Podcast appearances and mentions of Johnnie Johnson

death song blues rollin frisco syndicate taj mahal lucinda williams burnside everthing robben ford son house pinetop perkins lightnin hopkins larry mitchell johnnie johnson clarence gatemouth brown alvin youngblood hart

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 13, 2020 63:34

BLUES SYNDICATE Nº 23 1- SON HOUSE. Death letter blues. 2- LIGHTNIN HOPKINS. Mean old Frisco. 3- PINETOP PERKINS. How long. 4- ALVIN YOUNGBLOOD HART. Big mama´s door. 5- R.L. BURNSIDE. Rollin and tumblin. 6- LUCINDA WILLIAMS. Happy woman blues. 7- ROBBEN FORD. Everthing´s gonna be alright. 8- JOHNNIE JOHNSON. I´m mad. 9- TAJ MAHAL. She caught the katy. 10- CLARENCE GATEMOUTH BROWN. Song for Renee. 11- LARRY MITCHELL. I loved another woman.

Blues syndicate nº 23

death song blues rollin frisco syndicate taj mahal lucinda williams burnside everthing robben ford son house pinetop perkins lightnin hopkins larry mitchell johnnie johnson clarence gatemouth brown alvin youngblood hart

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 13, 2020 63:34

BLUES SYNDICATE Nº 23 1- SON HOUSE. Death letter blues. 2- LIGHTNIN HOPKINS. Mean old Frisco. 3- PINETOP PERKINS. How long. 4- ALVIN YOUNGBLOOD HART. Big mama´s door. 5- R.L. BURNSIDE. Rollin and tumblin. 6- LUCINDA WILLIAMS. Happy woman blues. 7- ROBBEN FORD. Everthing´s gonna be alright. 8- JOHNNIE JOHNSON. I´m mad. 9- TAJ MAHAL. She caught the katy. 10- CLARENCE GATEMOUTH BROWN. Song for Renee. 11- LARRY MITCHELL. I loved another woman.

Forever Forum 022: Johnnie Johnson

CHRIS STUART: GOOD TO KNOW

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 2, 2020 59:43

On this episode of the Forever Forum, Chris is joined by Johnnie Johnson a former All-American at the University of Texas and all-pro defensive back with the Los Angeles Rams. Johnnie very successfully transitioned his career in the National Football League to a meteoric career as a top-producing real estate professional and then onto a corporate coach and relocation consultant through his companies; World Class Coaches and the Moving Families Initiative. Johnnie and his companies deal with a variety of family and corporate moving situations, so we'll discuss the dynamics surrounding families as they move and in particular, the impact to families and children from relocations. Don't miss this one! Link to Johnnie Johnson's Book; “YOU'RE CLOSER THAN YOU THINK WHETHER YOU REALIZE IT OR NOT” -- Store.bookbaby.com/profile/JohnnieJohnson

university texas leadership forever real estate forum all american los angeles rams national football league relocation johnnie berkshire hathaway homeservices johnnie johnson world class coaches

Greg Martin - Kentucky Backcountry Blues Guitar Lessons, Performance, & Interview

TrueFire Live: Guitar Lessons + Q&As

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 15, 2020 77:49

Greg Martin talks about his Kentucky Backcountry Blues guitar lessons available on TrueFire, performs, and answers questions. To learn more and watch the video from this live session, please visit truefire.com/live.About Greg:Greg Martin is a master of homecooked Southern-style Rock, Blues, Country and Rockabilly guitar. Along with his band, The Kentucky HeadHunters, he has helped reshape the face of country music. To date the HeadHunters have released six albums, winning countless awards and Grammies. In 1992, Greg Martin filled in for injured Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist, Ed King. The HeadHunters have also collaborated with the great Johnnie Johnson on a stellar rockin’ blues CD “That’ll Work!”. Johnnie was inducted into the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame this year by Rolling Stone’s Keith Richards. Greg also released a Gospel Blues CD with former Wet Willie singer, Jimmy Hall, entitled “The Revelators”.

Johnnie Johnson - 20th Century Jukebox

20th Century Jukebox

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 19, 2020 10:04

It was New Years Eve 1953, and pianist Johnnie Johnson had a problem.... See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

new year's eve promised land chuck berry 20th century jukebox school days tanqueray chess records roll over beethoven johnnie johnson leonard chess

Johnnie Johnson - 20th Century Jukebox

Auscast Music

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 19, 2020 10:04

It was New Years Eve 1953, and pianist Johnnie Johnson had a problem.... See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

new year's eve promised land chuck berry 20th century jukebox school days tanqueray chess records roll over beethoven johnnie johnson leonard chess

Kentucky Headhunters' Richard Young

Go Beyond Here

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 24, 2020 41:52

Kari connects Richard to his dad who is now his guardian angel, as they talk about when his dad watches over him, the blessing of "Crazy Jim" that he wrote in minutes for his Grammy-winning Southern rock band, having a sort of karmic connection getting to cross paths and play with music greats like Johnny Cash and Johnnie Johnson, as a validation he was on the path he was meant to be on, what Julian Lennon said that made Richard tear up, Lennon's "Imagine," and always striving to be a better person, during this time and always.

grammy southern johnny cash julian lennon richard young kentucky headhunters johnnie johnson

