Chuck Berry LIVE at The House of Blue Lights

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 Well, not really!  It was Chuck Berry and Company at Blueberry Hill, the 11th day of December, 2013.  But as you'll see, with my old camera and no flash, there's a blurry blue light that captures the event better than the cold, hard light of my flash.

It was a fun night.  Sometimes it was so much fun Chuck seemed to think we were laughing at him.  "I hear you talking and laughing.  But no man is perfect!"

But never, Mr. Berry.  Everybody loved every moment.

It began, as ever, with "Roll Over Beethoven," followed by a long, beautiful version of "Wee Wee Hours" and a short half version of "Maybellene."  Then a long rock and roll instrumental in G, where Chuck and his band hit the St. Louis groove that I became more familiar with on this trip.  "That was pretty good!" he said, with considerable understatement.

Someone yelled "We love you, Chuck!"

"Thank you girls," he said.  "I know a girl when I hear one!"

There was a moment in the set where Chuck Berry tried to show us all his hearing aid.  "This one's gone," he said, pointing to his right ear.  "If you spend 52 years in front of a drummer you pay a penalty!"

"I didn't say 'a penny,'" he added.  "I've paid this one plenty!"

But that hearing aid obviously helps.  There were some flubbed notes, but on "Wee Wee Hours" and a couple of the instrumentals, Chuck was killing it.  So was the band.

He did "School Days (Ring Ring Goes the Bell)," but forgot to let us sing "Hail! Hail!"

He launched into a short one about no poem as lovely as a tree and admitted "We've never played this one before."  The band members agreed.

When he asked what Chuck Berry songs we wanted to hear I used my position in the front row to lobby for one I've never heard him play.  "No Money Down!" I yelled.  I hold a perfect record on that one.  I still haven't heard Chuck play it-- he stood there listening while Ingrid and the band did a great job on the song.  That made me feel a little bad, but I was consoled by a high five from the rhythm guitarist.  Anyway, it was a great Chuck Berry song that ought to be played more!

To get himself back on track Chuck launched into another rocker instrumental, and once again, they killed it.  Then he asked Bob Lohr what to play.  "How about Johnny B. Goode?"  And they rocked that one, too, with some lyrics I've never heard but that I liked: "a little boy who looked a lot like me!"

Ingrid did a slow blues next.  "You know what I'm talking about ladies, don't you.  I work hard every day taking care of castle keep."

And then a wonderful version of "Reelin' and Rockin'," with the vocal highlight coming from bass player Jimmy Marsala.  At a quarter to 12 Chuck began singing "I didn't know if I was...".  And when he paused for just a breath Jimmy filled the void with "going to Hell!"  Charles was laughing so hard he was unable to play guitar for at least four bars.

A band called Palace opened.  We heard their soundcheck and knew they were good, but during the first few numbers the sound equipment faltered badly and they had to stop mid-song two or three times.  One of their singers-- a very pretty young woman-- told stories and jokes and answered silly questions from the audience while BBH's sound man figured out the problem, and then they went back to work with a shortened by triumphant set of rhythmic pop that mixed bits of Brian Wilson, Queen and The Beatles.  The crowd loved them, so did I, and so did Charles Berry, Jr., who applauded their professionalism afterwards.

All in all, a wonderful night.  We topped it off by staying up way past our bedtimes to see a bit of Roland Johnson's set downtown at The Beale.  I guess I'll pay tomorrow.  Tonight, I'm just pleased we came back to St. Louis one more time.

(Unbelievable!  Just lost all the pictures I was trying to show you.  It was taking forever, so I'll do a selection!)

A Night of Blues and Soul in St. Louis

(I didn't go out in St. Louis with the idea of writing about what I'd seen and heard, so I didn't take notes.  But what I saw and heard was worth recording somehow.  Here's the best I can do under the circumstances.  The way to find out what it was really like- head there yourself!)

I’ve never been to New Orleans (I’m saving it up) but I know about New Orleans-- that it’s a place famous for its musicians.  I know about Memphis, Nashville and Austin (though, come to think of it, I’ve never been to to a couple of those, either.) Everybody knows these places are music places, and still lively that way.

But I didn’t really know about St. Louis.  

Which is odd, considering that my hero and the lifelong object of my obsession hails from St. Louis, and considering that I associate the city names like Albert King, Miles Davis and Ann Peebles.  

