Chuck Berry R.I.P.

[Big Beat Steve]

1 hour ago, medjuck said:

I remember seeing Chuck in all those Alan Freed films and just not getting it.  But I was so much older then....  

 

Don't know what kind of music you were into at that time but I suppose you were not the only one. Far from it. Reading all those (period) reviews of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and of "Jazz On a Summer's Day" today, it is uncanny how his appearance at the festival was blasted by really everyone of the scribes out there (and then some more ... ).

 

[Dmitry]

Top comment : Three Rock'n'Roll hero's: Chuck Berry, John Lennon, the sound guy who cut Yoko's mic 

 

[ep1str0phy]

Sad to hear this, though (like many) astonished that he was still with us in the 21st century. I was just the other day teaching a kid how to play Johnny B. Goode, and the process illustrated to me how the basic mechanics of rock guitar have retained a kind of root integrity for over half a century now. A lot of Chuck's playing is turbocharged blues, jump blues, hillbilly, and swing vocabulary consolidated into something both faster and slicker, but there may very well be a wider berth between Chuck and, say, T Bone Walker than there is between Chuck and Hendrix. You can draw straight line from Berry to Hendrix to the MC5 to the Sex Pistols to the Pixies to Deerhoof or Queens of the Stone Age or whatever even exists right now. I know I'm playing that shit. 

Berry's own music is a remarkable historical achievement, but I can't fathom the notion of imprinting yourself on an instrument so completely that the basic genetics of your vocabulary get passed down to kids who don't even know your name. That's both a legacy and a service--though the capital letter Important stuff should not undercut the fact that the dude wrote and played some straight up bad shit. 

Edited March 19, 2017 by ep1str0phy

[felser]

7 hours ago, Dmitry said:

What is the best-sounding remastered cd or cd box set of his music? 

Probably the three 4-CD Chess sets with his entire output for the label, though the BGO sets also sound great.

Hail, hail rock and roll
Deliver me from the days of old
Long live rock and roll
The beat of the drums, loud and bold
Rock, rock, rock and roll
The feeling is there, body and soul

Edited March 19, 2017 by felser

[medjuck]

3 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:

Don't know what kind of music you were into at that time but I suppose you were not the only one. Far from it. Reading all those (period) reviews of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and of "Jazz On a Summer's Day" today, it is uncanny how his appearance at the festival was blasted by really everyone of the scribes out there (and then some more ... ).

 

Well I was about 15 and thought I was too sophisticated for someone who did the duck walk.  Chuck now seems like the most exciting thing in Jazz on a Summer's Day but I can't tell if Jack Teagarden and Jo Jones are amused or bemused. 

[skeith]

A true giant and much beloved american icon....he will be missed!

[catesta]

20 hours ago, Dmitry said:

Top comment : Three Rock'n'Roll hero's: Chuck Berry, John Lennon, the sound guy who cut Yoko's mic 

 

 

Fuckin' Yoko, what a train wreck.

RIP Chuck and thanks for all the hits.

 

[paul secor]

Something that's perhaps overlooked about Chuck Berry is the social commentary that appeared in his lyrics.

He wrote and recorded "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" in 1956 when it was unheard of for a record with lyrics like that to be heard on the airwaves:

Arrested on charges of unemployment,
he was sitting in the witness stand
The judge's wife called up the district attorney
Said you free that brown eyed man
You want your job you better free that brown eyed man

Flying across the desert in a TWA,
I saw a woman walking across the sand
She been a walkin' thirty miles en route to Bombay
To get a brown eyed handsome man
Her destination was a brown eyed handsome man

Way back in history three thousand years
In fact every since the world began
There's been a whole lot of good women sheddin' tears
For a brown eyed handsome man
It's a lot of trouble was brown eyed handsome man

Beautiful daughter couldn't make up her mind
Between a doctor and a lawyer man
Her mother told her darlin' go out and find yourself
A brown eyed handsome man
Just like your daddy, he's a brown eyed handsome man

Milo Venus was a beautiful lass
She had the world in the palm of her hand
But she lost both her arms in a wrestling match
To get brown eyed handsome man
She fought and won herself a brown eyed handsome man

Two, three count with nobody on
He hit a high fly into the stand
Rounding third he was headed for home
It was a brown eyed handsome man
That won the game; it was a brown eyed handsome man

He had to be sly with his lyrics, but the meaning was there. Beat James Brown by 12 years.