Episode 67: “Johnny B. Goode”, by Chuck Berry

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 27, 2020

Episode sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, and the decline and fall of both Berry and Alan Freed. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Splish Splash” by Bobby Darin. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists — part one, part two. I used foue main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. I also used a Chuck Berry website, http://www.crlf.de/ChuckBerry/ , which contains updates on Rothwell’s research. The information on the precursors to the “Johnny B. Goode” intro comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum. And for information about Freed, I used Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without much of the filler. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A brief content warning for this episode – like last week’s, this discusses, though not in any great detail, a few crimes of a sexual nature. If that’s likely to upset you, please either check the transcript to make sure you’ll be OK, or come back next week. Today we’re going to talk about the definitive fifties rock and roll song. “Johnny B. Goode” is so much the epitome of American post-war culture that when NASA sent a record into space, on the Voyager probes in the seventies, it was the only rock and roll song included in the selection of audio, which also included pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky, and performances by Louis Armstrong and Blind Willie Johnson, along with folk songs, spoken greetings from world leaders, and so on. At the time the golden record was put together, it was criticised for containing any rock and roll at all. Now, that record is further away from Earth than any other object created by a human being. On Saturday Night Live, the week the probe was launched, Steve Martin joked that there’d been a message from aliens – “Send more Chuck Berry”. That’s what an important record “Johnny B. Goode” is. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] When we last looked at Chuck Berry, he’d just released “School Day”, which had been his breakout hit into the broader white teenage market that had started to listen to rock and roll. Berry’s career didn’t go on a completely upward curve after that point. His next single, “Oh Baby Doll”, was a comparative flop — it reached number twelve in the R&B charts, but only number fifty-seven on the pop charts. But the record after that was the start of a three-single run that would consolidate Berry as rock and roll’s premier mythologiser. Where in May 1956 Berry had sung about “these rhythm and blues”, this time he was going to use the music’s new name, and he was singing “just let me hear some of that rock and roll music”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Rock and Roll Music”] That put him back in the top ten, and everything seemed to be going wonderfully for him. He was so popular now as a rock and roll star that on one of the late 1957 tours he did, when Buddy Holly and the Crickets were lower down the bill, the Crickets would do “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” as part of their set. Berry had written enough classics by now that other acts on the bill could do the ones he didn’t have time for. When he next went back into the studio, it was to cut seven songs. One of them, “Reelin’ and Rockin'”, was a slight reworking of the old Wynonie Harris song, “Round the Clock Blues”. Harris’ song, which had also been recorded by Big Joe Turner with Johnny Otis’ band, was an inspiration for “Rock Around the Clock” among other records: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, “Round the Clock Blues”] Berry’s version got rid of some of the more sexual lyrical content — though that would later come back in live performances of the song — and played up the song’s similarity to “Rock Around the Clock”, but it’s still basically the exact same song that Wynonie Harris had performed. Of course, the copyright is in Chuck Berry’s name — for all that he and his publishers would be very eager to sue anyone who might come too close to one of Berry’s songs, he had no compunction about taking all the credit for a song someone else had written. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] You might notice that the piano style on that track is very different from some of Berry’s earlier recordings. Now, there are two possible explanations for this, because I’ve seen two different pianists credited for these sessions. Some sources credit Lafayette Leake with playing the piano here, and that might be enough to explain the difference in style, but I’m going with the other sources, which credit Johnnie Johnson, Berry’s regular player, as playing on the session. If it is, though, he’s playing in a different style. This is because of the popularity of Jerry Lee Lewis, who had risen to fame since Berry’s last session. Lewis used to use a simple technique called “ripping” when playing the piano, in which you just slide your fingers across the keys as fast as possible. He does it pretty much constantly in his solos, as you can hear in this: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”, piano solo] Leonard Chess had heard that sound, and become convinced that that was the main reason that Lewis’ records were so successful, so he insisted on Johnnie Johnson doing that on Berry’s new records. Johnson didn’t like the sound, which he considered “all flash and no technique”, but Chess insisted — to the extent that when they were rehearsing the tracks, Chess would walk over and rip his hand down the keys himself, to show Johnson what he wanted. Johnson eventually went along with it, though he said he “’bout tore my thumbnail off” getting it done. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] He later acknowledged that Chess had a point, though — simple as it was, it did make the records more exciting, and it was something that the kids clearly liked. And something else that the kids liked was another song recorded at the same session — this time about the kids themselves: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Sweet Little Sixteen”] “Sweet Little Sixteen” was one of the first songs about the experience of being a rock and roll fan. There had been earlier records about just dancing to rock and roll music, of course — things like “Drugstore Rock & Roll” or “Rip it Up” — but this was about fandom, and about the experience of following musicians. It’s not completely about that, sadly — it’s the teen girl fan filtered through the male gaze, and so it’s also about how “everybody wants to dance with” this sixteen-year-old girl, and about her “tight dresses and lipstick” — but where the song gains its power is in the verse sections where the girl becomes the viewpoint character, and we hear about how excited she is to go to the show, and about her collections of autographs and photos. However flawed it is, it’s one of the best evocations of the experience of fandom as a hobby — not just liking the music, but having the experience of fandom be a major part of your life. One of the most notable things about “Sweet Little Sixteen” is the way that Berry uses the song to namecheck American Bandstand, which was fast becoming the most important rock and roll TV show around. While in the first chorus he sings about how they’ll be rocking in Boston and Pittsburgh, PA, in the subsequent choruses he changes that to “on Bandstand” and “in Philadelphia PA”, which is where American Bandstand was broadcast from. It’s a sign that Dick Clark was becoming more important than Berry’s mentor, Alan Freed. A week after the session for “Reelin’ and Rockin'” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”, came another session for what would become Berry’s most well-known song, and one that remains in the repertoire of almost every bar band in the world. It’s instantly recognisable right from the start. The introduction to “Johnny B. Goode” is one of the most well-known guitar parts in history: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] But that guitar part has a long history — it’s original to Chuck Berry, but at the same time it’s based on a lot of earlier examples. Berry took the basic idea for that line from Carl Hogan, Louis Jordan’s guitarist, who played this as the intro to Jordan’s “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] But Hogan was only the latest in a long line of people who had played essentially that identical line. The first recording we have of that riff dates back to 1918, and a recording by Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra. Sweatman was a friend and colleague of Scott Joplin, and his band was one of the very first black jazz groups to record at all. And on their song “Bluin’ the Blues”, you hear this: [Excerpt: Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra, “Bluin’ the Blues”] We hear it in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Got the Blues”, in 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Got the Blues”] In Blind Blake’s “Too Tight”, also from 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, “Too Tight”] then in records by Cow Cow Davenport, Andy Kirk, and Count Basie, before it turns up in the Louis Jordan record. But there is a crucial difference between what Carl Hogan played and what Chuck Berry played. Listen again to Hogan’s playing: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] and now to Berry: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] The crucial change Berry makes there is that most of the time he’s playing the solo line on two strings instead of one, creating a thicker sound, with parallel harmonies, rather than just the simple melody line. This was something that Berry learned from the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker: [Excerpt: T-Bone Walker, “Shufflin’ the Blues”] Berry took Walker’s playing style, and combined it with Hogan’s note choices, and that simple change makes all the difference. It transmutes the part that Hogan had played from just a standard riff you find in dozens of old jazz records, a standard part of any musician’s toolkit, into a specific intro to a specific song. When, six years later, Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys played this as the intro to “Fun, Fun, Fun”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Fun Fun Fun”] Absolutely no-one listening thought “Oh, he’s riffing off ‘Texas Shout’ by Cow Cow Davenport” — everyone instantly thought “Oh, that’s the intro to ‘Johnny B. Goode'”. Berry had taken a standard piece of every musician’s toolkit, and by putting a very slight twist on it had made everyone listening hear it differently, so now it was identified solely with him. The lyric to Johnny B. Goode is more original than the music, but even there we can trace its origins. Berry always talked about how the original idea for the lyric was as a message to Johnnie Johnson, saying “Johnnie, be good”, stop drinking so much — a wake-up call to his friend and colleague. But that quickly changed, and the song became more about Berry himself, or an idealised version of Berry, perhaps how he would want people to see him — something that was even more explicit in the original version of the lyric, where rather than sing “a country boy”, he sang “a coloured boy”. But there’s another sign that Berry was talking about himself, and that’s in the very title itself. Goode is spelled “G-o-o-d-e”, with an “e” on the end — and Berry’s childhood home was at 2520 Goode avenue, with an E. There’s another possible origin as well — the poet Langston Hughes had written a very widely circulated series of newspaper columns, which Berry would have encountered in his teenage years and early twenties, about a character named Jesse B. Simple. (And in an interesting note, in 1934 Hughes wrote a story about racial injustice called “Berry”, about a boy named Berry who would, among other things, tell children stories and sing them songs, and Hughes signed the dedication in the book that story was in “Berry” rather than with his own name.) You can point to every element of “Johnny B. Goode” and say “well, this came from there, and this came from there”, but still you’re no closer to identifying why Johnny B. Goode works as well as it does. it’s the combination of all these elements in a way that they’d never been put together before that is Berry’s genius, and is why Berry is pretty much universally regarded as an innovator, not just as an imitator. “Johnny B. Goode” was also the title song for what turned out to be Alan Freed’s final film — a film called Go, Johnny, Go! which