Hugh Masekela passed last week, and it seemed there was far too little said about one of our time’s great musical masters, his brave stance in politics, self-exile from South Africa and energetic international advocacy for political change and against apartheid.
Masekela was a talented trumpeter, singer, composer and band leader. He made great music throughout his long career, knew and worked with some of the greatest artists of the African diaspora (and others: check out his interplay with Roger McGuinn on the Byrds So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star). His compositions reflected the lives of labor sojourners and migrants who struggled for dignity and a living in brutal systems of exploitation and degradation; his trumpet playing was spirited, lyrical and transcendent. You can read more in his Wiki or on his official site.
I first heard his music on a juke box at a University of Pennsylvania hang everyone called the Dirty Drug. They had his huge 1968 hit Grazing in the Grass, but I liked the funky flip better, Bajabula Bonke. I saw him in 1990 along with 50,000 other enthusiastic Atlantans when he played for Nelson Mandela’s U. S. Tour after his release from a South African prison and again at Wesleyan University when he played there in 2013. That performance was a revelation, up close and beautiful with a great band and his enormous presence. He told a little joke about being in Zimbabwe with his “old friend” Robert Mugabe, then added, “He stole my cookies.”
There is a lifetime of his good music on record, and your local library will likely have a disc or two: check it out. A great man, a great musician, a great humanitarian and an important voice for freedom, progressive political change and against the poison of racism.
You can see some video of the Wesleyan performance by clicking the image above. All of the songs listed next to it are downloadable with a right click.
You have to see this as the twin to Mike Love’s autobio, Good Vibrations: I wrote earlier that you were constantly reading between the lines in that book. Brian’s book is exactly the opposite: if anything there is just too much information, Brian is way in touch with his feelings and ready to share. He writes repeatedly about his lifelong struggle with mental illness and is frank about his drug use. I’d had the idea that he was an acid casualty, but he only tripped twice and wrote a lot of California Girls during one of those. He began smoking pot beginning in 1964 (a year he repeatedly refers to as “the year everything happened,” the year the Beach Boys became international stars, had their first number one record, (the year the Beatles broke in America), and the year he had a mental breakdown on a flight from Houston and retired from performing). In the seventies he was fed semi-pro cocktails of psychoactive drugs by his therapist, Eugene Landy while he continued to self-medicate when he could with whatever he could get his hands on, from a four pack a day smoking habit and lots of bevvies to downs, coke and even heroin.
Brian Wilson is not one to push himself forward. “I wasn’t usually the kind of guy who would make a big deal about correcting a misunderstanding. If someone got the wrong idea about me, I might agree with a wrong story just to get out of the conversation.” Shy and sensitive (“The guy in the song sounds like he hasn’t even talked to the surfer girl. He just watches her and thinks about her. That was me. I was kind of shy, and whenever I started talking to a girl she would end up talking to Dennis or Mike instead. They were slicker and more aggressive, and I sort of got moved off to the side to wonder if the girl ever liked me or was interested at all”), but immensely creative (same quote continued: “I felt a little lonely at times, but I also knew that it made for good songs. Loneliness was something that everyone felt but that people were afraid to talk about”), people tried to control him through most of his life: his father, his band, his therapist, his band again, “One of the things I did back then was think about Don’t Hurt My Little Sister all the time. Maybe it’s because it was a song about protection and I felt scared that no one was protecting me.” But the main theme here is his second marriage to Melinda Wilson, better (professional) doctors, a more effective drug regimen and a healthy environment that put him back on his feet. He is relentlessly positive, happy to be writing and performing and seems surprised that people hold him and his work in such high regard. This is nice to see in a superstar.
There are heroes and there are villains: Brian’s abusive and controlling therapist of the seventies and early eighties Eugene Landy comes off really really badly, (only a step above cameo band contact Charles Manson), finally loses his license to practice and fades into a notable obscurity. Dad Murry Wilson terrorizes his sons but also, in Brian’s telling, loves them (unlike Landy), gives them music and, a child of the depression, constantly urges them (often violently) to work harder: ”You have to sing harder,” he said, ”like you care.” ”I’m a genius, too, Brian,” and then not too much later, ““I cannot believe that such a beautiful young boy, who was kind, loving, received good grades in school and had so many versatile talents, could become so obsessed to prove that he was better than his father.” Mike Love….Mike Love. Brian writes, “This Mike, Mike Love, was very friendly and very funny and he made me laugh. I really liked him. We hit it off real well, and soon enough he was almost a fourth brother,” and then “Other guys in the group didn’t like the idea. Mike couldn’t believe it. When he heard the demos he just shook his head and stared at me. The record label wasn’t sure about the album either. Often the record labels agreed with the other guys in the group. The album never came out….” Complicated. The long string of abusive relationships crippled his creative work and raises questions that many many many people on the internet have felt they could answer. I can’t. I’m glad he’s happy, that he’s recording and performing and that people can again enjoy his music.