And "Nadine":

I saw her from the corner when she turned and doubled back
And started walkin' toward a coffee colored Cadillac
I was pushin' through the crowd tryin' to get to where she's at
And I was campaign shouting like a southern diplomat
 

"Promised Land" makes subtle reference to the Freedom Riders in Alabama:

We had motor trouble it turned into a struggle
Half way 'cross Alabam
And that 'hound broke down and left us all stranded
In downtown, Birmingham

He was ahead of his time in many ways.

[Big Beat Steve]

22 hours ago, ep1str0phy said:

 I was just the other day teaching a kid how to play Johnny B. Goode, and the process illustrated to me how the basic mechanics of rock guitar have retained a kind of root integrity for over half a century now. A lot of Chuck's playing is turbocharged blues, jump blues, hillbilly, and swing vocabulary consolidated into something both faster and slicker, but there may very well be a wider berth between Chuck and, say, T Bone Walker than there is between Chuck and Hendrix. You can draw straight line from Berry to Hendrix to the MC5 to the Sex Pistols to the Pixies to Deerhoof or Queens of the Stone Age or whatever even exists right now. I know I'm playing that shit. 

 

I for one can hear connections between T-Bone Walker's guitar playing and Chuck Berry.

But OTOH, how about drawing additional lines between predecessors like Pee Wee Crayton and Saunders King and their guitar styles leading towards Chuck Berry, maybe?

See his "Rockin' At The Philharmonic" (Chess 5121), for example.

[ep1str0phy]

I for one can hear connections between T-Bone Walker's guitar playing and Chuck Berry.

But OTOH, how about drawing additional lines between predecessors like Pee Wee Crayton and Saunders King and their guitar styles leading towards Chuck Berry, maybe?

See his "Rockin' At The Philharmonic" (Chess 5121), for example.

That's a good call in terms of precedent, especially with Crayton--there is a very explicit relationship there in terms of phraseology and articulation:

Apropos of this, an old teacher of mine told me that the thing that had gotten lost in translation with Berry's imitators and successors after the 1950's was the swing feel. A prototypical Berry rhythm part is a blues shuffle ratcheted up to a frantic tempo, and like you suggest, there's some interstitial material there with R&B and (again) jump blues and swing. There's a tendency to even out the eighth notes at fast tempi, and a couple of decades removed, the performance practice of the music is abstracted from its origins. Then you get this:

And that's not a knock on Hendrix, who was his own kind of genius and the genuine article in a crowded field of fannish practitioners--it's only a commentary on the fact that, somewhere down the line, rock music-as-homage had played enough telephone to nearly divorce itself from the sort of antecedent practices and concepts were at the root of music like Chuck's. It's weird, too, because guys like Hendrix were reforging ties with jazz and entrenching themselves in blues and R&B in a classicist sense. 

When I say there's a wider breadth between T-Bone and Chuck than between Chuck and Hendrix, I refer more to what later rock musicians took from Chuck rather than what Chuck took from his predecessors. That's not to diminish the very clear ties with guys like Crayton--and I wish I knew more about the intermediate stages of black popular music than I do--so much as to draw attention to the fact that, like guys like Bird, the Beatles, or, yeah, Hendrix, Berry was as much (or more) the first of a new breed rather than part of a definitive continuum. 

[Big Beat Steve]

Need I say that Texas Hop was one of the tunes I was thinking of, in particular?

Edited March 20, 2017 by Big Beat Steve

[paul secor]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/arts/music/chuck-berry-funeral.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Farts&action=click&contentCollection=arts&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=8&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0

Good to read that people were thankful that he kept his roots in St. Louis, rather than leaving for NY or LA.

[Rooster_Ties]

A topic I've long thought I'd try to bring up somewhere (in some context), and I do mean to do so respectfully...

Is the question of how in the heck Chuck rehabilitated himself purely from a PR-perspective, after the various charges that were brought against him regarding the hidden cameras he had installed in his restaurant (I think all civil charges, iirc, or were any of them criminal?).

I don't mean to re-litigate any of that (honestly), but I have to confess I was absolutely dumbfounded about 15 years ago when I discovered Chuck's picture, big as life, on the front cover of the official, annual St. Louis Tourism Bureau brochure -- and I'm talkin' one of those semi-thick magazines they give out for an entire calendar year, close to 70-80 pages, slick and glossy, the whole 9-yards.

His image on the cover of that Tourism "Magazine" for St. Louis -- hell, it might have even been for the entire state of Missouri, come to think of it -- took up 80% of the cover.

As little as 10 or 15 years before (I forget the exact chronology), I was very much aware of the hidden-cameras case against him, and although I realize either the charges were ultimately dropped, or pled-down -- or he settled out of court (probably without claiming any culpability), I always felt like Chuck was seriously hurt in "the court of public opinion".

