When Elvis Presley died, someone had the bright idea of asking Chuck Berry for what Elvis would be remembered.
"Oh," Berry mused dismissively, "boop-boop-boop; shake your leg; fabulous teen music; the '50s; his movies."
Never an Elvis fan, Berry couldn't help but be annoyed by the success of the pretty white boy from Memphis. He wasn't about to pretend he wasn't gratified to have outlasted the singer they called "the King."
He outlived Elvis by nearly 40 years. And in the end he was almost as well known for his bitterness as for his rock 'n' roll music. And maybe that's fair, for you don't hear many stories about Berry's generosity--he was the guy who demanded cash before he'd play a note, who traveled alone, and expected the pickup musicians who backed him at his gigs to keep up.
Sometimes he wouldn't even call out the title of the next song. The hired guns were expected to have his set down pat, even if he began "Johnny B. Goode" in a key other than the one on the famous record. He rarely played more than an hour, and usually didn't say more than a handful of words to the crowd that showed up to watch him play. He was arrogant and quick to anger. God help the semi-pro bass player who couldn't follow the great Chuck Berry.
But even semi-pro bass players should know Berry's songs; they are not only part of the canon of rock 'n' roll but essential pieces of Americana. As Buddy Flett, the venerable Shreveport guitar player says, you just can't trust musicians who don't know Chuck Berry songs.
Berry did not invent rock 'n' roll. The post-war disintegration of cultural boundaries combined with certain technological developments (such as television and the popularization of the electric guitar) and the rise of a new leisure class of teenagers who, for the first time in history, were not required to work to help support their families made the evolution of the music we call rock 'n' roll inevitable. Something would have emerged to absorb all the new disposable income of which teens suddenly found themselves in control.
But if Berry was not the originator of the style, he was the genre's first great instrumentalist and songwriter. His powers of observation and eloquence were unique among early performers, who seemed to accept the popular dismissal of rock as mere greasy kid stuff, an adolescent form destined to be no more than a fad. (Elvis, after all, wanted to get into movies because he doubted that rock 'n' roll would last.)
But Berry wasn't an adolescent when he got into rock 'n' roll. He critiqued the changes American culture was undergoing and simultaneously defined the rock subculture. "Too Much Monkey Business," his 1956 song about the tribulations--the "botheration"--of the working life was one of the first rock songs to marry social commentary to a big beat. The flip side of that record, the marvelous "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," is nothing less than a coded fable of black men overcoming the strictures of segregation (think "brown-skinned handsome man").
At the same session that produced these two songs, Berry recorded what may be the greatest rock 'n' roll song of all time and probably the best song ever about rock 'n' roll, the glorious, irreverent "Roll Over, Beethoven," incredible from the first seconds, with that wonderful two-string riff, a mad spasm of joy-drunk notes followed by that great giddy opening line:
"Gonna write a little letter, gonna mail it to my local DJ ..."
"Roll Over, Beethoven" is the first song that successfully describes what rock 'n' roll feels like. It's a heartfelt manifesto that even today leaps out of the speakers and compels you either to dance or give a reason why not.
Although Berry's musical intelligence is immediately graspable, it's his witty, wised-up lyrics that make him indispensable. There is a delicious cynicism in most of Berry's work--after all, he was in his heyday a black man in his 30s pursuing a market by making party music for "almost grown" white kids from the suburbs--that anticipated the curdling of the hippie dream. Berry was both the minor-league Elvis and the Sex Pistols that subverted the kingdom.
He wasn't the same after he went to prison in 1962; when he got out he left Chess for Mercury Records where the paychecks may have been more regular but his muse didn't follow. He was left to re-record his old hits which in their day weren't as big as their echoes make them seem. Berry had only a handful of Billboard Top 10 hits during the '50s. Lots of songs charted but few climbed high, and he didn't record a meaningful new song between 1965 and 1970 (if you accept John Lennon's theory that "Nadine" and "No Particular Place to Go" were written before his prison term).
By the late '60s Chuck Berry was an oldies act. It is ironic his biggest commercial success--his first and only No. 1 single-- came in 1972 with "My Ding-a-Ling," an irrelevant, naughty novelty sing-along.
He was an oldies act for the rest of his life, playing 250 or more dates a year. (His contract rider from the early '70s on specified: "Three professional American Federation of Musicians musicians including one drummer with set of drums, one pianist and a baby or grand piano and one electric bass player and bass. Said musicians shall have professional knowledge of Artist's songs." Berry also specified that promoters furnish "two UNALTERED Fender Dual Showman Reverb" amps or else pay a penalty. Since Showman amps are notoriously hard to find, a lot of promoters ended up paying Berry's penalty, which was probably the point all along.)
So what will Chuck Berry be remembered for?
It's hard to say. He was the epitome of a certain kind of wicked elan, the first and still foremost poet of rock 'n' roll. (And I'd stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.) But people don't remember much, and it's hardly ever the right thing. I'm guessing a bitter old coot who copped his sound from Michael J. Fox.
------------v------------
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 03/21/2017