also featured Eddie Cochran, the Moonglows, and Ritchie Valens. [Excerpt: Berry and Freed dialogue from Go, Johnny, Go!] That film came out in 1959, and had Berry as Freed’s co-star, appearing with Freed as himself in almost every scene. It was the last gasp of rock and roll cultural relevance for almost everyone involved. By the time the film had come out, Valens was already dead, and within a little over eighteen months after its release, Cochran was also dead, Freed was disgraced, and Berry was in prison. In the last couple of episodes, I’ve mentioned a tour that Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis headlined in 1958, just after “Johnny B. Goode” came out, with Alan Freed as the MC. What I didn’t mention until now is that as well as the tension between Chuck and Jerry Lee, that tour ended up spelling the end of Freed’s career. Freed was already on the downturn in his career — rock and roll was moving from being a music made largely by black musicians to one dominated by white people, and to make matters worse the major labels had finally got a handle on it and started churning out dozens of prepackaged teen idols, most of them called Bobby. Freed didn’t have the connections with the major labels, or the understanding of the new manufactured pop, that he did with the R&B records from labels like Chess. But it was the show in Boston on this tour that led to Freed’s downfall. The early show, which had been headlined by Lewis, had had the audience dancing, and the police were not at all impressed with this. They’d forced Alan Freed to make the audience sit down, and Lewis had had to play his set to an audience who were seated and squirming, unable to get up and dance to his recent big hits like “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Then came the late show, which Berry was headlining. The same thing started to happen — the kids in the audience got up to dance, and the police made Alan Freed make them sit down. But then, when the audience had quietened down, while Berry was standing there on stage, the police refused to dim the house lights and let the musicians carry on playing. So Freed got back on stage and said “It looks like the Boston police don’t want you to have a good time.” The show continued with the lights on, but the audience got annoyed — so much so that Chuck Berry finished the show from behind the drummer, in case the audience attacked. But the police got more annoyed. They got so annoyed, in fact, that they decided to simply claim that every single crime reported to them that night had been inspired by the show. Nobody now thinks that the New York Times reports which said there were multiple stabbings, fifteen people hospitalised, and multiple rapes, are actually accurate reports of anything caused by the show. But at the time, everyone believed it. Boston decided to ban rock and roll concerts altogether, as a result of the show, and while the tour continued through a couple more dates, most of the remaining tour dates got cancelled. Oddly, going through this adversity seems to have brought Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis together. While they’d been fighting each other for almost the entire tour, after this point they became quite close friends, and would speak warmly about each other. Things didn’t end so happily for Alan Freed. Freed had been having some problems with his radio station for a little while. He was difficult to work with, and they particularly disliked that he had started doing his broadcasts from home, rather than from the studio. When he’d been hired, the station was losing money, and he’d been a gamble. Now, they were in profit, and they didn’t need to take risks, and they’d been considering not renewing his contract when it came up in six months. Now that this had happened, they took the opportunity to use the morals clause in Freed’s contract to fire him, although he was allowed to present it as a resignation instead of a firing. Freed would manage to get another radio job, but not one with anything like the same prominence. He would, within a couple of years, become the designated industry fall guy for the practice of payola. This is something that we’ve talked about before — record labels would pay DJs to play their records. Sometimes it was in the form of adding their name to the writing credits, as was the case for Freed with records like “Maybellene” and “Sincerely” – and you can tell how much Freed contributed to those songs by hearing his own attempts at making records: [Excerpt: Alan Freed and his Rock and Roll Band, “Rock and Roll Boogie”, Rock Rock Rock version] Sometimes a promoter would just slip a DJ fifty dollars when handing over a promotional copy of the record. Sometimes, the DJ would be hired to announce a show by the act whose record was to be promoted. There were a lot of different methods, some of them more blatant than others, but it was a common practice. Every DJ and TV presenter took part in this, pretty much — Dick Clark certainly did — and while no-one other than the DJs liked the practice, the small labels that built rock and roll, labels like Sun or Chess or Atlantic, all saw it as a way that they could equalise things a little bit. The major labels all had an inbuilt advantage, and would get their records played on the radio no matter what — this was a way that the smaller labels could be heard. But precisely because it levelled the playing field somewhat, the larger record labels didn’t like it, and by this point the major labels were becoming more interested in rock and roll. And to protect that interest, they promoted a campaign against payola. Freed, as the most prominent DJ in the country, and someone who did his fair share of taking bribes, was essentially chosen as the scapegoat for this, once he lost his job at WINS. By the end of 1959 he lost his job with the station he moved to, WABC, once the payola scandal became headline news, and he spent the next few years moving from smaller stations to yet smaller ones, not staying anywhere very long. He died in 1965, of illnesses caused by his alcoholism. He was only forty-three. [Excerpt: Alan Freed sign-off, “This is not goodbye, it’s just goodnight”] And here we get to the downfall of Chuck Berry himself. It’s an unfortunate fact of chronology that I have to deal with this the week after dealing with Jerry Lee Lewis’ own underage sex scandal — well, a fact of both chronology and a terrible society that sees the bodies of young girls as something to which powerful men are entitled, anyway. Chuck Berry had been on a tour of the Southwest, when in Texas he had met up with a fourteen-year-old sex worker, who had accompanied him on the rest of the tour. He’d promised her a job working at his nightclub in St. Louis, and when he fired her shortly after she started there, she went to the police. Like Lewis, Berry has been more or less forgiven by the consensus narrative of rock history. There is slightly more justification for doing so in Berry’s case than in Lewis’, because the Mann Act, the law under which he was charged and convicted, was a law that was created specifically to punish black men — indeed, its official title was The White Slave Traffic Act. Given the way that other rock and roll artists seem to have had carte blanche to abuse young girls, the fact that a black man was about the only one, certainly for many decades, to spend time in prison for this, is more than a little unjust. But the fact remains, a man in his thirties had had sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl. And it’s not like this was an isolated incident — he would later famously settle a class-action suit brought against him by a large number of women he had videotaped on the toilet without their permission. So while Berry had an entirely fair complaint that the prosecution was motivated by race — and his prison sentence was reduced in large part because the judge made some extremely racist remarks — it’s still a fact that what he did was wrong. Now, I’m not going to spend much more time on this with Berry — not as much as I did with Jerry Lee Lewis last week — and that’s because as I said in the beginning of the series, this is not a podcast about the horrible crimes men have committed against women. So why bring it up at all? Well, there’s a myth that Berry’s career was completely wrecked by his arrest. This simply isn’t true. It’s true that “Johnny B. Goode” was Berry’s last top ten hit for quite a few years, and he only had one more top twenty hit in the fifties. But the thing is, his singles had had a very inconsistent chart history before that. He’d released eleven singles up to that point, and only five of them had made the top ten on the pop charts. Classics like “Thirty Days”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “You Can’t Catch Me” had totally failed to hit the pop charts at all. Berry was arrested in December 1959, and between trials and appeals, he didn’t end up going to jail until 1961. “Johnny B. Goode” came out in March 1958. That means that for almost two years *before* the arrest, Berry was, at best, charting in the lower reaches of the charts. The fact is, there’s a simple reason why Berry didn’t chart very much in the late fifties and early sixties. Well, there are two reasons. The first is that public taste had moved on, as it does every few years. There are very few singles artists — and all artists in the fifties were singles artists — who can survive a major change in the public’s taste. The other reason, as he would later admit himself, is that the material he recorded in the few years after “Johnny B. Goode” wasn’t his best. There were some good songs — things like “Carol”, “Little Queenie”, and “I’ve Got to Find My Baby” — but even those weren’t Berry at his absolute peak. And the majority of the material he put out during that time was stuff like “Anthony Boy” and “Too Pooped to Pop”, which very few of even Berry’s most ardent fans will tell you are worth listening to. There was one exception — during that time, he put out what may be the best song he ever wrote, “Memphis, Tennessee”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Memphis, Tennessee”] While it’s a travesty that that record didn’t chart, in retrospect it’s easy to see why it didn’t. Berry’s audience were, for the most part, teenagers. No matter how good a song it was, “Memphis Tennessee” was about a man wanting to regain contact with his six-year-old daughter after he’s split up with her mother. That’s something that would have far more relevance to people of Berry’s own age group than to the people who had been, a year or so earlier, wanting to dance with sweet little sixteen, and wanting to hear some of that rock and roll music. As odd as it is to say, Berry’s eighteen months in jail may have done him some good as a commercial prospect. The first three singles he released in 1964, right after getting out of prison, were all bigger hits than he’d had since summer 1958 — “Nadine” made number 23, “You Never Can Tell” made number fourteen, and “No Particular Place to Go”, a rewrite of “School Day”, with new, funnier, lyrics about sexual frustration, went to number ten: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “No Particular Place to Go”] Those songs were better than anything he’d released for several years previously, and it seemed that Berry might be on his way back to the top, but it was a false dawn. Berry’s studio work slid back into mediocrity with occasional flashes of his old brilliance, and his only hit after this point was in the seventies, when he had his only number one with a novelty song by Dave Bartholomew, “My Ding-a-Ling”, which if you’ve not heard it is about as juvenile as it sounds. In the late seventies, Berry essentially retired from making new music, choosing instead to spend the best part of forty years touring the world with just his guitar, playing with whatever local pickup band the promoter could scrape together, and often not even letting them know in advance what the next song was going to be — he assumed that everyone knew all of his songs, and he was, by and large, correct in that assumption. He was, by all accounts, an extremely bitter man. He did, though, work on one final album, just called “Chuck”, which was announced as part of the celebrations for his ninetieth birthday, but wasn’t released until shortly after his death. He died, aged ninety, in 2017, and the obituaries concentrated on his music rather than his crimes against women. John Lennon once said “if you tried to give rock and roll another name, it would be Chuck Berry”, and for both better and worse, that’s probably true.

