Go Head On! The ART and Rock & Roll of Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry in Paris, 18 Mars, 2008

2012-01-28T08:44:00.000-08:00

So, I'm heading to St. Louis to see Chuck Berry and couldn't be happier. Unless, of course, I was heading to the place where the other Peter, and Jan, and Jean all saw him.

Thank you Peter K for the photos, which I stole.

Chuck Berry to Receive PEN Award for Songs of Literary Excellence

2012-01-21T09:32:00.000-08:00

Chuck Berry and Lenard Cohen will receive the Pen New England award for Songs of Literary Excellence in Boston on February 26. Judges include Pal Simon, Roseanne Cash, Salman Rushdie, Bono, and Elvis Costello. Read more HERE. You can read more about PEN New England and maybe even get yourself admitted to the ceremony HERE. Pretty cool! Read my take on it Right Here.

Why it's Right and Fitting: Chuck Berry Wins Pen Award for Literary Excellence

2012-01-21T09:31:00.000-08:00

(To find a lot more about Chuck Berry, click on the "Go Head On!" masthead above.)

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—not too different from the 82 year old voice I heard at Blueberry Hill in St. Louis in 2009. 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 his famous fine diction 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

Mick’s song certainly has more in common with Chuck’s than with Muddy’s hard core “Can’t Be Satisfied.”

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 has been “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 ground 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 50^th 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.

Freedom Riders in Rock Hill, 1961

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.

Got a Chance, I Oughta Take It!

2012-01-20T19:39:00.000-08:00

So my Christmas present got better. Now, instead of a 36 hour trip to St. Louis and back to see Chuck Berry at Blueberry Hill it's become 100 hours, two shows, at least two states and maybe three, or four, or five. The highlight, for me, will be a chance to see Mr. Berry at the Argosy Casino in Alton, Illinois in the company of Rebecca, the sweetie who planned the trip. She's never seen him. (She's never even watched "Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll" with me! It seems to be a point of pride with her.) But she has always supported my habit. She sent me to Blueberry Hill the first time, and let me go again in 2010. And she has gone with me to see B. B. King, Macy Gray, Dr. John, Cassandra Wilson, Taj Mahal, Sonny Rollins, and more. So it's fitting and proper that, at least once, she go with me to see my surrogate dad, the Father of Rock and Roll.

But here's the deal-- there are two shows! One on Wednesday, one on Saturday. Rebecca can't attend both. Something at work prevents it. But I can! The luxury of it overwhelms me. And in between, I might have time to squeeze in a mad dash to Memphis, a town I've never seen. I won't see much if I do-- I'll have to be back in 30 hours to pick up Rebecca at the airport. We'll eat out. We'll honeymoon at the Moonrise. The next day we'll tour city. And then we'll cross the Mississippi and see another Chuck Berry show.

Life is short. The first of these two shows will start 41 years and 48 hours after my very first live Chuck Berry show on February 13, 1971. Seems like a long time ago, and like yesterday.

RIP Etta James

2012-01-20T15:12:00.001-08:00

Tulane's Ancestor, Joe.

2012-01-17T12:56:00.000-08:00

The title of this blog comes from the Chuck Berry song "Tulane." Jean in France posted this clear predecessor from Chuck's hero Louis Jordan on Facebook today.

Alas...

2012-01-17T10:26:00.000-08:00

No trip to St. Louis this month. Got too complicated. But maybe next month. Maybe TWO Chuck Berry shows, and a quick side trip to Memphis and Clarksdale. Here's hoping for splendid mid-February weather in Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee.

Enrique Berry Let it Rock

2012-01-15T17:35:00.001-08:00

To Chuck from Fred Bellow

2012-01-14T23:36:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm jumping to a conclusion...

Chuck Berry Fans Will Enjoy This

2012-01-10T18:33:00.001-08:00

http://www.peajaymusicblog.com/Pages/Chuck%20Berry.html

Omar Sharriff a/k/a Dave Alexander

2012-01-10T08:32:00.000-08:00

The video of Chuck Berry on ABC's Wide World of Entertainment (below) aired December 8, 1972. I remember watching it. The song St. James Infirmary, above, was recorded three days prior, on December 5, 1972. You should listen. I would see Dave Alexander the first time a few months later at an on campus coffee house at San Jose State University, where I did time in 1973 and 1974. The coffee house was free. It was run by someone smart enough to bring in Alexander and Mark Naftalin for shows that spring. And Alexander's show was seared into my brainstem. It was some very serious blues. He had a serious demeanor that day. (Maybe it was the crowd, which numbered about half a dozen.) He didn't smile much, or chat, or try to "entertain." But there was a fine piano, and he played some extraordinary blues and boogie woogie on it. A few days or weeks later I found the promotional album you see in this video-- "For Review Purposes, Not For Sale"-- which I bought for less than $3. Dave Alexander got nothing from me at the show, nothing for the record. That's the way it too often works.

When I told my sister Maggie about Dave Alexander the next weekend I learned that she and her husband were fans and went to see Alexander often at Minnie's Can Do Club in San Francisco's Fillmore District. That was undoubtedly a happier place to see him, with a trio, and dancers. I was too young, but they got my sister Ann in one time because, hey, the rules weren't made for young women, they were made for boys.

I saw Alexander one more time at the first or second Sacramento Blues Festival. It was a great festival, with Alexander, L.C. "Good Rockin'" Robinson and Queen Ida Gilroy, but though big hearted, the organizers were not so good on details. Alexander was given one of those blond wood uprights you'd see at primary schools. He grimaced and grumbled, but played great music.

For a while Alexander actually moved to Sacramento. I didn't live there any more, but I googled him and learned that he was living and performing there under the name Omar Sharriff and the nickname Omar the Magnificent. I think that one of the articles I read mentioned a history of mental and emotion difficulties. I wrote about him on my other blog, Can't Be Satisfied.

Then one day last December I found a tiny newspaper article explaining that Omar was moving back home to his hometown in Texas, a place called Marshall, where he'd been given the position of Artist in Residence. The town was giving him a place to stay and steady work. Once he did a show with Robert Baldori, who played on Chuck Berry's "Back Home" and "San Francisco Dues" albums. (The show was actually with Seeley and Baldori-- Baldori's current two piano boogie woogie group.) I followed Alexander's progress as best I could, and enjoyed the videos from Marshall. Here's the last one I saw:

I love this video. I love the "easy" way Omar has of playing such difficult stuff. I love the drummer. I love the repartee. I love the way the kid on guitar looks like he might die when told to play a third verse. (He was blessed, undoubtedly knows it, and will probably never forget his apprenticeship in the blues.)

When I saw the video, a few weeks ago, I actually looked up Marshall again, saw it's proximity to Shreveport, Memphis, New Orleans and St. Louis, and tried once again to mentally chart my cross country drive to musical nirvana. (If I were a kid without kids I'd have done it years ago.)

Anyway, Omar Sharriff ended his own life yesterday, at the age of 73.

I don't know anything about Sharriff, but I was hoping he'd found some real happiness back home in Marshall, a town he'd fled as a youth. I know that he was a man of huge talent. My guess is that, like many great artists, he lived in poverty at the edge of greatness. This is a man who played with Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker, and who, in his prime, probably got $50 or $75 to entertain a handful of us at a coffee house in San Jose. (A few minutes after posting, I found a great article by Alexander on Facebook. Check it out HERE.)

It's weird that December, 1972 came up twice for me yesterday. Must be the stars.

And I thank the people of Marshall for their efforts to support one of their own during his last year. It's what every community should do.

In the meantime, I'm getting ready to go to Missouri. And still planning the road trip. Maybe with a kid.

Chuck Berry Wide World of Entertainment, December 1972

2012-01-09T09:29:00.000-08:00

For me you can't beat those shows from the days I first saw Chuck Berry. My first show was February 1971. Here he is 20 months later, enjoying the thrill of victory after The London Sessions. I'd see my last 1970s show about a year and a half later. When I see performances like this, all the elements that drew me in are there. And you've got to admit-- the practice of constant touring made him pretty perfect in those days!

By the way, it wasn't 1973. I figured that out a long time ago but forgot. It was December 1972.

1950s Radio in Color by Christopher Kennedy

2012-01-08T18:51:00.000-08:00

I'd seen the photographs circulating around on the internet, but had no idea of their historical context. Chuck Berry in a wood paneled room, with a strange guitar, short blue pants, and a pale blue jacket. Same string tie. Behind him, the usual assortment of children on backup.

What amazes me, now that I've found the source, is that this picture was taken at the very beginning, mid August 1955, a month after the release of "Maybellene," by Chicago deejay and photographer Tommy Edwards. Check out the story, and some of the photographs HERE. It's part of a whole bunch Edwards photographs found in a basement and turned into a book by Christopher Kennedy.

I'm Charles Berry, Jr.

2012-01-07T19:22:00.000-08:00

Why you should have a good time and not misbehave!

Took the Year Off??

2012-01-05T23:10:00.000-08:00

Say, Chuck. Did you know you took the year off after your New Years collapse? Says so HERE. It's a well meaning piece of puff, but you'd think the writer might at least check the CB website to see that Chuck played all of these shows after the Chicago concert and before his New Years Eve show at B. B. King's.