Does anyone remember better than me, was it simply a matter of enough time had passed that people simply forgot about all that?

It wasn't that I expected his overall popularity to disappear overnight -- THAT was never going to happen.  But for Chuck to have those sort of charges leveled against him, and to then later appear as the poster-personal for an entire region's (or state's) tourism advertising campaign (a risk-adverse client, as you might ever find), just came as an utter surprise to me.

Is my take and memory on the whole thing out of whack?  Did he more successfully "beat those charges" than I'm remembering?  All I remember is that the story had all kinds of "ick"-factor written all over it.  And, again, simply from a PR-perspective (realizing that that are a heck of a lot of people with all kinds of morals and urges in this world - a fact I'm not the least bit oblivious to), I just could not imagine he would ever manage to turn around what I assumed (maybe wrongly?) was some pretty seriously-negative public perception issues.

Edited April 11, 2017 by Rooster_Ties

[Dmitry]

Rooster, the details of that case are in his Wikipedia entry. He was a peeping tom.

Berry had a pervy side to him, in case you forgot. In the early sixties he got sentenced for a good stretch in prison for transporting a minor across the state lines, iirc a 14 year old native American girl.

[Dmitry]

On 3/19/2017 at 5:53 AM, Big Beat Steve said:

And so has been Bill Haley.

And strangely enough, fairly early on Haley was belittled as being an "old father" not really suitable for being promoted as a teen idol by "virtue" of his "age". Whereas they at the same time clipped off 5 years off the actual age of Chuck Berry (5 years being a hell of a lot that may have made an enormous difference at that time and in that age bracket) when a lot of early (i.e. 70s, probably earlier too) rock encyclopedias (at least in Europe) all claimed him to have been born in 1931 while later on - after R'n'R had long ebbed off and turned into "rock" and the R'n'R heroes played the oldies circuit to their fans who had gotten older too - we were faced with the fact he actually dated from 1926 which made him almost as "old" as Bill Haley. And this despite the fact that Berry would have needed that artificial rejuvenating far less (just by the way he came across).

In a  1980s documentary Berry stated that Chess speeded up his voice on studio tape, to make it sound higher, and consequently, younger, to appeal to teenagers. What we're hearing on those early seminal hits may not be his god-given vocals, but an early incarnation of music industry marketing.

[Rooster_Ties]

On 4/11/2017 at 1:17 PM, Rooster_Ties said:

A topic I've long thought I'd try to bring up somewhere (in some context), and I do mean to do so respectfully...

Is the question of how in the heck Chuck rehabilitated himself purely from a PR-perspective, after the various charges that were brought against him regarding the hidden cameras he had installed in his restaurant (I think all civil charges, iirc, or were any of them criminal?).

I don't mean to re-litigate any of that (honestly), but I have to confess I was absolutely dumbfounded about 15 years ago when I discovered Chuck's picture, big as life, on the front cover of the official, annual St. Louis Tourism Bureau brochure -- and I'm talkin' one of those semi-thick magazines they give out for an entire calendar year, close to 70-80 pages, slick and glossy, the whole 9-yards.

His image on the cover of that Tourism "Magazine" for St. Louis -- hell, it might have even been for the entire state of Missouri, come to think of it -- took up 80% of the cover.

As little as 10 or 15 years before (I forget the exact chronology), I was very much aware of the hidden-cameras case against him, and although I realize either the charges were ultimately dropped, or pled-down -- or he settled out of court (probably without claiming any culpability), I always felt like Chuck was seriously hurt in "the court of public opinion".

Does anyone remember better than me, was it simply a matter of enough time had passed that people simply forgot about all that?

It wasn't that I expected his overall popularity to disappear overnight -- THAT was never going to happen.  But for Chuck to have those sort of charges leveled against him, and to then later appear as the poster-personal for an entire region's (or state's) tourism advertising campaign (a risk-adverse client, as you might ever find), just came as an utter surprise to me.

Is my take and memory on the whole thing out of whack?  Did he more successfully "beat those charges" than I'm remembering?  All I remember is that the story had all kinds of "ick"-factor written all over it.  And, again, simply from a PR-perspective (realizing that that are a heck of a lot of people with all kinds of morals and urges in this world - a fact I'm not the least bit oblivious to), I just could not imagine he would ever manage to turn around what I assumed (maybe wrongly?) was some pretty seriously-negative public perception issues.

I know, am well aware, and THAT was his rep in plenty of press around the time of the hidden-cameras court-case.