I finished reading Mike Love’s autobiography, “Good Vibrations.” This is a book where you’re constantly reading between the lines and I did it the wrong way around, most people read Brian’s first. Mike Love is a force, raised in privilege in Baldwin Hills, cars, talent, Swedish good looks, an easy familiarity with the way things are, he perfectly represented the Southern California myth that the Beach Boys epitomized: Lutheran, a rebel whose rebellion mainly consists of lots of girlfriends (Lots! And Lots! More below), a casual attitude towards ethnic divisions, drinking (beer!) and generally transcending the extremely narrow moral ground of his parents while he remained conventionally double standard. Later he turns to environmentalism, the soft, acceptable politics of ocean, earth, love and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, all the while finding comfort close to the Reagans and George H. W. Bush (while opposing the Iraq invasion, based on Maharishi Mahesh’s own opposition).
While the world surges and quakes around him, his own somewhat situational and personally satisfying values seem not to change. His main concern is not, as many charge, money but rather security: he builds the Beach Boys brand and it provides a lifetime of support for all of the band members and their families despite what is often only a mediocre product. This has obviously good but equally obvious bad effects, most immediately on the band members, most clearly on Brian Wilson, the genius, and then by extension on their families. Disastrous actions do not have disastrous effects. Mike goes through women like….what’s the metaphor? He has a lot of them. There are two marriages in five short chapters, he has the marriage certificate for the current one filed with the divorce papers from the previous one in the same folder. I lost count—five? Six? Traditional, he will not live with a woman who he has not married, but living with them invariably (until he’s 55 or so) ends in a breakup. Just like….oh yeah, the band.
Here at least it is obvious that he is the one who keeps the band together, popular and touring, and that is no small feat. He will not be swayed, he is continually positive about their worth and value even as their reputation slides on mediocre albums followed by terrible albums punctuated by occasional unexpected hits. He mentions poor management which they definitely experienced. He compares Brian Epstein’s Beatles management to dad and sociopath Murry Wilson’s Beach Boy’s management (compare stage costumes) as a telling if late revelation. Paul McCartney suggests they pay more attention to their album covers: and other things, Mike, and other things. Until it was a little too late to draw the best, all of the music and business relationships are based on family ties or people they meet personally, the old southern way. The Beatles found actual real professionals when they were at the top. No management in Los Angeles saw the Beach Boys as anything but one hit wonders, and when Brian started hitting harder, first with I Get Around and Barbara Ann, and then Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys became the first of the new kind of bands that no one knew what to do with, most especially the rest of the band.
All of it goes back to a mythical time for Americans, imagined largely in terms of Southern California high school with its ideal combination of cars, girls, beer and a carefree (careless?) life full of imagination (Brian) and daring (Mike). They never really grow out of it, try as they might. Mike is smart and perceptive, writes the lyrics to some of their best songs (Good Vibrations, California Girls, Warmth of the Sun, Don’t Worry Baby, etc.), but when Brian’s wife Melinda tells him, “You’ve got a big chip on your shoulder, Mike Love,” he responds with “Oh yeah? Well me and my chip are out of here” and momentarily quits the band. It’s telling, and he tells it. Left out are how and why his cruises with Brian, listening to the radio together and harmonizing (Imagine! Mike Love and Brian Wilson on the Hollywood Freeway, Saturday night, windows down, singing along loud! with the Jive Five, My True Story or the Regents Barbara-Ann), why those cruises came to an end, and why neither one of them could ever really find the way out of that.
The last chapter of the book has this section, deeper, more personal and revealing than anything else in the book:
“In 1972, Brian wrote “Mount Vernon and Fairway,” the corner of my childhood home. It wasn’t really a song but a 12 minute fairytale, or allegory, about a young Prince (me) whose special bedroom window (like mine) ”looked down into a deep, deep forest [and glimpsed] distant lights from other castles in the kingdom.” A Pied Piper (Brian) brings magical music to the Prince through a glowing transistor radio (like the one we listened to as kids). The Piper tells the Prince that if he leaves the transistor radio on after midnight, the Piper will bring more magic music to him. In days ahead, the Prince does that, but “he heard nothing like the music of that magic night… There’s nothing but Bach on this radio.” The Prince stops believing in the Piper and disregards the transistor until he hears a mysterious sound one night.