01/19/2011 Blueberry Hill's Duck Room (Saint Louis, MO) : http://www.Blueberryhill.com (SOLD OUT!)
02/16/2011 Blueberry Hill's Duck Room (Saint Louis, MO) : http://www.Blueberryhill.com (SOLD OUT!)
03/04/2011 Nutty Jerrys (Winnie, TX) : http://www.nuttyjerrys.com/
03/16/2011 Blueberry Hill's Duck Room (Saint Louis, MO) : http://www.Blueberryhill.com (SOLD OUT!)
03/19/2011 The Pageant (Saint Louis, MO) : http://www.thepageant.com (SOLD OUT!)
04/01/2011 Pala Casino (Pala, CA) : http://www.palacasino.com/entertainment/
04/09/2011 Argosy Casino (Alton, IL) : http://www.argosy.com/stlouis/entertainment.asp (SOLD OUT!)
04/13/2011 Blueberry Hill's Duck Room (Saint Louis, MO) : http://www.Blueberryhill.com (SOLD OUT!)
05/25/2011 Blueberry Hill's Duck Room (Saint Louis, MO) : http://www.Blueberryhill.com (SOLD OUT!)
06/22/2011 Blueberry Hill's Duck Room (Saint Louis, MO) : http://www.Blueberryhill.com (SOLD OUT!)
07/02/2011 Choctaw Event Center (Durant, OK) : http://www.choctawcasinos.com/durant/calendar/tabid/169/vw/3/itemid/859/d/20110702/Chuck-Berry.aspx#calendarTop(SOLD OUT!)
07/13/2011 Blueberry Hill's Duck Room (Saint Louis, MO) : http://www.Blueberryhill.com (SOLD OUT!)
07/29/2011 Chuck Berry Statue Dedication 10:00am (6555 Delmar, Saint Louis, MO) : http://chuckberrystatue.com/index.html(open to the public)
08/17/2011 Blueberry Hill's Duck Room (Saint Louis, MO) : http://www.Blueberryhill.com (On sale 07.15.2011)
09/14/2011 Blueberry Hill's Duck Room (Saint Louis, MO) : http://www.Blueberryhill.com (SOLD OUT)
09/16/2011 California Theatre of Performing Arts - San Bernardino, CA : http://www.californiatheatre.net/Check-Berry
09/25/2011 Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame Interview : New Orleans LA (Private event)
09/26/2011 Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame Interview : New Orleans LA (Private event)
09/27/2011 Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame Interview : New Orleans LA (Private event)
10/01/2011 Lindenwood University Performing Arts Center : St. Charles Mo (SOLD OUT)
10/12/2011 Blueberry Hill's Duck Room (Saint Louis, MO) : http://www.Blueberryhill.com (SOLD OUT)
10/15/2011 Argosy Casino (Alton, IL) : http://www.argosy.com/stlouis/entertainment.asp (SOLD OUT!)
11/5/2011 State Theatre : Easton, PA : Tickets can be purchased at http://www.statetheatre.org/
11/16/2011 Blueberry Hill's Duck Room (Saint Louis, MO) : http://www.Blueberryhill.com (SOLD OUT)
12/14/2011 Blueberry Hill's Duck Room (Saint Louis, MO) : http://www.Blueberryhill.com (SOLD OUT)

2012-01-04T23:45:00.001-08:00

Chuck Berry in Pistoia, Italy, 2005

2012-01-04T12:32:00.001-08:00

Doug sent this, interesting in part for its view from backstage as Chuck and company enter.

Chuck Berry, Mean Old World 12-31-2011

2012-01-03T09:55:00.001-08:00

There's loads of clips out there, but I always like hearing him play and sing the blues. (Missing something on stage right, though.) (Or is it stage left?)

You Never Can Tell: Bonne Annee!

2012-01-03T07:49:00.000-08:00

The best of the many tidbits posted by a fan at B. B. King's on New Years. (But the lack of a piano just SHOUTS! Need to plan ahead Mr. Berry!)

Covers

2012-01-02T09:21:00.000-08:00

How many millions of times has this song been played? Anyway, here's a good one.

Which led me to his earlier hit, "Carol."

Tools, you know. Deductible!

2012-01-01T11:49:00.000-08:00

Which would lead some people to think about just possibly carrying two, and hiring a kid or just asking some happy stage crew member to tune whichever one was not being used. But he isn't anybody's some person-- so he keeps taking one, and cranking it out of tune, and then borrowing someone else's. Ah well-- I guess that's why we love him? (In his relative youth he is said to have snatched one out of the hands of Howlin' Wolf and had to apologize on stage!) But in his old age he's going to start being known as Mr. Fender!

Thanks to Ida May for the picture from last night at B. B. King's. Wish she was there!

The Little Things: Chuck Berry: How You've Changed

2012-01-01T10:03:00.000-08:00

The LAST time I went to Missouri to see Chuck Berry (October 2010) I was lucky and saw two shows. The first, at The Pageant, was spectacular. Berry was feeling good and played the guitar well. The second show, four nights later at Blueberry HIll, was fun but fell apart for a few minutes when Berry untuned his guitar. Both nights he played the riff you hear behind the singing in this song. The way he plays it (from a barre chord at the root position) requires fingers a yard long and a little finger with the strength of ten ordinary men. (Well, anyway, it makes my finger hurt in the key of C and becomes nearly impossible for me in G, where he so often plays slow blues.) Both times he played it while his daughter Ingrid sang. The first time it worked beautifully. The second time it was immediately after he'd cranked every knob and the riff became unrecognizable-- a series of strange bleats from his Gibson that he stubbornly refused to stop playing. But it's a reason I enjoy seeing him. Each time I learn something. In olden times (a phrase my daughter used to use while discussing my youth) I was too overwhelmed by the scoots, the laughs, the splits and the songs to see or hear the littler things. Now I can pick and choose-- and always seem to walk away with something.

Luke Dittrich Talks About his Interview of Chuck Berry

2011-12-31T22:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a good interview of Luke Dittrich, who did the cool piece about Chuck Berry in Esquire.

Traffic of the Forbidden!

2011-12-30T17:53:00.001-08:00

Well, not quite the original, but what ever is? A good idea, anyway, and a fun version.

Chuck Berry New Years Eve 2011

2011-12-30T07:46:00.000-08:00

Chuck Berry will play TWO SHOWS at B. B. King's in Times Square tomorrow night. Get tickets HERE. It will probably cost more than a night at the Club Cosmopolitan, but hey...

Chuck Berry in The New Yorker

2011-12-29T19:47:00.000-08:00

There's a great little write up about Chuck in this week's New Yorker. "[I]f Elvis was Apollo (beardless, beautiful) and Jerry Lee Lewis was Mars (virile, sometimes savage), Berry is Mercury: Silver-tongued, fleet, and the inventor of the lyre..." The New Yorker, which has run a couple of nice Chuck Berry pieces over the years, is publicizing Chuck's upcoming New Years Eve shows at B. B. King's in New York City's Times Square. Wish I were going-- but hey: I'm going to St. Louis!

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/notebook/2012/01/02/120102gonb_GOAT_notebook_greenman

Again! (Rebecca allows me.)

2011-12-25T11:48:00.000-08:00

Three years ago Rebecca ignited all of this fury by getting me a $25 ticket to BBH. My Chuck Berry problem had been on a low simmer from the late 1970s until 2008-- but that trip turned it into a full fledged fever. Heck-- I even wrote a book! Now, in the most amazing surprise, she's done it again. My girls were getting all giddy as the box came to me. I had no clue. Then I open it, see the ticketmaster receipts and those instantly recognizable words. But this time TWO $35 tickets and TWO mileage plan airfares. So I get to go with her! Her first time! (And she never even read my post about her first gift!) Thank you! And thanks to everyone for a wonderful Christmas.

Christmas

2011-12-22T23:08:00.000-08:00

It's hard for most people to give me Chuck Berry presents. In the last five years or so people have given me old records, forgetting, maybe, that I pretty much own them all. (Not all the records, but pretty much all the songs.) My lovely wife Rebecca gave me a tattered copy of The Chuck Berry London Sessions to put next to the tattered copy of The Chuck Berry London Sessions that I've owned from the moment it was issued. She also gave me a weird and tattered compilation of Mercury sides that I also bought used (and now tattered) pretty much as soon as The Chuck Berry London Sessions was issued. But Rebecca is also the one who gave me two of my most treasured items. The first was an autographed photo of Chuck Berry, which she gave me four months after we met and which, I believe, sealed the deal. That was in 2003. I don't even remember talking about Chuck Berry in those days, (I usually wait until I'm related by blood or decades to admit to someone that I'm certifiably insane) but I obviously did, and obviously with enough intensity and repetition to allow her to make an e-bay purchase and have it delivered in time for my birthday. But then, three years ago, the bigger, cheaper gift: a $25 ticket to see my hero at a St. Louis bar and restaurant called Blueberry Hill. I do remember talking about that, often. I'd heard rumors, read short accounts, knew this was the place he liked to perform, and that many people came from miles-- thousands of miles-- around to hear him make his music there. I didn't want the sun to go down on me, or on Chuck Berry, or on the Blueberry Hill shows, before I did, too. I wasn't even that much of a fan at the time. But it was something I had to do. It was the logical and illogical finale to a lifetime of worship.

But things kept getting in the way. Mainly depositions. I used to sue car companies a lot, so I flew to Detroit a thousand times, but nothing ever took me to St. Louis. Things just kept me from going there.

Then along comes Rebecca, and cuts past all of that. She bought me the ticket, gave it to me on Christmas, a flat out surprise as we ate cinnamon rolls and drank coffee and filled the living room with wrapping paper. And somehow, in the next few weeks, I wrangled a free ticket out of Delta Airlines, and a cheap motel, and learned on line how to ride Metrolink, and how to walk, frozen, from Metrolink to the King Henry the Eighth Motel and then to Blueberry Hill.

