Chapter 14 - Back Home

The Tower Theater in Downtown Sacramento

Although Rasco Tempo held scattered treasures it couldn’t satisfy me for long, so in late spring or summer I found myself visiting the outlying sections of Tower Records on Watt Avenue. Tower was one of those rare points of pride in Sacramento. I’m not sure what the others were— Shakey’s Pizza? Tomato juice? Tower began at a downtown Sacramento drugstore, spread to the major capitals, then disappeared instantly and forever like some ancient civilization. So much for Sacramento’s contribution to arts and culture.

I got my first job in Seattle at Tower through a Sacramento connection. We set up the store. It was hard work, carrying boxes of records one direction and books the other. We worked 12 hour days, which meant lots of overtime. A man from corporate supervised. One day he watched me carry boxes of vinyl record albums that would break my back today. He offered help. “Could you use some amphetamines, Peter?”

But this is still 1971, and I’m at the second Tower, on Watt, exploring sections I haven’t visited before. There’s a section called “Oldies,” and a few feet away, a section for “Blues.” This is where I’ll stay. This is where I’ll find my first T-Bone Walker record, and my first Robert Johnson record. Both are marketed almost directly to me. The cover of the Robert Johnson record is a comfortable cartoon of Johnson recording in a hotel room. It is warm and welcoming. Who knew that the early bluesmen were surrounded by doilies? (They probably were!) The notes on the T-Bone Walker record say “Surprisingly often these old timers sound pretty good in the quaint authenticity of their period styles.” Jesus! But at 15 I miss the condescension. To me everything about the record is strange and wonderful, from the cover shot with the brown suit, thin socks and strange Gibson guitar, to the music itself, where I hear roots of my new master.

But today we’re talking about my second Chuck Berry record, an album called “Back Home.” I find it in the oldies bin. It isn’t an oldie. It was released five or six months prior, in November 1970, a few weeks after I first saw the man climb down from those perilous risers on the Mike Douglas show, and a few weeks before I saw him again on Dick Cavett.

The cover of “Back Home” has a high contrast black and white portrait of my new hero printed in sepia tones. Remember, they are marketing to me, and old is new. Butch Cassidy. Granny glasses. Chuck is seated in front of a crinkly backdrop holding his Gibson. He looks serious, like the hostage I met at Tahoe. The famous, large hands (“like baseball mitts,” said his friend and original piano player, Johnnie Johnson) caress the shoulder and neck of the guitar. A similar shot from the same session will be used on the back of his next album, “San Francisco Dues,” which I will find at the same branch of Tower a few months later.

On the back there are more photographs, not so somber. He’s clowning, doing posed versions of his “scoot” and duck walk. He’s mugging, flipping a peace sign, hugging his Gibson like a girl some he’s met backstage and will take home. These are charming portraits that will absorb my attention for hours. I will stare and ponder. Decades later, reading a biography of Howlin’ Wolf, mesmerized by the stunning cover shot- Wolf, with eyes half shut, drawing hard on a cigarette- I will see that it was taken by the same photographer, Peter Amft, who took these pictures of Chuck Berry.

I listen, I stare. I read. The liner notes on “Back Home” by writer Michael Lydon keep me absorbed almost as long as Amft’s photographs. Lydon is both a fan and a scholar. He wrote a Ramparts magazine article about meeting Chuck Berry at Berry Park that will be instrumental in causing me to stall my car there a few years hence. His notes dance at the edge of my 15 year old understanding. He compares Chuck Berry to Charles Chaplin and B. B. King, and drops important sounding names I only vaguely know, like Norman Mailer, Kerouac and Lenny Bruce. He takes my new hero seriously. He calls him a “comic genius,” makes reference to Huckleberry Finn, the Supreme Court, and the Montgomery bus boycott. He says “To dance to, sing along with, or just dig Chuck Berry body and soul, was not only to celebrate him and oneself, but to celebrate the celebration. That doubling of involvement created an intensity like that of full participation in ritual.” Chuck Berry knows this. Twenty-five years later he will tell Rolling Stone “I’m not an oldies act. The music I play is a ritual— something that matters to people in a special way.” At 14 or 15 I have begun to participate, learning the songs, joining in the call and response- Go, Johnny Go! Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll! Deliver me from the days of old! Sweet Little Sixteen! Got the grown up blues!