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Episode 67: “Johnny B. Goode”, by Chuck Berry

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 27, 2020

Episode sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, and the decline and fall of both Berry and Alan Freed. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Splish Splash” by Bobby Darin. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists — part one, part two. I used foue main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. I also used a Chuck Berry website, http://www.crlf.de/ChuckBerry/ , which contains updates on Rothwell’s research. The information on the precursors to the “Johnny B. Goode” intro comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum. And for information about Freed, I used Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without much of the filler. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A brief content warning for this episode – like last week’s, this discusses, though not in any great detail, a few crimes of a sexual nature. If that’s likely to upset you, please either check the transcript to make sure you’ll be OK, or come back next week. Today we’re going to talk about the definitive fifties rock and roll song. “Johnny B. Goode” is so much the epitome of American post-war culture that when NASA sent a record into space, on the Voyager probes in the seventies, it was the only rock and roll song included in the selection of audio, which also included pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky, and performances by Louis Armstrong and Blind Willie Johnson, along with folk songs, spoken greetings from world leaders, and so on. At the time the golden record was put together, it was criticised for containing any rock and roll at all. Now, that record is further away from Earth than any other object created by a human being. On Saturday Night Live, the week the probe was launched, Steve Martin joked that there’d been a message from aliens – “Send more Chuck Berry”. That’s what an important record “Johnny B. Goode” is. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] When we last looked at Chuck Berry, he’d just released “School Day”, which had been his breakout hit into the broader white teenage market that had started to listen to rock and roll. Berry’s career didn’t go on a completely upward curve after that point. His next single, “Oh Baby Doll”, was a comparative flop — it reached number twelve in the R&B charts, but only number fifty-seven on the pop charts. But the record after that was the start of a three-single run that would consolidate Berry as rock and roll’s premier mythologiser. Where in May 1956 Berry had sung about “these rhythm and blues”, this time he was going to use the music’s new name, and he was singing “just let me hear some of that rock and roll music”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Rock and Roll Music”] That put him back in the top ten, and everything seemed to be going wonderfully for him. He was so popular now as a rock and roll star that on one of the late 1957 tours he did, when Buddy Holly and the Crickets were lower down the bill, the Crickets would do “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” as part of their set. Berry had written enough classics by now that other acts on the bill could do the ones he didn’t have time for. When he next went back into the studio, it was to cut seven songs. One of them, “Reelin’ and Rockin'”, was a slight reworking of the old Wynonie Harris song, “Round the Clock Blues”. Harris’ song, which had also been recorded by Big Joe Turner with Johnny Otis’ band, was an inspiration for “Rock Around the Clock” among other records: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, “Round the Clock Blues”] Berry’s version got rid of some of the more sexual lyrical content — though that would later come back in live performances of the song — and played up the song’s similarity to “Rock Around the Clock”, but it’s still basically the exact same song that Wynonie Harris had performed. Of course, the copyright is in Chuck Berry’s name — for all that he and his publishers would be very eager to sue anyone who might come too close to one of Berry’s songs, he had no compunction about taking all the credit for a song someone else had written. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] You might notice that the piano style on that track is very different from some of Berry’s earlier recordings. Now, there are two possible explanations for this, because I’ve seen two different pianists credited for these sessions. Some sources credit Lafayette Leake with playing the piano here, and that might be enough to explain the difference in style, but I’m going with the other sources, which credit Johnnie Johnson, Berry’s regular player, as playing on the session. If it is, though, he’s playing in a different style. This is because of the popularity of Jerry Lee Lewis, who had risen to fame since Berry’s last session. Lewis used to use a simple technique called “ripping” when playing the piano, in which you just slide your fingers across the keys as fast as possible. He does it pretty much constantly in his solos, as you can hear in this: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”, piano solo] Leonard Chess had heard that sound, and become convinced that that was the main reason that Lewis’ records were so successful, so he insisted on Johnnie Johnson doing that on Berry’s new records. Johnson didn’t like the sound, which he considered “all flash and no technique”, but Chess insisted — to the extent that when they were rehearsing the tracks, Chess would walk over and rip his hand down the keys himself, to show Johnson what he wanted. Johnson eventually went along with it, though he said he “’bout tore my thumbnail off” getting it done. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] He later acknowledged that Chess had a point, though — simple as it was, it did make the records more exciting, and it was something that the kids clearly liked. And something else that the kids liked was another song recorded at the same session — this time about the kids themselves: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Sweet Little Sixteen”] “Sweet Little Sixteen” was one of the first songs about the experience of being a rock and roll fan. There had been earlier records about just dancing to rock and roll music, of course — things like “Drugstore Rock & Roll” or “Rip it Up” — but this was about fandom, and about the experience of following musicians. It’s not completely about that, sadly — it’s the teen girl fan filtered through the male gaze, and so it’s also about how “everybody wants to dance with” this sixteen-year-old girl, and about her “tight dresses and lipstick” — but where the song gains its power is in the verse sections where the girl becomes the viewpoint character, and we hear about how excited she is to go to the show, and about her collections of autographs and photos. However flawed it is, it’s one of the best evocations of the experience of fandom as a hobby — not just liking the music, but having the experience of fandom be a major part of your life. One of the most notable things about “Sweet Little Sixteen” is the way that Berry uses the song to namecheck American Bandstand, which was fast becoming the most important rock and roll TV show around. While in the first chorus he sings about how they’ll be rocking in Boston and Pittsburgh, PA, in the subsequent choruses he changes that to “on Bandstand” and “in Philadelphia PA”, which is where American Bandstand was broadcast from. It’s a sign that Dick Clark was becoming more important than Berry’s mentor, Alan Freed. A week after the session for “Reelin’ and Rockin'” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”, came another session for what would become Berry’s most well-known song, and one that remains in the repertoire of almost every bar band in the world. It’s instantly recognisable right from the start. The introduction to “Johnny B. Goode” is one of the most well-known guitar parts in history: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] But that guitar part has a long history — it’s original to Chuck Berry, but at the same time it’s based on a lot of earlier examples. Berry took the basic idea for that line from Carl Hogan, Louis Jordan’s guitarist, who played this as the intro to Jordan’s “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] But Hogan was only the latest in a long line of people who had played essentially that identical line. The first recording we have of that riff dates back to 1918, and a recording by Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra. Sweatman was a friend and colleague of Scott Joplin, and his band was one of the very first black jazz groups to record at all. And on their song “Bluin’ the Blues”, you hear this: [Excerpt: Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra, “Bluin’ the Blues”] We hear it in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Got the Blues”, in 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Got the Blues”] In Blind Blake’s “Too Tight”, also from 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, “Too Tight”] then in records by Cow Cow Davenport, Andy Kirk, and Count Basie, before it turns up in the Louis Jordan record. But there is a crucial difference between what Carl Hogan played and what Chuck Berry played. Listen again to Hogan’s playing: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] and now to Berry: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] The crucial change Berry makes there is that most of the time he’s playing the solo line on two strings instead of one, creating a thicker sound, with parallel harmonies, rather than just the simple melody line. This was something that Berry learned from the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker: [Excerpt: T-Bone Walker, “Shufflin’ the Blues”] Berry took Walker’s playing style, and combined it with Hogan’s note choices, and that simple change makes all the difference. It transmutes the part that Hogan had played from just a standard riff you find in dozens of old jazz records, a standard part of any musician’s toolkit, into a specific intro to a specific song. When, six years later, Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys played this as the intro to “Fun, Fun, Fun”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Fun Fun Fun”] Absolutely no-one listening thought “Oh, he’s riffing off ‘Texas Shout’ by Cow Cow Davenport” — everyone instantly thought “Oh, that’s the intro to ‘Johnny B. Goode'”. Berry had taken a standard piece of every musician’s toolkit, and by putting a very slight twist on it had made everyone listening hear it differently, so now it was identified solely with him. The lyric to Johnny B. Goode is more original than the music, but even there we can trace its origins. Berry always talked about how the original idea for the lyric was as a message to Johnnie Johnson, saying “Johnnie, be good”, stop drinking so much — a wake-up call to his friend and colleague. But that quickly changed, and the song became more about Berry himself, or an idealised version of Berry, perhaps how he would want people to see him — something that was even more explicit in the original version of the lyric, where rather than sing “a country boy”, he sang “a coloured boy”. But there’s another sign that Berry was talking about himself, and that’s in the very title itself. Goode is spelled “G-o-o-d-e”, with an “e” on the end — and Berry’s childhood home was at 2520 Goode avenue, with an E. There’s another possible origin as well — the poet Langston Hughes had written a very widely circulated series of newspaper columns, which Berry would have encountered in his teenage years and early twenties, about a character named Jesse B. Simple. (And in an interesting note, in 1934 Hughes wrote a story about racial injustice called “Berry”, about a boy named Berry who would, among other things, tell children stories and sing them songs, and Hughes signed the dedication in the book that story was in “Berry” rather than with his own name.) You can point to every element of “Johnny B. Goode” and say “well, this came from there, and this came from there”, but still you’re no closer to identifying why Johnny B. Goode works as well as it does. it’s the combination of all these elements in a way that they’d never been put together before that is Berry’s genius, and is why Berry is pretty much universally regarded as an innovator, not just as an imitator. “Johnny B. Goode” was also the title song for what turned out to be Alan Freed’s final film — a