no exceptions) had been hired for $50 to entertain the tots. I was supposedly the drummer in this band. We had a good rock and roll guitarist with a weird and wonderful old German semi-hollow body guitar, and during a break the guitarist and I switched instruments. I had the nerve and gall to perform a comic but loud version of the great B. B. King song, “How Blue Can You Get.” The kids stared in disbelief while running from the pool stairs back to the diving board. By the time I got to the climax—“I gave you seven children, and now you want to give ‘em back,” I was screaming blissfully. I’m sure I got to play twelve bars or so of guitar. It was pitiful, pitifully bad, disrespectful of the genre, and fun.

Beauty: The Battered Guitar of Chuck Berry

There’s a great scene in the Chuck Berry movie “Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll” where he’s walking through an airport talking about how he travelled back in the day—i.e., toothbrush, guitar, and a roundtrip ticket. And when he’s asked if he checks the guitar he says something like:

“Oh yeah, each one about six months, then a new one. Deductible. Tools, you know!”

Years ago I used to see him with a cherry red Gibson, but for decades he’s often been seen with a reddish brown one.

I assumed it was one of many—tools, you know, deductible.

But if you look at http://www.chuckberry.com/forum, you’ll find wonderful details about that particular guitar—a beat up, scratched up, battle hardened, Gibson ES 355 with missing knobs, a missing tremolo bar, and duct tape (or something like it) stuck carelessly along the base. And the details come from "a reliable source"—his son and backup guitarist, Charles Berry, II (a/k/a CBII, a/k/a “Son of Rock and Roll.”)

You can and should go to the original sources on the forum—but I can't help sharing some of it here.  From what I gather, this particular old guitar is one helluva specimen. Says CBII: “It has a tone like very few Gibsons I have ever heard. They (Gibson) really built that Guitar to perfection! Other than an electrical conduit brace being added, the only things that have been done to it are string changes, setups, and me polishing it on December 13, 2008 before a show here in St. Louis.”

I can testify personally to this much—when Chuck Berry plays it, it has a sound of its own, like railroad airhorns, beautiful to hear.

In another post CBII describes the guitar in more detail: “It's a 1978 ES-355. My father bought it new here in St. Louis. It's a true work horse of a guitar. What's really special about it is the tone. For it to be from the 70's, it's one of the best sounding 355's made (excluding of course the one's made in the 50's - mid 60's). Yeah, it's been beat up but it has a really rich sound quality to it. The newer ES-345's have a REALLY, REALLY good tone to them as well."  He says a little later that it was a factory second, with blemishes of some kind, stamped "second" somewhere.

But first in our hearts.

My favorite story on the website is about a time when CBII tried to do his dad a favor, and fix up the old guitar just prior to a show at Blueberry Hill.  He put on new knobs and a new tremelo bar.  

“They were off the guitar before we went on stage,” says Charles.

(You may have seen Berry react to someone's effort to adjust the sound on his amplifier in “Hail! Hail!” The man knows his mind.)

Read all about it here. And here. And here.

Guitars can be beautiful things.

I got my own guitar in about 1975—so evidently I've had it even longer than Berry's had his brown one.  Mine is not a Gibson—but I bought it because it looks like a Chuck Berry guitar-- except prettier, maybe, with a light natural finish-- spruce up front, and maple in the rear.  It's pretty gorgeous, to tell you the truth.

But it's also one of the weirder guitars on the planet—an Ovation semi-hollow body called something like a “Thunderhead.” I have only seen two others outside the internet. One was held by David Cassidy of the Partridge Family in a publicity shot.  The other was played on stage by a guitarist for Zydeco star Queen Ida Gillroy at the Sacramento Blues Festival sometime around 1975 or 1976. The Partridge Family guitar made me feel pretty ridiculous, but the Zydeco blues guitar made me happy. I loved Queen Ida, I liked her guitarist, and he was a real musician playing my slightly unreal guitar.

Even if you’re not Chuck Berry guitars wear out, and after 34 years I’d worn certain frets on my Ovation down to the rosewood. And the action got bad, especially up high.  So a few months ago I took it to a Seattle luthier with the very contradictory but poetic name of Cat Fox.  (Find her here.)  Her initial plan was to file down the frets, but when she got started working on the guitar she realized there was no hope for the little filaments that remained.  She called me to say that we needed to replace them all.