By the time I buy “Back Home” I know Chuck Berry’s classic 1950s sound— ringing guitar, pounding drums, piano and acoustic bass, all with plenty of rhythm, reverb and energy. Here is something similar but distinctly different. The album begins with a twist on the familiar “Chuck Berry” intro—the guitar lick that begins songs like “Johnny B. Goode” and “Roll Over Beethoven.” It takes me years to decipher the difference. One day I pick up my guitar and figure it out. Instead of playing it the normal way, fretting the two thinnest strings at the same fret then dropping an octave, he goes up the frets and then drops to his normal position. The result is familiar in structure but altogether different in feel— which is a good description of the entire album.

“Back Home” doesn’t always have all the energy of Chuck Berry’s best early stuff, but there are some great songs and a new refinement. In the 1950s he was a brash innovator. There’s nothing innovative on “Back Home,” but 15 years on the road have made Chuck a virtuoso. In the liner notes Lydon writes that Berry’s guitar has “the bitingly fine quality of etched steel”—a perfect description of the Berry’s guitar on this record.

I listen with interest. I’m happy that the man I’d seen battling through that sad set in an empty hall is making new songs. Even though I recognize the contours, I can feel the passage of time in these songs. The sound had been modernized. The bass is electric. There’s not a teenage song on the album. It is a serious adult record. A couple of songs are forgettable, but a few stand with the best he ever recorded.

“Tulane” is often called the last great Chuck Berry song. (Not true. It’s great. It’s not the last.) It’s the story of Johnny and Tulane, who run a novelty shop but keep the best stuff—the “cream of the crop”— under the counter. There’s an assumption by most writers that “cream of the crop” means drugs, but we’re talking Chuck Berry, so who’s to say what’s actually down there? When “one day lo and behold an officer comes,” Johnny and Tulane take off—or try to.

Johnny jumped the counter but he stumbled and fell

Tulane made it over, Johnny fell to the yell

Go head on, Tulane!

If this is Johnny B. Goode, Johnny’s gone bad. His name’s not in lights, it’s a number, on a mug shot. He spends the next several verses yelling fevered instructions to the real hero of the song, a girl named Tulane, who’s faster, stronger, and long gone.

Which is no surprise. The best Chuck Berry characters are his women, who are always a step ahead of the men. Maybellene disappears over the hill in another man’s Cadillac. Her long-limbed sister Nadine moves around like a wayward summer breeze, always just beyond reach. And Tulane, the youngest and fastest, jumps the counter and runs like East St. Louis native Jackie Joyner-Kersey.

Johnny, neither nimble nor quick, winds up in jail, singing “Have Mercy Judge,” a hard blues about hard prison and Berry’s best blues after “Wee Wee Hours.”

Chuck Berry once told a writer "Look, I ain't no big shit, all right? My music, it is very simple stuff. I wanted to play blues. But I wasn't blue enough. I wasn't like Muddy Waters, people who really had it hard. In our house, we had food on the table. So I concentrated on this fun and frolic."

But one place Berry lived hard is in the justice system. As a kid he high-jacked a car and was sent to reform school. As a rich, middle aged rock star he did what many rich people do- avoided taxes- and got what a lot of rich people deserve but don’t get: a sting in prison. But as a young, handsome, black rock and roll star, rivaling Elvis, he got what he no doubt didn’t deserve—a felony conviction on trumped up charges of transporting a minor across state borders for immoral purposes. The charges were essentially bogus, and the first judge was so insistently and clumsily racist that the original conviction was grudgingly overturned. But they tried him again in front of a better judge, convicted him, and put him away for 20 months at the height of his artistic and commercial success. All of which is simply to say that Chuck Berry was definitely “blue enough” to sing about the penitentiary. “I was thirty-five years old, really set back, out of contact, feeling more black but still intact, and determined to make the best of it,” he said in his Autobiography.

And he did. He made “Have Mercy Judge.”