The rest of it is all in this blog someplace or another. The rest of it is this blog: the whole thing is Rebecca's fault.

The name Rebecca only made it into one Chuck Berry song, and here it is. But in my world it's Delilah who's worried!

Elephant's Memory, Chuck and Bo

2011-12-21T10:22:00.000-08:00

Remember Elephant's Memory, who backed Chuck and John Lennon on Mike Douglas, then backed Chuck on the more interesting cuts from Bio? I never knew that they recorded a song called "Chuck 'n' Bo."

You can find a photograph of them all together Here

Chuck Berry Back at Chess, 1970

2011-12-20T23:29:00.000-08:00

So they made him a lefty-- it was a great song and a great album!

The Hoochie Coochie Gal, Etta James

2011-12-20T12:23:00.001-08:00

Hope she's comfortable. This is about as good as it gets. Chuck seemed to like it well enough, too.

Check out the dialogue at the end:

CB: I didn't KNOW you!

EJ: I was singing background on your songs! (To Keith) You know him. I told him 'I was singing background on your songs.' He went 'Oh Yeah?'

She wasn't alone, either. Marvin Gaye was with her. So was Reese Palmer, who recently passed. Read about him HERE.

Chuck Berry Christmas

2011-12-20T07:28:00.001-08:00

(I'm still looking for the song "Christmas" from the "Back Home" album.

Great New Article About Chuck Berry in Esquire

2011-12-19T07:17:00.000-08:00

Photo by Danny Clinch

A GREAT article by Luke Dittrich. Read it HERE.

I love this article. Wish I'd written it. The stuff about Ingrid is very touching-- that she bought his records when he was on the road and listened to them in her room. That she cries when thinking what it's like to play on stage with him now. As Dittrich sees while writing, the shows at BBH aren't about the money. There's gobs of money at this point. He's doing it-- they're doing it-- for some larger satisfaction.

I also love that he's still creating, still working. I'd love to hear it all, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that it's something he can't stop doing, and he's still doing it.

Chuck Berry: Tulane

2011-12-18T09:15:00.000-08:00

For Leila T. on her first birthday!

(I thank whoever posted it but this copy sounds bad. Someone who knows how needs to remake the Youtube video with a new soundtrack!)

Chuck Berry at Blueberry Hill

2011-12-18T07:12:00.000-08:00

The money line from keyboardist Bob Lohr:

Chuck Berry at Blueberry Hill December 14, 2011

2011-12-17T09:04:00.000-08:00

This is a nice, slow, nearly flawless, version of his anthem. (The feeling is there at 85 years old.)

Doug Sent it.

A Blog Post about Chuck Berry, Michael J. Fox, and How we Get There.

2011-12-16T10:02:00.000-08:00

Here's a blog post that is indirectly about our man. The blog is called Folk Thief. He almost apologizes for getting to Chuck Berry through Michael J. Fox-- but think how many millions got there through The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. I only learned that "Rock 'n' Roll Music" and "Roll Over Beethoven" were Chuck Berry songs on the way home from my first Chuck Berry concert. And of course, it keeps going-- because there's another million of us who only learned about Muddy Waters, Elmore James, T-Bone Walker, Charlie Christian and a hundred others through Chuck Berry. Why, just the other day, I first heard the music of Floyd Smith-- and I thought THAT was a Chuck Berry song!

A Letter from Barack Obama to Chuck Berry: at Blueberry Hill, December 14, 2011

2011-12-15T11:00:00.000-08:00

It's amazing how quickly these get around. It's amazing that there have been 175 shows at Blueberry Hill. It's amazing how much fun they still can be. It's amazing that Doug keeps sending them to me. (Love how he introduces three of his children.)

Chuck Berry Should Get the Presidential Medal of Freedom

2011-12-15T10:37:00.000-08:00

                                     Picture by Alan White http://www.earlyblues.com/

I sent this more than two years ago. I will send it again. Maybe YOU can, too-- or cut and paste mine, add your own sentiments, and send it. It's an idea that should happen. Medal of Freedom is perfect-- after all: Who delivered us from the days of old?

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20500

December 15, 2011

    Re: Charles Edward “Chuck” Berry
          Presidential Medal of Freedom

Dear President Obama,

You have a full plate. Not much of it looks fun. But here’s an easy decision for you.

I’m asking that you honor Chuck Berry with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Chuck Berry is often called one of the architects of rock and roll music. He’s credited with nearly inventing rock and roll guitar. He is often called the first poet of rock and roll. He’s a first class showman who continues to play at age 85.

The songs he wrote are the basis of rock and roll: Maybellene, Nadine, Rock and Roll Music, Roll Over Beethoven, Brown Eyed Handsome Man, School Day (Ring Ring Goes the Bell), Johnny B. Goode, No Particular Place to Go—and that’s just for starters.

His music helped change the world. When Chuck Berry and his contemporaries first started playing big shows, a rope separated black from white—but as the music caught fire, the rope fell down, and kids mixed and mingled, dancing together despite segregation.

Chuck Berry built his success the old fashioned way—he worked for it, putting on thousands of shows, in hundreds of towns and cities around the world. He often travelled alone, carrying his guitar and an overnight bag, teaching his songs to the backup group in a matter of minutes just prior to the show.

In the segregated south Berry sometimes slept in his car, and often cooked his own food on a portable hot plate rather than knock on the back door of a restaurant.

When Chuck Berry’s first single, “Maybellene,” was released, in 1955, the record included two “co-authors” who had no part in writing the song. Berry fought hard to get the rights restored to his name. He managed much of his own career.

He has made mistakes. So has our country. In the late 1950s, at the height his success, Chuck Berry was arrested and tried three times on trumped up charges that he violated the Mann Act. The first conviction was overturned because of the blatant racism of the trial judge. The second trial ended in acquittal. The third time was the charm for the prosecution—and just after releasing “Johnny B. Goode,” Berry spent two years in prison.

He didn’t waste his time there. He studied business and typing. He practiced. He wrote songs. And when he was released, he hit the ground running, putting on shows wherever his parole officer allowed, and releasing new classics such as “Nadine,” “Promised Land,” You Never Can Tell” and “No Particular Place to Go.”

His music was the foundation of the so-called “British Invasion” of the early 1960s. Ex Beatle John Lennon once said that “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'." Stevie Wonder said "There's only one true king of rock 'n' roll. His name is Chuck Berry."

He Performed for President Jimmy Carter at the White House in 1975.

In 1977, his song “Johnny B. Goode” was launched into outer space on Voyager 1. (In one Saturday Night Live episode, Father Guido Sarducci announced that the first message from extraterrestrials had been received. Once decoded, the message stated, "Send more Chuck Berry!")

In 1986 he was among the very first inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In 1987 he published his Autobiography, writing every word of it himself.

In the year 2000, he was honored by the President at Kennedy Center.

At age 85, Chuck Berry continues to tour and perform. Once a month he puts on a show at a St. Louis bar and restaurant called Blueberry Hill. (He just did his 175th Blueberry Hill show!) These hometown shows have become legendary, drawing fans from around the country and around the world to see one of America’s musical legends perform among friends in a small room. His backup group is something of a family affair, with longtime friends and with his own son and daughter helping out with guitar, harmonica and vocals. If he’s feeling inspired, Mr. Berry even performs his famous “scoot” or “duck walk.”

Mr. President—most of what you do for us is hard. You’ve said that if a decision is easy, someone else makes it before it gets to your desk.

Well, here’s an exception to that rule.

This decision is yours alone. It's an easy one. And it’s a great one.

As Chuck Berry turns 85 this year, “deliver us from the days of old,” and honor him and his work with the Medal of Freedom.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

PETER O’NEIL

All Shook Up: Floyd's Guitar Blues = Blues for Hawaiians

2011-12-15T00:09:00.000-08:00

Not that many people have looked at this. But it's worth looking at, even though I have to admit it shook me up. But it's the way the blues so often worked-- songs passed down through time. I was brushing my teeth, looking at Fred Rothwell's Long Distance Information, when I saw for the first time in the section about "Deep Feeling" mention of "Floyd's Guitar Blues" recorded in 1939 by Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy, with Floyd Smith on steel guitar. (Smith, incidentally, or not incidentally, is from St. Louis!) Take a listen.

The song isn't "Deep Feeling." It's "Blues for Hawaiians." Check it out.

It's too late now, but the Floyd Smith estate might have taken the same route Chuck did with "Surfin' USA." (Funny that he gave it a surf name.) Which of course takes us back to Berry Park in 1986, the camera flying over a filthy pool, and there is Chuck, maroon jacket and bolo tie, paying homage to Mr. Smith.

I always wondered how and why he remembered the song after all those years-- (a song he obviously hasn't played much in concert). Now I know. It's a song he heard as a teenager, and we never forget those.

Here's Muddy Waters doing it, too-- although his version is a bit modified.

I've got to say, I always credited the strange slide sound of Chuck Berry to Chuck Berry, and was knocked senseless by the melancholy beauty of that closing scene in "Hail! Hail!" Now I need to learn more about Mr. Smith.

All Over St. Louis! Chuck Berry at Blueberry Hill Tonight!

2011-12-14T13:26:00.000-08:00

Photo by ME

Willie Dixon Interview in the Jas Obrecht Archive

2011-12-13T07:52:00.000-08:00

I mention in the post below that the index in the linked story is a goldmine. I've spent the morning reading about the origins of "Dust My Broom" and one of my guitar heroes, Jesse Edwin Davis. Then I clicked on the "Home" button, and found the front page of the Jas Obrecht Music Archive. There's a story about Willie Dixon on the first page, and it includes a 1980 interview.