But after a quick trip back to St. Louis this December-- one of several that I’ve taken in the last five years-- I’ve finally begun to scratch the surface and learn a little about the city’s still thriving Blues scene.  

In the course of three nights-- December 7, 10 and 11-- my wife and I saw five great performances by artists like Boo Boo Davis, Marquise Knox, Eugene Johnson, Kim Massie and Roland Johnson.  It was easy to do since all of them performed at two cool venues that sit across from each other a few blocks south of the Arch on South Broadway-- B.B.’s Soups, Jazz and Blues and Beale on Broadway.

I’d gone to St. Louis to see my old hero Chuck “one last time.”  (He keeps fooling me.)  But these two clubs-- and I’m sure there are a half a dozen more to add to the list-- are worth a trip to St. Louis all by themselves.  The drinks are big and cheap.  The food at B.B.’s is good.  The crowds ranged from boisterous on the weekend to intimate on a Wednesday.  The music was consistently stellar.

Every night we found a new mix of musicians, always with some crossover from a prior night.  Bassist Gus Thornton played for both Marquise Knox and Kim Massie.  Guitarist Stephen Martin backed up Massie and Roland Johnson.  Drummer Gerald Warren played with Eugene Johnson and stayed to provide beats for Kim Massie.  Keyboardist Robert Lohr was with Delta blues great Boo Boo Davis on Saturday night and on the following Wednesday crossed town to back Chuck Berry.  Eugene Johnson led his own group on Tuesday but also appears on  Marquise Knox’s newest cd.

I can’t pretend to know much about these musicians, (and I went to enjoy the music, not to take notes; I wish now I’d written a few things down) but bassist Gus Thornton provides an example of the depth of talent.  Watching him back up the remarkable Marquise Knox, I was struck by Thornton’s easygoing smile and the effortless way his fingertips touched the five strings of his bass to drive the songs.  A couple of days later Bob Lohr clued me into Thornton’s background playing bass for people like Albert King.  You can check it out yourself and read a good interview of the man HERE.   

Guitarist Stephen Martin, who played with Massie and Roland Johnson has a similarly angelic smile but plays devilishly good stuff on his pale blue Telecaster.  Massie was complimenting him on a new haircut when we saw them together.  You had to crane your neck to see him, tucked away in a corner behind Thornton, but you could hear every lick, down to the subtlest little bent “twing” that got drummer Gerald Warren laughing and nodding at the end of a song.  

And that’s one of the best parts: these musicians, who collect themselves in different groups every night, (or twice a night,) seem to really enjoy hearing and playing with each other.  In Memphis, on Beale Street, we saw some fine musicians putting on a fine show for us toursits, but at Beale on Broadway we saw fine musicians making music with and for each other.  Which works out fine for the audience.  

At the Marquise Knox show one young woman danced with half the men in the place, enticing them to all sorts of silly acts of lust which she then rejected with a grin.  Kim Massie brought out post-it notes and a vase to collect requests and big bills.  (She got plenty!)  Eugene Johnson invited a drummer he’d met in Europe to sit in.  The drummer, who took the sticks from Warren, might have regretted his decision about half way through “Brick House,” but it proved just how good the Warren and the other regular musicians are.  Another guy who took the stage before Roland Johnson’s set had better luck.  He borrowed Stephen Martin’s guitar and began to sing and strum a bit timidly.  We thought it was going to be a disaster, and one man made a face and laughed.  But the further he got, better it sounded, and one by one the musicians began to join him on stage.  Lew Winer, III, comedian of the group, played some wonderful sax, Eugene Johnson added bass, and Roland Johnson even tried to play the drums.  It was downright pretty.

As for the stars, dang!  To hear voices like Kim Massie’s and Roland Johnson’s from ten feet away restores a soul.  Both are great performers, too.  Johnson is as close as I’ll get, in attitude, to seeing Otis Redding alive, and Massie’s all attitude.  (To see Johnson and his band Soul Endeavor live, check out this clip of them playing at the Blues Deli in St. Louis's Soulard neighborhood.  Follow this Link!)  Between great songs Massie fires off wickedly dry one liners and singled me out for a cruelly shouted line questioning my manhood!  (It took a while to forgive her- but you can’t hold a grudge against a voice like that!)

(Here's a chance to hear her with a pretty well known drummer.)

Boo Boo Davis, who plays the first Saturday of every month at B.B.’s Soups, Jazz and Blues, was the old timer of this group, a veteran Delta Blues musician and drummer who helped nurture the current St. Louis blues scene back in the 1970s. B.B.‘s is a long, narrow place with a long bar that opens into a dining room and stage.  You can eat there, too.  When we arrived Davis, resplendent in black leather and bordello red, was seated at the front of the house just beneath the stage taking visits from audience members.  Boo Boo Davis was preceded on stage that night by singer and harmonica player Tom “Papa” Ray, who did a rhumba style “Summertime” on a very cold fall night backed by a group that included Robert Lohr on Piano, Nephew Davis on bass, Carlos Hughes on drums and Larry Griffen on guitar.  Then Boo Boo Davis, who alternates his deep growl of a voice with harmonica.  A man claiming to be his little brother sat whooping and hollering a few feet from us.  I decided his claim might be true when he said “the Wolf’s in the house” just before Davis launched into a startling imitation of Howlin’ Wolf.

When Davis’s first set was over we crossed the street to see and hear Marquise Knox.  At Beale on Broadway, the stage is right next to the front door, so as soon as you enter your are slammed with blues coming full force from a line of old guitar amps that seem to be stationed permanently against the back wall.  We paid our 7 dollars and sat on stools right next to the door while Knox, just 21 years old but completely mesmerizing, leaned forward to do a medley classics and originals.  (One song takes the title of a Billy Peek classic, “Can a White Man Play the Blues?” and makes it relevant to Knox by asking if a young man can.)  (The answer, in both cases, is that if it’s the right one, yes indeed.)  Here's a sample.

I don’t know if Chuck Berry will get me back to St. Louis again, but I know I’ll be back, and that when I return, I’ll go wherever these folks are playing.  And then I’ll head down the river to New Orleans.  ‘Cause I haven’t been there, yet.

Chapter 2 - A Gift from Stevo

My brother Stevo is the one who first told me about Chuck Berry. It came in two conversations— lectures really, because there was no give and take. And I doubt that he was talking to me. We weren’t close then. He was older. My guess is that he was talking to Danny, who was closer to Stevo’s age, and that I was sitting nearby, listening.

If I were to guess again, I would say we were in a car, Danny at the wheel of his 1958 Chevy sedan, Stevo riding shotgun, pontificating with lots of hand motion and no eye contact. I was likely in back. But that is only a feeling, because this first lecture is disembodied in my memory, just Stevo’s words describing an old rocker who was “better than Elvis.” This was no recommendation. The Elvis I knew made bad movies and sappy ballads.

Though I have no visual of Stevo talking—only that vague sense of a moving car— I recall exactly the visual I formed of this Chuck Berry fellow. For me “Chuck” meant blond, with freckles. Chuck was the catcher on my little league team. Chuck was the actor who played “The Rifleman” on TV. So the mental image I formed was a 1950s rocker, tall and a bit menacing, with Connors’ high cheek bones—David Bowie with a blond pompadour. He wore a checkered shirt and played an acoustic guitar.

Then one day I was listening to the beginning of The Mike Douglas Show, a daytime talk show and after school favorite of mine. I liked Mike. He seemed genuinely nice, and took time to talk to the musicians who appeared on his show.

This time I have actual memories. It is before my parents separate. I am in the swanky, suburban rambler that we occupy from the time I am nine until I am fourteen. I am listening to the chatter of a small black and white television when the announcer says that Chuck Berry will be on today’s show. That gets my attention.

It is October 22, 1970. Four decades later I learn the date from a reference book and, through the miracle of YouTube, I watch again.

Mike Douglas sits with Cher and Sonny. He says: “In the rock era of the fifties he was an innovator, with tunes like “Maybellene,” “Rock and Roll Music” and “Johnny B. Goode. Here is Mr. Chuck Berry!” Sonny and Cher applaud without enthusiasm.

Chuck is standing on a series of risers that look like giant building blocks about four feet tall and three feet square. He’s crowded by the mike stand. One misstep and he’s an innovator with a limp.

He’s wearing yellow pegged slacks that tighten about three inches above his shoes and show skinny ankles. He’s got the purple paisley shirt I’ll see in hundreds of pictures and at a couple of performances over the next 20 years or so. His upturned pencil mustache is mimicking Salvador Dali or Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux. He has giant sideburns and slicked back hair. He has the high cheek bones I envisioned, and he might have freckles, but the pompadour is not blond.

The guitar intro is flawless. When he starts to sing he recoils from the volume, but someone adjusts it and he settles into a grim, nearly joyless performance of “Johnny B. Goode.” No wonder I wasn’t overly impressed. The band plays a lifeless arrangement with bass and drums that are too neat and horns that are dorky. (A comment posted on YouTube says : “Man, that band is really dragging Chuck down. That bass player flat sucks!”) During the instrumental break Chuck has to climb down from the riser without tripping over his guitar cord and killing himself, all the while picking a complicated solo. You can see his relief when he finally gets to the stage where he can dance and do his “scoot.” With his too-short pants he looks a bit like what Michael Jackson will look like 10 or 11 years later at the Motown 25th anniversary show except that these pants are totally uncool.

I watch, interested, but unchanged.

Why I remember that show I’m not sure. I had no real stake in Chuck Berry then. The obsession didn’t hit until four months later, in winter. It is a testament to whatever Stevo told me about the man that I filed away fragments of this event as lifelong memories. It’s as if Stevo’s words were an injection of live virus for which I had no antibodies.



A few months later, in December, on the other side of the same split level rambler, I’m awakened by loud music and voices. This has to be just days or weeks before our life at that house will end— days or weeks before we will leave my father and move to an old Victorian farm house on the edge of town. It can’t happen too soon. The house and our life in it have become disturbing. There’s too much craziness. Even the dark paneling on this side of the house—the side where I sleep— is nightmarish. In my young mind the dark waves of wood grain are like shrieking ghosts, the incarnation of what scares me about our life in this place.

This night Stevo and Danny are in the sunken, paneled room where my father usually watches television. It’s around midnight. Danny and Stevo are watching the Dick Cavett show at high volume. They are laughing and talking. I sleep in the next room, but as Chuck says, no use of me complaining, my objection’s overruled. I get up and walk to the den, bleary with interrupted sleep.

I remember colored stage lights and glinting chrome. “Who is this?” I ask.

“Chuck Berry,” says Stevo. He’s not lecturing now, he’s annoyed at my interruption.

It’s a color television and a more exciting performance than I saw on Mike Douglas. I watch, but I’m too groggy to be affected. I go back to bed and to sleep.

And then, (because all of this happens over a fall, and a winter), maybe a few months later, Stevo again holds forth on Chuck Berry. I know this is later because we have left the suburban rambler. We are living in changed and changing circumstances— released from a five year nightmare of alcohol and insanity in the suburbs. The drunken howling is no more. The scary paneling is behind me. My mother, my sister Ann and I have moved, just weeks prior, to a dream world: a yellow Victorian in Orangevale, with a three story tower, a rock garden, small pastures and barns.

Stevo must be visiting. He has his own apartment—one of the dozens he occupied in those years. We are in the living room. Stevo is by the door. He moves from the door to the piano, waving his hands, lecturing again.

Stevo is short, stocky and Irish in a half Irish family where the men tended to be tall and (in our youth) lean. He’s got a mustache and goatee. He wears his brown hair pushed back, a bit like the man he’s talking about. It’s continuation of the same lecture he started months before: Chuck Berry 101. He’s describing a show he attended at the Fillmore in San Francisco, a show that was mostly blues.

“He’s not really a blues guy,” says Stevo, “not like Muddy Waters, or B. B. King, or Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland.” Stevo, at age 20 or 21, has been toughened by fights and car crashes and stints in jail. His face is scarred. There is a round half circle punched into his cheek by the steel rim of a steering wheel hub.

“You can tell he came up playing in blues clubs,” he tells us. “He knows that stuff. He’s good at it, too.”

Stevo probably knows nothing about Chuck Berry’s actual and specific history—how he started in North St. Louis and East St. Louis, playing blues and bits of country music at places like The Crank Club and the Cosmopolitan— but he’d seen Chuck Berry play a bluesy set and had processed it through his tremendous stores of pop culture knowledge and is here to testify, to teach, to bear witness. He leans over my mother’s old baby grand piano and picks out bit of two or three fingered boogie-woogie.

“He ain’t a bluesman, but he can play it! He’s good at it!”

I’m 14 years old. I don’t know what a bluesman is, or who Bobby “Blue” Bland is, or that the boogie-woogie music Stevo is playing is what formed the backbone to so many of Chuck Berry’s early rock ‘n’ roll hits. But Stevo’s words have altered me, and within weeks or months I will feel raw, slow guitar pouring bent blue notes through the doors of an old civic auditorium, and when I push those doors open, my life will change forever.

(This is part of a 33 Chapter "book" on my imaginary life with Chuck Berry.  You can keep reading HERE!)

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Chapter 4 - Why He Matters, Part One: Chuck Berry as Songwriter

One night I challenge my wife Rebecca to name someone with more cultural impact than Chuck Berry. 

“Shakespeare,” she says.

She gets me, first time.

“Okay, but he’s the only one!” I stammer, less confident.

I am quick to acknowledge other musical geniuses—greater ones: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk.

There are many better singers. There are better guitar players (though not many who could be called more important or more influential). I’m not sure there are better entertainers—just different ones. Few songwriters can match him.

But Chuck Berry’s importance goes beyond the music, or the songs, or the poetry, or the performance. He is one of the big daddies of modern history. In the pantheon of important and great Americans I think he matches all but two. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln are alone at the top. But when you accept that an artist can be as important as a military leader, or a politician, or an industrialist, or an inventor—and I certainly do—then he is up there with the most important. Compare Chuck Berry to the self important— to murderers for hire like Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney. See who actually matters. Some men are distinguished only by the slaughter and heartache they cause, or what they stole. Chuck Berry changed a culture.

He didn’t do it alone, and though his art and his career moves were carefully calculated, he didn’t exactly do it on purpose; but he was part of a movement that delivered us from days of old to a new and different and in many ways a better place. And there is something unique about his individual role. He wasn’t just a singer, or a star, or a guitarist, or performer, or poet, or songwriter, or businessman, or felon, or genius, or icon—he was all of that. It is no accident that he was born and stayed at the very heart of the country and continent, on a river that has symbolized the soul of that country from the time of Twain until the time of Dylan. Nor is it mere coincidence or happenstance that in his fourth recording session he told Tchaikovsky the news and then, in the 60 years that followed, lived up to the boast.

He might deny his importance. He once told a reporter “I ain’t no big shit.” But he is a big shit— a popular artist who achieved uncommon results in the vernacular. Our Dante. Our Shakespeare. A man who does everything Mark Twain did, but backwards, with a guitar. And like both Twain and Shakespeare, he did it as much to earn a living as to make art.

It starts, of course, with the songs— dozens and dozens and dozens of them. Hundreds, actually. Written, Chuck Berry will tell you, for commercial purposes. “I was writing commercially then,” he says of “Johnny B. Goode.” In the film Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll he says “Half the young people go to school so I wrote about school… Half the young people have cars and I wrote about cars. And mostly all the people, if they are not now, they’ll soon be in love—and those that have loved and are out of love remember love, so write about love. So I wrote about all three.”

The vast majority of Chuck Berry songs are “good” songs. (There are definitely some clunkers.) But then there are the great ones— the two minute ditties with the fast folk poetry and searing 10 second guitar breaks, the songs recorded at Chess Records between 1955 and 1964, with Johnnie Johnson, Otis Spann, or Lafayette Leake on piano, Willie Dixon on bass, and Ebby Hardy, Fred Below, or Odie Payne on drums—those songs—“Johnny B. Goode,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “School Day,” “Memphis,” “Nadine,” “No Money Down,” “Maybellene,” and more— those songs come as close to perfection as we human beings get. They have it all: energy, poetry, youth, sass, nostalgia, family, fantasy, comedy, rhythm, rhyme and blues.

The poet Cornelius Eady, who wrote a poem entitled Chuck Berry about Chuck Berry, wrote in an e-mail that “John Lennon once called CB one of America's great poets, and I have heard (and read) little to dis sway me of that notion."

Consider “Johnny B. Goode,” recorded by hundreds of different groups and individuals, played by hundreds of thousands of small time singers, guitarists, and bands, in millions of performances, a song that was sent out to the galaxy on both Voyager spacecraft to represent humanity’s better angels to other worlds. “This is a present from a small, distant world,” wrote President Jimmy Carter to whatever distant life form first spins “Johnny B. Goode” on that ultimate, intergalactic gold record, “a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” (The joke, on Saturday Night Live, is that the first radio message received from aliens in outer space says “Send more Chuck Berry!”) It’s a song so overplayed and omnipresent that it should be cliché, but Chuck’s original version, recorded in 1958, never grows old. And no wonder— it has everything: ringing guitar, pounding bass, Lafayette Leake’s rippling piano, great drums, inventiveness, a perfect title (the economy of turning “be” into an initial), a timeless story, and vivid imagery: the log cabin “made of earth and wood,” the gunny sack, the tree, the railroad track, the great name envisioned in lights. (He wrote it after seeing his own name on the marquee of a theater in New Orleans.) It is pure and perfect poetry, the best all around rock and roll song ever recorded, and probably the greatest American song of all time—that famous “Great American Novel” crystallized in two minutes and 42 seconds of perfect sound.