Berry has too much to say on “Have Mercy Judge” to be restricted to the AAB pattern so common to the blues where the first line of each verse is repeated. Here every line advances the story. “Lord, have mercy, I’m in a world of trouble,” he begins. “I’m being held by the state patrol.” He is “charged with traffic of the forbidden” and has “almost finished doing my parole.”

Now, I'm on my way back downtown.

Somebody help me! Have mercy on my soul.

Chuck Berry is usually a cool singer— a Nat King Cole/Charles Brown wannabe. But he almost shouts these lines, and no wonder. He lived all of this. He had been held by the state patrol. He had been in a world of trouble. He’d been “charged with traffic of the forbidden”- twice.

I go to court tomorrow morning

And I got the same judge I had before

Lord, I know he won't have no mercy on me

'Cause he told me not to come back no more

He'll send me away to some stony mansion

In a lonely room and lock the door

The final lines of “Have Mercy Judge” go to the girl who jumped the counter. “Have mercy on my little Tulane,” he sings. “She's too alive to try to live alone.” And in some ways, except for songs to mother, or child, this seems like Chuck Berry’s only true love song.

“I know her needs,” he sings, “and although she loves me, she's gonna try to make it

While the poor boy's gone.”

Somebody tell her to live

And I'll understand it

And even love her more

When I come back home.

It’s a rare and unusual line in the blues- and fitting for the author of odes to Maybellene and Nadine, girls who aren’t waiting, anyway.

This pairing- “Tulane” and “Have Mercy Judge”- is the only example I can think of where a song and its sequel play in consecutive order on an original album. They are among Chuck Berry’s best songs and come fifteen years after “Maybellene” and “Wee Wee Hours” introduced him to the world.



Another great one, perfect for an album about returning home, is a reinterpretation of the Benny Goodman/Lionel Hampton/Charlie Christian classic, “Flying Home.” The song is a deep vein of Chuck Berry influences. Goodman's guitarist, Charlie Christian, was one of his heroes, and Berry cites Hampton’s saxophonist, Illinois Jacquet as another important influence.

Jazz is a series of stepping stones. You jump from one artist to the next as sidemen become headliners and hire sidemen of their own. Goodman had Christian and Hampton. Hampton, when he went on his own, hired Jacquet. All four are famous for versions of "Flying Home." And Chuck Berry should be famous for it, too. He recorded the song three times, trying to get it right, and this time he did, making it very much his own. It has the same “I Got Rhythm” chord changes as the original, and if you listen carefully, you’ll hear Chuck putting his usual twist on the tune, but those snippets of the original melody are overpowered by Robert Baldori’s wailing harmonica. Chuck and pianist Lafayette Leake (who played on “Johnny B. Goode” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”) have fun trading chords and riffs—but my favorite moment comes from Leake, whose crescendo of piano notes at the end of the bridge perfectly reflects the exhilaration of an overdue journey home.

My third Chuck Berry album, after “The Golden Decade” and “Back Home,” was “San Francisco Dues.” It’s an album I associate with my failed effort to grind a telescope mirror. I still have the chipped Pyrex mirror blank stored in a plaid lunch box, and I still have that original record, its cover frayed and worn, the vinyl scratched and dusted with finger prints (though not nearly as worn out as “Back Home,” which I bought twice, and wore out twice.) It’s been called Chuck Berry’s most “cohesive” album, but I don’t think so. (I give that nod to “Back Home.”) If it’s cohesive the glue is a hideous “wah-wah” on one of the guitars. (“Why-why” I would ask?) To me the record has a patched together feel. And no wonder. Most of the songs were recorded in 1971, just a few weeks before I’d first see him at the Memorial Auditorium, but two older songs were thrown in as filler. The older songs are okay- among the better songs on the album- but they are teenage songs that Chuck Berry wisely left behind when he recorded “Back Home.” Even as a kid I found it vaguely weird that a middle aged man was singing about “Lonely School Days.”

The new songs on “San Francisco Dues” are a mixed bag. “Festival” is dippy—a long recitation of every band Chuck Berry could think of and make rhyme. (The Beatles are tossed in at the end like minor characters in the Gilligan’s Island theme song.) The title track has a nice bluesy feel, but the hip lingo of 1967 was already dated by 1971:

Went on a little trip last night

And the boys was playin' some of them old Fillmore Blues

And every head was right on in there diggin'

Beautiful vibrations, had some heavy grooves.

