Download It #10: Chuck Berry

July 16, 2008

I’ve always maintained that there are important artists whose gifts are so powerfully communicative, they eventually generate their own clichés. For instance, you can’t deny that Ingmar Bergman was a masterful filmmaker, regardless of whether or not you care for the types of movies he made.

But as the years have passed, most viewers can’t help smirking a bit when they encounter Bergman. He was so original in his approach to narrative - clocks ticking away on the mantle, existential despair, lingering close-ups, etc. - his signifiers are now deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness. Unless you divorce yourself from the accumulated residue of his favorite devices, you can’t properly experience what’s so special about his best movies.

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Chuck Berry, believe it or not, has a lot in common with Ingmar Bergman. Millions of people have at least a passing knowledge of Berry’s most popular tunes, if not through his own records, then via cover versions by zeitgeist-slingers like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But there’s a good chance you’ve never studied him closely enough to properly grasp his brilliance.

To most rock fans, Chuck Berry just is, like the law of gravity, and there’s no point in pondering him any further than that. If you take that approach, though, you’re cheating yourself out of a stunningly detailed, often hysterical joy ride through the central building blocks of the American psyche.

Set aside his wildly inventive guitar playing for now, although that’s akin to ignoring commas, quotation marks, and explanation points when it comes to the type of music he plays. As a lyricist, Berry ranks among the four or five greatest talents in the history of rock & roll. Before Dylan and the Beatles even knew how to tune a Stratocaster, he drew a sweeping, multi-volume comic book detailing the teenage American experience, and it retains every inch of its seductive power fifty years later.

In the same sense that many modern-day Mafioso often insist they’ve taken their behavioral cues from “The Godfather,” rather than the other way around, it’s completely possible that Berry dictated a chunk of our fascination with cars, soda pop, and the open highway. Those things existed before he hit the scene in the mid-1950s, to be sure. But he buffed, polished, and mythologized them until we couldn’t help kicking the bumpers and taking his fantasies out for a never-ending ride. He may not have dropped acid, grown his hair out, or made the President tremble. But this guy could sling the zeitgeist like it was bacon and eggs.

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Giddily evocative descriptions of American life abound in Berry's music, to such a degree that it’s easy to forget he was, at the peak of his career, an African-American man in his early-30s who couldn’t even eat in the kinds of joints he was describing, much less live in the suburbs among the lawn sprinklers and pink flamingos.

In song after song after song, Berry’s descriptions are so luminous you can practically smell the burgers cooking and feel the curve of the road. He doesn’t simply describe a situation. He takes you there and you experience it. That’s the sign of a great writer, and it’s genuinely stunning how many times - and how inventively - he manages to pull it off.

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I’ll pick two Berry tunes that I repeatedly blast into my frame of reference, both on my iPod when I'm walking around Manhattan, and on the stereo when I’m lugging the baby around our apartment. Like all Berry songs, listening to these two encourages movement. Your feet get involved, and so does your brain.

Pretty much everybody is familiar with “Johnny B. Goode,” a rocking little number about a country boy who never learned to read and write too well, but “could play a guitar just like a-ringin’ a bell .” But “Bye Bye Johnny,” Berry’s rollicking sequel to that tune, is, for my money, even more engaging. The imagery here conveys an especially goofy rags-to-riches movie, in a few succinct verses. The only thing that could ruin this would be Elvis starring in it, with Norman Taurog directing:

She drew out all her money at the Southern Trust,
And put her little boy aboard a Greyhound bus.
Leaving Louisiana for the Golden West,
Down came her tears from her happiness.
Her own little son, named Johnny B. Goode,
Was gonna make some motion pictures out in Hollywood.

Bye-bye, bye, bye.
Bye-bye, bye, bye.
Bye-bye, Johnny.
Goodbye, Johnny B. Goode.

She remembered taking money in from gathering crop,
And buying Johnny's guitar at a broker shop.
As long as he would play it by the railroad side,
And wouldn't get in trouble, he was satisfied.
But she never thought there’d ever come a day like this,
When she would have to give her son a goodbye kiss.

Hollerin’, “Bye-bye, bye, bye.”
Hollerin, “Bye-bye, bye, bye.”
“Bye-bye, Johnny.
Bye-bye, Johnny B. Goode.”

She finally got the letter she was dreaming of
When Johnny wrote and told her he had fell in love.
As soon as he was married he would bring her back,
And build a mansion for 'em by the railroad track.
So every time they heard the locomotive roar,
They'd be a' standin', a' wavin' in the kitchen door.

Hollerin, “Bye-bye, bye, bye.”
Hollerin, “Bye-bye, bye, bye.”
“Bye-bye, Johnny.
Good bye Johnny B. Goode.”

Phrase after phrase simultaneously embraces America’s love of a Cinderella story while making the entire trajectory of this kid seem like something out of a glossy magazine, half believable and half star-spangled bullshit.

As he so often does, Berry manages to cover miles of ground in the narrative; his character arcs often move between cities and states rather than mere streets or neighborhoods. Woody Guthrie - and, believe me, I’m not bad-mouthing Guthrie - has nothing on this guy, except for maybe a union card and a darker outlook.

I also marvel at the unrequited love tale, “Nadine (Is That You?),” in which Berry employs a series of precisely-tooled vignettes to describe an hilarious tale of love never-lost, because it was never in the main character’s possession to begin with. You get it all here— a pithily-described city environment, a cartoonishly panicked storyline, and goofy turns of phrase that rise out of nowhere:

As I got on a city bus, and found a vacant seat,
I thought I saw my future bride walkin’ up the street.
I shouted to the driver, “Hey conductor, you must.
Slow down, I think I see her, please let me off the bus!”

Nadine. Honey is that you?
Oh, Nadine. Honey, is that you?
Seems like every time I see you, Darlin’, you got somethin’ else to do.

I saw her from the corner when she turned and doubled back,
And started walkin' toward a coffee-colored Cadillac.
I was pushin' through the crowd, tryin’ to get to where she's at.
And I was campaign-shoutin’ like a southern diplomat.

(chorus)

Downtown, searching for her, lookin’ all around.
Saw her gettin’ in a yellow cab headin’ uptown.
I caught a loaded taxi, paid up everybody's tab.
Flipped a twenty dollar bill, and told him, “Catch that yellow cab.”

(chorus)

She moves around like a wayward summer breeze.
“Go, driver, go! Go on- catch her for me, please!”
Movin’ through the traffic like a mounted cavalier.
Leanin’ out the taxi window, trying to make her hear.

(chorus)

“Movin’ through the traffic like a mounted cavalier?!” “Campaign-shoutin’ like a southern diplomat?!” These are not the similes of a charlatan. Berry takes joy in his use of language, and - on record, especially - you get thoroughly caught up in it (Bruce Springsteen specifically mentions that “coffee-colored Cadillac” in the Berry documentary, “Hail, Hail Rock & Roll!” Even the Boss marvels, as he should.)

"Nadine"'s lyrics , by the way, are tied to a Latin rhythmic figure that bounces up and down for the song’s entire running time, like the city bustling around the main character. This ain't “Be-Bop-a-Lula.” Berry, even if people don’t care to notice anymore, always got an “A+” in Composition. And virtually every significant rock & roller to follow him leaned over and copied from his paper.

He is, in a word, a genius.

Don't fool around here. Download “The Definitive Collection” by Chuck Berry. It contains no less than 30 indispensable songs, an entire Old Testament of rock that somehow never seems to age. Hail, hail rock & roll indeed.

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