Interesting fact: all the most important rock and roll pioneers, provided they did not die too soon (really too soon) - Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Elvis, of course - managed to live to a very old age. It's hard to believe, especially after everything they've been through: Little Richard (he'll be 84 now), Jerry Lee Lewis (81) and Fats Domino (88) are still alive and, even more amazingly, still playing. No one is more long-lived or active than Chuck Berry, who turned ninety on October 18. I guess that's how it fits when it comes to the man with the strangest career in rock and roll and almost certainly the "hottest" in the honorary group of old men - although he could easily compete with the black and white preacher duo Little Richard and Jerry Lee for the championship in craziness.
From that, something else interesting, and far more important: although the rock and roll direction in the collective perception and cultural memory is identified with a single instrument that is the very symbol of the direction - with the electric guitar of course - none of the songs that are there around 1954-1955. started this, for a long time, the most acute genre of the twentieth century, it did not start with her. Of course, it is difficult to determine which one it would be first a rock'n'roll song (how would it even be established, and according to what criteria?), but here, already among the usual suspects, it's easy to see: That's alright., Mama, Elvis' "New Testament", young Presley begins by tapping the acoustic guitar and then the rest of the trio joins in; Jerry Lee Lewis begins Great Balls of Fire four-note piano ostinato; Ike Turner's Rocket 88, in persistent and "positively discriminatory" racial revaluation, often taken as "first" in past years, also appears on the piano. For some reason (probably under the British influence), the song has long been considered as the beginning, by Bill Halley Rock Around the Clock opens with the famous counter: "one – two – three o'clock, four o'clock rock...". On the contrary, and incomparably compared to the harmless Halley - Little Richard, perhaps the greatest enigma of rock and roll, is his obscene Tutti-frutti also ignited with vocals - squealing, and non-lexical, with a series of voices without meaning, almost surrealistic (and infinitely more authentic than the contemptuous and cold European surrealists), a "sentence" of terrifying force and freneticness even today, which means nothing and at the same time, to those who understand, means everything: "A wop boom a loo mop a puddle
boom tree...!
JUST LIKE A RINGING BELL: Chuck Berry was the first to create a song that begins with a sound and musical "pattern" that, like the instrument itself, will be synonymous with the entire genre - a guitar riff. And that - quite faithfully to rock and roll - by stroking the intro note by note from Louis Jordan and his Ain't That Just Like a Woman (fans of the latest Nobel laureate will immediately make a further connection there). But Chuck Berry did something else here: he "bolded" the phrase, duplicating and bending the notes with a provocative, precisely "cheeky" and extremely exciting tone, which is both "dirty" and ringing (after all, "he could play guitar just like a ringing a bell", as the verse says right after) - a tone full of optimism and sarcastic in equal measure, just like the song itself a moment later. Johnny B. goode with his intro on a Gibson 335, after which a small band runs in and drives on as if endlessly, announced himself as a complete novelty and at the same time codified the musical and cultural direction. Regardless of the famous inaugurators and colleagues, the base will remain exactly what is heard on the recording for a long time: the piano is "optional" (although here it is played masterfully by Johnnie Johnson) - only the guitar, bass and drums will be important. And the voice, of course, the one that would tell the story.
Chuck's story, unlike his seemingly cheerful fictional character, is much darker. Born in the same year and in the same city as Miles Davis, in 1926 in St. Louis, Missouri, and also atypically for black musicians at the time, in an upper-middle-class family - a fact that had a great influence on his development, character and general culture, which will be seen when he starts writing songs. The parallel with Miles and a similar social background is not just a coincidence. Like the great jazzer, Chuck Berry faced a psychosocial "fall from Paradise" in his early adulthood, coming out of protection into the then (?) harsh American world determined by race, discrimination and abject violence, so the shock of such exposure permanently determined the musician. Racism combined with manager's fraud, the almost comical unfairness of the music business, inequality, undervaluation of all kinds, all of that caused deep and understandable hurt and frustrations that manifested in the author, little by little and more and more noticeable, through the consequences: anger, aggressiveness, mistrust and avarice ( To this day, Chuck travels to concerts with a leather briefcase, so only when the organizer brings the fee in cash, does the musician go on stage). The worst of all is that the circumstances seem to have reflected on the personal psychological world, which, unfortunately, developed into dark and unhealthy urges, some of which stirred up to serious obsessions. Because of them, he was repeatedly arrested, convicted and served his sentence. Still, the bitter taste and unpleasantness remain.
IT'S GOT A BACK BEAT: On the other, brighter and more important side, the relative safety of an early age, the influence of home circumstances and a solid education were reflected in his attitude towards texts. Chuck Berry is without a doubt the innovator of the sung word of rock and roll. The reason for this, as he says, is that in his youth he did not listen to the blues, but, counterintuitively, to country & western music, which drew his attention to the narrative element - country always tells stories.
Rock and roll lyrics, we saw with Little Richard, "do not have to mean anything" (although, of course, this is not the case) - it is important that they have percussiveness and rhythm, that they "swing", and the meaning is elsewhere. And Chuck Berry changed that. His lyrics really "roll", but they also brought long verses and stanzas to rock and roll, as well as content, story, and stylistic solutions, unusual rhymes and associations. Chuck Berry is generally the most "verbose" of the rock and rollers and as such is closer to the method of the so-called "great American songbook" from the previous era - Porter, Carmichael, Berlin and the Gershwin brothers. He was the first to create autopoetic songs and those whose theme is the genre itself: "Just let me hear some of that rock 'n' roll music – any ol' way you choose it" - where he defines the prominent rhythmic feature of the direction: "it's got a back beat, you can't lose it" - "back beat", what Bajaga accurately and wittily described in our country as "the drum hits you, only in two", a blow to another age, the falling one, which "you can't kill", which is missable. Chuck expands the vocabulary of the previously "primitive" style, rhymes "melody" and "symphony", quotes other musical genres, rhyming strangers: "tango - mambo - congo - piano", teases "modern jazz" and humorously apostrophizes classical composers - "Roll over Beethoven - tell Tchaikovsky the news". After all, the already mentioned "legitimacy" and trademark are also a play on words - Johnny B. goode, this is how the character's name and surname are written, but in pronunciation, in singing, it sounds like "Johnny, be good" - or closer to "Johnny, be good".
Which brings us to the most important thing.
It's fascinating to look at and, apart from the repeated cliché, it's like really seeing for the first time: every big name and all the main currents of the best periods of rock and roll are most directly influenced by Chuck Berry: the Beach Boys were the first to take it tone by tone sweet little sixteen (which would be hard to pass today due to lasciviousness on the border of what is permissible) and pasted another text over it and called it, what else, Surfin 'USA. The Beatles, like a kind of "Leviathan" that will eat everything around them, marked their own beginning and end with Berry: they early adopted the above-described Rock'n'roll Music, and the last album is opened by Lennon Come Together – Berry's slow motion You Can't Catch Me. The Rolling Stones' debut single is a cover of Chuck Come on. Bob Dylan is a verbal speedster Subterranean Homesick Blues introduced new principles of how to write a pop song - but precisely its characteristic rhythmic and prosodic basis was taken from Berry's Too Much Monkey Business. In the next generation, at the zenith of the form itself, the point of its (self) combustion, Sex Pistols through a medley with Richman Roadrunner they made a late modernist "deconstruction" Johnny B. goode – parodying and affirming it in the same move.
AND THEN GO DANCING ALONE: We should stop there. Namely, we are not writing all this from the periphery and from a frog's perspective, as is often done from all provinces since the beginning of time; we are not describing a distant and abstract phenomenon that has nothing to do with us from here. Rock and roll in its first incarnation entered many cultures, by the nature of things. But in some of them he remained mostly superficial and in them Chuck Berry didn't mean anything in particular. Or nothing really important, which would encourage a true teaching and study of it separate language, musical and cultural, with its foundations, grammar and "scholasticism". In Italy, Portugal or Poland, let's say, taking a "random sample", this sound remained as a marginalia and did not give birth to things of importance.
On the contrary, in a strange, complicated culture and a country just like that - our former one - the American author and his sound have been creating connections since the 1960s, and have left traces that are impressive and difficult to explain. And what is more fascinating, also in stages, as in America and Britain. Thus, in the innocent days of Yugoslav rock and roll, Toni Sovilj and Njego Siluete recorded an all but innocent cover (although that could also be in quotation marks) Johnny B. goode - "Stop, Johnny." A unique single, but soon almost forgotten in the acceleration of culture in its happiest period - especially when the local "rock and roll Leviathan" came on the scene, which, like the Beatles, covered everything and divided time into before and after itself: The White Button, of course. The people of Sarajevo recorded the boogie song "Don't sleep my little music while it's playing", thinly disguised Rock'n'Roll Music, with which it was inaugurated that "if you wanna dance with me" will henceforth be "and then odo' dance alone". That reign will be interrupted only seven long years later, during the change of generations, a new wave/wave - Idoli will also have the song "Hajde" on their first (mini)album, which of course is a cover Come on, with which Jagger and Richards made their debut in 1963, while the always and in every way different Johnny Štulić will make perhaps the most joyful cover of all with Azra - the same Johnny B. goode which became, anew and consistently autopoetic, "Johnny, be good." In the middle of the decade, the eighties, a new band will appear, adolescently angry, brash and musically fierce. He not only wanted to return to the basics in terms of style, in the countless sub-genres of the developed genre, but he also intended to throw both previous generations of domestic rock and roll into the dustbin - both Bijelo Dugme and Idols, metaphorically and literally. Partibrejkers, the last truly important Yugoslavian band, with their penchant for the "roots spelling" of rock and roll, dug into the past and found somewhere there Sovil's confusing cover, transforming it on the first album into something completely fresh, as if written for the first time, with underground invisible veins of tradition . With a text about a former idol and the seduction of his girlfriend, sung slyly and with a pouting demeanor like that of a young singer, as befits the post-pubertal street "philosophy" radiated by Zoran Kostić - Cane, the young singer of Partibrejkers, Stop, Johnny is the song by which the band is recognized even now, and most of them neither know nor care (it's not their job after all), where it came from and how deep its roots are. Therefore, perhaps it should not be surprising and perhaps it is a "higher justice" that it is the Belgrade band that is being written about these days and New York Times, was the one who - many years after both country and culture ended in disaster - was assigned to open a Chuck Berry concert. And to get to know as much as possible (in the singer's nasal description: "my hand in his rucherda") and talk to the one from whom it started.
Today, taking all this, on the ninetieth birthday of the indestructible Charles Edward Anderson Berry, the whole thing could be expressed in a paraphrase of one of Canet's sentences: rock and roll is probably not "eternal", but it seems that "children are still faithful to it". The better and more durable one at least.