“Bound to Lose” is another semi-blues and rings truer.

Now I've lost the only one I really loved
And I'm bound to this pain in my heart.

Who knows what goes on in the heart of Chuck Berry? He gives us his songs and his stage presence, not a confession. But some of his truest songs— “Memphis” or “Have Mercy Judge”—reflect the fall from wild times to the sometimes painful consequences. There’s no better example than the bluesy “Oh Louisiana,” which I consider to Berry’s last truly great song. Louisiana is both a place and a person. He remembers “quaint porches and windows,” the local food and “bayous of green.” Like many so Chuck Berry songs, it is steeped in place.

Oh, Lou’s’ana, I'm flying on Delta 903

Right over St. Louis, high over Memphis, Tennessee

On southward to the sea

Where I long to be

But when Berry sings about Louisiana’s “beautiful delta,” it’s hard to imagine terrestrial geography, and his final cry, “Oh, take me back!” is sung with a raw emotion rarely heard from Chuck Berry. “Oh Louisiana,” probably played once or twice in the studio to fill an album and then forgotten, is a song that should be played, either by Berry himself, or by anyone smart enough to cover it.



Berry went on to create three more albums at Chess. They were like most Chuck Berry albums—a couple of great songs, some good ones, some filler. (He once called the filler “sausage.”) “The Chuck Berry London Sessions” had a brilliant version of “Mean Old World,” and an entertaining instrumental (the real “Concerto in B. Goode”) called “London Berry Blues.” The album “Bio” produced at least three good songs, including the title song and a loose-limbed shuffle called “Woodpecker.” (“Bio” is one of only two 1970s songs that he has kept playing. The other is the show-ending “House Lights.”) The final Chess album, simply titled “Chuck Berry,” was a disappointment—but more about that later.

Berry’s 1970s music seems to be getting more respect. A lot of the songs have received a democratic “thumbs up” on YouTube where people post them from time to time. The record company Hip-O-Select put out a collection of the 1970s material that contains everything recorded from 1969 through 1975. (You almost wish it wasn’t everything. Like most Chuck Berry collections, it’s good, bad, sometimes spectacular, and occasionally very, very ugly. The best “new” release on the set is a solo performance of Robert Nighthawk’s “Anna Lee” which Berry recorded as “Annie Lou.”)

I’ve often thought a carefully selected compilation of the best material from these final Chess records would make a good double album, and could change the stubborn perception that Chuck Berry never made a good record after his “golden decade.” But that idea has probably been rendered obsolete by I-tunes, and the new, fragmented way that music is marketed.

I’ve spent a lifetime imagining such things. As a kid in my room I foolishly imagined how I’d tinker with Chuck Berry’s career to make it more perfect, more interesting, more enduring. (Ha!) I planned tours with a regular band. I mentally storyboarded a concert film I hoped to direct. I lay in bed nights and produced “all star” albums with superstar lineups (that weren’t half as good as the personnel on the original Chess records!) And I never really outgrew these childish fantasies. As an older fellow I imagined encouraging Chuck Berry to sing or re-cut neglected songs like “Oh Louisiana.” In my mid-50s, when I first heard “Annie Lou,” I imagined the impact it might have had if it had been released in the 1970s—made part of the album “Bio,” perhaps— and how it might have lifted from Chuck Berry the burden of always playing his big hits and “oldies.”

What foolishness.

One day, not long ago, I read where someone asked Bob Dylan if he ever thought of collaborating with Chuck Berry. Dylan laughed. "Chuck Berry?" he says. "The thought is preposterous. Chuck doesn't need anybody to do anything with or for him.”

That’s it, exactly. Chuck Berry is, was, and ever shall be exactly what he is.

Hail! Hail! And Have Mercy.

(This is a chapter from a longer, book length piece about how Chuck Berry grabbed onto my imagination when I was 14 and never let go.  To find the very beginning, CLiCK HERE!  The whole thing is here on these pages.  Comments appreciated!) (Usually!)

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