So how in the hell does he go from that, to being on the cover of the state-sponsored travel glossy with a shelf-life of a full year?

Couldn't (and still can't) fathom how that happened.

[Dmitry]

How big was he in St.Louis 15 years ago? You're from that area. He must've had some serious presence in town, a restaurant, amuseument park, something like that? He studied business & accounting during his second stay at the state pen, and heavily invested in real estate, I'm presuming in the St.Louis area.

People do give artists a break in cases of weird and wacky, often times bordering on criminality. Think Woody Allen. 

 

[Brad]

On 3/19/2017 at 9:15 AM, Dmitry said:

What is the best-sounding remastered cd or cd box set of his music? 

From what I’ve read the Chess Box issued by MCA sounds a bit sanitized, although it’s still readily available. Back in 2007, Hip-O Select issued a box called Chuck Berry Johnny B. Goode: His Complete 50s Chess Recordings, which received very good reviews. Of course, it’s sold out and a little pricey. 

[soulpope]

Goodbye and R.I.P ...

[J.A.W.]

4 hours ago, Brad said:

From what I’ve read the Chess Box issued by MCA sounds a bit sanitized, although it’s still readily available. Back in 2007, Hip-O Select issued a box called Chuck Berry Johnny B. Goode: His Complete 50s Chess Recordings, which received very good reviews. Of course, it’s sold out and a little pricey. 

Universal also released You Never Can Tell: His Complete Chess Recordings 1960-1966 on their (now discontinued) Hip-O label. I have both sets, but don't like the sound very much, it's also too "sanitized" as you call it.

[Brad]

There was a program on PBS recently called Chuck Berry: Brown-Eyed Handsome Man that was pretty good. It used some excerpts from this 1972 program from the BBC, which I thought was excellent, Sounds for Saturday:

 

[Dave Garrett]

On 4/11/2020 at 4:58 AM, J.A.W. said:

Universal also released You Never Can Tell: His Complete Chess Recordings 1960-1966 on their (now discontinued) Hip-O label. I have both sets, but don't like the sound very much, it's also too "sanitized" as you call it.

Hip-O also released a third set that went up to 1974, Have Mercy: His Complete Chess Recordings 1969 - 1974. Given the asking prices for the Hip-O sets now, if I didn't already have them and was looking to get a comprehensive set of Berry's recordings I'd probably opt for the big Bear Family box instead. I haven't heard it, but I've read generally positive things about it (although the mastering on some BF sets can be a contentious subject).

Chuck Berry: Rock And Roll Music - Any Old Way You Choose It - The Complete Studio Recordings ... Plus! (16-CD & 2 Bücher)

[felser]

I have the three Chess sets, no complaints from me on the sound.  And I like his later Chess material fine.   Also have a few of the Mercury CD's, the re-recorded greatest hits (which I actually like despite its reputation, but it has no real purpose at this late date), the Fillmore set, which can be had very cheaply online and you get what you pay for (lazy sloppy blues and the ghastly "My Ding-a-ling"), and "Concerto in B Goode" (love the side long instrumental title cut, not much to recommend the other side).  I've heard the other Mercury's, and they're a mess.  I also have the original 3-CD Chess box, which I'd like to find a good home for eventually.

[Brad]

6 minutes ago, felser said:

I have the three Chess sets, no complaints from me on the sound.  And I like his later Chess material fine.   Also have a few of the Mercury CD's, the re-recorded greatest hits (which I actually like despite its reputation, but it has no real purpose at this late date), the Fillmore set, which can be had very cheaply online and you get what you pay for (lazy sloppy blues and the ghastly "My Ding-a-ling"), and "Concerto in B Goode" (love the side long instrumental title cut, not much to recommend the other side).  I've heard the other Mercury's, and they're a mess.  I also have the original 3-CD Chess box, which I'd like to find a good home for eventually.

When you say you have the three Chess boxes, do you mean the Hip-O Select ones? The one I was referring to in my original post was this one, which I assume is the one in your last sentence. 

 

[bertrand]

On 4/13/2017 at 8:23 AM, Dmitry said:

How big was he in St.Louis 15 years ago? You're from that area. He must've had some serious presence in town, a restaurant, amuseument park, something like that? He studied business & accounting during his second stay at the state pen, and heavily invested in real estate, I'm presuming in the St.Louis area.

People do give artists a break in cases of weird and wacky, often times bordering on criminality. Think Woody Allen. 

 

Exactly three years later, and now it is clear that Woody Allen is through. He will never do time, but will never make another movie either.