film called Go, Johnny, Go! which also featured Eddie Cochran, the Moonglows, and Ritchie Valens. [Excerpt: Berry and Freed dialogue from Go, Johnny, Go!] That film came out in 1959, and had Berry as Freed’s co-star, appearing with Freed as himself in almost every scene. It was the last gasp of rock and roll cultural relevance for almost everyone involved. By the time the film had come out, Valens was already dead, and within a little over eighteen months after its release, Cochran was also dead, Freed was disgraced, and Berry was in prison. In the last couple of episodes, I’ve mentioned a tour that Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis headlined in 1958, just after “Johnny B. Goode” came out, with Alan Freed as the MC. What I didn’t mention until now is that as well as the tension between Chuck and Jerry Lee, that tour ended up spelling the end of Freed’s career. Freed was already on the downturn in his career — rock and roll was moving from being a music made largely by black musicians to one dominated by white people, and to make matters worse the major labels had finally got a handle on it and started churning out dozens of prepackaged teen idols, most of them called Bobby. Freed didn’t have the connections with the major labels, or the understanding of the new manufactured pop, that he did with the R&B records from labels like Chess. But it was the show in Boston on this tour that led to Freed’s downfall. The early show, which had been headlined by Lewis, had had the audience dancing, and the police were not at all impressed with this. They’d forced Alan Freed to make the audience sit down, and Lewis had had to play his set to an audience who were seated and squirming, unable to get up and dance to his recent big hits like “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Then came the late show, which Berry was headlining. The same thing started to happen — the kids in the audience got up to dance, and the police made Alan Freed make them sit down. But then, when the audience had quietened down, while Berry was standing there on stage, the police refused to dim the house lights and let the musicians carry on playing. So Freed got back on stage and said “It looks like the Boston police don’t want you to have a good time.” The show continued with the lights on, but the audience got annoyed — so much so that Chuck Berry finished the show from behind the drummer, in case the audience attacked. But the police got more annoyed. They got so annoyed, in fact, that they decided to simply claim that every single crime reported to them that night had been inspired by the show. Nobody now thinks that the New York Times reports which said there were multiple stabbings, fifteen people hospitalised, and multiple rapes, are actually accurate reports of anything caused by the show. But at the time, everyone believed it. Boston decided to ban rock and roll concerts altogether, as a result of the show, and while the tour continued through a couple more dates, most of the remaining tour dates got cancelled. Oddly, going through this adversity seems to have brought Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis together. While they’d been fighting each other for almost the entire tour, after this point they became quite close friends, and would speak warmly about each other. Things didn’t end so happily for Alan Freed. Freed had been having some problems with his radio station for a little while. He was difficult to work with, and they particularly disliked that he had started doing his broadcasts from home, rather than from the studio. When he’d been hired, the station was losing money, and he’d been a gamble. Now, they were in profit, and they didn’t need to take risks, and they’d been considering not renewing his contract when it came up in six months. Now that this had happened, they took the opportunity to use the morals clause in Freed’s contract to fire him, although he was allowed to present it as a resignation instead of a firing. Freed would manage to get another radio job, but not one with anything like the same prominence. He would, within a couple of years, become the designated industry fall guy for the practice of payola. This is something that we’ve talked about before — record labels would pay DJs to play their records. Sometimes it was in the form of adding their name to the writing credits, as was the case for Freed with records like “Maybellene” and “Sincerely” – and you can tell how much Freed contributed to those songs by hearing his own attempts at making records: [Excerpt: Alan Freed and his Rock and Roll Band, “Rock and Roll Boogie”, Rock Rock Rock version] Sometimes a promoter would just slip a DJ fifty dollars when handing over a promotional copy of the record. Sometimes, the DJ would be hired to announce a show by the act whose record was to be promoted. There were a lot of different methods, some of them more blatant than others, but it was a common practice. Every DJ and TV presenter took part in this, pretty much — Dick Clark certainly did — and while no-one other than the DJs liked the practice, the small labels that built rock and roll, labels like Sun or Chess or Atlantic, all saw it as a way that they could equalise things a little bit. The major labels all had an inbuilt advantage, and would get their records played on the radio no matter what — this was a way that the smaller labels could be heard. But precisely because it levelled the playing field somewhat, the larger record labels didn’t like it, and by this point the major labels were becoming more interested in rock and roll. And to protect that interest, they promoted a campaign against payola. Freed, as the most prominent DJ in the country, and someone who did his fair share of taking bribes, was essentially chosen as the scapegoat for this, once he lost his job at WINS. By the end of 1959 he lost his job with the station he moved to, WABC, once the payola scandal became headline news, and he spent the next few years moving from smaller stations to yet smaller ones, not staying anywhere very long. He died in 1965, of illnesses caused by his alcoholism. He was only forty-three. [Excerpt: Alan Freed sign-off, “This is not goodbye, it’s just goodnight”] And here we get to the downfall of Chuck Berry himself. It’s an unfortunate fact of chronology that I have to deal with this the week after dealing with Jerry Lee Lewis’ own underage sex scandal — well, a fact of both chronology and a terrible society that sees the bodies of young girls as something to which powerful men are entitled, anyway. Chuck Berry had been on a tour of the Southwest, when in Texas he had met up with a fourteen-year-old sex worker, who had accompanied him on the rest of the tour. He’d promised her a job working at his nightclub in St. Louis, and when he fired her shortly after she started there, she went to the police. Like Lewis, Berry has been more or less forgiven by the consensus narrative of rock history. There is slightly more justification for doing so in Berry’s case than in Lewis’, because the Mann Act, the law under which he was charged and convicted, was a law that was created specifically to punish black men — indeed, its official title was The White Slave Traffic Act. Given the way that other rock and roll artists seem to have had carte blanche to abuse young girls, the fact that a black man was about the only one, certainly for many decades, to spend time in prison for this, is more than a little unjust. But the fact remains, a man in his thirties had had sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl. And it’s not like this was an isolated incident — he would later famously settle a class-action suit brought against him by a large number of women he had videotaped on the toilet without their permission. So while Berry had an entirely fair complaint that the prosecution was motivated by race — and his prison sentence was reduced in large part because the judge made some extremely racist remarks — it’s still a fact that what he did was wrong. Now, I’m not going to spend much more time on this with Berry — not as much as I did with Jerry Lee Lewis last week — and that’s because as I said in the beginning of the series, this is not a podcast about the horrible crimes men have committed against women. So why bring it up at all? Well, there’s a myth that Berry’s career was completely wrecked by his arrest. This simply isn’t true. It’s true that “Johnny B. Goode” was Berry’s last top ten hit for quite a few years, and he only had one more top twenty hit in the fifties. But the thing is, his singles had had a very inconsistent chart history before that. He’d released eleven singles up to that point, and only five of them had made the top ten on the pop charts. Classics like “Thirty Days”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “You Can’t Catch Me” had totally failed to hit the pop charts at all. Berry was arrested in December 1959, and between trials and appeals, he didn’t end up going to jail until 1961. “Johnny B. Goode” came out in March 1958. That means that for almost two years *before* the arrest, Berry was, at best, charting in the lower reaches of the charts. The fact is, there’s a simple reason why Berry didn’t chart very much in the late fifties and early sixties. Well, there are two reasons. The first is that public taste had moved on, as it does every few years. There are very few singles artists — and all artists in the fifties were singles artists — who can survive a major change in the public’s taste. The other reason, as he would later admit himself, is that the material he recorded in the few years after “Johnny B. Goode” wasn’t his best. There were some good songs — things like “Carol”, “Little Queenie”, and “I’ve Got to Find My Baby” — but even those weren’t Berry at his absolute peak. And the majority of the material he put out during that time was stuff like “Anthony Boy” and “Too Pooped to Pop”, which very few of even Berry’s most ardent fans will tell you are worth listening to. There was one exception — during that time, he put out what may be the best song he ever wrote, “Memphis, Tennessee”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Memphis, Tennessee”] While it’s a travesty that that record didn’t chart, in retrospect it’s easy to see why it didn’t. Berry’s audience were, for the most part, teenagers. No matter how good a song it was, “Memphis Tennessee” was about a man wanting to regain contact with his six-year-old daughter after he’s split up with her mother. That’s something that would have far more relevance to people of Berry’s own age group than to the people who had been, a year or so earlier, wanting to dance with sweet little sixteen, and wanting to hear some of that rock and roll music. As odd as it is to say, Berry’s eighteen months in jail may have done him some good as a commercial prospect. The first three singles he released in 1964, right after getting out of prison, were all bigger hits than he’d had since summer 1958 — “Nadine” made number 23, “You Never Can Tell” made number fourteen, and “No Particular Place to Go”, a rewrite of “School Day”, with new, funnier, lyrics about sexual frustration, went to number ten: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “No Particular Place to Go”] Those songs were better than anything he’d released for several years previously, and it seemed that Berry might be on his way back to the top, but it was a false dawn. Berry’s studio work slid back into mediocrity with occasional flashes of his old brilliance, and his only hit after this point was in the seventies, when he had his only number one with a novelty song by Dave Bartholomew, “My Ding-a-Ling”, which if you’ve not heard it is about as juvenile as it sounds. In the late seventies, Berry essentially retired from making new music, choosing instead to spend the best part of forty years touring the world with just his guitar, playing with whatever local pickup band the promoter could scrape together, and often not even letting them know in advance what the next song was going to be — he assumed that everyone knew all of his songs, and he was, by and large, correct in that assumption. He was, by all accounts, an extremely bitter man. He did, though, work on one final album, just called “Chuck”, which was announced as part of the celebrations for his ninetieth birthday, but wasn’t released until shortly after his death. He died, aged ninety, in 2017, and the obituaries concentrated on his music rather than his crimes against women. John Lennon once said “if you tried to give rock and roll another name, it would be Chuck Berry”, and for both better and worse, that’s probably true.

