Hail! Hail! Chuck Berry

Where to start with Chuck Berry, dead today at the age of 90? How about his first record, Maybellene? As he told a Soul Train audience 15 years later, "it was about a car and a girl," which means it was about rock & roll. He was a hard man to love as a person, but his best songs defined the word "infectious," inducing you to move and dropping perfect little lyrical couplets into your head. He was a keen observer, especially in the early days, and wrote songs about what teenagers did and what they wished they could do. Put all the classic songs together and it becomes clear that he created an American iconography as clearly defined as that of Norman Rockwell. 



And then there is the guitar playing, a combination of jump blues and country twang that defined the instrument as THE sound of rock & roll. Each solo is a clinic, linking riffs together in various combinations, always driven by electric energy. Live, he played with casual mastery, tossing his guitar this way and that, indulging in a wild array of entertaining poses and creating another iconography, this one of movement, like the famous duck walk.

Sounds, words, sights - Berry was the full package. As John Lennon said, "If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'." If you still house physical product in a collection, then your shelves are not complete without a copy of The Great Twenty-Eight, which features most of the classic songs from his early years.

While the really creative part of his career ended in around 1965, when he adapted the Liverpool sound for I Want To Be Your Driver, his last great single on Chess Records, he continued to be a live draw for nearly the rest of his life. There is the matter of My Ding-A-Ling, a puerile song that caught people's fancy at the dawn of the rock & roll revival in 1972, becoming Berry's only number one hit. It was an artistic injustice but commerce and art don't always get along, even when you're getting paid in cash. Despite the renewed interest, his tours were often slapdash affairs, with pick up bands, no rehearsals, and rote performances. His last album, 1979's Rock It, wasn't terrible - just indifferent, which may be worse.




We have Keith Richards to thank for convincing Berry to try a little harder, leading to the 1987 film, Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll. While there are some unnecessary guests, it's filled with wonderful performances of some of Berry's greatest songs, putting a fine cap on the legend's indomitable legacy. While the arguments with Richards got a lot of attention, one of my favorite Berry moments comes at the end of the movie. While the credits roll, we see him alone in his nightclub, playing the loneliest sounds known to man on a pedal steel guitar. Was this a glimpse of his heart? As the great man himself once sang, you never can tell.

 

Postscript: In 2016, on his 90th birthday, Berry announced a new album called Chuck, to be released in 2017. According to his son, Charles Berry, Jr., "These songs cover the spectrum from hard driving rockers to soulful thought provoking time capsules of a life's work." Whatever it turns out to be, Chuck Berry will always have a place in the firmament of American music.

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Buddy Holly.

Not The Price But The Cost

Lloyd Price, the untold story.

In 1969, 17 years after his first million seller, Lloyd Price nearly cracked the R&B Top 20 with the funky social criticism of Bad Conditions. "Psychedelic age on campus grounds/Tear gas, billy clubs and vicious hounds/People making promises that they can't keep/System's turning over for its final sleep/We're living in bad conditions!" That's a long way from Lawdy Miss Clawdy. It's also quite an accomplishment for a founding father of rock and roll to so successfully insert himself into late 60's culture. 

Lloyd Price NOW!, the album that contains Bad Conditions, also delivers credible takes on Light My Fire, Hey Jude, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, For Once In My Life, and other songs. It's a solid album, with Price in fine, soulful voice, but you won't hear a word about it in sumdumhonky, Price's new memoir. Except for a picture caption, you also won't hear a thing about how he ended up working with Don King to produce the notorious Rumble In The Jungle, or about how one of his labels released early sides by Wilson Pickett.

What you will hear a lot - and I mean A LOT - about is Price's disturbing and disgusting experiences with racism in the Jim Crow south. Growing up in Kenner, LA in the 1930's was a profoundly demoralizing experience for anyone of a darker tone, ruled as they were by all the iterations of "sumdumhonky" you can imagine, and some you likely can't. Casting a long shadow over Price's childhood was Ol' Jake, the barely literate local lawman. His idea of a good time was to hang around the railroad tracks with his friends, lying in wait for Price and other kids. "They'd stand to block our path and laugh their asses off. We were scared half to death because we didn't know what they might do next," Price writes in Who Feared Whom, the first chapter. "Sometimes they'd grab one of our hands and hold it to their ass and laugh while they farted on it and scream, "Boy, spot that!" This is what they called having fun: scaring little boys who were just eight and nine years old."

