By the time Chuck Berry had his breakout hit “Maybellene” in the summer of 1955, he was already nearly thirty years old, with significant experience: he had spent three years of his adolescence in a reformatory for armed robbery; been a boxer and a janitor; worked in an automobile factory and an ammunition plant; trained as a hair stylist and a beautician; been married for nearly seven years; and been industrious and canny enough to purchase a pretty three-room house for himself and his wife, Themetta, known as Toddy. He had one existence chalked up, and was headed out toward several more.
“Maybellene” is classic Chuck Berry: a boy driving a Ford V-8 is chasing a girl in a Cadillac DeVille, the two cars potent symbols for sexual jockeying and pursuit. A rhythm of negotiated feint, never crossing into anything too obvious or vulgar—bumper-to-bumper, side to side, until finally the man-machine gives up the ghost. “The Ford got hot and wouldn’t do no more.” But then he suddenly revives and catches Maybellene “at the top of the hill.” Crest, cusp, plateau. The world spread out before him, waiting to be embraced.
Berry never claimed that he invented rock and roll, and was always quite happy to point out where he’d gotten his inspiration: from the great hinterland and invisible college of rhythm and blues. He happily fessed up to his influences, such as Louis Jordan and T-Bone Walker. There was a lot of guilt-free recycling involved—transplanting a riff or a lick, a line or a trope, into fresh new settings. (Jordan’s guitarist Carl Hogan was the source for the famous opening guitar riff of “Johnny B. Goode.”) Even the execrable (but insanely popular) late hit “My Ding-A-Ling” was a virtual xerox of a roiling 1952 R & B side by the marvelous Dave Bartholomew. He tinkered, customized, and retooled songs as if giving an old car a new coat of paint, adding horsepower, then taking them back out on the open road again.
What he did do, indisputably, was visualize a whole new postwar landscape, and provide a soundtrack for its leisure time: a hybrid somewhere between white pop and black R & B. Smith has a lovely phrase for this: “Scraps and rags and things given away for free were pulled together and made into a brand new flag.” Rhythm and blues had always referenced highways and trains (even that dark Faust of the Delta blues, Robert Johnson, name-checks Greyhound buses and Terraplane cars), but Berry was the first person to give it a pop art twist. “Up to the corner and ’round the bend / Right to the juke joint, you go in / Drop the coin right into the slot / You gotta hear something that’s really hot.” All the fetishes of the emerging teenage culture of ready consumption appear in the mind’s eye: car radios, bright milkshakes, sizzling burgers, blaring jukeboxes. Dating and driving and disposable income. There is far more clamor about travel and consumer goods in Berry’s music than there is about sex and/or love. Also notable: the number of songs that reference marriage. (If he were a book, he’d, improbably, be Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties.) He doesn’t really write what you would call love songs—beautiful souls, pining hearts—rather, his songs are about things pursued, purchased, possessed. Various makes of cars. A “hi-fi phono.” High-heeled shoes. Skyscrapers. A TWA flight. “A model on the cover of a magazine.” Berry understood that technology would change everything, would shape the very nature of desire. “She could not leave her number, but I know who placed the call / ’Cause my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall.” Sharp and punchy and streamlined, his songs are like episodes of a TV series that had yet to be made by anyone.
From an early age, Berry loved to tinker: junior handyman, hipster bricoleur. “Taking things apart explained the way the world worked far better than a sermon,” Smith writes. Berry comes to see everything, including learning the guitar, as a matter of mathematics. Radios, guitars; he wants to see the nuts and bolts behind the magical sound. Central to his development were what he called the “magic boxes,” the family piano and the Victrola record player. There was nothing he liked to do more than take something apart and put it back together again—which is just what he did with his music. He took the reigning spirit of R & B—raucous, gritty, nasty, alternately melancholy and murderous—and toned down its saturnine aspects while buffing up and emphasizing its Saturday-night shine.
If his scientific bent was one thing that marked him out, the other crucial difference between Berry and his musical contemporaries is that he wrote his own songs. Most performers at the time relied for their material on managers, publishing companies, pals of pals, or pals of heavy guys in fedoras. Berry wanted to rely on no one but himself. Even if you’re not a big Chuck Berry fan, there’s no arguing with his back catalogue. To list just the best-known songs from his impeccable run between 1955 and 1964 is to survey an unparalleled achievement: “Maybellene,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” “School Day,” “Rock And Roll Music,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Carol,” “Sweet Little Rock and Roller,” “Back in the U.S.A.,” “Memphis, Tennessee,” “Let It Rock,” “No Particular Place to Go,” “You Never Can Tell,” “Promised Land.” (...)
Elvis and Little Richard and Jerry Lee sang as if they had something trapped inside of them that was so combustible it could only escape as a staggered hiss of stutters, moans, and squeals. When Berry sings, he enunciates crisply, as if he is still reciting poetry in his mother’s parlor. He never smears or elides his words, everything is clear and precise, milk teeth in the mouth of a cartoon character, pebbles in a stream. As an exercise, try reading out the lyrics of “Promised Land” yourself—even slowly, never mind at Berry’s kind of clip. The song communicates a feeling of travel as a breathless rush—and yet every name vibrates, every word rings like a bell. He’s a vaudeville comic who makes sure the whole audience, right to the back of the hall, registers every last hint, wink, and syllable.