tv american texas earth rock woman new york times dj fire simple philadelphia fun tennessee nasa blues pop harris sun pittsburgh atlantic rock and roll rip clock southwest classics hughes djs john lennon bach ludwig van beethoven chess mozart hard times hogan voyager freed beach boys rockin steve martin wins ling early years crickets mixcloud louis armstrong chuck berry rock music cochran buddy holly goode johnnie jerry lee lewis school days langston hughes memphis tennessee stravinsky dick clark count basie great balls scott joplin wabc bobby darin ritchie valens rothwell thirty days american bandstand johnny b goode catch me eddie cochran bandstand fun fun fun splish splash louis jordan moonglow jerry lee valens jazz orchestra rock around reelin carl wilson blind willie johnson big joe turner alan freed blind lemon jefferson andy kirk roll over beethoven mann act johnny otis johnnie johnson dave bartholomew maybellene shufflin jesse b every dj leonard chess little queenie too much monkey business

Episode 67: "Johnny B. Goode", by Chuck Berry

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Play Episode Listen Later Jan 27, 2020 36:20

Episode sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry, and the decline and fall of both Berry and Alan Freed. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Splish Splash" by Bobby Darin. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists -- part one, part two. I used foue main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn't shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry's Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry's career up to 2001. I also used a Chuck Berry website, http://www.crlf.de/ChuckBerry/ , which contains updates on Rothwell's research. The information on the precursors to the "Johnny B. Goode" intro comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum. And for information about Freed, I used Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I'd recommend if you don't have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without much of the filler. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A brief content warning for this episode – like last week's, this discusses, though not in any great detail, a few crimes of a sexual nature. If that's likely to upset you, please either check the transcript to make sure you'll be OK, or come back next week. Today we're going to talk about the definitive fifties rock and roll song. “Johnny B. Goode” is so much the epitome of American post-war culture that when NASA sent a record into space, on the Voyager probes in the seventies, it was the only rock and roll song included in the selection of audio, which also included pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky, and performances by Louis Armstrong and Blind Willie Johnson, along with folk songs, spoken greetings from world leaders, and so on. At the time the golden record was put together, it was criticised for containing any rock and roll at all. Now, that record is further away from Earth than any other object created by a human being. On Saturday Night Live, the week the probe was launched, Steve Martin joked that there'd been a message from aliens – “Send more Chuck Berry”. That's what an important record "Johnny B. Goode" is. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] When we last looked at Chuck Berry, he'd just released "School Day", which had been his breakout hit into the broader white teenage market that had started to listen to rock and roll. Berry's career didn't go on a completely upward curve after that point. His next single, "Oh Baby Doll", was a comparative flop -- it reached number twelve in the R&B charts, but only number fifty-seven on the pop charts. But the record after that was the start of a three-single run that would consolidate Berry as rock and roll's premier mythologiser. Where in May 1956 Berry had sung about "these rhythm and blues", this time he was going to use the music's new name, and he was singing "just let me hear some of that rock and roll music": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Rock and Roll Music"] That put him back in the top ten, and everything seemed to be going wonderfully for him. He was so popular now as a rock and roll star that on one of the late 1957 tours he did, when Buddy Holly and the Crickets were lower down the bill, the Crickets would do "Roll Over Beethoven" and "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" as part of their set. Berry had written enough classics by now that other acts on the bill could do the ones he didn't have time for. When he next went back into the studio, it was to cut seven songs. One of them, "Reelin' and Rockin'", was a slight reworking of the old Wynonie Harris song, "Round the Clock Blues". Harris' song, which had also been recorded by Big Joe Turner with Johnny Otis' band, was an inspiration for "Rock Around the Clock" among other records: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, "Round the Clock Blues"] Berry's version got rid of some of the more sexual lyrical content -- though that would later come back in live performances of the song -- and played up the song's similarity to "Rock Around the Clock", but it's still basically the exact same song that Wynonie Harris had performed. Of course, the copyright is in Chuck Berry's name -- for all that he and his publishers would be very eager to sue anyone who might come too close to one of Berry's songs, he had no compunction about taking all the credit for a song someone else had written. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin' and Rockin'”] You might notice that the piano style on that track is very different from some of Berry's earlier recordings. Now, there are two possible explanations for this, because I've seen two different pianists credited for these sessions. Some sources credit Lafayette Leake with playing the piano here, and that might be enough to explain the difference in style, but I'm going with the other sources, which credit Johnnie Johnson, Berry's regular player, as playing on the session. If it is, though, he's playing in a different style. This is because of the popularity of Jerry Lee Lewis, who had risen to fame since Berry's last session. Lewis used to use a simple technique called "ripping" when playing the piano, in which you just slide your fingers across the keys as fast as possible. He does it pretty much constantly in his solos, as you can hear in this: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”, piano solo] Leonard Chess had heard that sound, and become convinced that that was the main reason that Lewis' records were so successful, so he insisted on Johnnie Johnson doing that on Berry's new records. Johnson didn't like the sound, which he considered "all flash and no technique", but Chess insisted -- to the extent that when they were rehearsing the tracks, Chess would walk over and rip his hand down the keys himself, to show Johnson what he wanted. Johnson eventually went along with it, though he said he "'bout tore my thumbnail off" getting it done. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin' and Rockin'”] He later acknowledged that Chess had a point, though -- simple as it was, it did make the records more exciting, and it was something that the kids clearly liked. And something else that the kids liked was another song recorded at the same session -- this time about the kids themselves: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Sweet Little Sixteen"] "Sweet Little Sixteen" was one of the first songs about the experience of being a rock and roll fan. There had been earlier records about just dancing to rock and roll music, of course -- things like "Drugstore Rock & Roll" or "Rip it Up" -- but this was about fandom, and about the experience of following musicians. It's not completely about that, sadly -- it's the teen girl fan filtered through the male gaze, and so it's also about how "everybody wants to dance with" this sixteen-year-old girl, and about her "tight dresses and lipstick" -- but where the song gains its power is in the verse sections where the girl becomes the viewpoint character, and we hear about how excited she is to go to the show, and about her collections of autographs and photos. However flawed it is, it's one of the best evocations of the experience of fandom as a hobby -- not just liking the music, but having the experience of fandom be a major part of your life. One of the most notable things about "Sweet Little Sixteen" is the way that Berry uses the song to namecheck American Bandstand, which was fast becoming the most important rock and roll TV show around. While in the first chorus he sings about how they'll be rocking in Boston and Pittsburgh, PA, in the subsequent choruses he changes that to "on Bandstand" and "in Philadelphia PA", which is where American Bandstand was broadcast from. It's a sign that Dick Clark was becoming more important than Berry's mentor, Alan Freed. A week after the session for "Reelin' and Rockin'" and "Sweet Little Sixteen", came another session for what would become Berry's most well-known song, and one that remains in the repertoire of almost every bar band in the world. It's instantly recognisable right from the start. The introduction to "Johnny B. Goode" is one of the most well-known guitar parts in history: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Johnny B. Goode"] But that guitar part has a long history -- it's original to Chuck Berry, but at the same time it's based on a lot of earlier examples. Berry took the basic idea for that line from Carl Hogan, Louis Jordan's guitarist, who played this as the intro to Jordan's "Ain't That Just Like a Woman": [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Ain't That Just Like a Woman"] But Hogan was only the latest in a long line of people who had played essentially that identical line. The first recording we have of that riff dates back to 1918, and a recording by Wilbur Sweatman's Jazz Orchestra. Sweatman was a friend and colleague of Scott Joplin, and his band was one of the very first black jazz groups to record at all. And on their song "Bluin' the Blues", you hear this: [Excerpt: Wilbur Sweatman's Jazz Orchestra, "Bluin' the Blues"] We hear it in Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Got the Blues", in 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] In Blind Blake's "Too Tight", also from 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Too Tight"] then in records by Cow Cow Davenport, Andy Kirk, and Count Basie, before it turns up in the Louis Jordan record. But there is a crucial difference between what Carl Hogan played and what Chuck Berry played. Listen again to Hogan's playing: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Ain't That Just Like a Woman"] and now to Berry: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Johnny B. Goode"] The crucial change Berry makes there is that most of the time he's playing the solo line on two strings instead of one, creating a thicker sound, with parallel harmonies, rather than just the simple melody line. This was something that Berry learned from the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker: [Excerpt: T-Bone Walker, "Shufflin' the Blues"] Berry took Walker's playing style, and combined it with Hogan's note choices, and that simple change makes all the difference. It transmutes the part that Hogan had played from just a standard riff you find in dozens of old jazz records, a standard part of any musician's toolkit, into a specific intro to a specific song. When, six years later, Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys played this as the intro to "Fun, Fun, Fun": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Fun Fun Fun"] Absolutely no-one listening thought "Oh, he's riffing off 'Texas Shout' by Cow Cow Davenport" -- everyone instantly thought "Oh, that's the intro to 'Johnny B. Goode'". Berry had taken a standard piece of every musician's toolkit, and by putting a very slight twist on it had made everyone listening hear it differently, so now it was identified solely with him. The lyric to Johnny B. Goode is more original than the music, but even there we can trace its origins. Berry always talked about how the original idea for the lyric was as a message to Johnnie Johnson, saying "Johnnie, be good", stop drinking so much -- a wake-up call to his friend and colleague. But that quickly changed, and the song became more about Berry himself, or an idealised version of Berry, perhaps how he would want people to see him -- something that was even more explicit in the original version of the lyric, where rather than sing "a country boy", he sang "a coloured boy". But there's another sign that Berry was talking about himself, and that's in the very title itself. Goode is spelled "G-o-o-d-e", with an "e" on the end -- and Berry's childhood home was at 2520 Goode avenue, with an E. There's another possible origin as well -- the poet Langston Hughes had written a very widely circulated series of newspaper columns, which Berry would have encountered in his teenage years and early twenties, about a character named Jesse B. Simple. (And in an interesting note, in 1934 Hughes wrote a story about racial injustice called "Berry", about a boy named Berry who would, among other things, tell children stories