A Word for Our Father, Chuck Berry
by the Reverend Wayne Coomers
(Summer 2001)

Any time is a good time to break out some Chuck Berry (The Great 28 is handy, dandy, and cheap). And, by God, he's the Daddy if anybody is. Seems to me that his loud, ringing, back-talking, gauntlet-dropping guitar, his furious beat, and his crystal clear vision of a changing America mark the point at which rhythm and blues, rockabilly, blues, and country all become other things. Think about it: you can call Elvis by a couple of those names, Little Richard one and Bo Diddley maybe two--but you can't call Chuck ANY of 'em. He is rock and roll. Plain and simple. The guitar and the beat and the rhythm of the words rocked, and Johnnie Johnson (who's suing the boss as I wrote) or Lafayette Leake laid a rolling sea of keys beneath it all.

That guitar. Like I said, loud. Still. Has there ever been a six-string intro more eye-opening than the barely-harnessed explosion of "Maybelline"? It's so fat and sprawling it almost doesn't sound like a guitar. Then there's the metallic scat-line which leads off "Johnny B. Goode." Supposedly Chuck transposed it from one of Johnnie J's favorite licks, but Johnnie stole it from a horn riff Mary Lou Williams wrote for Andy Kirk's 12 Clouds of Joy big band in the late '30s, so who gives a rip? Rock and roll--and pretty much any great creative achievement--is inspired thievery anyhow. He got other licks from Carl Hogan in Louis Jordan's Tympani 5 and from T-Bone Walker, so let's just say Chuck has genius taste and leave it at that. Beyond the irresistible intros, there's the solos (the one on "Too Much Monkey Business" is almost punk rock: a spark shower), the rhythm ("Memphis," "Around and Around," and "Carol" are Tungsten-tough architectural blue prints for 75% of future rock and roll songs), and, best of all, the fills, in call-and-response tandem with his vocals, like a buddy backing him up in a knife fight. Even if he does play horribly nearly every night in the present, he had command of the whole vocabulary of guit-noise. Can you name an axe-slinger today who's a quadruple threat: lead-in, rhythm, solo, and fills?

Then there's the lyrics, always delivered with a hustler's cool, a shaman's confidence, and a priest's compassion. As has been said before, they've seldom, if ever, been topped. He was equally confortable with futuristic fantasy (the exquisite Airmobile of "You Can't Catch Me," destined, I am sure, to one day be reality), explicit protest ("Too Much Monkey Business"), subtle protest ("Brown-Eyed Handsome Man"), cultural prophecy ("Roll Over, Beethoven"), explicit lust ("Little Queenie"), subtle lust ("Nadine," or "Reelin' and Rockin'"), state-of-the music pronunciamentos ("Rock and Roll Music"), patriotic anthems ("Back in the U.S.A."), vehicular celebration--a speciality, of course--("Maybelline," "No Money Down," "Jaguar and Thunderbird," the underrated "Dear Dad), or simple, popular rock and roll songs ("Carol").

But his meat and potatoes was writing about the everyday lives of the kids who were buying his records. It was coldly calculated; he boasts in his autobiography that he deliberately composed with the popular (and predominantly white) market in mind, a sin for which he'd be castigated by the Sentinels of True Rawk today. If he hadn't aimed thataway, though, we'd have been deprived of the ultimate rock and roll lexicon, dipped into by everybody from Dylan to Thunders since. From his audience's innate wisdom ("Almost Grown," "You Never Can Tell"), desire for rebellion ("School Days"), potentially--hell, literally--liberating hero-worship ("Sweet Little Sixteen"), upward-and-onward conquest of boredom ("No Particular Place to Go") and dreams of having it all ("Johnny B. Goode"), he nailed it. Motivated to observe the youthful new crowd closely by a yen for big bucks, he succeeded in exhilarating fashion.

And, amazingly, the works he created weren't just temporal in nature. "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" may be more true today than it was then; I think of that song every time a white 6th grader raves to me about Ja Rule or the Wu or D'Angelo. The key line of "Johnny B. Goode" still defines pop dreams: "Maybe some day your name will be in lights," with its hint of improbable success. And though Mad Cow Disease has put a damper on many an American's beef jones, we're still the place "where hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day"--and damned proud of it. "Too Much Monkey Business" is itching for an iconoclastic traditionalist's revision; Chuck saw the deluge of trivia coming, but he didn't realize how deep we'd be swimming in a swamp of minutiae some 40 years later. OK, we ain't got no Airmobile yet--but there's still time.

This summer's been doing a number on the Old Reverend so far. Haven't heard a new thing with much vision, verve, or vivacity for months. So maybe it's time to go to the wellspring. Mark Twain once wrote something to the effect that, hey, when I was fourteen, I thought my dad was the stupidest man on the planet, but when I turned 21, I couldn't believe how much he'd learned in seven years. We're way past that point, you know? So you could do worse tonight than to commune with the magic songs of Daddy Rolling Stone.

After all, he da man. The rest of us are just visiting.

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