I was happy.

I had an immediate vision: Chuck Berry’s beautiful yellow guitar encased in glass near the front door of Blueberry Hill.  The guitar that played Maybellene.  The guitar that rocked the Apollo and the Brooklyn Paramount.  I remembered staring at the fretboard and those beautiful frets, thinking what had come off them and how those sounds had affected my life.

“I want those big fat frets,” I told her.

When I picked up the guitar a few days later, it was better than it ever had been—the action low, the hardware tight, the neck straight! The jack slipped in with a hearty clunk and stayed put. The strings glistened millimeters above big fat frets.

Ah, ‘twas a joy.

(She even took out the Ikea battery that my youngest child had inserted into the guitar at some point long ago, and which had been clunking loudly and helplessly for several years!)

I’m not much of a guitarist. I have a certain feel for music, but not much technique or talent. But I love my guitar and play it all the time.  (Or one of them anyway.  There are others.)

And I love that Chuck Berry seems to love his guitars, too, and that he's kept the one so long. In an old interview in Guitar Player Magazine he fondly remembers one of his first electrics. In his book he talks about his first four string.  Somewhere else he talks about fat frets. In his “poem” he talks about playing his favorite old guitar to the sound of rainfall. (“Sometimes it will be classics, and sometimes lullabies. But mostly rock and roll, which I’ll surely improvise.”) In a song he sings a lot these days-- "Love in 3/4 Time"-- he mentions his liking “my best red guitar.” And as you'll see above, his son can go on and on about the details of various Gibsons.

If you play guitar, or want to, you probably understand.

Chuck Berry in Cordoba-- Bienvenidos!

I have to thank chuckberry.com/forum and an Italian fan for this wonderful clip and interview.  (And they say he doesn't give 'em!)  And he's speaking espanol! (Sort of!) Great music, too.

45 Years Later, Today, And What A Show! (Missed Opportunity)

Here’s Rolling Stone editor Jan Wenner:

"Look, there was a very special moment in the 1950s with Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. It just all happened at once. It was incredible. Then in the 1960s, the Beatles and the Stones, emerging from England at the same time as America's greatest writer of any kind, Bob Dylan . . . are those moments going to happen again? Those are hard to predict, but a generation later came U2 and Bruce Springsteen. They do keep coming."

Being no scholar of hip hop I can’t say exactly when one of those moments happened in Brooklyn or Queens a few decades ago, but add it to the list if you know. We do know that the tiny town of Clarksdale, Mississippi and other cotton towns in the Delta exploded with music 20 or 30 years before rock and roll burst out. And then there are the other bursts—Detroit and Memphis in the mid-1960s, San Francisco later that decade, and even wet, dark, rainy cold Seattle in the late 1980s or early 1990s. (I was here but only hearing African music at the time.)

Anyway, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame begins its 25th Anniversary celebrations tonight with couple of concerts involving people like Bruce Springsteen, U2, Paul Simon, Aretha Franklin. Read about it here and here. 

I wish Chuck Berry was there to participate-- a bookend to T.A.M.I.  I have this funny but completely unsubstantiated feeling (saw an ad once with his name in lights) that he was invited but demanded a fee and therefore won't be on the bill.  Sort of like they say happened at Monterey Pop. 

Ah well-- he does it his way, and it's worked so far. (Some of the people who criticize his insistence on being paid for his work are the same people who demand, say, 100 times as much before appearing at stadium to perform; not to mention lavish spreads in the dressing room, helicopters, chartered planes, etc.  Give me and the man a break!)

But I'd like to see him honored the way he ought to be honored.  This could have been (should have been) it.  And who knows-- maybe it'll happen anyway!

45 Years Ago Today (The T.A.M.I. Show!)

And what a show! Bo Diddley! Marvin Gaye! The Rolling Stones! Smokey Robinson! James Brown collapsing on stage and wrapped by attendants in an ermine stole-- only to cast it off and begin again! (The Rolling Stones, mere newbies at the time, the mere latest thing, chose to follow James Brown! Baaaaad idea! But give Mick credit for learning some Brown dance moves back stage before going on.) And of course, OUR MAN-- or about half to a third of him, shot bizarrly from up close and below in a misguided effort to feature the go go girls instead of the Go Johnny Go man-- but he got a bunch of songs in, fast, and was part of something that was pretty incredible. Here's a tidbit that I found on youtube.