This is obviously horrendous and, along with cross-burning and lynching, forms a background which would be a challenge for the strongest among men to overcome. As Price puts it: "As we grow older we tend to let our minds review our souls and sometimes we are amazed at ourselves - and the things our hearts have withstood. As I see it now, the white man of my younger days was a master sociologist - and a brutal one at that - because he knew how to downplay a black man's pride, not taking account of the fact that we had limited opportunities." 

But overcome it Price did, following his desire to make music and also help support his family in the wake of his father's workplace injury. Of course, becoming a national celebrity with Lawdy Miss Clawdy at the age of 17 came with its own challenges, some of them the usual music biz tales of woe, some of them due to becoming a prominent black man in an America that rejected the very notion. Also, there's the fact that his music had a way of bringing black and white kids together on the dance floor in a society where race-mixing just wasn't done. Understand, Lawdy hit in 1952, which puts Price on the leading edge of both the rock and roll and civil rights revolutions.

But what of the music? Where did it come from and what were the roots of Price's creativity? Besides a few paragraphs here and there, we get precious little about it. We also don't hear much about trying to stay relevant in the rapidly changing world of pop culture - no thoughts on the British Invasion, the rise of James Brown and funk, not to mention disco and hip hop. While he does have some interesting things to say about being placed in the "oldie but goodie" ghetto, he spends more time asking questions with no answers like "Can you imagine an entire race of people who are afraid that God didn't like black people?"

Don't get me wrong - the tales of late-night drives through Mississippi in a brand new Cadillac or of bribing his way into Nigeria only to find "people, black people, peeing and pooping on the road" - range from harrowing to hilarious and are written vividly. But I ultimately found sumdumhonky to be an unsatisfying read. I couldn't help but feel that Ol' Jake might have won the day after all. To my mind, this makes Price's experience of racism even more tragic. It also makes sumdumhonky an important but deeply flawed book.

When I got sumdumhonky, I turned first to the pictures. Great shots abound - the trip to Hollywood for the 1953 Cash Box awards, getting down in a huge-collared jumpsuit in 1968, receiving an honorary doctorate in 2001. When I looked back at the photos after finishing the book, I was struck by the chasm between the story they told and the one the words depicted. Perhaps a good, tough editor or co-writer could have helped bring the two closer together.

One gift the book gave me was the discovery of Price's later music. Perhaps you'll enjoy it, too - here's a quick mix.

Record Fair Thoughts

"Rock'n'roll's a loser's game/It mesmerizes and I can't explain." - Ballad of Mott the Hoople (26th March 1972, Zurich)

The sheer con artistry of the music biz is never more present than at a record fair. Bands promoted as the next big thing fill the dollar bins while great music that never got its due is lovingly traded for big bucks. The former represents the bad investments of record labels, the latter the missed opportunities. One can't help becoming a bit of a skeptic after living a life in music, whether you're onstage, like Ian Hunter singing the words quoted above, or in the crowd, searching for greatness.

Of course, if you're going to talk about music industry charlatans, one would have to touch on used record dealers themselves. Sure there are books that try to rationalize pricing, but dealers know they can charge almost anything they want to the right customer - the one who just has to have whatever it is they've got. Everyone who has ever sold a record to a shop for a dollar and seen it hanging in the window for $20 knows what I mean. Most of them, though, are music lovers and crucial stewards of our recorded legacy.

These are the kind of thoughts I had early on at the WFMU record fair, but it has such a nice vibe and benefits a great local radio station so they were fleeting. They only returned when I was flipping through a bin and realized it was completely unchanged since the last WFMU event. Those Lee Dorsey CD's are still overpriced, thank you very much. Re-price, rearrange - do something to respect the long memories of music fans! Granted, I'm not a vinyl fetishist and I'm always on the hunt for the new so it's easy for me to be selective at an event like this. But I'm also so unreasonable about music that I could spend a few hours flipping through crates and listening to people rhapsodize about their finds without even buying anything and call it a day well spent.