Could it be the Pied Piper himself, Coming out of the magic transistor radio? Or was it just the wind whistling by the castle window.
If you have a transistor radio and the lights are all out some night, Don’t be very surprised if [the radio] turns to light green. And the whirling magic sound of the Pied Piper comes to visit you. I’m the Pied Piper In the radio.
Like I said, in this book you’re constantly reading between the lines.
I just finished reading Elvis Costello’s autobiography, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. I have always liked Elvis Costello’s music and know that’s not a universal opinion. “That pigeon toed thing,” “The avenging dork,” (Village Voice), “Don’t take off the glasses!” (manager Jake Riviera), those many long albums, that Ray Charles thing (he apologizes profusely and at length). On the other side a masterful, varied, much admired and prolific song writer, head of a great band, a great voice and admirable (and again varied) musical knowledge. He starts his career wildly aggressive and very slowly moves to more lyrical music with more complex (but still rocking) arrangements and then to a reflective style with many stellar collaborations (Burt Bacharach, George Jones, Chet Baker, Brodsky Quartet, Questlove, Macca, T-Bone Burnett, others). At heart, I think, he has always been a romantic: many of his best songs are ballads and his politics are fundamentally Fenian (“God saving the queen hadn’t always seemed like good idea in our house”), progressive (Rock Against Racism during the punk thing), and on display (Oliver’s Army, Green Shirt, Shipbuilding, White Knuckles, What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace Love and Understanding (which he didn’t write but everyone thinks he did)….but ultimately also deeply romantic.
You’re curious going into it about the writing—after all, he’s one of the most prolific popular musicians with eight great almost all original albums (My Aim is True,This Years Model, Armed Forces, Get Happy, Punch the Clock, Trust, Imperial Bedroom, Blood and Chocolate). In the book, the writing’s good but doesn’t call attention to itself. There are many quotes of lyrics and like most quotes of lyrics they make you realize how important the musical part is, accenting the good lines, covering the weak ones. Song writing is his main craft (he was originally signed to Stiff records as a songwriter rather than performer) and that affects the book’s writing style which is elliptical in sometimes confusing ways, but more often flatters the reader into thinking how hip s/he is to get it.
The autobiography is unique in the music bios I’ve read in that it is at once historical and not, that is it is closely tied to Costello’s (and his family’s) history but is so broken up by asides and leaps to other times that it is able to avoid that dread “and when I went to my first soccer game with my friend Rod Stewart” thing. It’s a measure of his cleverness and wit that he manages this very well (he wrote without a ghost). He’s also disarming in his modesty and enlightening in his many references to his family and especially his Dad who was a singer (thanks for the voice Dad!) and who clearly influenced him. Both the advantages and the problems with having a Dad in show business are there: some writer writes “Cool dad aging snazzily,” meeting many people and seeing musicians as musicians rather than stars, but also the philandering (his mom! Who comes up almost only in this context!), also homologue to his own life once he gets to a place where girls are swooning over “Alison” (and he is married and father to his own young lad).
And that’s a disturbing business he frequently returns to, when he found that his father was not faithful to his mother, in fact was a “ladies man,” and just a bit later, realizing that he himself was now also guilty of this, that shadow darkened by his knowledge of how his Dad’s philandering had hurt his mother. Elvis skates over it, but is obviously very very very guilty about his own unfaithfulness towards women (as he reminds us, it’s in the book’s title). It’s our national pastime to psychoanalyze celebrities and he gives us plenty of material: his infrequent mentions of his mother (he writes more about his grandmother, grandfather and certainly his father), his status as a single child. He writes of his long affair (or marriage?) to Cait O’Riordan of the Pogues. Outside the book (there’s more outside than inside on the affairs), an interview with O’Riordan in the Irish Independent goes like this:
“You know Pat Henry, [the fitness guru] don’t you? He has told me he knows couples right now where very plainly the man is punishing himself for being successful through his choice of woman. That really resonates with me. I think we can punish ourselves. We can use people to punish ourselves.”
“Was that the need Elvis was fulfilling with you?
“You’d have to ask him.”
“Is that what you felt?
“I hope it is not true, but it seems, just from my experience, that it might be true.”
This not from him, but the partner. Costello was raised, of course, Catholic. We expect him to be a little fucked up, we allow him to be. He is now happily married to Diana Krall with two sons.
Formerly famously dismissive of his band’s importance (and feuding with Bruce Thomas, his stellar bass player about it), here he goes out of his way to write about the many ways in which they were fabulous. He realized late what a gem keyboardist Steve Nieve was and gives him much specific praise for album orchestrations and on stage performances: “We could play anyone off the stage.” One of the great joys of the book is his many shout outs to music (Dave Bartholomew, “That’s What Got You Killed Last Time”) and performances by both his band and others (see below). He is generous, an attractive trait, but not one that had always been on view. And he really knows music.
I only started noting quotes half way through, this first one on his legendarily writing “Watching the Detectives” after hearing the Clash’s first album, “I was trying to work out why the flimsy but furious sound of this record, with its siren guitars and square, dry drumming, could come across as so powerful.” This passage opens a couple of pages on where his song came from (film noir mostly) and a new literary style for him (hard-boiled) that seems apropos to his entry with the Attractions onto the world stage. This is half way through the longish book, but your (my—Amazon reviewers are not always kind on this point) interest has not flagged.
A few more quotes:
My only luggage was a notebook with a confederate flag on the cover. It was hard to explain but harder still to lose.
Ray Brown leaned into the microphone and said, “Nobody play any ideas.”
They’ve got men building fences to keep other men out Ignore him if he whimpers and kill him if he shouts
Allen Toussaint
I’d asked a local cabdriver what people did for fun in the nearby village, and he’d replied, “Oh it’s all wife-swapping and witchcraft around here.”
This is the second of two posts inspired by an autobiography by Jerry Wexler and David Ritz, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in Music. Jerry Wexler, along with Ahmet Ertegun was the management of Atlantic Records: he was the salty one, Ertegun the butter.
Don’t Need You No More-Allman Brothers Band
Soothe Me (live)-Sam and Dave
Don’t Play That Song-Aretha Franklin
One Way Ticket-Aretha Franklin
Walking on Gilded Splinters-Doctor John
It’s All Over-Wilson Pickett
There is a mix of songs here that is now downloadable with a right click (the last post’s music is also now downloadable).
One of the reasons that Atlantic lasted longer than any of the independent R&B labels was that Wexler and Ertegun adjusted to the rapidly changing opportunities in popular music. In the late fifties they began bringing in talented staff producers, first Lieber and Stoller (Charlie Brown-The Coasters) and then Bert Berns (Under the Boardwalk—Drifters). Wexler kept producing too, sticking to his main line, R&B. He also initiated a relationship with Stax Records based on a distribution deal that led to hits with Sam and Dave and that also opened his interest in southern soul.
But Wexler wasn’t always good at business: at his instigation, they sold the company in the late sixties to Warner/Seven-Arts for US$17.5, what Wexler (and a lot of other people) later thought was about half its value. Wexler, the street smart guy who grew up in depression era NY had misgivings about the long term viability of the music business and argued that it was time to cash out—right on the brink of the business’ and Atlantic’s exponential growth in the late sixties and seventies: Wexler produced Aretha Franklin’s first record that same year—not for Atlantic but for Atlantic as part of Warner Brothers.
The sale amped up what were already serious differences between Wexler and Ertegun. Up to then they had been completely independent—Wexler said “despots”—and that suited both of them well. After the sale they were managers at a music industry conglomerate soon owned by Kinney, originally a parking lot operator. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that Ertegun was very talented in that environment while Wexler rubbed just about everyone the wrong way. That rough weather exacerbated Wexler and Ertegun’s personal differences. Ertegun began to be interested in the possibilities that lay in rock and signed Buffalo Springfield and then Crosby Stills and Nash, Cream and finally Led Zeppelin. The Atlantic subsidiary Cotillion had the Woodstock album.
Wexler stayed with soul music, produced Wilson Pickett, first at Stax and then at Muscle Shoals, and produced all of Aretha Franklin’s miraculous albums of the sixties and early seventies. This was beginning to not be Ahmet’s scene: Otis Redding pretended he couldn’t say his name and called him “Omelet.” It’s also likely that Ertegun saw more clearly that an industry built on white men recording (and profiting from) black music was going to have to make some possibly difficult changes in the era of Black Power. Wexler writes of black friends hustling him out of the infamous August 1968 NATRA meetings in Miami after they heard death threats. He was hung in effigy. You could also see the differences in the two men’s backgrounds becoming more significant: the street smart Jewish kid from Manhattan who squeaked through high school and the multilingual son of an ambassador who grew up in the Turkish embassy in Washington.