You can buy a tape of the show on line, with an older Chuck Berry narrating-- but it lacks the James Brown with cape routine that I swear (in my dementia) I watched on television years ago with Stevo and Danny. That's like showing Woodstock without Jimi, Hamlet without a soliloquy, or any of those Rock 'n' Roll Revivals without Chuck Berry to close the show with a bang.

Why Beethoven had to Roll

This is somewhere back there in one of the old posts, but it's worth repeating. (Thank you Mr. Rothwell).

Golden Decade, Volumes 2 and 3

I’ve talked in the past about my first Chuck Berry collection, The Golden Decade. It was a helluva record (two records, actually). And for a while it was my only old stuff.

But then came Volumes 2 and 3. As I recall, they came one right after the other, sometime after the massive success of “The Chuck Berry London Sessions,” introducing me to a whole new set of great Chuck Berry records.  both have a bit of roughness to them, at least in parts-- stray guitar notes twanging insistently on a couple of songs-- but they have a freshness, too, like live recordings.

Volume 2 was sort of the “Rolling Stones’” collection, with “Carol” and “Little Queenie.” Or maybe “The Christmas Collection,” with “Run Rudolph Run” and “Merry Christmas Baby.” This collection was somehow rougher edged Chuck Berry, with more reverb and a bit less polish. Except for a couple songs. “You Never Can Tell” and “No Money Down” were as intricate and poetic as anything on the first volume, and should have been included there for sure, along with “Carol.” But the others were somehow, to me, wilder and rougher. “Let it Rock” is a grown up work song.

In The Heat Of The Day Down In Mobile,Alabama
Working on the railroad with the steel driving hammer
Gotta make some money to buy some brand new shoes
Tryin' to find somebody to take away these blues
She don't love me, hear ‘em singing in the sun
Payday's coming and my work is all done

It’s a strange song, but seems to me to be a favorite of Chuck Berry, who plays it live a lot. What’s strange is the story—a train comes and they have to scatter.

Everybody's scrambling, running around
Picking up their money, tearing the teepee down
Foreman wants to panic, 'bout to go insane
Trying to get the workers out the way of the train
Engineer blows the whistle loud and long
Can't stop the train, gotta let it roll on

This isn’t "Johhny B. Goode." No one’s going to make a motion picture. No  one's name's gonna be in lights.  Their names are gonna be on a tombstone if they don't hurry.  It’s a song about work, motion and an unstoppable force.

Another wild one is "Promised Land"—same sort of motion, but this time across the continent by bus, train and plane to California. The song starts with an abbreviation of the Carl Hogan intro and just steamrolls—the only break being a T-bone stake a la carte(y) up in the airplane. (AT least two other Chuck Berry songs look down from airplanes—“Brown Eyed Handsome Man” and “Oh Louisiana” are a couple I can think of.) I think of “Promised Land” as one of Chuck Berry’s veiled civil rights numbers, with its mention of bus breakdowns in Alabama, and a quick shot through Mississippi. Not that Houston was probably a whole lot safer for the poor boy if he hadn’t had friends there.

“Little Queenie” was always a favorite. It’s the shy Chuck Berry hero, mostly watching and thinking.

There she is again standing over by the record machine
Looking like a model on the cover of a magazine
She’s too cute to be a minute over seventeen

I don’t know who Chuck Berry saw when he wrote it, or who Mick Jagger saw when he sang it, but I know who I saw when I heard it, and who I still see about 35 years later, and she was cuter than sin itself. It’s a great song, funny, with Chuck Berry’s incredible comic timing. “Meanwhile, I was stilllllll thinking…” (I was a kid who thought wayyyy to much at age 17.)

If I had been choosing, some of these songs would have made it onto volume one. I’d have relegated “Too Pooped to Pop” and “Anthony Boy” to later volumes and swapped in “No Money Down” and “You Never Can Tell.” And I would have squeezed in “Carol” somehow or another. But that’s okay. When you’re as good as our man, there’s always something more out there—and it was a treat to be introduced to it back in 1973 or thereabouts.

I used to laugh at “Together We Will Always Be” which sounded tentative and—well—bad. But I slowed down my turntable and learned to like it better. See my (perhaps whacky) analysis here.

And then comes Volume 3—a whole new kettle of fish, funky, with a little bit more blues. My favorites on Volume 3 were songs Berry didn’t even write— the sentimental “Time Was,” a song originally recorded by Jimmy Dorsey, and the wonderful “House of Blue Lights.”

Time was when we had fun
On the school yard swings
When we exchanged graduation rings
One lovely yesterday.
Time was when we wrote
Love letters in the sand
Or lingered over our "coffee and";
Dreaming the time away.

It is no surprise that Chuck Berry thought a song about school yard swings and graduation rings was a perfect fit. I wouldn’t be surprised if this song didn’t give him ideas. He probably knew it in high school, and it fits his oft repeated assertion that his songs were written on purpose to appeal to a large, crossover audience. (He was, I guess, one of the original Michael Jacksons. When Michael died everyone was repeating the media mantra that he was the “first” crossover artist. They were forgetting single namers like Chuck, Louis, Nat, Ray, B.B., Otis, Fats, Jimi, Sly and probably a dozen others who did it a long long time ago. Oh yeah—how about groups like The Temptations, The OJays, The Supremes. Lordy! Such revisionism!)

I liked the cover art of Volume 3, which showed Chuck as a filling station sign, and hearkened back to one of my favorite Chuck Berry lines ("dollar gas!"). Volume 2 showed hm reflected in a Coke glass and didn't quite do it for me-- except that all that expensive cover art showed a committment from Chess to sell the guy.  But the inside of Volume 2 had a great discography that I checked off with my ballpoint pen, and a blue-tinted photo of the smiling Chuck Berry that I wanted to adopt me (when I was 16 years old!). Volume 3 has lots of information about the musicians and recording dates—something no one bothered with on Volume 1.

Of course, all of these are somewhat irrelevant now, with the two four disk sets that contain every recording from the 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s.  (A late 1960s-1970s set is coming!)  But these three disks were sure important to me.

Bruce Springsteen Rolling Over Mr. Beethoven in St. Louis

“We always get requests for a Chuck Berry song when we come to St. Louis,” said Bruce Springsteen, at his recent concert there.  A fan held up a sign requesting “Roll Over Beethoven.” Turns out that the fan had the lyrics written out on the flip side of the sign.  Read about it here.  (And see a great picture of the two of them here.


If you're a fan, you've already seen this.  But it's sweet.

She Believes (In the Public Option!)

Chuck Berry has an interesting family-- Daughter Ingrid, who sings with him; son Charles, who plays guitar for him; Daughter Isalee, who gave her name to his publishing company, and Melody, a health care executive who is featured in this article.  I'm happy to say that she supports a public option!  Go head on, Melody!

Heroes: Elmore James (I Believe!)

I've long lamented the lack of a film or video of Elmore James.  American television and Hollywood evidently didn't have enough vision for something so raw, and maybe he didn't make the European tours that got some of our other heroes recorded on film or video.  But here's a hell of a version of "Rolling and Tumbling."  Look here for a version of the same song by Muddy Waters.  (Bob Dylan's was taken away from or by youtube.)  Here's some history (from the National Park Service!  Hail! Hail!)

Founding Fathers

It’s not an original thing to say that America’s music is one of its biggest gifts to the world—but it’s a true thing that bears repeating. Blues, Jazz, Gospel, Country, Rock and Roll, R & B, Soul, Funk, Rap.

It’s a gift that keeps on giving, ain’t it?

And it comes from our diversity. Look at the list— the only music that didn’t start in the African American community is Country. But it is the mixing and matching that make the music so wonderful. Chuck Berry writes a “hillbilly” tune. Elvis and Carl Perkins sing R & B. Ray Charles brings gospel into pop music. John Coltrane plays a song from The Sound of Music. Miles Davis plays Michael Jackson. Otis sings the “Tennessee Waltz.” Sly Stone yodels like Jimmy Rodgers. Bob Dylan channels Muddy. The rappers sample them all.

There is a lot we can be proud of. (The Constituion. The Declaration. Our old movies.) There's a lot we should NOT be proud of. (Torture. Slavery. Vietnam. Our modern corporations.)

