by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
After running Show Boat I put on KPBS for a pledge-break special tied in with Black History Month: Chuck Berry: Brown-Eyed Handsome Man, a clip show documenting Berry’s history and the sheer extent of his influence on musicians since, including almost everyone who’s played rock. Berry is sometimes referred to as the inventor of rock ’n’ roll, which he wasn’t – before him there had been Louis Jordan, Roy Brown and Fats Domino, among quite a few other talents who were relegated to the Black charts (called “race music” in the 1930’s and rhythm-and-blues in the 1940’s – in an interview with Blues Unlimited magazine Domino recalled, “I’d always thought of myself as a rhythm-and-blues musician. Then they told me I was playing rock ’n’ roll. I hadn’t changed my style any – they’d just changed the name for it!”) And, as Charles reminded me, before any of them there had been Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who’d debuted on records in 1937 as a gospel singer backing herself on acoustic guitar, but within four years she’d bought an electric guitar, joined Lucky Millinder’s band and made records like “Shout, Sister, Shout” and “That’s All” that are rock in all but name (and incidentally also showcase how much the whole rock style was rooted in the gospel music of the Black church).
When Chuck Berry died in 2017 – just a month or so before the scheduled release of his first new studio album in 28 years – it occurred to me that he had the same historical role in rock that Louis Armstrong had had in jazz. He was not the first Black innovator in the form but he pulled so many strands of Black musical culture (and not just Black culture as well; Berry had a strong interest in white country music and his friend and Chess label-mate Bo Diddley once said, “Chuck’s always really wanted to be a country singer”) together he created a powerful new sound. He also created a body of work that, more than any other single singer-songwriter, shaped the repertoire of future bands. Asked why through most of his career he didn’t have a band of his own, but relied on hiring pickup bands in whatever city he played in, Berry said, “You don’t know rock ’n’ roll if you don’t know Chuck Berry.” But there’s an ironic tale in Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography that in his early days, before he became a star himself, Springsteen and his band were hired to back Chuck Berry. They didn’t think this would be a problem since they knew a lot of Berry’s songs – but when they rehearsed with him they discovered, to their shock, that they did not know them in the keys in which Berry played them.
The film doesn’t touch on some of the darker sides of Berry’s legend – including his jail sentences or the account of his long-time pianist Johnny Johnson that the Berry licks weren’t all that new – they were simply boogie-woogie piano licks Berry asked Johnson to demonstrate for him and then learned to play on guitar – and as a portrait of Berry’s influences on other musicians it’s hardly as good as the 1987 documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll, directed by Taylor Hackford and mostly filmed at a concert in London celebrating Berry’s 60th birthday, in which he played onstage with major names in their own right like Linda Ronstadt and members of the Rolling Stones. Nonetheless, it’s an excellent portrayal and features quite a few of Chuck Berry’s best-known songs, both with him performing them and in clips of other bands with major reputations. It begins with a clip from Berry himself performing his song “Carol” (though this isn’t mentioned in the film, it was also the first song ever recorded by the Rolling Stones – a band which came about because one day Mick Jagger and Keith Richards walked past each other on a London street; one was carrying a Chuck Berry album and one was carrying a Muddy Waters album, and they complimented each other on their taste in music and then became friends and, ultimately, bandmates) and then a brief segment in which we hear Berry’s first record, “Maybelline,” over a narration by Danny Glover explaining how Berry got his career break.
After years of playing small blues clubs in his native St. Louis, he got the chance to record at age 28 (awfully late in life for a rock star!) when Muddy Waters recommended him to Leonard and Phil Chess. Berry showed up in the studio with a blues called “Wee Wee Hours” in the romantic ballad-blues style of Charles Brown, Chess recorded it and then asked Berry if he had anything they could use for the flip side. Berry started jamming on Bob Wills’ old country tune “Ida Red” and shortly thereafter Berry, Johnson, the Chess studio musicians and the Chess brothers themselves had tweaked it into a novelty song about a street race between the villain’s Cadillac and the hero’s V-8 Ford, punctuated with a chorus which took its name from a popular woman’s cosmetic brand: “Oh Maybelline, why can’t you be true?/You just started back something doing things you shouldn’t do.” As often happened in the days when single records, not albums, dominated the rock market, disc jockeys decided “Maybelline” was the song to play, audiences made it a hit and, according to Glover, a lot of white radio stations picked up on it and started playing it – until enough photos of Berry got out to let people know he was Black.