Watch TV clips of Berry from his pomp (my favorite is a black-and-white one from Belgian TV, circa 1965, in which a sharp-suited Berry seems to be playing with a full-on jazz combo), and you realize that he was more of a natural all-round entertainer than most of his contemporaries. He managed to transfer the spirit of the traveling tent show into the compressed television age. He had an innate sense of what was required—something cool in both the jazz and the McLuhanite sense. He acts out his songs, using his exceptionally mobile face and beanpole body and cheese straw limbs. There is something almost unreal about him, like a zoot-suited roué out of a Tex Avery production. The country cousin and the city slicker in one and the same body. A walking contradiction. (...)
There was a paradox in the way the blues was framed by its early white enthusiasts: in order to be considered “authentic,” bluesmen had to remain bowed down, angry, bereft, defeated by the miseries of black life under American capitalism. Its practitioners, however, saw playing music precisely as a way out of that cul-de-sac. They wanted all the available spoils: shiny weekend suits, not tattered dungarees. Berry’s “poor boy” is no longer cooling his heels down on the farm, he’s being served food and drinks by an air hostess. There was no blues or church in Berry. His music may have been dashboard light to the crossroads darkness of the blues, but this wasn’t a sanctified light. It was more like a neon sign on a night out. It’s impossible to imagine him ever singing anything like Howlin’ Wolf’s “When I Laid Down I Was Troubled.”
Berry’s peers had a sense of sin and damnation in common, to the degree that their music might be taken for a form of speaking in tongues. Songs such as “Lucille” and “Great Balls of Fire” are metabolic eruptions; Berry’s music lacked any comparable sense of imminent demise. What it did convey was his own feeling of “ridin’ along in my automobile”: the roll and sway of a big car on an open road on a sunny day. One hand—or maybe just a pinkie—on the wheel. Not creeping along in a traffic jam to work, but driving for the sheer pleasure of it, without a destination, taking in the scenery. This is a man at ease.
Did anyone else write songs that were quite so visual? “They furnished off an apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale / The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale.” Elvis might sing about being down at the end of lonely street, but Berry would give you directions to the hotel parking lot, the bellhop’s name, and the color of the lobby carpet. His songs might almost be the memory-jog notes of someone scouting locations or pitching a sharp new road movie. They seem less like the cinema of the late Fifties and early Sixties than like advertisements or MTV-era music videos. Deft cuts from scene to scene. Traveling shots and bright flashbulb edits. “Promised Land” traverses the continent in two minutes and twenty-four seconds, via Greyhound bus, train, and plane. Berry’s motto is not “I’m a soul man,” but “I am a camera.”
It was his cousin Harry who introduced him, as a teenager, to the joys of photography (and much more besides: chemistry, rockets, astronomy, hypnotism). Harry “provided a conduit of science and rational thought to Chuck, plus also plenty of dirty pictures.” At this point we hear an ominous organ note on the soundtrack: “Over the years, Berry would amass a vast collection of cameras, video monitors, darkroom technology, and assorted recording devices.” Even after the success of “Maybellene,” his personal business cards read CHARLES BERRY, PHOTOGRAPHER. In tandem, Berry developed what might be termed an interest in, shall we say, the wilder shores of love. You get the impression that music was never really the place where he lost, found, or explored himself and his deepest desires. That place existed in the center of a Venn diagram whose twin cheeks were sex and tech.
This was consonant with his long-term taste for DIY, and just a different form of tinkering, of seeing things from all angles. An anthropologist of filth, Berry was fascinated by bodily waste, fore and aft. Boundary fetish: a moment between inside and outside. Berry owned and maintained several properties in the Hollywood Hills, and by the late Eighties visitors to one house in particular might find more than they bargained for in terms of interior design:
In the living room was an exotic table. A plate of glass was spread atop a bronzed naked woman who was lying on her back, her left arm and her knees holding up the table top. Her bare breasts pointed to the ceiling. A switch when toggled sent a hot, golden oil flowing down the statue’s legs.Remember: this was a rental property. The troubadour mythos of rock and roll posits sex as a wild adventure; Berry is far more niche. He does not invite any kind of Dionysian cult. Despite their manifold flaws—the dead wives, drug insanity, and batty religious conversions—men like Elvis and Jerry Lee retain their patina of glamour, their plinth and their worshippers. In comparison, Berry is generally viewed as beyond the pale, his predilections distinctly un-wild, un-chic, un-romantic. Berry’s appetites were widely seen as excessive—or at least, excessive in the wrong way; he sculpted his own lurid, loopy world of fantasy, but it proved way too “real” for public taste.
by Ian Penman, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Chuck Berry on the road to Mobile, Alabama, October 1964.© Jean-Marie Périer/Photo12 