"[W]hen Memphis Slim and I was workin’ in Europe [circa 1962], a lot of the young artists, they didn’t have no rock around then no more than the little bit that Chuck Berry had done started, you know. So the kids over there was all interested in the blues and was askin’ me about how could they make this in the Chuck Berry style and like this. And I would go to work, just try to explain it to ’em. "

Floyd Smith Interview

2011-12-12T21:14:00.000-08:00

Here's a GREAT INTERVIEW of electric guitar pioneer Floyd Smith, whose song "Floyd's Guitar Blues" became Chuck's "Blues for Hawaiians."

(P.S. One learned reader points out that the INDEX of articles on the side of this interview is an absolute goldmine.)

Chuck Berry in Stockholm 1980

2011-12-12T20:47:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Peter K. for this one, a bit chopped up, but cool to see.

Better yet, check out the still photos from the same show that Peter posted on the CB website HERE.

A Chuck Berry Recording Session

2011-12-06T09:59:00.001-08:00

I'm told it's Reggie Boyd on bass, Matt Murphy on guitar, and LeRoy Davis on sax. If those are right, what do we think? 1960?

Chuck Berry Rocks-- a collection with some great pictures.

2011-12-05T13:47:00.001-08:00

From my friend Peter K. in Sweden, with a zillion photographs I've never seen. Somebody did a nice job putting together this collection!

Hubert Sumlin

2011-12-04T18:38:00.001-08:00

A story here in Sumlin's words about a battle royal with Wolf himself: Link.

RIP Hubert Sumlin: Willie "Big Eyes" Smith and Hubert Sumlin at Jazz Alley (A Repeat. RIP Mr. Smith)

2011-12-04T15:18:00.000-08:00

Alas, just got the news. Here's my account of the one time I saw him-- with Willie Smith, also now gone.

“Music heals,” said Hubert Sumlin, between breaths. “It cures you. That’s why I’m here.”

Then he proceeded to cure us all.

Last Wednesday I went back to Jazz Alley where, a year or so ago, I saw Pinetop Perkins and Willie “Big Eyes Smith” perform. Pinetop was 97 years old at the time, bent and frail, but played and sang beautifully. (Read about it HERE.)

Last night Smith returned with a revamped band and special guest Hubert Sumlin, who brought his own special guest, Jimmy Rogers, Jr.

The night was billed as a tribute to Pinetop Perkins, but I don’t think Perkins was even mentioned. What we heard and saw, instead, was, as Mr. Sumlin pointed out, an example of the healing powers of good music.

Except for drummer “The Amazing” Jimmy Mayes, (who once worked with Jimmy Reed, and started the night with “Bright Lights, Big City,” Smith’s band was different from last year’s version. Maurice John Vaughn played guitar and could have headlined the show himself. He started with a request for “The Thrill is Gone,” and then played his own “Everything I Do (Got to be Funky).” And it was. You can read about him here. http://www.alligator.com/index.cfm?section=artists&artistid=17 Dave Kaye replaced Bob Stroger on bass. I missed Mr. Stroger’s calm smile and dapper outfit, but Kaye did a fine job.

When Willie Smith came on stage after three or four songs by the bandmembers, I was a little worried. He seemed under the weather. He is a master showman, singing, playing his harp, making people smile, but this time, at the start, he seemed to be struggling. (When Pinetop Perkins played last year, Smith was, at 74, the youth of the group.) If Smith was indeed ailing, the music didn’t hurt any for it. He sang his “Born in Arkansas,” and a song from “Joined at the Hip,” his Grammy winning album with Pinetop Perkins.

Then came Mr. Sumlin, tubes in his nostrils, oxygen tanks behind. He sat slumped on a chair. He spoke his short words about healing. He made a few tentative riffs. And then magic.

I’d never had a chance to see him play before except on video. He obviously doesn’t have the strength he once had. But he is wonderful to watch and hear. His fingers flash up and down the frets touching down to bend and slide impossibly, sometimes fingering the strings so quietly and subtly you have to watch his hands to hear, other times scratching and grating the strings to produce rough percussive sounds, usually adding a little flourish by tapping the downstream end of his strings after a lick.

They began with “Sitting on Top of the World,” which Sumlin sang. As he did so, whatever might have ailed Mr. Smith was cured, and the entire band came came alive.

From then on it was impossible to stop them. Mr. Sumlin’s anxious manager sat next to the stage and seemed to try, at least twice, to get him to quit. He kept saying “One more!” They did a song that sounded like Killin‘ Floor, but wasn’t. They did “Big Boss Man.” They did Sonny Boy II’s “Don’t Start me Talkin’.” Most of the time Sumlin seemed perfectly happy to be sitting as another sideman, keeping up a constant rhythm and providing perfect little fills, either loud and raw, or wiggly and refined. Jimmy Rogers, Jr. did beautiful solos that sounded more like a young B. B. King or Buddy Guy than his father. Maurice John Vaughn stuck primarily with rhythm but was happy to solo in his own, unique, finger picking style whenever he got the nod. Mayes kept a close watch on Smith, who led the band with quick nods. And bassist Kaye just seemed overjoyed to be there, surrounded by legends and blues journeymen, healing us all.

Daniel Glass and the History of Early Rhythm & Blues Drumming at The Drum Exchange in Seattle

2011-12-04T09:21:00.001-08:00

Earl Palmer and Daniel Glass

Put on an old blues or r&b record. You always know the drums are there at the very center of it all, but sometimes it’s hard to hear exactly what the drummer is doing. (The bass drum is usually the hardest for me to find on an old record.) But that’s exactly the sound and the feel that I want-- so when I started trying to learn how to play drums I looked for some help. That’s when I learned about The Commandments of Early Rhythm and Blues Drumming by Daniel Glass and fellow drummer Zoro. (Find it HERE.) It’s a goldmine, packed with drumbeats from a hundred or so r&b classics, but also packed with history-- stories and information about people like Earl Palmer and Fred Below. I’ve only skimmed the surface of what it contains, but it’s there for me.

Then yesterday Glass, a regular member of the Royal Crown Revue, came to Seattle and put on a free drum clinic at a local drum store called The Drum Exchange. I took my seven year old, who likes to steal and scatter my drum sticks and knows how to do a rock beat or two. (At one point during the clinic Glass thrilled him by saying, “We all started with something like this, right?” and then played Raff’s first drum beat.) The Drum Exchange provided a beautiful room for the clinic, with a raised stage so that everyone (there had to be 50-75 people-- a full house) could see. Rafferty and I were in the first row. It was all a bit like Christmas. Glass and the Drum Exchange passed out dozens of gifts-- drumsticks, cymbals, t-shirts. Rafferty got a pair of sticks of his own, and a chart of r&b beats for his wall.

But the real gift was Glass. For more than two hours he told and played the history of drums and rhythm in America, starting with military and marching beats that got turned “ragged” down in Louisiana close to New Orleans. He told about the introduction of tom toms from China, bass pedals, cymbals from China and Turkey, high hats, and the smaller bass drums and ride cymbals courtesy of be-bop stars like Max Roach and Kenny Clark. He put it all in the context of slavery, the gay nineties, prohibition, World War II, the swing era, be-bop, rock and roll, and finally, even a moment or two about Ringo Starr on Ed Sullivan. (If Glass saw it first hand he is remarkably well preserved.) And he did all this with incredible respect for the drummers and history that came before him. Glass is a true historian. He’s gone back and talked to them, interviewed them, listened to every beat, even played with them. (He can tell you the first time a drummer hit the crash cymbal on the "one," and the first record to include the high hat.) And then he shows you. That, of course, was the other treat-- when Glass would turn to his left handed drum set and play. Rafferty was squirming a bit during the lecture portions (prohibition? be-bop?) but no one squirmed during the drum exhibitions.

(Well, I take that back. I was squirming. Whenever I see someone so good I wonder why in hell’s name I even bother to head down to my basement and irritate my neighbors. As the saying goes, you can’t get there from here.)

But-- if you ever get a chance to hear Glass talk or play, take advantage.

And if you love early r&b, get his book.

As for my squirming-- it doesn’t matter. I can’t get there-- but like the duffer who once in a while hits a soaring drive-- I like trying.

Learn more about Glass HERE. Learn more about The Drum Exchange (great store, with expert help and cool stuff) HERE.

Well Mr. Berry They Want a Red Convertible... Chuck Berry's Cadillac Goes to The Smithsonian!

2011-12-03T17:12:00.001-08:00

Here's a story that will make your day: Chuck Berry, a Cadillac convertible, a major museum, and an ice cream sandwich in Wentzville.

Daryl Davis on Chuck Berry's Performance at The Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival

2011-12-01T15:15:00.000-08:00

I'm re-running this one because of the great comment I just got, below, from a fan who stepped on his blue suede shoes during the show. No warning required-- check out his reaction when she tracks him down to apologize!

A long time ago I asked the amazing Daryl Davis if he'd consider writing a "review" of Chuck Berry's performance at The Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival from his rather unique position on stage. He agreed to do so once he'd completed a bunch of other projects that included recording sessions, performances, and a performance with his buddy and mentor Pinetop Perkins. I was pretty excited. But as usual, what we got from Daryl Davis is bigger than what you might hope for. Everything not in italics comes straight from Mr. Davis.

The Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival started in 1998 and is still going strong and growing in popularity, due to the wonderful insight, professionalism and dedication of its founder and visionary, Don Hooker and his staff. This festival is very unique in that apart from the performing talent, all the producers, stage hands and other festival workers, are volunteers. All the proceeds are distributed to charities. There’s an old saying that I normally live by; “You get what you pay for.” It is been my experience on a number of gigs that if the promoter tries to cut corners and go cheap by not paying for quality and professionalism, then you don’t get it. This festival proves that old cliché can be wrong. I have played festivals all across the country and I can tell you that many with paid professional staffing will find this one very hard to beat.

The 2010 musical lineup for the 2-day weekend Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival included Tinsley Ellis, The Yardbirds, Shemekia Copeland and Buddy Guy on Saturday. The entertainment culminated on Sunday with the talents of among others, Joe Louis Walker, Jimmy Vaughan, and Chuck Berry who closed out this year’s festival.

I arrived at the airport and met a great guy named Jay from the festival staff who was there to pick up Chuck Berry. While we waited, Jay briefed me on the background and history of this particular festival. He was very passionate about his work with the festival, considering the fact that he wasn’t being paid for it. He does this one weekend every year just for the festival. I was soon to learn that everyone I met, including the producer/promoter Don Hooker was equally as passionate, dedicated and nice to work with at the festival. This certainly translates well to the performers who come to do the show. They are treated extremely well with genuine respect and it immediately puts them at ease.

Chuck arrived and Jay took him to the hotel to get checked in. From there, I took Chuck to the festival. It had been calling for bad weather in the area for that day. While the stage is covered, the audience is not and would get wet should it rain. As I drove Chuck to the venue, we rode through cloud bursts of rain which would alternate with sunshine. I crossed my fingers in hopes that the bad weather would hold off and festival goers would not be deterred from attending. Amazingly, my finger-crossing trick worked!!! We arrived to beautiful weather. No expense was spared. Very nice mobile trailers served as dressing rooms, not the tents that one sees at some of the other festivals.

I got Chuck situated in his dressing room and went to listen to some of Jimmy Vaughan’s set. When Jimmy’s set was over, I went up on stage and assisted the stage hands with the correct placement and electronic knob settings of the two Fender Dual Showman amps and speaker cabinets that had been specially rented for Chuck Berry.

Looking out from the stage was a sea of people and behind them was the beautiful Chesapeake Bay complete with passing boats. A performer could not have asked for a better setting. I returned to the dressing room and tuned Chuck’s guitar as well as my own which I brought for backup. When it was time, Chuck followed me to the stage and when the MC announced his name, thousands of people rose to their feet clapping and cheering to acknowledge the person who 50 some years ago created a whole new form of music. I handed him his guitar and took my place on the piano. He waved at the audience and then went into the familiar Chuck Berry guitar riff that starts "Roll Over Beethoven" and many other Chuck Berry songs. By the second song, the moist salty air blowing off the Chesapeake Bay had affected the tuning of his guitar. He switched to mine, but it too had been affected. A couple of stage hands were right on top of it and rescued each guitar and quickly re-tuned them.

This being a Blues festival, Chuck mixed in some Blues tunes with his Rock’n’Roll repertoire. He has a number of his own Blues compositions and one of my favorites which I immensely enjoy playing with him is Wee Wee Hours. But he did not pull that one out this particular evening.

There was a slight pause in the show when during one of the songs, Chuck asked a videographer to not videotape. The cameraman didn’t understand and Chuck came to me at the piano and asked me to take care of it. I called over one of the sound techs and informed him that Mr. Berry would not continue the show until the camera was turned off. The tech explained that the video was not being recorded it was simply being used for the closed circuit big screens so the audience far back would be able to see the performance on stage. I advised him to still have it cut off. He did and Chuck continued the show. About halfway into the performance, Chuck motioned to the cameraman who was standing in the wing, that it was now okay to continue filming. I don’t think he understood what Chuck was saying because he had a puzzled look upon his face and didn’t pick up the camera that was sitting at his feet.

Chuck is a master of pacing himself. This comes not just intuitively but through over 50 years of seasoned performance experience. He began to kick the show into high gear. More often than not, he will close his show with Reelin’ & Rockin’ by inviting women on stage to dance. This time, we had about 20 minutes left and he decided to invite the girls from the audience on stage during his performance of "Nadine." Ironically, the great Blues and R&B singer Nadine Rae who had performed earlier that day was backstage watching the show. She came out with some of the other women and shook her stuff to the delight of the audience. The party continued with "Johnny B. Goode" and "Reelin’ & Rockin’." (read more about Nadine Rae on her website.)

As he will sometimes do when I play with him, Chuck came to the piano and handed me the guitar to play while he took over the roll of pianist. Many people may not know it, but Chuck can play piano. In fact, piano was his first instrument before switching to guitar. While one of his older sisters was being trained in Classical music on the piano, little Chuck taught himself to play some Boogie Woogie by ear.

Chuck is as fond of harmonies as he is of melodies. When one hears his guitar licks and solos, many of them are what are known in the guitar world as double stops. It means he is playing two strings at once. These notes harmonize with each other. He plays the piano much in the same fashion by playing two notes at once in harmony. Chuck has often mentioned T-Bone Walker as one of his influences. If one were to strip away the harmony note and leave just the melody note to some of Chuck’s leads, one would easily see the influence as T-Bone played similarly but less syncopated and using a single note line instead of the double stop approach.

The performance concluded with the aforementioned "Reelin’ & Rockin’" and Chuck made his way back to the dressing room. I packed up Chuck’s and my guitars. Don Hooker who makes this festival possible every year is an affable, hands-on person who enjoys the performances and enjoys mingling out front with the audience. He is very respectful of the talent he brings and their privacy. At this point he had not even met Chuck. I introduced him and some of the other charitable workers to Chuck who had already read up on the great work that Mr. Hooker was doing and was pleased to meet him.

We said our goodbyes to the wonderful festival people and Chuck signed some autographs for fans, before getting in my car for me to drive him to his hotel. Along the way, we stopped to get something to eat and as we drove through Washington, DC that evening, Chuck reminisced about playing there in the 1950s. He mentioned the Howard Theatre. Having graduated from Howard University, I knew exactly where it was. I also knew he would be stunned and disappointed to know how run down it had become. I made a detour and under the cover of darkness drove Chuck his old stomping ground.

This guy had not been there in over 50 years but still knew the area and was telling me about what was on which corner and little tidbits of information. Sure enough, when we turned down the street, everything he had said was accurate. He pointed out the rooming house where he would stay because in those days, Blacks couldn’t stay in the White hotels. He had named a bar next door to the Howard where the entertainers would hang out. Sure enough, there it was. It had since changed names but it was still the same bar in the same building.

As I suspected, when he saw the now decrepit Howard Theatre, his excitement turned somber and he shook his head. I explained there has been a lot of talk about refurbishing the Howard and that while there is hope, so far it’s been nothing but talk. The neighborhood is now very crime- and drug-ridden. As we drove around the building and through the backstage alley, he pointed out the backstage door he used to use. I could tell these were bittersweet memories; the good times he had there, countered by the racism he would have to face off stage at hotels and restaurants to coming back 50 years later and reliving the fun times in his mind of this once thriving area, only to face the reality of the run down neighborhood and it’s decrepit landmark. While the neighborhood has new faces, there are still people who reside there from back in the day and would remember seeing Chuck Berry at the theatre across the street from their homes. I couldn’t help but wonder what they would have thought had they been able to see through my tinted windows on my car and seen their idol from their youth, fifty years later sitting in front of the Howard. (For more about the Howard Theater, see http://www.howardtheatre.org/home.html)

He continued to tell me more stories about playing in DC and some of the places where he performed. I drove him by these places as well. Then it was on to the hotel to get him some well-deserved rest before his early morning flight. I drove back to my home with my life that much more enriched from not only playing with him but from receiving an historical education from him as well.

- Daryl Davis

(Daryl Davis will be coming to my cold, gray neck of the woods in August to teach and play at the Centrum Blues workshops and festival in Port Townsend, Washington. Read about it here. Find his website here.

Boo Boo Davis with Keith Robinson and Bob Lohr in St. Louis

2011-11-29T19:03:00.001-08:00

Saw that the estimable Mssrs. Lohr and Robinson from the Chuck Berry Band are going to be backing Boo Boo Davis in at BB's Jazz, Blues and Soups in St. Louis on December 3 and found them all together in a show from about a year ago.

The level of blues you can hear in some cities is pretty unbelievable.

According to the French notes on the video: James Boo Boo Davis (harmonica et chant), Bob Lohr (piano), Marquise Knox (guitare), Big Mike Aguirre (guitare), Nephew Davis (basse), Keith Robinson (batterie). John May intervient à la fin en tant que présentateur.

Chuck Berry, Etta James, Andrew Sullivan: Too Pure to Pop

2011-11-28T15:49:00.001-08:00

Look who's on my favorite opinion website-- The Dish. (Andrew Sullivan is a "conservative" who doesn't like the radicals who use that name these days. Andrew Sullivan is actually pretty liberal. But it's a worthwhile blog to check each day. And look who I found there!)

American Folk Blues Festival, Vol. 4

2011-11-27T18:36:00.001-08:00

Muddy Waters, Joe Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Hubert Sumlin, Willie Dixon, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. And here it is.

American Folk Blues Festival, Vol. 3

2011-11-27T18:13:00.001-08:00

Enjoy this while it lasts-- the whole show!

Chuck Berry Back in the (Former) USSR!

2011-11-26T22:10:00.001-08:00

Gracias Enrique!

Thanksgiving Blues

2011-11-24T13:12:00.000-08:00

Are there other blues songs that say "thanks?" J. B. Hutto spent some time in Seattle when I first moved here, around 1978. A small miracle, and one of many for which we now give thanks.

Keith Richards on Chuck Berry in Rolling Stone

2011-11-23T11:53:00.001-08:00

I like it!

"When I saw Chuck Berry in "Jazz on a Summer's Day" as a teenager, what struck me was how he was playing against the grain with a bunch of jazz guys. They were brilliant – guys like Jo Jones on drums and Jack Teagarden on trombone – but they had that jazz attitude cats put on sometimes: "Ooh... this rock & roll..." With "Sweet Little Sixteen," Chuck took them all by storm and played against their animosity. To me, that's blues. That's the attitude and the guts it takes. That's what I wanted to be, except I was white."

"I listened to every lick he played and picked it up. Chuck got it from T-Bone Walker, and I got it from Chuck, Muddy Waters, Elmore James and B.B. King. We're all part of this family that goes back thousands of years. Really, we're all passing it on.
"Chuck was playing a slightly heated-up version of Chicago blues, that guitar boogie – which all the cats were playing – but he took it up to another level. He was slightly younger than the older blues guys, and his songs were more commercial without just being pop, which is a hard thing to do. Chuck had the swing. There's rock, but it's the roll that counts. And Chuck had an incredible band on those early records: Willie Dixon on bass, Johnnie Johnson on piano, Ebby Hardy or Freddy Below on drums. They understood what he was about and just swung with it. It don't get any better than that.
"He's not the easiest guy in the world to get along with, which was always a bit of a disappointment for me – because that cat wrote songs that had so much sense of humor and so much intelligence. The old son of a bitch just turned 85. I wish him a happy birthday, and I wish I could just pop around and say, "Hey, Chuck, let's have a drink together or something." But he ain't that kind of cat."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-guitarists-20111123/chuck-berry-19691231#ixzz1eYmltU00

I love in the clip how the brash young Berry tells that man a wailin' clarinet to "blow, blow, blow!" How many times have we seen it since? Chuck, making the tour of the (more compliant) big named backup and encouraging them to play. (Check out the 1994 version of Roll Over Beethoven below. Why, he's probably doing it in this shot, too.

Calling Chuck Berry: King Kahn and the Shrines

2011-11-23T09:01:00.001-08:00

Here's a little interview with King Kahn and his upcoming visit to St. Louis. (Off Broadway, 3509 Lemp Avenue, November 25.) He wants Chuck Berry to come see the show. So if you know Mr. Berry, I'll leave it to your discretion.

Chuck Berry Playing Roll Over Beethoven at 1994 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert

2011-11-22T14:48:00.001-08:00

Sharing the wealth at the 1994 Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame concert. (As usual, we thank Doug!)

Chuck Berry in London, February 1967

2011-11-22T07:20:00.001-08:00

Del Shannon and Chuck Berry, Saville Theatre, February 1967

Here's some microfilm about Chuck, John, Ringo and Beatles manager Brian Epstein at the Saville Theatre in London back in 1967. (It was curtains for the theater manager who dropped the curtains on Berry before his finale.) You can evidently pay to read more about the tour HERE. Alas, the famous theater, which hosted everybody who was anybody except for ME and YOU was turned into a movie house. You can read more about its ancient history here.

Bob Gruen Photos of Chuck Berry

2011-11-20T15:52:00.001-08:00

You've seen the picture of Chuck in the 1970s, probably playing blues, looking like he's about to kiss the frets of his guitar. HERE'S a little interview of him talking about his time in St. Louis.

Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Della Reese, Illinois Jacquet, Kiel Auditorium, St. Louis 1956

2011-11-19T14:02:00.001-08:00

Yep. I'd pay $1.50 to see this one! Thank you Mr. Bootlegger.

George Thorogood and the Preservationists

2011-11-19T10:23:00.001-08:00

Here's an interview with George Thorogood talking about his LP 2120 South Michigan Avenue. The money line for our purposes:

Do you ever get intimidated taking on a song by Chuck Berry or Muddy Waters, just because of their stature?

No. If you’re going to be intimidated in this business you shouldn’t be in this business. Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters — it’s almost like actors who don’t know anything about Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams — [they’re] almost like a standard part of your education. So it’s not something to be intimidated by; it’s something to be educated by.

From the Redwood Forests, to the Blues

2011-11-13T11:55:00.001-08:00

I first “discovered” the blues when I was 14 or 15, when I found record after record in the bargain racks. Unfortunately, after an initial blast of enthusiasm that probably put me temporarily in the top 100 of young, naive blues fans, I adopted a line of thought made famous by once Governor Ronald Reagan who, desiring to cut them all down as fast as possible, once said “If you’ve seen one Redwood, you’ve seen them all.” By the time I was 21 I figured I pretty much knew it all, and went on to dip just as shallowly in jazz, country, and other forms of music.

Of course, that’s pretty much all we can do, unless we’re musicians or historians or absolutely crazy. I’ve only had time to be absolutely crazy about one musician, and we know who he is. So I’m not ashamed to have stopped collecting blues in the late 1970s, with bunches of records by people like Elmore James, T-Bone Walker, Jimmy Reed, B.B., and lots of others-- just embarrassed that I thought I knew more than a tidbit about the music.

When I started blogging about Chuck Berry it was a pretty natural progression to head back to the bargain bins, and luckily for me they have improved. Blues are cheap again, but better produced. People have taken those old masters and lovingly reworked them so that the sound and selection are better than ever-- and certainly better than the electronically altered for stereo versions that were out there when I was younger.

In addition to the blogging, I’ve been pushed to go back by my other interest-- playing. I dabble in any instrument I can find time with, which turns out to be guitar, piano and drums. (I should dabble more with bass, but tend to wait until I’m forced to play it to finish a song before picking it up. I should get Gemma that stand up she wanted. That would get me motivated.) For a while I was trying to get in one band as a guitarist and spent a few weeks learning the top 25 blues riffs so that I could fit in. Almost but not quite. But then I found another band of aging fogies who let me in, so all that cramming came in handy. But they wanted to do Allman Brothers versions, and I didn’t, so I had to look for another group of old folk, and what they wanted, and claimed was hard to find, was a drummer. I don’t think they wanted a good one, either, because, they said, the good ones always left. So I’ve found my temporary home. A couple times a month I shuffle in and try to play shuffles.

But here’s the point. When you try to play, you have to listen. And when you listen-- or when you look-- suddenly all the redwoods don’t look the same anymore. (There’s another thing. One redwood just doesn’t cut it. You need a forest to appreciate a redwood.) When you listen you hear all the different twists and punches on that shuffle. When you listen you hear all the little bits of this guy and that who went in and then came out as whoever it is you’re listening to: a little bit of T-Bone, and that new guy B. B., and thus and such.

One of the benefits of the blog is that I get occasional tips from my Blues 102 instructor, Mr. Lohr, who tells me or his Facebook friends, check out this, or check out that. This morning I’m listening to ancient recordings from St. Louis-- Little Milton, and Clayton Love-- and I finally own a Magic Sam record. Mr. Lohr says, charitably, that my guitar sounds a little like these guys. (That first band should have nabbed me! They loved Magic Sam, but went for a slick player who sounded sort of disco to me.) Also Amy Winehouse’s record, because she’s part of the forest, too.

So, I keep walking a bit deeper among the trees. But I know that if the camera panned back it would reveal that I’m still at the very, very edges of something huge. I can’t get there from here, but it’s good to try.

Meanwhile, 16 Years Later, He's Stiiiiiilllll Cookin'

2011-11-12T16:57:00.001-08:00

Thank Ida May for this one. Too bad the director's goal seemed to be to hide Chuck Berry behind peoples head's and drum heads (and to hide a really good piano player in the orchestra pit) this is a GREAT performance from 1988. I've said it before-- I think this is Chuck Berry's favorite Chuck Berry song.

Chuck on BBC: Enjoy it While it Lasts

2011-11-12T09:50:00.001-08:00

Thank Doug for this one! (And if you like it [you will] check out what he did 16 years later, right above this post.) (You might have to click on the masthead to find it.)

From St. Louis and Beyond

2011-11-11T18:32:00.001-08:00

I figure if I get a tip from Mr. Lohr, I follow up. This is the first thing I found from Little Milton at Bobbin Records in St. Louis. Among everything else, I like the horns.

Here's another, but the sound's not great. (Sound of the post.)

Magic Sam didn't record for as long a time, so easier to zero in!

But tomorrow, off to the used record store!

They'll be Rocking at the State-- Easton, PA : Chuck Berry at the State Theater

2011-11-06T21:18:00.000-08:00

Daryl Davis on guitar, the St. Louis band backing, and Chuck Berry on ... on... Vocals! (Hey-- if you like this, click on the masthead and find more.) (Although maybe not exactly like this!)

Blues from Barcelona

2011-11-06T11:34:00.000-08:00

Actually, blues from a bright fall morning in Seattle, when, for reasons unknown, I decided to go back to my basement and record something. I haven't done it in months. Haven't played guitar in months, really-- been trying to learn to play the drums. And I only play piano while balancing my 10 month old granddaughter Tulane between my hands, (which probably does increase skill development.) Anyway, one take each on guitar, bass, and piano, and two on drums, because something was catching me up in the first verse. But basically I'm proud. As for the photos-- apologies in advance to the lovely Rebecca, who doesn't know that the only way I could fill five minutes was to use our recent trip photos. Anyway, I make no apologies for this one. It worked as well as it's ever gonna!

It Ain't Easy!

2011-11-06T08:04:00.000-08:00

The caption says that David Grohl is doing his best Chuck Berry duckwalk. You be the judge. (His "scoot" is about a minute or so in.

2011-11-03T11:11:00.001-07:00

A Vision

2011-11-03T10:39:00.000-07:00

I've had this sudden vision of Enrique:

And Dominic (check out this rarity!):

And Carmelo:

And Jean:

And Thomas-- (Can't find a good video) and get them all on stage together. Before a Chuck Berry show.

Or after one, at a different location.

Either wasy

Chuck Berry and Johnny Rivers Together at Chuck's Birthday Show

2011-11-01T08:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to a great slideshow of photographs by Peter Wochniak from the show with Johnny Rivers.

Squeeze

2011-10-31T12:02:00.000-07:00

A good blog I just ran across... http://squeezemylemon.blogspot.com/

Enrique!

2011-10-30T22:02:00.000-07:00

Worth Repeating: Chuck Berry, A Poem by Cornelius Eady

2011-10-29T16:51:00.000-07:00

The same sister who accompanied me to my first Chuck Berry concert some 40 years ago (I was 14) just gave me a poem by poet Cornelius Eady called "Chuck Berry." I sent Mr. Eady an e-mail telling the story of that show, asking permission to run the poem here, and thanking him "for creating great art about a man that I consider one of our great artists." He wrote back: "Thanks for thinking of me, and sharing that wonderful memory. 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."

I was going to wait until I had read more of Mr. Eady's poetry before running this-- but sometimes a gift is meant to be shared immediately. As for the other poems, one's called "Amost Grown." Could it be a coincidence? "Almost Grown" shows up below, I think, along with bits and pieces and hints of "Carol," and "Nadine," "You Can't Catch Me," "Back in the U.S.A.," "Around and Around," "Sweet Little Sixteen," "Johnny B. Goode," "Little Queenie," "Sweet Little Rock and Roller," and "Go, Go, Go". I love that he knows these songs so thoroughly. (I never can remember the name of the Chuck Berry song that is made up almost entirely of lines and titles of Chuck Berry songs. His work lends itself to that sort of thing.) This is a poem that seems to celebrate all of what's celebrateable about Chuck Berry-- the energy, the beauty, the felonies, the hard work, the poetry, the dance, and the thing Chuck Berry himself might be most proud of: "The amazing leap, from nobody to stockholder, (Look, Ma, no hands), piped through a hot amp." When you've finished the poem in your voice, you can hear him read it in his at the bottom of the page. And you can learn more about Mr. Eady (who is moving to Chuck Berry's home state of Missouri soon) here and here.

Chuck Berry

Hamburger wizard,
Loose-limbed instigator,
V-8 engine, purring for a storm

The evidence of a tight skirt, viewed from
    the window of a moving city bus,
Yelling her name, a spell, into the glass.
The amazing leap, from nobody to stockholder,
(Look, Ma, no hands), piped through a hot amp.

Figure skater on the rim of the invisible class wall,
The strength of the dreamer who wakes up, and it’s
   Monday, a week of work, but gets out of bed

The unsung desire of the check-out clerk
The shops of the sleepy backwater town,
   waiting for the kid to make good,
   to chauffer home

The twang of the New Jersey turnpike
   in the wee, wee hours.
The myth of the lover as he passes, blameless
   through the walls.

The fury hidden in the word almost.
The fury hidden in the word please.

The dream of one’s name in lights,
Of sending the posse on the wrong trail,
Shaking the wounded Indian’s hand, a brother.

The pulse of a crowd, knowing that the police
Have pushed in the door, dancing regardless

The frenzy of the word go.
The frenzy of the word go.
The frenzy of the word go.

The spark between the thought of the kiss
   and receiving the kiss,
The tension in these words:
   You Can’t Dance.

The amazing duck walk
The understanding that all it's going to take
   is one fast song.

The triumph in these words:
   Bye-bye New Jersey, as if rising
   from a shallow grave.

The soda-jerk who plots doo-wop songs,
The well-intentioned Business School student
   who does what she’s told, suspects
   they’re keeping it hid.

Mr. Rock-n-Roll-jump-over
   (or get left behind),
Mr. Taxes? Who, me? Money beat,
Money beat, you can’t catch me,
   (but they do),

A perpetual well of quarters in the pocket.
The incalculable hit of energy in the voice
   of a 16 year-old as her favorite band
   hits the stage,

And 10,000 pair of eyes look for what they’re after:
   More.
And 10,000 voices roar for it:
   More.

And a multitude you wouldn’t care to count
   surrounds the joint, waits for their opportunity
   to break in.

(You can find this poem starting at 7:00)

More Blues, Jazz and Near Blues from Barcelona

2011-10-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

A week or so ago I told about blues in Madrid. Yesterday, when we climbed up to Parque Guell in Barcelona we found someone named Robert playing excellent slide guitar just below the peak.

I wish I could tell you his name-- just looked at the cd's he was selling, and it said "Robert Live at..." (add name of club. But he played some very good blues on that old resonator.

My bet was that street performers in Barcelona have to pass some sort of licensing exam. The ones we saw were all great. One group outside the Cathedral played a sort of gypsy-tinged, new agey jazz. You can see people were digging into their pockets. They were really good.

Not far away was a brass band playing traditional Catalonian music. Maybe my video will work here. Unfortunately, it's reallllly short.

I could go on and on. On the steps of the other cathedral (what city has two?!) there was a great choir. Then behind that, a kids performance, with baby drummers, baby clarinetists, and a rapper. All in all a great city. But of course, you come here to see THIS guy!

Ah-- but he wasn't there. That was a year ago. In St. Louis.

Chuck y Pablo

2011-10-26T02:56:00.000-07:00

Our last day in Barcelona and we went to the Picasso Museum. The last time I was there I was 19, and my Chuck Berry problem was still in it's original full flower. That was 36 years ago. The hotel I shared with my brother Danny cost $2. But in those days I wouldn't have made the connections I made today. As I walked through the museum I saw that the series of paintings Picasso did on Las Meninas was made in 1957. Pablo was already a superstar. Chuck was getting there. And I saw that a couple were painted in late August, 1957. This one, on the 27th.

I knew that date! When Pable was painting, Chuck was probably still enjoying the pleasure of having done a show in Sacramento with his idol Louis Jordan. Heck, given the time difference, his ears were probably still ringing.

Picasso kept working on the series, and Chuck kept touring. Picasso's life looked easier. He was living in Cannes with a balconey overlooking the Mediterranean. In October he was painting red versions of Las Meninas.

What Pablo was doing was similar to what someone like Chuck did when he covered "Time Was" three or four times (probably the same year!) Picasso was playing with a famous painting by Velasquez-- one we saw for the first time in Madrid a few days and several lifetimes ago. In the painting, a little princess stares at the viewer while people paint her, and fuss over her, and enter the room to gaze upon her. Picasso painted a dozen different riffs on it, often several in a day. Here's the original.

Chuck, meanwhile, had joined up with the Fats Domino tour and by the time Picasso was seeing red, Chuck was back in Sacramento for what might have been the first of so many birthday shows. The little town never had it so good.

I Want to Be Your Driver The Blues Project

2011-10-25T23:13:00.000-07:00

I love finding evidence that Chuck Berry remained an influence after his "golden decade" had more or less passed. If memory serves, my brother Stevo (who introduced me to Chuck) was a fan of The Blues Project.

He Hit a High Fly into the Stands. Three Times!

2011-10-23T06:08:00.000-07:00

Hey-- you could hear the pop across the Atlantic.

Of course, regular readers know that he was inspired by another 'brown-eyed handsome man's' visit to the Pujols foundation a few weeks ago.

Or maybe by the stirring National Anthem a few weeks ago.

Everywhere

2011-10-20T12:52:00.000-07:00

The thing that interests me is that, last night, sitting in a tiny place in Madrid, Spain, talking to my wife, that riff starts. It's on the jukebox or soundtrack. It isn't Chuck Berry-- it's someone doing Chuck Berry. But it's there, 4216 miles and 55 years from when he first recorded it. (I know he's not the first to play it-- but he's the first to play it that way, and it's his.) Pretty cool.

Wine, Beer, Salty Meat, and Blues

2011-10-19T16:11:00.000-07:00

So I'm in Madrid with my wife, and we have vague plans to attend a concert of Flamenco and Baroque music tonight, but we're too late. So we spend the evening getting wine and beer at tapas places along the Calle de la Cava Baja and in the Plaza de Santa Anna. This is, by itself, a good time. You order a drink. They give you food. You order another bit of food and you might get lucky again. We stopped at three places and got a lifetime supply of delicious sodium and fat in the form of olives, cured meats, cold soup, cured meats, and meatballs. Then on the way home we see "Blues" at a nice looking bar. We drop off our shopping at the apartment and head back down the street to the Cafe Jazz Populart on Calle de la Huertas where we get a small beer and wine and stand at the bar for a while. The star tonight is an American drummer, Rico McClarrin. When we arrive he's asking if anyone's seen the movie Cadillac Records. Since this is a Chuck Berry blog you know my hand is waving. "Remember the big guy?" he asks. "That's Howlin' Wolf." Then they start into the Wolf/Wille Dixon song "I Ain't Superstitious." We quickly realize that we have stumbled into something good here. If you read this blog you may remember that I once saw Memphis Slim and Booker T. Laury in Paris. (Read about it HERE.) Tonight we didn't hear legends, but we heard good music, with Marcos Coll on harmonica, Carlos Delelane on bass, and __ o guitar. These guys are good. (Here they are a month ago at a different club in Madrid.)