and sing them songs, and Hughes signed the dedication in the book that story was in "Berry" rather than with his own name.) You can point to every element of "Johnny B. Goode" and say "well, this came from there, and this came from there", but still you're no closer to identifying why Johnny B. Goode works as well as it does. it's the combination of all these elements in a way that they'd never been put together before that is Berry's genius, and is why Berry is pretty much universally regarded as an innovator, not just as an imitator. "Johnny B. Goode" was also the title song for what turned out to be Alan Freed's final film -- a film called Go, Johnny, Go! which also featured Eddie Cochran, the Moonglows, and Ritchie Valens. [Excerpt: Berry and Freed dialogue from Go, Johnny, Go!] That film came out in 1959, and had Berry as Freed's co-star, appearing with Freed as himself in almost every scene. It was the last gasp of rock and roll cultural relevance for almost everyone involved. By the time the film had come out, Valens was already dead, and within a little over eighteen months after its release, Cochran was also dead, Freed was disgraced, and Berry was in prison. In the last couple of episodes, I've mentioned a tour that Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis headlined in 1958, just after “Johnny B. Goode” came out, with Alan Freed as the MC. What I didn't mention until now is that as well as the tension between Chuck and Jerry Lee, that tour ended up spelling the end of Freed's career. Freed was already on the downturn in his career -- rock and roll was moving from being a music made largely by black musicians to one dominated by white people, and to make matters worse the major labels had finally got a handle on it and started churning out dozens of prepackaged teen idols, most of them called Bobby. Freed didn't have the connections with the major labels, or the understanding of the new manufactured pop, that he did with the R&B records from labels like Chess. But it was the show in Boston on this tour that led to Freed's downfall. The early show, which had been headlined by Lewis, had had the audience dancing, and the police were not at all impressed with this. They'd forced Alan Freed to make the audience sit down, and Lewis had had to play his set to an audience who were seated and squirming, unable to get up and dance to his recent big hits like “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Then came the late show, which Berry was headlining. The same thing started to happen -- the kids in the audience got up to dance, and the police made Alan Freed make them sit down. But then, when the audience had quietened down, while Berry was standing there on stage, the police refused to dim the house lights and let the musicians carry on playing. So Freed got back on stage and said "It looks like the Boston police don't want you to have a good time." The show continued with the lights on, but the audience got annoyed -- so much so that Chuck Berry finished the show from behind the drummer, in case the audience attacked. But the police got more annoyed. They got so annoyed, in fact, that they decided to simply claim that every single crime reported to them that night had been inspired by the show. Nobody now thinks that the New York Times reports which said there were multiple stabbings, fifteen people hospitalised, and multiple rapes, are actually accurate reports of anything caused by the show. But at the time, everyone believed it. Boston decided to ban rock and roll concerts altogether, as a result of the show, and while the tour continued through a couple more dates, most of the remaining tour dates got cancelled. Oddly, going through this adversity seems to have brought Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis together. While they'd been fighting each other for almost the entire tour, after this point they became quite close friends, and would speak warmly about each other. Things didn't end so happily for Alan Freed. Freed had been having some problems with his radio station for a little while. He was difficult to work with, and they particularly disliked that he had started doing his broadcasts from home, rather than from the studio. When he'd been hired, the station was losing money, and he'd been a gamble. Now, they were in profit, and they didn't need to take risks, and they'd been considering not renewing his contract when it came up in six months. Now that this had happened, they took the opportunity to use the morals clause in Freed's contract to fire him, although he was allowed to present it as a resignation instead of a firing. Freed would manage to get another radio job, but not one with anything like the same prominence. He would, within a couple of years, become the designated industry fall guy for the practice of payola. This is something that we've talked about before -- record labels would pay DJs to play their records. Sometimes it was in the form of adding their name to the writing credits, as was the case for Freed with records like "Maybellene" and "Sincerely" – and you can tell how much Freed contributed to those songs by hearing his own attempts at making records: [Excerpt: Alan Freed and his Rock and Roll Band, “Rock and Roll Boogie”, Rock Rock Rock version] Sometimes a promoter would just slip a DJ fifty dollars when handing over a promotional copy of the record. Sometimes, the DJ would be hired to announce a show by the act whose record was to be promoted. There were a lot of different methods, some of them more blatant than others, but it was a common practice. Every DJ and TV presenter took part in this, pretty much -- Dick Clark certainly did -- and while no-one other than the DJs liked the practice, the small labels that built rock and roll, labels like Sun or Chess or Atlantic, all saw it as a way that they could equalise things a little bit. The major labels all had an inbuilt advantage, and would get their records played on the radio no matter what -- this was a way that the smaller labels could be heard. But precisely because it levelled the playing field somewhat, the larger record labels didn't like it, and by this point the major labels were becoming more interested in rock and roll. And to protect that interest, they promoted a campaign against payola. Freed, as the most prominent DJ in the country, and someone who did his fair share of taking bribes, was essentially chosen as the scapegoat for this, once he lost his job at WINS. By the end of 1959 he lost his job with the station he moved to, WABC, once the payola scandal became headline news, and he spent the next few years moving from smaller stations to yet smaller ones, not staying anywhere very long. He died in 1965, of illnesses caused by his alcoholism. He was only forty-three. [Excerpt: Alan Freed sign-off, “This is not goodbye, it's just goodnight”] And here we get to the downfall of Chuck Berry himself. It's an unfortunate fact of chronology that I have to deal with this the week after dealing with Jerry Lee Lewis' own underage sex scandal -- well, a fact of both chronology and a terrible society that sees the bodies of young girls as something to which powerful men are entitled, anyway. Chuck Berry had been on a tour of the Southwest, when in Texas he had met up with a fourteen-year-old sex worker, who had accompanied him on the rest of the tour. He'd promised her a job working at his nightclub in St. Louis, and when he fired her shortly after she started there, she went to the police. Like Lewis, Berry has been more or less forgiven by the consensus narrative of rock history. There is slightly more justification for doing so in Berry's case than in Lewis', because the Mann Act, the law under which he was charged and convicted, was a law that was created specifically to punish black men -- indeed, its official title was The White Slave Traffic Act. Given the way that other rock and roll artists seem to have had carte blanche to abuse young girls, the fact that a black man was about the only one, certainly for many decades, to spend time in prison for this, is more than a little unjust. But the fact remains, a man in his thirties had had sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl. And it's not like this was an isolated incident -- he would later famously settle a class-action suit brought against him by a large number of women he had videotaped on the toilet without their permission. So while Berry had an entirely fair complaint that the prosecution was motivated by race -- and his prison sentence was reduced in large part because the judge made some extremely racist remarks -- it's still a fact that what he did was wrong. Now, I'm not going to spend much more time on this with Berry -- not as much as I did with Jerry Lee Lewis last week -- and that's because as I said in the beginning of the series, this is not a podcast about the horrible crimes men have committed against women. So why bring it up at all? Well, there's a myth that Berry's career was completely wrecked by his arrest. This simply isn't true. It's true that "Johnny B. Goode" was Berry's last top ten hit for quite a few years, and he only had one more top twenty hit in the fifties. But the thing is, his singles had had a very inconsistent chart history before that. He'd released eleven singles up to that point, and only five of them had made the top ten on the pop charts. Classics like "Thirty Days", "Too Much Monkey Business", "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" and "You Can't Catch Me" had totally failed to hit the pop charts at all. Berry was arrested in December 1959, and between trials and appeals, he didn't end up going to jail until 1961. "Johnny B. Goode" came out in March 1958. That means that for almost two years *before* the arrest, Berry was, at best, charting in the lower reaches of the charts. The fact is, there's a simple reason why Berry didn't chart very much in the late fifties and early sixties. Well, there are two reasons. The first is that public taste had moved on, as it does every few years. There are very few singles artists -- and all artists in the fifties were singles artists -- who can survive a major change in the public's taste. The other reason, as he would later admit himself, is that the material he recorded in the few years after "Johnny B. Goode" wasn't his best. There were some good songs -- things like "Carol", "Little Queenie", and "I've Got to Find My Baby" -- but even those weren't Berry at his absolute peak. And the majority of the material he put out during that time was stuff like "Anthony Boy" and "Too Pooped to Pop", which very few of even Berry's most ardent fans will tell you are worth listening to. There was one exception -- during that time, he put out what may be the best song he ever wrote, "Memphis, Tennessee": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Memphis, Tennessee"] While it's a travesty that that record didn't chart, in retrospect it's easy to see why it didn't. Berry's audience were, for the most part, teenagers. No matter how good a song it was, "Memphis Tennessee" was about a man wanting to regain contact with his six-year-old daughter after he's split up with her mother. That's something that would have far more relevance to people of Berry's own age group than to the people who had been, a year or so earlier, wanting to dance with sweet little sixteen, and wanting to hear some of that rock and roll music. As odd as it is to say, Berry's eighteen months in jail may have done him some good as a commercial prospect. The first three singles he released in 1964, right after getting out of prison, were all bigger hits than he'd had since summer 1958 -- "Nadine" made number 23, "You Never Can Tell" made number fourteen, and "No Particular Place to Go", a rewrite of "School Day", with new, funnier, lyrics about sexual frustration, went to number ten: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "No Particular Place to Go"] Those songs were better than anything he'd released for several years previously, and it seemed that Berry might be on his way back to the top, but it was a false dawn. Berry's studio work slid back into mediocrity with occasional flashes of his old brilliance, and his only hit after this point was in the seventies, when he had his only number one with a novelty song by Dave Bartholomew, "My Ding-a-Ling", which if you've not heard it is about as juvenile as it sounds. In the late seventies, Berry essentially retired from making new music, choosing instead to spend the best part of forty years touring the world with just his guitar, playing with whatever local pickup band the promoter could scrape together, and often not even letting them know in advance what the next song was going to be -- he assumed that everyone knew all of his songs, and he was, by and large, correct in that assumption. He was, by all accounts, an extremely bitter man. He did, though, work on one final album, just called "Chuck", which was announced as part of the celebrations for his ninetieth birthday, but wasn't released until shortly after his death. He died, aged ninety, in 2017, and the obituaries concentrated on his music rather than his crimes against women. John Lennon once said "if you tried to give rock and roll another name, it would be Chuck Berry", and for both better and worse, that's probably true.