The next clip was from the 1956 movie Rock, Rock, Rock! – which the narrator said was the first rock ’n’ roll movie ever made (it was actually the third of Alan Freed’s productions, after Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock) – a product of the introduction of magnetic recording on both records and films, and the decision of movie producers that instead of requiring musicians to re-record their songs for films, they could just use the already made records and have the players mime to them.(One clip I’m glad they didn’t use was Berry’s surprisingly anemic and nervous appearance doing “Sweet Little Sixteen” in the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day from the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival; despite the triumphalism of imdb.com reviewer “Stephen-357” that “this particular slice of time has special significance, because jazz would soon be replaced in popularity by Rock & Roll. We watch it happen before our eyes as a young Chuck Berry takes the stage, backed by some excellent jazz musicians, all looking ‘amused’ but not taking very seriously the music that would knock them off the charts for good within a couple of years,” the fact is Berry looks ill at ease and hardly shows his usual command of the stage – and even with such formidable competition as Berry, Dinah Washington and Big Maybelle, the person in Jazz on a Summer’s Day who rocks the hardest is gospel singer Mahalia Jackson!)
After the clip from Rock, Rock, Rock! – Berry singing “You Can’t Catch Me” (for which the great blues pianist Otis Spann replaced Johnson and really cooked!) in front of a plain backdrop but comfortable in his stage moves, and the only glimpse we get here of Berry in his absolute prime, when he was still a creative musician instead of a nostalgia act – we start with the covers. The Rolling Stones are shown doing a cover of “Around and Around” in a clip from the classic 1965 T.A.M.I. Show, wretchedly colorized (just about everyone, on stage and in the audience, looks sunburned) and featuring the Stones more nervous than usual – Mick Jagger waves his tush at the audience in a foredoomed attempt to top the act he had to follow on that program, James Brown. Next up is a live Beatles clip from the Washington, D.C. appearance that was the Beatles’ first U.S. concert, doing “Roll Over, Beethoven” with George Harrison singing lead (John or Paul could have done it better, but they had to let George sing something) and having to move from Paul’s mike to John’s when he realizes Paul’s is dead, but still outplaying the Stones and re-establishing their credentials as the best rock ’n’ roll band of all time.
Next up is Jimi Hendrix doing “Johnny B. Goode” from the film Jimi Plays Berkeley, shot on Hendrix’ final U.S. tour in 1970 with the best band he ever led (Billy Cox, electric bass; Mitch Mitchell, drums) and for the most part played “straight,” though there are some of those unique sounds Hendrix got with his whammy bar and rubbing the strings on the fretboard without strumming them. (In 1985 the jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan was hailed as such an innovator for being able to sound guitar strings by rubbing instead of picking them – a Hendrix innovation that got lost in the sheer number of creative effects Hendrix cooked up.) There’s also a bit of Hendrix plucking the guitar strings with his teeth – an effect he learned from the great bluesman Aaron “T-Bone” Walker when Hendrix toured the chit’lin’ circuit in bands that opened for Walker. After a pledge break we got Linda Ronstadt doing “Back in the U.S.A.” in her guest shot from Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll; she made a record of the song but did it far better here, obviously inspired by the man himself being on stage with her.
Then, blessedly, we got some more of Berry himself – “Nadine” (his set opener when I saw Berry myself in 1971 on a rock ’n’ roll oldies show with Little Richard and Bo Diddley), “Sweet Little Sixteen” and a version of “Johnny B. Goode” from one of the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame concerts with Bruce Springsteen billed as a duet partner but really just a backup singer and guitarist. Oddly, Berry looks darker here than he did in the earlier clips; I suspect that his early appearances were filmed with harsher lighting to make him look lighter (though he still looked totally African-American), followed by the Electric Light Orchestra at their Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, playing their 1972 hit version of “Roll Over, Beethoven” that blended Berry’s song with the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (not the Ninth, as claimed in Glover’s narration). Incidentally ELO leader Jeff Lynne must have learned the song from the Beatles’ cover, since he makes the same mistake in the lyrics they did: he sings “Reel it, rock it, roll it over,” where the line Berry wrote was “Reel and rock with one another.”
The next clips were Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers doing “Carol” (an interesting song because Petty mostly featured his keyboard player, Benmont Tench, on piano – restoring all those boogie licks Johnny Johnson taught Berry to their original instrument) and Paul McCartney doing “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” from a TV special that took him back to the Cavern Club in Liverpool where the Beatles had got one of their first big breaks. (Actually they’d started out in an even smaller club, the Casbah, run by Mona Best, whose son Pete Best was the drummer the Beatles fired on the eve of stardom.) Then we got three more songs from Berry himself: “Let It Rock,” “Memphis, Tennessee” (in a more laid-back version than usual that made it sound more country than rock) and “Johnny B. Goode” as intro music over the closing credits. This isn’t exactly the greatest film tribute Chuck Berry ever got (that would be Hail, Hail, Rock ’n’ Roll! – whose title came from “School Days,” one of Berry’s best songs and oddly not performed here), but it’s a nice assemblage of some of the greatest rock songs ever written played by some of the greatest rock acts of all time.