But wait—there’s more! The ode to broken homes called “Memphis, Tennessee!” “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” rock and roll’s first manifestation of black pride. There’s the angst and excitement of young love in “Carol” and “Little Queenie.” There’s the sexual frustration of “No Particular Place to Go,” and the sexual riot of his live version of “Reelin’ and Rockin’.” There’s the youthful frustration of “Almost Grown,” the youthful fantasy of “You Never Can Tell,” the youthful energy of “School Day.” There’s the geography and history of “Promised Land,” the insane, unstoppable energy of “Let it Rock!” the crushed spirit of “Oh, Louisiana,” the hard blues of “Have Mercy Judge,” and the charming innocence of “Sweet Little Sixteen.”

New York Times writer Verlyn Klinkenborg called “Memphis” a “short story,” and found herself haunted by “the metrical precision of the lyrics, its emotional realism and, of course, the revelation in the penultimate line. You know the one: that this is a father’s mournful love song to his daughter, Marie, who is only 6 years old.”

“What I really find myself listening to,” wrote Klinkenborg, “is Chuck Berry the sociologist of incredible economy. It’s the open-ended plea to that disembodied personage, ‘Long-distance information.’ It’s the household where uncles write messages on the wall. It’s the geographical precision of Marie’s home, ‘high up on a ridge, just a half a mile from the Mississippi bridge.’ Undercutting it all is the very hopelessness of the singer’s plea.”

“Too Much Monkey Business,” almost a protest song, is the certain inspiration for Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and a probable inspiration for the Stones’ “Satisfaction.” In his autobiography Berry said he wrote it to describe “the kinds of hassles a person encounters in every day life” and says he “would have needed over a hundred verses to portray the major areas that bug people the most.”

It begins with Chuck’s lead guitar ringing exactly like a bell.

Deedlee-dee, deedlee dee,

deedlee-dee, deedlee-dee,

deedlee dee, deedlee-dee,

deedlee-dee-dee.

Then Willie Dixon’s jazzy acoustic bass, answered by Chuck‘s chords and Johnnie Johnson’s rippling piano. The song doesn’t have the boogie-woogie rhythm guitar work that Chuck Berry became so famous for (almost none of the early songs have it); the roots here are jazzier, with strummed chords. The sound is incredibly light and clear, like a flat rock skipping over wind dimpled water on a bright day. It swings. But when the band jolts to a stop to make room for the lyrics, it’s pure rock and roll.

Running to and fro

Hard working at the mill

Never fail in the mail here come a rotten bill

Chuck’s 29 when he sings that first verse, but his voice sounds older. Unlike “School Day” or “Oh Baby Doll,” this isn’t teenage stuff—it’s real world frustration, “16 Tons” with a backbeat. He doesn’t use the fine diction his mother insisted upon here—“business” is pronounced “bidness,” or just “bi’ness,” “here” is “hiya.”

Salesman talking to me

Tryin’ to run me up a creek

Says you can buy it go and try it

You can pay me next week—Ahh!

This is where Mick Jagger, an accomplished Berry scholar, first hears absence of Satisfaction:

Man comes on to tell me

How white my shirts can be,

But he can’t be a man cause he doesn’t smoke

The same cigarettes as me.

I can’t get no

And it’s a radical song. In 1956 Chuck Berry sings:

Blond hair, good lookin’

Trying to get me hooked

Wants me to marry, settle down,

Get home, write a book. Hmmf!

In 1956 it’s against the law in many states, and frowned on in all of the others, for Chuck Berry to marry a blonde—especially, it seems, in 1958 Missouri, where what passed for the law routinely stopped, prosecuted, and once imprisoned the man for dalliances with any female not black. How dare he sing these words? Of course, maybe it’s not Chuck— but we know it is: it’s Chuck rounding third and heading for a once forbidden place he admits had always tantalized him; and somehow, in a way, predicting his own future, since in just two months (according to his Autobiography) he’d meet the good looking blonde who would share much of his life and ultimately help him write his book. (Maybe the book is off by a few months. Maybe he’d already met her.)