But they were both huge music fans and also….I think this is significant…readers. In an article by George W. S. Trow that ran in the New Yorker, Ertegun sings the praises of the Delage automobile, something he almost certainly picked up from James Salter’s A Sport and A Pastime (a great book, incidentally) and a nice note in his performance of class, whether you recognized it or not. Wexler also read widely and it shows in the verbal skills that made him a sought after elder statesman of R&B, a good and accessible interview with great stories. But “wanna” and “have” are different places to start from and the foundation influences everything.
Still, Wexler continued to turn out awesome music (Aretha) but found his personality is a problem in board rooms. He opened his own Criteria Studio in Miami and played an important role in the white blues guitar band fever of the late sixties and seventies recording Eric Clapton, Delaney and Bonnie, the Allmans and Doctor John. A lot of the legendary interplay between Duane Allman and Eric Clapton happened at Criteria, produced by Tom Dowd and as far from New York as Wexler could easily manage. But as the decade continued, fewer people were interested in white guys jamming the blues and the kind of music he excelled at producing faded against the lightning of punk (never mentioned), the twitter of disco (ditto) and the glam of new wave (also ditto).
Ertegun became a king maker. In the high rolling and mostly personal relations of the seventies record business, he was an emperor. He had Led Zeppelin and then the Rolling Stones on the label (Led Zeppelin’s contract specified that Atlantic management was not allowed in the studio when they were recording. Whether this was aimed at Ertegun, Wexler or someone else it is revealing). He excelled at the jet set and coke scene and had a knowledge and ease in the business that others could not compete with. In his article on Ertegun, George Trow writes, “Successful people in the music business were familiar with styles you could buy —black groups under contract and expensive department stores did not, generally speaking, terrify them—but Ahmet seemed to have an easy familiarity with styles you could come by only through instinct or inheritance, and this made it seem likely to the men in the business that he existed in a state of special grace.” Imagine. There’s a famous anecdote in Trow’s article that gets it all. “Do they have recording studios in France?” [David] Geffen asked Ahmet. “France is like Brooklyn,” Ahmet said. “They have everything.”
Ertegun remained a force majeure in the industry right up to his death. Wexler ran up a 40 year string of amazing records and grew into a comfortable retirement, still giving interviews, still able to spin great stories about the amazing talents that he had known and worked with through his long life in the music he had christened “rhythm and blues” back in 1948.
I just finished reading an autobiography by Jerry Wexler and David Ritz, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in Music. Jerry Wexler, along with Ahmet Ertegun was the management of Atlantic Records: he was the salty one, Ertegun the butter. Choleric, an autodidact, smart, hip, competitive and very very very focused, Wexler did the day to day while Ertegun made people happy or at least comfortable. When David Geffen came to ask that Stephen Stills be released from his Atlantic contract so that he could be in Crosby Stills and Nash, Wexler was apoplectic, stormed and shouted and sent him away. This being David Geffen, he went to Ertegun who, rather than keep Stephen Stills from doing what he wanted to do, talked Geffen into bringing Crosby Stills and Nash to Atlantic. Wexler came to work early and was always on the phone: Ertegun was usually out somewhere doing something glamorous.
Names? Wexler was producer for the Drifters, Clyde McPhatter, Ray Charles, the Clovers, Big Joe Turner, Chuck Willis, Solomon Burke and Bobby Darin in the ‘before the Beatles’ period.
He saw talent not so much as stars as musicians, each with their special qualities and talents. One of Wexler’s talents was knowing which musicians went together and being able to put together a studio band that would bring out the best in the lead talent. And Atlantic did not chase the teen market, they imagined their audience as adult blacks. This led to Ray Charles, certainly, but also to hits like “Down in the Alley” by the Clovers (with an opening riff Wexler says they took from Elmore James—dig it). You know, cross-overs. This stood them in good stead when the bigs moved in on the youth market in the late fifties: most indies folded, Atlantic hung on…and they brought in Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller as contract producers to give them a string of teen hits with groups like the Coasters (Charlie Brown-not included).
