“In my universe, Chuck Berry is indispensable!”
— Bob Dylan
Coming from Dylan, whose take on the American musical pantheon resonates more than most, such acclaim for the man many call the “father of rock and roll” carries some weight.
In his interview with Douglas Brinkley for a May 2009 Rolling Stone cover story, Dylan spoke further about his buddy Chuck. “All that brilliance is still there, and he’s still a force of nature. As long as Chuck Berry’s around, everything’s as it should be. This is a man who has been through it all.”
Berry, who will be bringing his iconic stature, amazing persona, and “duck walk” to the stage at Deer Valley’s Snow Park Amphitheater this coming Saturday night, has always drawn praise from those who truly understood the genre. “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry,'” was how John Lennon put it.
As part of his induction as the very first member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, it was noted, “While no individual can be said to have invented rock and roll, Chuck Berry comes the closest of any single figure to being the one who put all the essential pieces together. It was his particular genius to graft country & western guitar licks onto a rhythm & blues chassis in his very first single, ‘Maybellene.'”
Putting his finger directly onto the pulse of the classic 1950s teenage themes of hot rods and young love, Berry reinvented the lexicon and vernacular of the times with lyrical street-slang and highly danceable guitar riffs that spoke directly to every pimply-faced wannabe “gear-jammer” within earshot of his favorite “DJ.”
“The motor cooled down the heat went down/And that’s when I heard that highway sound/The Cadillac a sittin’ like a ton of lead/A hundred and ten half a mile ahead /The Cadillac lookin’ like it’s sittin’ still/And I caught Maybellene at the top of the hill.”
There would be no looking back. Soon he would take us “Deep down Louisiana close to New Orleans,/Way back up in the woods among the evergreens/There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood,/Where lived a country boy name of Johnny B. Goode/ Who never ever learned to read or write so well,/But he could play the guitar like ringing a bell.” NASA sent that song as a greeting to other worlds aboard the Voyager I spacecraft!
To the emerging American youth culture, “Berry-world” was populated by strange characters and stranger notions. It was about cruising with the radio cranked and no particular place to dwell. “‘C’est la vie,’ say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.”
You could be “Flying across the desert in a TWA” and catch sight of “a woman walking across the sand” lookin’ for her “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” Or a guy pleading into the phone: “Long distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee. Help me find the party trying to get in touch with me.”
But mostly, what it was all about was heading out to the dance in your buddy’s ’34 V-8 Ford and “boppin'” with your current crush, which usually involved unreciprocated affection of some sort. That was OK, though. We were in on the ground floor of the evolution of “angst” and we had Chuck to tell us we weren’t alone.
“They’re really rockin’ in Boston, In Pittsburgh, Pa./Deep in the heart of Texas, And round the ‘Frisco Bay./All over St.Louis, And down in New Orleans,/All the cats wanna dance with Sweet Little Sixteen.”
Berry’s legend had blossomed earlier when he bumped into Muddy Waters in Chicago and got steered toward Leonard Chess and Chess Records. There he joined Muddy, Howling Wolf, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Bo Diddley and others as progenitors of what became the phenomenon of “Chicago Blues.”
Chuck Berry, however, took the music in another direction. Like B.B. King, he began incorporating the more sophisticated jazz licks of T-Bone Walker into original tunes that were more accessible to a wider demographic, including white youth. Before you could say “hail, hail, rock and roll,” Little Richard and Elvis were onboard and the stone was rolling.
Chuck Berry plays Deer Valley Saturday night and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if “Lightnin'” shows up.
“Roll Over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news!”
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.