My life list of music acts lacks the Beatles and the Stones, but it includes the Duke and the Count, Doc Watson and Dr. John, The Band and The Who, Frank Sinatra and Mel Torme.
I have seen Paul Simon and Eagles and Clapton in large arenas, the Modern Jazz Quartet in a chapel, Charles Mingus at the bowery Five Spot, The Lovin’ Spoonful in a college gym, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opening concert in the cavernous Cleveland Stadium, and Rod Stewart, James Taylor, Jimmy Buffett, Neil Young and others in summery outdoor amphitheaters.
But the best concert I ever saw was in UNC-Greensboro’s Aycock Auditorium sometime in the mid-1970s. It was by a brown-eyed handsome man in his 50s whose hits were over a decade in the real view mirror. He arrived in town with a guitar, met a local pick-up band minutes before he hit the stage, and played his songs. He expected them to follow along.
This was not a problem since everyone on earth who’d ever heard of Rock and Roll could probably have played along with “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Roll Over, Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Maybellene,” “O, Carol,” “Back in he USA,” “No Particular Place to Go,” and a dozen more.
It was, of course, Chuck Berry, aka Johnny B. Goode, who died a week or so ago at 90 in his hometown of St. Louis. In an age of mega-concerts with trucks full of equipment, stage sets, light shows, special effects, fireworks, loaded by roadies, accompanied by back-up singers, Chuck was a throwback to the roots of the music.
He needed nothing but six strings, an electric socket, his personal songbook and showmanship. He loped through the familiar tunes, did his splits and duck walks, embellished a few silly songs like My Ding-a-Ling” and “Reelin”’ and Rockin”’ with winking double entendres that he got the coeds to sing along with.
Before long, a staid venue for stage plays and graduations had turned into a sock hop with the entire audience singing along and dancing in the aisles. He invited a few dancers up on stage to shimmy, coaxed them back to their seats without missing a beat, and inserted into the lyrics “it’s time to go now, gotta go now,” and vanished into the wings. He was probably halfway to the airport by the time the cheering died down.
It was not cerebral entertainment, had no angst or deep meaning, but was just plain teen-age fun and entirely American. Not for nothing is he regarded as the first poet laureate of rock. From soda shops and fast cars and school day boredom and sexual frustration he made magic. They were sly and witty and pitch perfect songs. Sweet little sixteen has “just got to have about a half a million framed autographs.” And back in the United States, he wrote a love song to what he’d missed — “the long freeway,” the hamburgers that “sizzle on an open grill night and day,” and “the jukebox jumpin’’ with records.”
His songs were little odysseys, often about seeking freedom. And the key to escape was all those V8 Fords and Thunderbirds and Coupe de Villes where you could go “cruisin’ and playin’ the radio.”
In “School Days” the protagonist is yearning for escape from “American History and Practical Math,” because “all day long you’ve been waiting to dance.” In “The Promised Land” he narrates an actual coast to coast trek from Norfolk, Virginia to Los Angeles by bus, train and plane with troubles Ulysses never had to deal with. A black man riding a Greyhound in the days of segregation finds himself in troubled waters when “that hound broke down and left us all stranded in downtown Birmingham.” He got out of there as fast as possible.
In three minutes he can tell the tale of young love in “You Never Can Tell” or write the autobiography of a kid who escapes a hardscrabble beginning by becoming a guitar slinger in “Johnny B. Goode.” It is a vanished mythic America and it is impossible to imagine Dylan or Springsteen or Credence or a hundred other acts without him. As Bob Seger sang, “all Chuck’s children are out there playing his licks.”
Since it was a rock and rock life, it had its shares of troubles with women, with the IRS, with crooked record companies. Once, in the same year, he played The White House and spent time in the slammer on a tax evasion rap.
All of which made him guarded and suspicious and touchy offstage. Once burned, forever distrustful. He learned to trust no one, dispense with all overhead and keep as much money from his performance as possible. He famously watched the exchange rates when performing in Europe and refused to go on when the dollar was up until he was paid in cash, in greenbacks.
But onstage, over forty years ago when I saw him, he was completely entertaining, made the crowd sing and dance and laugh and sent them out into the night with a feeling of joy. And in the decade of Nixon, stagflation, an OPEC oil embargo, and disco, that was a triumph of hope over experience.
Hail, Hail Rock and Roll and Chuck Berry, the man who made it possible. He has rounded third and headed for home, a brown-eyed handsome man that won the game.