Wexler and Ertegun were good at the business of running an independent R&B label in the fifties and sixties, which was not the kind of thing you learned to do at Wharton. They were unique because they used basic good business practices: they had an excellent product (not only great talent, but good tech too: Tom Dowd (hello cousin!) was their engineer, they recorded on Ampeg #3, the third eight track recorder in existence and miced the rhythm instruments separately so they could mix for clarity and bass), paid fairly (a relative term in the fifties, but paid fair royalties and, as Ertegun told a doo wop group deciding who to record for, “Yes they’ll offer more but we’ll actually pay you”) and they took care of service, following up on payments to DJs and record jobbers who were the infantry of publicity and record distribution at that time.
They also offered a great track record, music knowledge and a sophistication the others couldn’t match. And they knew when to get out of the way: they produced Ray Charles, but it was Ray that really taught Wexler how to hear and produce. And while they loved the music inordinately, a minority position among fifties R&B record producers, they were in a business where they hoped to (and did) make a lot of money.
My Cousin Joan’s son Rob and his lovely partner Hannah married last weekend in Howard County Maryland. A “Merry Moot” was part of the celebration and many of their friends performed Rob’s songs: but the treat of the afternoon was Hannah and Rob’s duet performances, of which this clip is a part. Congratulations to the couple and all our wishes for many happy years together!!
Bruce Hampton died on stage doing an encore at his 70th Birthday show in the Fox Theater. Writers (who obviously knew very little about him or his music) have been reaching for things to say, mischievous, mystifying (Robert Palmer), unusual, surrealist. Only Ben Ratliff mentioned Dada which for my money is the best way to describe his work. Patriarch of the jam band scene? My memories don’t exactly match that, like Hampton with the Geese Band (Karl Ratzer and Al Nicholson) in the seventies at the Lighthouse on Peachtree just above Tenth, Hampton bolting out the door quick as a squirrel (it was right next to the bandstand)when someone in the audience shot another patron—he’d seen the muzzle flash and was out of there. Or rolling out the slide guitar-mandolin for an extended solo. Or out at Cable Dekalb passing a make-believe roach to some bold fellow trying to interview him. Pity anyone crazy enough to get up on the stage with him, his wit was deadly, he’d learn your laugh the first time he heard it and play it back to you perfectly for as long as you’d stay up there.
Thing about it was, you never ever knew what you were going to get with him: when it was good it was like nothing you’d ever dreamed, when it wasn’t, well, it wasn’t. So what? He never did the same thing twice, he was funny and he was amazing. He could get the craziest people to play together—and he always had great bands: the guitarists he played were always awesome, beginning with the Grease Band’s Howard Kelling and Glen Phillips. It’s sad to see him gone, but as many have said, if it had to be, this is the way he’d have wanted it, on stage, performing a Bobby Bland song with his friends.
Here’s a little taste of some classic work. I don’t have a copy of the Grease Band’s “Music to Eat” Album, so I’ve included a youtube link to Halifax.
Chuck Berry’s 1973 Cadillac Convertible Coupe at the National Museum of African American Culture and History in Washington. DC
Chuck Berry passed away this weekend, and the world is poorer for it. The discoverer—no, the creator of the archetype of a rock and roll song, his meld of blues and country (the studio musicians at Chess thought he played “mostly country songs”) came out as poetry. Articulate, with a deft touch for situationalization, his songs about car races, school, making out—and more—put you there. They were some of the first that made white teens think they understood black culture. They were rebel music.
Those songs. A story teller with bite, insight and daring, Berry made you think you yourself had done the things he wrote about: and had no doubt that he had.
The guitar: a countrified style that was unique and like the words, compelling, articulate and memorable. Musicians imitated him, notably Keith Richards who seemed more than comfortable with his early career mostly Chuck Berry guitar style. Clapton stole, Burton stole, Lennon stole, every high schooler with a pick and an amp stole: but how can you call it stealing when it’s the very substance of what you’re doing?
Of course, most of Berry’s career played out in the era of Jim Crow and he paid the price, drawing jail terms when white musicians who did much worse (Jerry Lee? Elvis?) got a pass. Even Leonard Chess’ famous attorneys couldn’t do better than a mistrial in 1959, and then saw him jailed anyway on the inevitable retrial.
Hip, quick, sparkling, witty: if rock and roll will never die, he’s a good reason for it.
Here are three of my favorites of his, ones you don’t hear too much that catch some of the breadth of his work.
