Chuck Berry was as skeevy as they come, but he was a great songwriter.
If you ask me, the music of the fifties was horrible, generally speaking. (Elvis? Horrible! Doo-wop? Horrible!)
But Chuck Berry and a few others (e.g., Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis) were a breath of fresh air.
* * * * *
Berry wrote “Roll Over, Beethoven” in 1956 in response to his sister Lucy always using the family piano to play classical music when Berry wanted to play popular music on it. (How did that classical music thing work out for you, Lucy? Remind me again how many top ten hit singles you had?)
Chuck Berry
A lot of bands covered the song, including the Beatles. I once owned a four-track Beatles EP that included their very credible version of the song.
But the best “Roll Over, Beethoven” cover by far was the Electric Light Orchestra’s eight-minute-long elaboration of Berry’s record, which they released in 1973.
ELO’s baroque, over-the-top, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink cover included excepts from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and a whole lot more. It brings a smile to my face every time I hear it, and I’m generally a pretty grumpy old f*rt.
And that’s why I’ve chosen it for the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” COVER RECORDS HALL OF FAME.
* * * * *
Click here to listen to the original Chuck Berry recording of “Roll Over Beethoven.”
Click here to listen to the cover of that record by the Beatles.
Click here to listen to the Electric Light Orchestra cover of the song.
Charlie Watts first appeared with the Rolling Stones at the Ealing Jazz Club in London on February 2, 1963. From that date until in death in August, he was the drummer every single time the Stones performed.
Watts had met Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones at that club the previous summer, when the three came to hear Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, the most popular English rhythm and blues band of that era.
Charlie Watts in 1963
Watts, who had a day job as a graphic designer for a London advertising agency, had been playing in jazz bands prior to joining Blues Incorporated. It took him some time to figure out how to play rhythm and blues. “I didn’t know what [rhythm and blues] was,” he told an interviewer in 2012. “I thought it meant Charlie Parker played slow.”
* * * * *
The day after the Rolling Stones hired Andrew Loog Oldham as their manager, the nineteen-year-old wunderkind scheduled a recording session for them at Olympic Sound Studios in London.
Only after reserving the studio for three hours on the evening of May 10 did the Stones decide what to record, choosing Chuck Berry’s “Come On.”
A few days later, the Stones signed with Decca Records – who were still smarting on taking a pass on the Beatles the year before. “Come On” was released as a single on June 7, and reached #21 on the UK charts thanks largely to Oldham’s efforts. (Decca did little to promote the record, but the Stones manager gave the band’s fan-club members the names of the record stores that were polled by the compiler of the singles charts, and urged them to go to those shops to buy “Come On.”)
The Stones followed up “Come On” – which they didn’t think much of – with a cover of Lennon and McCartney’s “I Wanna Be Your Man” (which was a #12 hit in the UK), a cover of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” (which made it to #3), and “Tell Me,” a Jagger-Richards original that became their first #1 UK hit about a year after they recorded “Come On.”
* * * * *
“Come On” is not one of Chuck Berry’s better-known efforts, but it’s as clever and catchy as many of his hit songs.
Click here to listen to the Rolling Stones’ cover of “Come On” – the group’s first recording featuring the late Charlie Watts on drums.
We’ve been working our way through the Musicoholics website’s ranking of states based their relative contributions to popular music.
Last time, we covered the states ranked from #30 to #21. Today, we’re going to discuss the states that Musicoholics ranked #20 through #11.
* * * * *
Arkansas holds down the #20 spot on the Musicoholics list mostly because the great Johnny Cash grew up there. I might flip Arkansas with Alabama – the home of Hank Williams – which was ranked 21st. But Cash is comparable in importance to Williams . . . so no harm, no foul.
Next in the Musicoholics rankings is Missouri. The most notable pop musician to hail from Missouri was St. Louis native Chuck Berry, a truly great songwriter and performer – Elvis Presley can’t hold a candle to him but was a much more popular figure than Berry because Chuck was (1) older, (2) black, and (3) a perv.
#19 (with a bullet!)
Jazz great Charlie “Bird” Parker also spent his formative years in Missouri – he was from Kansas City, which was home to a thriving jazz scene. (You did know that Kansas City is in Missouri, don’t you? Unless you’re talking about Kansas City, Kansas – which is much smaller than Kansas City, Missouri.)
* * * * *
Indiana comes in at #18 on the Musicoholics list. Michael Jackson and his musical brothers and sisters were born there, as were John Mellencamp (who wears his Hoosierness on his sleeve) and Axl Rose (who doesn’t).
Next comes Virginia, which spawned a number of country and bluegrass legends – Patsy Cline, the Carter Family, and the Stanley Brothers among them. I might Virginia higher but for the fact that Dave Matthews and Bruce Hornsby are from there.)
Florida ranks #3 among the states in population, but Musicoholics assigns them only the #16 spot in its rankings for its contributions to rock (Tom Petty and Lynyrd Skynyrd), rap (2 Live Crew and Pitbull), disco (KC and the Sunshine Band), and Latin music (Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine).
I would move Florida ahead of #15 Massachusetts – Aerosmith, Boston, the Cars, and the J. Geils Band had their moments, but are all overrated. (Mission of Burma, by contrast, is almost criminally underrated.)
* * * * *
Pennsylvania and Ohio are #6 and #7 in population, but are underachievers when it comes to their musical contributions – they are #14 and #13, respectively, in the Musicoholics rankings.
Pennsylvania produced a lot of great R&B artists, but personally I prefer the groups who came out of Ohio – among them the James Gang, Devo, Pere Ubu, and especially the Pretenders. (The Pretenders were formed in the UK, and three of its four original members were English – but Chrissie Hynde grew up in Ohio, and Chrissie Hynde is the Pretenders as far as I’m concerned. . . not to mention the greatest female singer/songwriter of all time.)
Chrissie Hynde
Washington (state – not D.C.) comes in at the 12th spot on the Musicoholics list. I would bump Washington up a few spots –after all, it was home to Jimi Hendrix, the Sonics (perhaps the greatest garage band of all), and grunge greats like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Mudhoney, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden.
Rounding out the second ten on the Musicoholics list is New Jersey. Frank Sinatra and the Four Seasons justify a high ranking for the Garden State, but it gets demerits for the hugely overrated Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen.
* * * * *
Between 1955 and 1959, the great Chuck Berry released a dozen or so hit singles, including “Maybellene,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and “Johnny B. Goode.”
But his career was derailed in December 1959 when he was arrested for picking up a 14-year-old Native American girl before a performance in El Paso and transporting her to St. Louis to work as a hatcheck girl at his club. (Berry claimed that she said she was 21.)
Berry was convicted of violating the federal Mann Act – which made it a felony to transport any female across state lines for immoral purposes – and given a five-year prison sentence. Click here to read a fascinating account of the trial.
The star won an appeal of the conviction – his lawyer claimed that the trial judge had made racist comments that prejudiced the all-white jury – but was retried in 1961 and convicted again. Berry’s appeal of that conviction failed and he spent a year and a half in jail.
Today’s featured song was the last single Berry released before he went to the poke. It didn’t chart, and I was unaware of the song until I recently heard the Rolling Stones cover of it, which was the very first single they released.
The Stones’ recording of “Come On” made it to #21 on the UK single charts, but was not released in the U.S.
Click here to listen to Chuck Berry’s version of “Come On.”
Friday night, the University of Maryland–Baltimore County’s men’s basketball team – which was the lowest-seeded team in its region – beat the top-seeded University of Virginia men in a first-round NCAA tournament game in Charlotte, NC.
Here’s the headline that appeared on the website of the NBC affiliate in Charlotte immediately after that game ended:
And here’s a corrected headline that appeared on that website about half an hour later:
As the NCAA pointed out in a tweet the morning after the UMBC upset, #16-seeded Harvard upset top-seeded Stanford in the 1998 NCAA women’s basketball tournament.
Until UMBC won Friday night, that was the only time in men’s or women’s tournament history that a #16 seed had beaten a #1 seed.
* * * * *
My twin daughters were 5th-grade basketball whizzes in 1998, so I watched women’s basketball on television whenever I could – including Harvard’s shocking upset of Stanford. I don’t remember a lot about the game, but I do remember being in awe of Harvard’s star player, senior Allison Feaster.
Feaster, who had led the nation in scoring that season, was unstoppable in the Stanford game, scoring 35 points and contributing 13 rebounds and three steals in the Crimson’s 71-67 victory. She played virtually every second of the game.
Allison Feaster in 1997
Two of Stanford’s starters suffered fluke injuries after the team was given a #1 seed by the NCAA tournament committee. There’s no doubt that helped Harvard’s chances, but Stanford was still a huge favorite. The Cardinal were perennial national championship contenders – they had been to the Final Four in each of the three previous seasons – and their players had a decided height advantage over Feaster and her teammates.
Feaster was 5 feet, 11 inches, which sounds pretty tall. But Stanford’s roster featured no fewer than eleven players who were taller than Feaster was – including a 6’7” player, a 6’6” player, and two 6’4” players.
Stanford was coached by the legendary Tara VanDerveer, whose teams had won national championships in 1990 and 1992, and who had been chosen to coach the women’s Olympic team in 1996. VanDerveer and Tennessee’s Pat Summitt are the only two women to coach Division I basketball teams to more than 1000 wins. (Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski is the only male coach to reach that milestone.)
Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer
And the game was played in Stanford’s home gym, giving the Cardinal a significant edge – the men’s tournament games are always played on neutral courts.
Here's an ESPN piece about the game that aired in 2008:
* * * * *
I’m not taking anything away from UMBC. But there are many fewer upsets in the NCAA women’s tournament than on the men’s side. While a #16 seed had never won in the men’s tournament until Friday night, eight #15 seeds and 21 #14 seeds have won first-round games over #2 and #3 seeds.
But not only has no #16 seed other than the 1998 Harvard team won in the women’s tournament since it became a 64-team tournament in 1994 – no #15 or #14 seed has ever won either. In other words, out of 300 games involving #16, #15, and #14 seeds against #1, #2, and #3 seeds, the Harvard win in 1998 represents the one and only game when a low-three seed beat a top-three seed.
* * * * *
The more you read about Allison Feaster, the more amazed you’ll be her athletic and academic accomplishments.
Allison Feaster in 2014
Here’s an excerpt from a resolution honoring Feaster that was passed by the South Carolina Senate in 1994:
Whereas, Allison Feaster has been named to the 1994 Parade All-American Basketball Team, the 1993 and 1994 Smith and Street All-American Basketball Teams, South Carolina Player of the Year for 1993 and 1994, Miss Basketball by both the Greater Greenville Basketball Club and The Charlotte Observer, and one of the 1994 Top Fifteen Seniors by USA Today; and
Whereas, she has been a member of the South Carolina AAAA State Champion basketball team in 1993, AAAA Player of the Year in 1993 and 1994, selected to All State for five years, the National AAU Junior Olympic Champion team in 1993, and the Most Valuable Player in the North-South All Star game in 1994; and
Whereas, Allison Feaster is the career leading scorer in South Carolina history with 3,427 points; and
Whereas, she has been a member of the 1993 All-Region Track Team and has thrice been a state finalist in both the Shot Put and Discus and has been a member of the 1993 and 1994 All Region Tennis Team; and
Whereas, she is graduating from Chester High School as number one in the Senior Class and will be attending Harvard University; and Whereas, the Senate of South Carolina wishes to hold Allison Feaster high as a role model for all the youth in our State. Now, therefore,
Be it resolved by the Senate:
That the best wishes and heartfelt congratulations of the South Carolina Senate be extended to Miss Allison Feaster of Chester High School in Chester County for the many honors and accolades she has received as an athlete and as a scholar and wish her continued success in pursuing her future endeavors.
Did you catch that Feaster was an All-State basketball player for five seasons? That wasn’t a typo – she made the All-State basketball team as an eighth-grader! (She started on the high-school varsity team as a seventh-grader.)
After graduating from Harvard with a degree in economics, Feaster was a first-round WNBA draft pick of the Los Angeles Sparks. (She’s still the only Ivy Leaguer to be picked in the WNBA draft.)
Feaster in the WNBA
She played ten seasons in the WNBA – she took 2007 off to have a baby, but came back in 2008 – and continued to play professionally in Europe until just after her 40th birthday.
Feaster recently was named Director of Player Personnel & Coach Relations for the 26-team “G League,” which is the NBA’s minor league organization.
* * * * *
“Sweet Little Sixteen” was a #2 hit single for Chuck Berry in 1958. (Berry was miles ahead of Elvis in those days.)
The song was a favorite of “British Invasion” bands – you can find recordings of live performance by the Stones, the Beatles, and the Animals on Youtube.
But he could play a guitar just like a ringing a bell
(Yes, I'm aware that's more than two or three lines, but this verse is so good that it deserves to be quoted in its entirety.)
The late Chuck Berry was the first person inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which is fine with me.
Here’s the first sentence from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s biography of Chuck Berry, who was 90 years old when he died on March 18:
After Elvis Presley, only Chuck Berry had more influence on the formation and development of rock & roll.
Chuck Berry in 1964
Writing on slate.com, Jack Hamilton (an American studies professor at the University of Virginia) begged to differ:
“Who invented rock and roll?” is a truly unanswerable question, but Chuck Berry’s claim is as solid as any. Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88,” the 1951 song most frequently cited as the music’s Big Bang, predates Berry’s emergence by four years, and Lloyd Price, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins, and even Elvis Presley had all made records before Berry broke through with “Maybellene” in 1955, at the shockingly advanced age of 28. But Berry . . . was rock and roll’s first great auteur, blessed with an effortless ability to render the specific into the universal, and vice versa. He wrote songs infused with play, humor, ennui, pain, rage, swagger, and sex. They spoke to a generation who assumed they were about them, which was always only partially true.
Hamilton goes on to identify exactly what it was about Berry’s early hits that was revolutionary:
Musical revolutions tend to happen more gradually and subtly than pop mythology would like . . . [T]here are precious few moments on record that you can point to as a precise, tectonic shift in music itself. But Berry’s early hits provide just this. If you listen closely to “Roll Over Beethoven, “School Days,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Johnny B. Goode,” or any number of other Berry sides from the period, you’ll hear a rhythm section playing a standard shuffle, the swung eighth-note rhythm that was the most common backdrop of 1940s and 1950s Chicago blues and R&B. Berry and pianist Johnnie Johnson, on the other hand, are playing the arrow-straight eighth notes that would soon become the defining rhythmic currency of rock and roll. It’s a startling clash, the sound of the old world colliding with the new, and once it’s pointed out, the drums and bass on these recordings sound instantly out-of-date, a relic of an earlier era.
* * * * *
I think that Berry was a better performer than Elvis Presley. And I know he was a better songwriter.
Elvis was credited as the co-writer of a number of his songs, but he contributed significantly to only a very few. By contrast, Berry wrote not only “Johnny B. Goode” but also “Roll Over, Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Back in the U.S.A.,” “Memphis, Tennessee,” and many others.
But I can’t argue that Elvis Presley was a bigger star than Berry.
Was that only because Elvis was white? I don’t think so. It didn’t hurt that Elvis was only 21 in 1956, when he had five #1 hits. Berry turned 30 in 1956, plus he was a bit of a skeeze. (I wouldn’t describe Elvis as exactly clean-cut, but he was a helluva lot more appealing to teenaged girls than Chuck Berry.)
Berry was still in high school when he was arrested for armed robbery after robbing three stores and stealing a car at gunpoint. (Berry later wrote that the gun he used to flag down the motorist driving the car he stole wasn’t functional.)
In 1959, he was prosecuted and convicted under the Mann Act, a federal law that forbade the transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes. (Berry was found guilty of having sex with a 14-year-old girl he had transported across state lines to work as a hatcheck girl in a St. Louis nightclub that he owned, and spent 18 months in prison.)
A few months after going to the White House in 1979 to play for President Jimmy Carter, Berry pled guilty to tax evasion charges.
And in 1990, he was sued by a number of women who found out that he had installed a videocamera in the women’s bathroom at a restaurant he owned. Berry paid the plaintiffs an estimated $1.2 million to settle the case. He also pled guilty to misdemeanor drug possession when police who were searching his house for his bathroom videotapes found 62 grams of marijuana.
Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, baby!
* * * * *
Today’s featured song is ranked number 7 on Rolling Stone magazine’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” – just behind “Good Vibrations” and just ahead of “Hey Jude.” It’s the only song from the fifties in Rolling Stone’s top ten.
And it’s also the only rock ’n’ roll song included on the golden record that was placed in the Voyager spacecraft that was launched in 1977 and is currently travelling through interstellar space.
Chuck Berry wrote a lot of iconic songs, and “Johnny B. Goode” is probably the iconic-est of all of them.
If you read the lyrics to that song on the printed page, they aren’t anything special. But they are perfect lyrics for a rock ’n’ roll song.
“Johnny B. Goode” peaked at #8 on the Billboard “Hot 100.” (The songs that reached #1 while “Johnny B. Goode” was on the “Hot 100” included “Witch Doctor,” “Yakety Yak,” and “The Purple People Eater.”)
I always assumed that Johnny B. Goode was a white boy from the boonies, but Berry’s original lyrics were “where lived a colored boy named Johnny B. Goode.”
Berry was born and reared in St. Louis – not the piney woods of Louisiana – but the song is based on his life.
In the very first post I ever wrote for this wildly popular blog -- an introduction of sorts titled "What? Who? Why?" -- I said that 2 or 3 lines "is more about the music than it is about me." Which is a very big lie, if not the BIGGEST LIE EVER TOLD.
2 or 3 lines is MUCH more about me than it is about the music. But today's post is going to be different. Today's 2 or 3 lines is going to be all about YOU!
Let's get started with some basic background info -- what's your height, weight, eye color, hair color, age, marital status, religion, and political affiliation? Hearing and vision normal? Any scars or tattoos? Also, what's your Social Security number? (I'm only asking for your protection.)
Now tell us a little about yourself -- where you grew up, where you live now, what kind of work you do . . . the usual stuff.
Do you have children? If so, which one of them is your favorite? (Oh, come on . . . of course you have a favorite. No one likes all his or her children just the same.)
What do you want from life? An Indian guru to show you the inner light? A meaningless love affair with that girl you met tonight? To get cable TV and watch it every night? Something else?
What do you wear when you're sleeping? And what are you wearing right now?
What in the world is in that bag? What you got in that bag?
This is a music blog, so let's turn our attention to music for a moment. What kind of music did you listen to in high school? What kind of music do you listen to today? How about a "desert island" list -- give us five albums you'd want to have with you if you were stranded on a desert island?
Finally, where's the weirdest place you've ever gotten the urge to make whoopee?
Let's stop there for a moment and think about your answers. How interesting are they? Can you truthfully say that your answers are compelling enough that others will want to read them?
Most importantly, is stuff about you more interesting than the stuff I write about me? Be honest -- really, really honest. . . .
I didn't think so. But don't feel bad. Most people are like you -- not that interesting. Certainly not interesting enough to be the heart and soul of a wildly popular blog.
But I am that interesting. As a very wise man once said about me, "He's got it, he was born with it, and he washes it twice a day." (Exactly!)
"I'm Talking About You" was released by Chuck Berry in 1961. The Rolling Stones covered the song (which they titled "Talkin' 'Bout You") on their 1965 December's Children album, and that's the version I know the best. The Hollies, Beatles, Yardbirds, Hot Tuna, and Delbert McClinton are among those who have also covered it.
A couple of weeks ago, 2 or 3 lines featured Devo's "Gut Feeling/(Slap Your Mammy)."
I had a hard time choosing between that song and "Come Back Jonee," the track that follows it on Devo's debut album, Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!, but I eventually chose "Gut Feeling."
Then it hit me: I'm in charge here . . . I can feature both songs if I want to! (If you don't like it, go find a different wildly popular blog to read.)
"Come Back Jonee" (pronounced "Johnny") was clearly inspired by Chuck Berry's classic 1958 hit, "Johnny B. Goode." (Just listen to the very Berry-esque lead guitar licks.)
With the possible exception of a few Elvis Presley songs, is there a more iconic fifties rock 'n' roll song than "Johnny B. Goode"?
Berry's hit is perhaps the most covered song in pop music history. (Wikipedia lists almost a hundred artists who covered it, including the Beach Boys, the Beatles, Elvis, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Prince, the Rolling Stones, the Who, and Marty McFly and the Starlighters -- that's the band that played at the high school dance in Back to the Future.)
Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly
The line about "a country boy named Johnny B. Goode" was originally written as "a colored boy named Johnny B. Goode," but Berry changed the lyric to increase his chances of getting on the radio.
The Devo song begins with a nod to Berry's hit:
Come back Jonee
Jonee be good
Treat her like you should
While Johnny B. Goode lived in a log cabin in the Louisiana backwoods, Devo's Jonee seems to have been a city boy -- after all, he bought his guitar in a pawnshop and drove his Datsun on an expressway.
Like many guitar heroes, Jonee wasn't very nice to his girl:
You gotta love 'em and leave 'em
Sometimes you deceive 'em
You made her cry
Jonee, you're bad
But karma's a bitch, and Jonee eventually paid the price for making his girl sad:
Jonee jumped in his Datsun
Drove out on the expressway
Went head-on into a semi
His guitar is all that's left now
If you're too young to know what a Datsun is, let me explain. Datsun was a brand name used by an old Japanese automobile company, DAT Motorcars, which was taken over by Nissan Motor Co. in 1933.
Datsun B210 (circa 1975)
When Nissan entered the American market in 1958, they called their cars Datsuns. But the company decided to phase out the Datsun brand and replace it with the Nissan name.
The rebranding strategy was announced in the U.S. in 1981, and the company took several years to fully implement the name change (at a cost of about $500 million). By 1986, the transition was complete.
At the time, I remember a lot of business experts saying Nissan was crazy to abandon the well-known Datsun brand name in favor of Nissan. I guess it worked out OK in the long run, but I remember that I was not entirely accustomed to the new name in 1990, when I bought a black Nissan Maxima. (Best car I ever owned, with the possible exception of my first one -- a 1970 Olds Cutlass two-door with the 350 V8.)
1990 Nissan Maxima (not mine)
By the way, Nissan just announced that it is going to revive the Datsun name for the inexpensive models it sells in India, Indonesia, and Russia.
Here's the truly demented music video for "Come Back Jonee." (Note the one-octave synthesizer Mark Mothersbaugh plays.)
Posts