The first vendor I hit, however, made me long for a sugar daddy. I could've dropped a $1,000 on box sets in a few minutes: Harry Nilsson, Bill Nelson, Leonard Cohen, Wilson Pickett, Miles Davis - all in perfect condition or sealed. Most of them were only minimally marked down, it's true, but the magnetism of such a haul was undeniable. He also had practically every issue of Ace records, the excellent British reissue label. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time immersing myself in his stock. I didn't buy anything at first as I wanted to make the full circuit, but I returned later for Miles Davis Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings - a six CD set for $30 and one of the few Miles boxes I don't already have.

My first trek around the enormous interior of the 69th Regiment Armory on 26th and Lexington was entirely focused on CD's in fact, but I only came up with one other object of desire: George Harrison's posthumous final album, Brainwashed. The reviews were always good for this one and you can't listen on Spotify (although a couple of people have put the full album on YouTube), so I thought $4 was well worth it for the full experience. George had his off moments but he's been my second-favorite Beatle since hearing the dark tones of Don't Bother Me and the brilliantly bitter Taxman as a child.

Going on the last day of the fair can be wise - sure things may be picked over, but people are also willing to deal. On my last go round at the armory, I got sucked by C.J. & Co.'s Devil's Gun album sticking out of a crate accompanied by the words, "Everything's $5 - and if you buy a few, I'll lower the price." The C.J. & Co. Record, featuring the classic title cut, was in good shape and is an out of print Dennis Coffey production so that stayed in my hot hands as I flipped through rest of the stock. Swathes of fantastic Philly soul, early disco and 70's funk kept me going. I struck gold with a sealed copy of Disco Connection by The Isaac Hayes Movement and, in a limited crate of soundtracks, an admittedly ratty copy of Curtis Mayfield's hard to find Claudine, featuring Gladys Knight & The Pips.

The final bin I looked at was 50's rock & roll. I pretty much have most of what I want in that area but I could not resist the album of "Fox Trots with Vocal Chorus by Bill Haley" simply called Rock Around The Clock. I was sold by the beautiful cover and the fact that I recently learned that my son has yet to hear that song. Also re-reading the quixotic tale of Haley in both Bob Stanley's Yeah Yeah Yeah and Mark Lewisohn's Tune In made me think this would be the perfect Haley record to have, instead of a slavishly complete clinically mastered CD reissue. Some music still needs a little smoke and mirrors to get across - or noisy grooves - and for all my sometimes cynical views, I'm always willing to fall in love all over again. Especially for the right price, which turned out to be $15 for all four records. See you at the next fair!

Buddy Holly.

Is there ever a bad time to talk about Buddy Holly? His birthday on September 7th is certainly a good occasion for these brief thoughts. 

In the late 70's I went through a spate of reading Anne Tyler books (didn't everybody?). One had a resonant image of a character, after a traumatic event, carrying themselves as if their head were an overfilled glass of milk. For some reason, I feel this way about Buddy Holly's music - as if his tragically attenuated career led to a small body of work that is easily containable - like a glass of milk - and I don't want to spill a drop.

On the other hand, that body of work is what I consider bedrock music. The songs are so perfectly constructed, the performances so natural, that they can be seen as nearly indivisible essences, like subatomic particles. This is one reason why covers of his songs are almost always disappointing. One of the best versions is The Beatles take on Words of Love, mainly because it's the most precise. That elemental power is also why listening to him, even the ballads, is so energizing. Not bad for barely four years of professional work.

Finally a word about influence. The self-contained unit of Buddy Holly & The Crickets set the template for much of what was to come (and inspired the name "The Beatles"). As Lou Reed put it, "You can't beat two guitars, bass, drums." He might have added that you can't beat having a great songwriter in the band. What would the 60's sound like if Buddy hadn't arrived at the precise moment he did? Perhaps John and Paul wouldn't have seen the need for George - or vice versa. Imagine that.

And as another quick exercise to appreciate him even further, consider all the life you've lived since turning 22. Happy birthday, Charles Hardin Holley!

Here's one favorite:

My wife and I had the words to True Love Ways read aloud as part of our wedding ceremony: 

Rave On, Buddy, Rave On: