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Friday, December 21, 2007
IT'S TOO DARK IN THERE
Chuck Berry
Concerto in B Goode
Mercury : 1969
[Buy It]
FISH AND CHIPS
Chuck Berry
Home Again
Chess : 1970
[Out of Print]
YOUR LICK
Chuck Berry
San Francisco Dues
Chess : 1971
[Out of Print]
MY DREAM
Chuck Berry
San Francisco Dues
Chess : 1971
[Out of Print]
PASS AWAY
Chuck Berry
Rock It
Atco : 1979
[Buy It]
Chuck Berry is playing B.B. King's on December 30. Of course you should go see him. He's Chuck Berry.
I recently expressed this opinion to a friend who responded by reminding me of the infamous golden shower film, in which Berry can be seen urinating on the faces of women. "I used to love him," she said. "Now I hate him." Those seemed like the same things to me.
Another friend wondered if Berry, at 81, could still take the stage. "Well," I said, "he played B.B. King's this fall, and then he went to Scandinavia. You can check it out on YouTube. It's not exactly the Led Zeppelin reunion, but he seems like he's in good shape." That friend shrugged.
A third friend considered my advice. Then she turned to me and said, "Well, are you going?" That stopped me. I hadn't planned on it. But my reasons are a little more complicated. I have never seen Berry live, I don't think, although I do have a vague recollection of him playing at Summerfest in Milwaukee one summer when I was visiting my cousins. My problem with a Chuck Berry concert, at least in theory, is that it's almost certain to be a show dense with his hits -- all great songs, unquestionably, but also all songs that have been seared into my brain, and his, and the brains of everyone else in earshot. I can't imagine that it's particularly rewarding to be present for the four hundred thousandth probably perfunctory performance of "Roll Over Beethoven." To call that horse dead is an insult to dead horses.
There is, of course, a Chuck Berry concert I would go to without a second's thought, but it is a Chuck Berry concert that exists only in my mind -- a concert of some of his lesser-known and later songs, particularly those that he recorded after he returned to Chess in 1970. The Chess resurgence of the early seventies, which I'll get to in a second, was Berry's second comeback. The first one came seven years earlier, when Berry was released from prison after serving three years for violating the Mann Act. This has been well-documented -- Berry, who always had an eye for very young ladies, in song and evidently in life, had invited a teenage Apache girl he met in Mexico back to St. Louis to work in the hat-check room of his night club. She was fired from the club and promptly arrested on prostitution charges. Berry was arrested, too, for transporting a minor across state lines for immoral purposes.
In retrospect, it seems like selective prosecution, though it's hard to argue that he was entirely railroaded. Whatever the case, while he was in prison from 1960 to 1963, the British Invation accelerated the music scene at an alarming rate, leaving many of the rockers of the fifties behind. Berry bounced back in 1964 and 1965, releasing a second round of classics, including "You Never Can Tell" and "Nadine (Is It You?)," the latter of which contained some of the most sophisticated rhythms and lyrics of his entire career:
She moves around like a wayward summer breeze,
Go, driver, go, go, catch her for me, please.
Moving through the traffic like a mounted cavalier
Leaning out the taxi window trying to make her hear
Berry released two more albums in 1965, "Chuck Berry In London" and "Fresh Berry's," the latter pairing him with young blues stars like Michael Bloomfield, the former finding Berry himself sharpening his sound on songs like "Dear Dad" and "I Want To Be Your Driver." Then came a second exile, not to prison this time but to Mercury records. Two of the four Mercury albums were live sets or rerecorded hits collections; one was a subpar but sometimes rewarding studio set; and the last, "Concerto in B Goode," was a bizarre experiment in the kind of acid blues that was all the rage (compare albums like Howlin Wolf's New Album and Muddy Waters' Electric Mud). "It's Too Dark In There" is one of the highlights of Concerto in B Goode, but it can't mask the fact that Mercury was the slackest phase of his career, not worthless but definitely worth less than his Chess output. The unprecedented title track was an 18-minute instrumental improvisation on his most famous song. (The album is long out of print; the link above will take you to an Amazon.ca page with a price of $225 Canadian.)
In 1970, Berry rejoined his former label. His first album back, Home Again, opened with a significant one-two punch: "Tulane," a story about a drug-dealing couple that is as much Elmore Leonard as Leonard Chess, and "Have Mercy Judge," which revisits "Tulane" from the perspective of one of the dealers, now about to be sentenced and wondering if his wife will remain faithful while he's in his "stony mansion." Both are major works in Berry's canon, beautifully played and passionately performed, and both have migrated to almost every greatest hits collections. The rest of the record is even more out of print than Concerto in B Goode, including "Fish and Chips," a strange little piece tucked away on the second side. Berry had always fooled around with accents, from "Anthony Boy" to "Havana Moon," and when I first came across "Fish and Chips," I assumed it was some across-the-pond japery, maybe a swipe at the English rock stars who had dethroned him. Rather, it's a simple ditty about getting with your girlfriend: Fish and chips
A little Coke and you, oh, babe
Honey drips
Two more to go, oh, babe
Let's go on back
The trip will be groovy, oh, babe
Jump in the sack
Flip your mood, oh, babe
Come to me
I really do love you, oh, babe
Honey, honey
Honey dripper too, oh, babe
Loved you before
I loved you a long, long time, my love
Loving you more
Then I got to have more of
Fish and chips For fifteen years, Berry had been writing about sex; in fact, there were long stretches where he seemed to write about nothing else. But his sex was fifties sex -- clandestine, desperate, sometimes implied by a single detail. In real life, the Summer of Love had come and gone, and the culture had shifted to the point where the Beatles could record "Why Don't We Do It In the Road," a song about two monkeys fucking. With its lilting melody and dripping honey, "Fish and Chips" is clearly dirty, but just how dirty is it? What is the fish in the fish and chips? Is it the woman's meal or the woman herself? Is Berry going out to eat with her or eating her out? Should Coke be capitalized or not? And of all the songwriters in the world, Berry's the one I'm least likely to believe doesn't have a double meaning in mind for the word "groovy." After all, they jumped in the sack and he flipped her mood.
The next Chess album, San Francisco Dues, was more uneven, mixing a lazy catalog of other rock acts ("Festival"), a pointless rewrite of "Jambalaya" ("Bordeaux in My Pirough"), and a blues about the free love and music that flowed like water in hippy-dippy San Francisco (the title track) with some top-drawer instrumentals and spoken-word pieces. Berry's instrumentals had always been staples of his album, and they were filler only in comparison to his titanic classics. "Your Lick" has sexy growls and mumbles and some killer slide guitar. And in "My Dream," Berry recites a poem about his ideal house over wonderful boogie-woogie piano furnished by Johnnie Johnson, his lifelong musical partner. It reminded me of a Pat Jordan article about Wilt Chamberlain in which Jordan somewhat skeptically describes Wilt's self-designed house, in which ambition and solipsism have run amok. The song is almost six minutes, an eternity for Berry, and initially he seems preoccupied with the good side of bad weather: The roof of it will have peaked lines and contours that dip
And form shadowy eaves where the little raindrops can drip
That sweet pitter-patter of raindrops at play
Is such a beautiful sound on a quiet gloomy day He goes on, though, at great length, discussing his love for a woman and how he will find it through contemplation. It's spiritual but not inaccessible, though his version of meditation sounds a little like the golden shower film: And I read my many books I have in my bachelor's nest
While the sun goes drooping down in the west
And I'll feel that gold warm light on my face
And then I'll start tripping to some far-off place After San Francisco Dues, he scored a freak number one hit with his live version of "My Ding-A-Ling," but karma set in and returns diminished once again. Bio, from 1973, was dismal, and Chuck Berry 75 was merely mediocre. Berry left Chess for good. Then, in 1979, on the heels of some messy tax-evasion trouble, Berry released Rock It, an album whose cover showed his Gibson guitar orbiting the earth. The songs were once again compact and the performances energetic, and "Oh What a Thrill" was enough of a return to form that Rockpile rushed to cover it. (Strangely, the record is available only as an import from brick-and-mortar stores, but pops right up on the iTunes store.) Rock It closed with another spoken-word piece; this one used as its lyrics a very slightly adapted version of "The King's Ring," an 1866 poem by Theodore Tilton. Berry changed the title for reasons of emphasis, renaming it "Pass Away," which all things must do. The final stanza of Tilton's poem finds the king suffering from palsy. Berry is even more brutal: Sick and sore with cancer; weak and tired and old, just minutes yet to go to pass the gates o' gold
Spake he with his dying breath, "Life is done, so what is death?"
Then in answer to the king fell a sunbeam on his ring
Reflecting words he failed to say: "Even this shall pass away" To this day, Rock It remains Berry's last studio album, and "Pass Away" is a fitting valediction -- rock-and-roll's archetypal lyricist and guitarist reciting someone else's words and burying his guitar in the distant corners of the mix, space-blues style.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
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