As they play in walks a man with dreadlocks and a trumpet case. McClarrin yells out "Here's arranger and trumpeter Barney Fields." (If Google has served me properly Mr. Fields is a co-owner of Highnote Records. (See here.) At any rate, the man can play. A few minutes later Fields is on stage leading the band through "Further on Down the Road."

I said that Mr. McClarrin was starring-- but Marcus Coll was also wailing.

What can I say? Pretty nice night. And a bit unexpected.

Oh Say Can You See...

2011-10-15T15:47:00.001-07:00

Jimi Follows Chuck, Chuck Follows Jimi

2011-10-15T00:20:00.001-07:00

Gotta find the video!

More From The Bootlegger

2011-10-13T23:02:00.000-07:00

Daryl Davis on Chuck's guitar...

This clip, which features Ingrid on vocals and Karen and friends on stage, shows why going to Blueberry Hill can be a fun time...

And watch Daryl end it Chuck Berry style with that left leg lift!

Cool that Johnny Rivers, who made Memphis, Tennessee so famous, was there to celebrate.

It Ain't Long, but...

2011-10-13T21:52:00.000-07:00

Doug took it from the front row...

Help Me Find The Party!

2011-10-13T07:01:00.001-07:00

I first learned Chuck Berry through The Beatles and Johnny Rivers. The Beatles didn't show up at the Blueberry Hill birthday show, but Johnny Rivers did. That's him in the middle. And that's Daryl Davis filling in on this number on keyboards. Thanks to Robert Lohr for the the shot, which I swiped from Facebook.

Chuck (and Jimmy) Had to Miss It...

2011-10-13T07:01:00.000-07:00

... but for his birthday we can all be Cardinals fans. (What? You think I'll ever root for the Rangers?)

It Happens Again Tonight! (Please don't check the math.)

2011-10-12T11:59:00.000-07:00

Tonight, Chuck plays again at Blueberry Hill, and a few days later, at a Casino across the river. How often has this happened?

There’s no authoritative or complete listing of the shows he has performed in his 60 years as a professional-- at least not in public. Morten Reff lists as many of the international shows as he could find and it is a bigger number than I care to count—well over 500. But I can make some reasonable (and I think reasonably conservative) estimates. Let’s assume that from 1955 until 1961 he did an average of 200 shows a year. That makes 1200. Let’s say that from 1963 until 1971 he worked a little harder—say 225 a year. That’s another 1800. Then comes his “Ding a Ling” and even more work—let’s say 750 shows over three years. We’re up to 3750. Then let it cruise at 150 shows a year for the next 10 years. That’s probably conservative, but it’s now 1986, and we’re at 5250 shows. But he’s only 60 and still going strong. Let’s assume 100 shows a year until he turns 70, 75 a year until 75, 50 a year till he turns 80, and then slow him down to something like 25 shows a year when he enters his 80s. By my reasonably well educated (and carefully manipulated) fantasy count we’re at 7000 shows and counting.

It’s guesswork on my part, but you get the idea. The man worked. This isn’t some superstar who plays golf 300 days a year and then regroups for a tour every ten years to refill the coffers. If there’s nothing else you take from this reading, take this: the man worked, and still does.

So tonight, if you're one of the lucky 350, it's number 7001.

Or thereabouts!

Have fun. And Happy Birthday Mr. Berry!

Daryl Davis to Direct Centrum Blues Workshop

2011-10-11T21:21:00.000-07:00

Here's a little post in the Seattle Times. You can find my original post about seeing Daryl and friends at the spectacular festival that ends the workshop HERE.

Looked at my Watch, it was Kinda Scary

2011-10-08T08:21:00.000-07:00

The place he sang his "Ding-a-Ling" is now the library!

Here's the story from Fred Rothwell, author of Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry's Recorded Legacy. (A book you ought to get if you're a Chuck Berry fan.)

I wanted to find the exact address of the Locarno Ballroom in Coventry and took advantage of a business trip to visit the city to check out the local archived papers in the central public library. After about two hours I'd read every contemporay report of the concert (which wasn't a lot because the Ding A Ling phenomena was still in the future) but still didn't know the address of the venue. In frustration I asked the female librarian, who was of similar age to me and therefore might know, where was the Locarno Ballroom. 'You're standing in it' she said. I gazed around me in wonderment and saw the whole thing, the dance floor and the balcony, all that was missing was the mirror ball hanging from the ceiling. The ballroom had been converted into the library later and I'd sat for two hours searching for the location I was actually sitting in!

I always envision places and people I've never seen. I always imagined the Coventry show happening in some giant barn of a place with thousands and thousands of people, but it was probably hundreds and hundreds in a big dance hall. Here are some pictures and a Link.

Chuck Berry Does a Benefit at Lindenwood University

2011-10-04T07:27:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Doug for this one. (The date is really 10-3-11; otherwise I slept longer than I thought.)

Set list is below. Tickets were $20. Student ticket's were $5! All to benefit the Chuck Berry scholarship fund. (The school has a branch in Wentzville!) http://www.lindenwood.edu/

Happy Birthday!

2011-10-03T11:54:00.001-07:00

The song is called "Ingo." I always figured it was written for his daughter Ingrid, who had a birthday recently.

And They Said It Didn't Exist

2011-10-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

A set list for a Chuck Berry show! (Now I know Bigfoot and UFO's are real!)

This is courtesy Bob Lohr on facebook. I experience heart palpitations seeing Havana Moon on the list, but evidently it didn't get played. Ah well. C'est la vie, I say.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T : Aretha and Chuck

2011-10-02T18:33:00.000-07:00

Aretha was in St. Louis and had some nice words for our man. Read about it HERE.

Seeley and Baldori at Rock in Rio

2011-10-02T18:27:00.000-07:00

If you read this blog you know that my favorite latter day Chuck Berry album was "Back Home," which featured the harmonica of Robert Baldori. (Baldori's group The Woolies backed Berry in innumerable concert appearances and on the record "San Francisco Dues.") Here he is with Bob Seeley at the Rock in Rio festival.

You can read Baldori's interview with Go Head On! HERE.

Ronny Elliott and a Very Famous Man (some things are meant to be.)

2011-09-29T22:59:00.001-07:00

If you read this blog a lot you've probably bumped into Mr. Elliott, who described his early days backing Chuck Berry and whose friend Ed Brown tells the best Chuck Berry story you'll ever hear (you can find it on this blog.) Well, Ronny Elliott met Chuck, and even got invited to Berry Park. But he also met this guy. And has a very good story to tell about it (he's in Ed Brown territory) right here.

(By the way-- it's not Ghadaffi.)

Report of the Chuck Berry Astronomical Society Committee on Historical Investigation and Minutiae

2011-09-29T22:59:00.000-07:00

Members present: Peter K. and Peter O.
Question raised: Was he observing, or simply posing?
Working Hypothesis: Actual Astronomical Observations.
Evidence: Shadows, Aperture, Apparent Age, Apparel.

The Committee observed that all shadows are directly behind the subject. This would indicate that his telescope is pointing directly at the Sun. Committee also observed that aperture of scope appears to have been reduced significantly at front end. This would indicate use of antique solar filter. Use of filter also supported by current absence of blindness in left eye of subject. Mr. K. presented data showing two annular solar eclipses visible from State of Missouri during subject's adolescence: April 19, 1939 and April 7, 1940, each of which seems consistent with subject's apparent age in photograph prior to major growth spurt. Subject's identity confirmed by shoes, which are substantially similar to shoes in painting below (by el padre de Enrique). Subject's other clothing appears consistent with spring weather conditions. Subject is located on roof of building-- a perfect location for solar observations. Additional spooky anecdotal evidence: Eclipse Restaurant's location directly between Pageant and Blueberry Hill.

Conclusion: Evidence indicates that Mr. Berry was an amateur astronomer, making observations of a partial solar eclipse in the spring of 1939 or 1940. Evidence also indicates that both the photograph, and the painting, are quite wonderful.

Michael Lydon in the New York Subway:La Vie!

2011-09-29T14:43:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite writers on the music and significance of Chuck Berry is Michael Lydon, who once published a great piece on Chuck in Ramparts Magazine, and who also wrote the liner notes to the album Back Home. (Mr. Lydon's Ramparts piece was reprinted in his excellent book Rock Folk, which you can find easily on line, and which you'll enjoy for its equally good essays on folks like the Rolling Stones and B. B. King.) Lydon gave me two lines I will never forget. The first was a description of Chuck's guitar style on Back home. Lydon wrote: "his guitar, when not ringing like a bell, has the bitingly fine quality of etched steel." It can't be said better. The other line I'll never forget is one that Chuck uttered when escorting Lydon back to his car after he refused an interview at Berry Park. Says Chuck, "So, standing in the sun ain't my shot." And then he walks away. Lydon went on to write a great essay about the man-- but you can't imagine how many times I've tried that line out for myself. "Standing in the sun ain't my shot." I'm not sure what my shot is. It ain't standing in the sun. But the words don't fit me at all, and I repeat them with a bizarre fascination, the way you might stare at photos of a crime scene.

Anyway, Michael and I have become imaginary friends. He read my efforts to create a book of my own, and sent me one of his. And then this-- an ancient documentary that just resurfaced showing Michael playing guitar and singing in the streets of the New York subway in 1991. You'll note that the song owes more to Edith Piaf than Pierre and the Mademoiselle. But check out the guitar!