That same day he recorded “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” whose first hero is “arrested on charges of unemployment.” Another radical song! It ends with another hero smacking the game winning home run. It so happens I was born a month after that song was recorded. My wife, Rebecca, once bought me an old LIFE magazine from the week that I was born. It’s a pretty scary document. There’s an ad for Heinz that tells how to make “Baked Fish in Ketchup Sauce.” There’s a Cadillac ad that would have got Chuck’s attention. In another a bunch of women hold up enormous panties that would make Bridget Jones’ boyfriend laugh. A dozen or so ads for Bourbon explain my father’s taste in tragedy. But the only brown eyed man in the whole magazine is Willie Mays, who, an ad for Wheaties explains, hit 51 homers the year prior. That makes me happy. I’ve always compared Willie and Chuck. Willie was described as a five tool player, who could hit, hit with power, field, throw and run. Chuck can write, write with poetry, sing, perform, and play. As a kid I saw Willie Mays in San Francisco, and I always figured it was Willie who was rounding third and heading for home in Chuck’s song of black pride.

If you want to appreciate Chuck Berry the singer, try to spit out the first line of “No Money Down”— “Well Mister I want a yellow convertible”— in the space allotted. (Pronounce it “convoitable.”) The syllables just keep coming, like circus clowns from a broken down old ragged Ford. Cars are, of course, everywhere in Chuck Berry songs, from the sleek “Flight DeVille” to the beaters in “Dear Dad,” “Come On,” and “Move It.” In “You Can’t Catch Me” Flat Top “comes movin’ up with me, then goes waving goodbye, in a little old souped-up jitney.” Pierre and the Mademoiselle also owned “a souped-up jitney, ‘twas a cherry red ’53.” Nadine and Maybellene are last seen in Cadillacs— a coffee colored one for coffee colored Nadine. Girls disappearing in Cadillacs are a big reason why the hero of “No Money Down” has to get out of his “broken down old ragged Ford” and into a “yellow convertible four door De Ville,” but it’s twice the Caddy.

I want air conditioning

I want automatic heat

I want a full Murphy bed

In my back seat

I want short wave radio

I want TV and a phone

You know I got to talk to my baby

When I’m riding alone…

“Let it Rock” is a grown up work song. I’m pretty sure it’s one of Chuck Berry’s own favorites. I don’t recall a show where he didn’t sing it, and with plenty of room for guitar, it always gets him going.

In The Heat Of The Day Down In Mobile, Alabama

Working on the railroad with the steel driving hammer

Got to 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

This isn’t “Johnny B. Goode.” No one’s going to make a motion picture. It’s a song about energy, motion and an unstoppable force.

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

Another wild one is “Promised Land”—the same sort of motion, but this time across the country by bus, train and plane to California. The song starts with an abbreviated Carl Hogan guitar intro and then rolls unstoppably, like the train in “Let it Rock,” the only pause being a T-bone steak “a la carty” high over Albuquerque. It’s never seemed like a coincidence that “Promised Land,” written a matter of months after the terrorist bombing of a church killed three little girls, talks about “trouble that turned into a struggle in downtown Birmingham.” Nor is it coincidence that the “Po’ boy” wants to get “across Mississippi clean.” Chuck Berry was nearly lynched in Mississippi by drunken frat boys who feigned outrage when he returned the kiss of a white girl who jumped on stage. Guess who got arrested.

In 2011, I would learn more about history and more about the lyrics of Promised Land. I was watching a television show celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Riders—a racially mixed group of young people who attempted to integrate commercial busses in 1961. A group of them are attacked in the Rock Hill bus station. The police who are supposed to protect the riders vanish.

No wonder the Po’ Boy’s Greyhound chooses to “bypass Rock Hill.”

And no wonder these songs grow larger and more powerful with time. It is like Chuck Berry dipped deeply into the Missouri or the Mississippi Rivers and pulled up what makes us who and what we are.

The untroubled vocals and sprightly guitar disguise something weightier and more important. This isn’t a silly trip on busses, trains and planes. This is the same Promised Land that Martin Luther King saw, but viewed through Chuck Berry’s unique perspective. Think how a ballet dancer’s art makes his partner look weightless. That’s what Chuck Berry does with his humor and his guitar. Don’t be fooled.

Rebecca was right, Shakespeare has more significance. But not many others.

(This is part of a book length piece.  It continues below.)

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