But our music-- that's one of our great legacies. It thrills me.  It thrills the world.  (I should add, paranthetically, that the world's music thrills me, too.  I spent a decade of my life drenched in African highlife and soukous and Jamaican reggae, and I've been thrilled by music from everywhere from Tibet to Bulgaria to Mexico.  We have no monopoly.  We just have what we have-- and it's great.)

And I have no hesitation putting Chuck Berry up there with the greatest contributors to American history-- up there with Washington, Jefferson and Franklin-- as one of the greatest Americans. (I put Lincoln and King a step higher. They are untouchable.) His contribution is different; he didn't write a constitution. But he wrote songs that set us free, in a lot of ways, a ringing gift to the world that will be felt forever.

And for me, personally, an entry into something bigger, huge and good, almost eternal.  I can only comprehend a tiny smidgen of it-- but Chuck Berry got me started near the foundations, with good instructions on how to find even more.

Here's "Waiting for a Train" from the Father of Country Music (and a direct influence on the king of modern funk, Sly Stone! Lordy!)

Heroes: Son House

If the devil didn't teach Robert Johnson, it was this man (and it's a straight shot from Johnson to Chuck).  He taught Muddy, too.  In fact, there's a great paragraph in the Muddy Waters biography "Can't Be Satisfied" where Muddy Waters spots a band member imitating the aged limp of Son House.  Waters puts a stop to it immediately and tells the band to give some respect to a man who was there before all of them.

We've got to do the same.  If you don't know him, here's a place to start.

He even looks a little like Chuck Berry in the shot up there.

Heroes (The Wonder of Youtube)

Youtube is a miracle-- a time machine, and a chance to see people and things I only dreamed about when I was a kid. 

Blues is a journey that's different for every person.  Mine started with Chuck Berry and B. B. King, who took me first to T-Bone Walker, and then further into the blues racks to find my first few dozen records.  As a kid I "discovered" Elmore James, Robert Johnson, Lightnin' Hopkins, and many of the usual suspects.  It was a good time to become a blues fan.  I remember one record that I bought new for 44 cents with two songs each by James, Howlin' Wolf, Ray Charles, B. B. King, John Lee Hooker, and Bobby Bland.   How's that for a bargain?

It's actually just about as good-- or bad-- a bargain today.  I just read B. B. King's autobiography.  He talked about how his early records were in the 99 cent bin.  It didn't thrill him.  There wasn't much profit in it.  It must not thrill anyone these days, either, at least if they're living-- but right now, for better or for worse, I've been concentrating on the records of departed saints, buying more old music that's new to me, and often finding it, new and used, at rock bottom prices.  There are a lot of particularly good collections from Chess-- Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, etc., and I've been finding great old acoustic stuff as well.  I drive girls to soccer practice and we bounce along to stuff neither of us have ever heard, with mandolins and guitars or maybe electrified harmonicas and a deadly slide (and Leaonard Chess pounding away on the bass drum!)

I forget how I first "found" Mississippi John Hurt.  (I "found" him about 80 years after his mom did, and 40 or 50 years after Okeh Records).  I think I probably just liked his face smiling out of the blues bin, and read the liner notes, and bought the record.  It was recorded when he was old, after he'd been rediscovered.  A little history here.  He has such a gentle sound-- part of the miracle of what we call blues.

A few weeks ago I found a collection of Hurt's oldest recordings, made in 1928, by Okeh.  What amazed me is that he sounds just the same in the twenties and the sixties.

For a few days I'm going to search out some of my old heroes.  I start, randomly, with Mississippi John Hurt, whose appearance on youtube I bumped into almost by accident.  Here he is with Pete Seeger, and a woman I can't identify. 



Like our man, he's got his own website, too. You can check it out here.

149 Shows and Counting! The Duck Room at Blueberry Hill

Three days before his 83rd birthday Chuck Berry did his 149th monthly show at Blueberry Hill. These BBH shows are a legacy that will be remembered.  I was lucky enough to see one of these wonderful shows, thanks to my dear wife, who bought the ticket I'd been threatening to get for years.  (Read about my visit here )  Here's a recent article about the 149th show.  http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/10/15/chuck-berry-rocks-his-149th-monthly-show-at-st-louis-restaurant-blueberry-hill/  Picture by Doug.

Happy Birthday Dear Charles, Happy Birthday To You

I hope you live forever-- and that I live to be 100!  (Your music's gonna for sure.)