tv american texas earth woman new york times dj fire simple philadelphia fun nasa blues pop harris sun pittsburgh atlantic rock and roll rip clock southwest classics hughes djs john lennon bach ludwig van beethoven chess mozart hard times hogan voyager freed beach boys rockin steve martin wins ling early years crickets mixcloud louis armstrong chuck berry rock music cochran buddy holly goode johnnie jerry lee lewis school days langston hughes rock roll memphis tennessee stravinsky dick clark count basie great balls scott joplin wabc bobby darin ritchie valens rothwell thirty days american bandstand johnny b goode catch me eddie cochran bandstand splish splash louis jordan moonglow jerry lee valens jazz orchestra rock around reelin carl wilson blind willie johnson big joe turner alan freed blind lemon jefferson andy kirk roll over beethoven mann act johnny otis johnnie johnson dave bartholomew shufflin maybellene jesse b every dj leonard chess little queenie too much monkey business

Headhunters and ”Night Gallery”

NIGHT-LIGHT RADIO

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 20, 2019 120:04

SCOTT SKELTON and GREG MARTIN are our special guests. Scott will be discussing what seemed like a promising series after Rod Serling's hiatus from TV and why "Night Gallery" did not achieve the critical acclaim that the "Twilight Zone" did. However, "Night Gallery" does have a loyal cult following and left an underappreciated legacy. Recently, Scott has been working with the paintings used in the series. Grammy Award winning guitarist Greg will be discussing the release of the Kentucky Headhunter's recording "Live at the Ramblin' Man Fair." How did this English audience receive American country-blues? Greg will talk about working with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Johnnie Johnson, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Rev. Billy F. Gibbons. How can we use the blues to make the world a better place? http://nightgallery.net http://kentuckyheadhunters.net

Headhunters and "Night Gallery"

Night-Light Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 20, 2019 120:04

SCOTT SKELTON and GREG MARTIN are our special guests. Scott will be discussing what seemed like a promising series after Rod Serling's hiatus from TV and why "Night Gallery" did not achieve the critical acclaim that the "Twilight Zone" did. However, "Night Gallery" does have a loyal cult following and left an underappreciated legacy. Recently, Scott has been working with the paintings used in the series. Grammy Award winning guitarist Greg will be discussing the release of the Kentucky Headhunter's recording "Live at the Ramblin' Man Fair." How did this English audience receive American country-blues? Greg will talk about working with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Johnnie Johnson, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Rev. Billy F. Gibbons. How can we use the blues to make the world a better place? http://nightgallery.nethttp://kentuckyheadhunters.net

Headhunters and "Night Gallery" SCOTT SKELTON and GREG MARTIN Host Mark Eddy

NIGHT-LIGHT RADIO

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 19, 2019 120:04

SCOTT SKELTON and GREG MARTIN are our special guests. Scott will be discussing what seemed like a promising series after Rod Serling's hiatus from TV and why "Night Gallery" did not achieve the critical acclaim that the "Twilight Zone" did. However, "Night Gallery" does have a loyal cult following and left an underappreciated legacy. Recently, Scott has been working with the paintings used in the series. Grammy Award winning guitarist Greg will be discussing the release of the Kentucky Headhunter's recording "Live at the Ramblin' Man Fair." How did this English audience receive American country-blues? Greg will talk about working with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Johnnie Johnson, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Rev. Billy F. Gibbons. How can we use the blues to make the world a better place? http://nightgallery.net http://kentuckyheadhunters.net

tv american live english rev grammy awards twilight zone rock and roll hall of fame headhunters lynyrd skynyrd ramblin rod serling skelton host mark night gallery greg martin billy f gibbons johnnie johnson mark eddy

Headhunters and "Night Gallery"

NIGHT-LIGHT RADIO

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 19, 2019 121:00

SCOTT SKELTON and GREG MARTIN are our special guests. Scott will be discussing what seemed like a promising series after Rod Serling's hiatus from TV and why "Night Gallery" did not achieve the critical acclaim that the "Twilight Zone" did. However, "Night Gallery" does have a loyal cult following and left an underappreciated legacy. Recently, Scott has been working with the paintings used in the series. Grammy Award winning guitarist Greg will be discussing the release of the Kentucky Headhunter's recording "Live at the Ramblin' Man Fair." How did this English audience receive American country-blues? Greg will talk about working with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Johnnie Johnson, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Rev. Billy F. Gibbons. How can we use the blues to make the world a better place? http://nightgallery.net http://kentuckyheadhunters.net

We Will Remember Them

Obstacle Course

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 9, 2019 88:19

At 96, George is our oldest guest. At 11, Roman is our youngest. Maeve is younger than George and older than Roman. Hi Maeve. :)Enjoy the chiming of George's clock in this episode."We need to sacrifice ourselves. Not just in big things but in little things every day." - George Brewster"I'm continually trying to become a better person and I intend to do so until the end of my days." - George BrewsterGeorge was honoured along with his fellow Veterans at the BC Lions last home game. Here's some footage from that great day!"I'm just an ordinary man trying to do some things which are sometimes more than I'm capable of." - George BrewsterGeorge made friends with some of the German pilots after the war. (Luftwaffe)."The ordinary people did extraordinary things. The heroism I saw all around me astonished me. It has lasted me a life time." - George BrewsterHere's the book George referred to, A Higher Call.George's dramatic story of taking out a moving train loaded with troops while under fire and losing his Wingman is yet another reminder of the reality of War and one of the more memorable events for George.What motivated George to continue to get back in the plane day after day is focusing on each moment as it came up. "That was my job. I had no other job but keep myself in readiness to do what I was trained to do and do it. That was my whole purpose in life at the time. You just had to do what you had to do."George mentioned Johnnie Johnson as one of his finest leaders. Johnnie made a great name for himself in the War.Charles Hoey was born in Duncan, BC and died bravely in combat. He is memoralized in Duncan.George loves his Yorkton oatmeal. He eats it multiple times a day and credits it to his longevity.George keys to longevity: Oatmeal, Drinking Water, Relaxation, Creative Pursuits and Gratitude.You learn more by serving others than serving yourself. You enjoy good gifts more with others than just yourself.George's spontaneous recitation of 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 in Gaelic was amazing! As is his memory.A Ceilidh is a Scottish party or celebration.George credits his joy and love for life with his ability to forgive. Forgiveness allows us to move on and move towards something better.George's recitation of the epic poems In Flanders Fields and High Flight from memory is something we'll never forget.George ended our conversation with a hope that it would touch perhaps even one person. Let's make sure it does folks! Lest we forget.

Richard & Johnnie Johnson

Some Roses Are Red

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 30, 2019 63:31

Richard & Johnnie Johnson visit our studios to give us a glimpse of their holiday traditions, plans for 2019 and what they want to work on in their relationship for the upcoming year.

relationships family holiday inspiration traditions johnnie johnson

Episode 46: “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” by Chuck Berry

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 19, 2019

Episode forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” by the Chuck Berry Combo, and how Berry tried to square the circle of social commentary and teen appeal. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr.. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used two main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left Chuck Berry, he had just recorded and released his third single, “Roll Over Beethoven”, the single which had established him as the preeminent mythologiser of rock and roll. Today, we’re going to talk about the single that came after that, both sides of which were recorded at the same session as “Beethoven”. Specifically, we’re going to talk about a single that is as close as Berry got to being outright political. While these days, both sides of his next single — “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “Too Much Monkey Business” — are considered rock and roll classics, neither hit the pop charts in 1956 when they were released. That’s because, although they might not seem it at first glance now, both songs are tied in to a very different culture from the white teen one that was now dominating the rock and roll audience. To see why, we have to look at the R&B tradition which Berry grew up in, and in particular we want to look once again at the work of Berry’s hero Louis Jordan, and the particular type of entertainment he provided. You see, while Louis Jordan was a huge star, and had a certain amount of crossover appeal to the white audience, he was someone whose biggest audience was black people, and in particular black adults. The teenager as a separate audience for music didn’t really become a thing in a conscious way until the mid-fifties. Before the rise of the doo-wop groups, R&B music, and the jump band music before it, had been aimed at a hard-working, hard-partying, adult audience, and at a defiantly working-class audience at that — one that had a hard life, and whose reality involved cheating partners, grasping landlords, angry bosses, and a large amount of drinking when they weren’t dealing with those things. But one mistake that’s always made when talking about marginalised people is to equate poverty or being a member of a racial minority with being unsophisticated. And there was a whole seam of complex, clever, ironic humour that shows up throughout the work of the jump band and early R&B musicians — one that is very different from the cornball humour that was standard in both country music and white pop. That style of humour is often referred to as “hip” or “hep” humour, and the early master of it was probably Cab Calloway, who was also the author of a “hepster’s dictionary” which remained for many years the most important source for understanding black slang of the twenties through forties. Calloway also sang about it: [Excerpt: “Jive: Page One of the Hepster’s Dictionary”, Cab Calloway] This style of humour, specific to the experiences of black people, was also the basis of much of Louis Jordan’s work – and Jordan was clearly influenced by Calloway. You only have to look at songs like “Open the Door Richard”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Open the Door Richard”] Or “What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’ll Only Get Drunk Again?)”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’ll Only Get Drunk Again)?”] Obviously the experience of being drunk is one that people of all races have had, but the language used there, the specific word choices, roots Jordan’s work very firmly in the African-American cultural experience. Jordan did, of course, have a white audience, but he got that audience without compromising the blackness of his language and humour. That humour disappears almost totally from the history of rock music when the white people start showing up, and there are only two exceptions to this. There are the Coasters, whose lyrics by Jerry Leiber manage to perfectly capture that cynical adult humour of the old-style jump bands, even when dealing with teenage frustrations rather than adult ones — and we’ll look at how successfully they do that in a few weeks’ time. The other exception is, of course, Chuck Berry, who would repeatedly cite Jordan as his single biggest influence. As we continue through Berry’s career we will see time and again how things that appear original to him are actually Berry’s take on something Louis Jordan did. Berry would later manage to couple Jordan’s style of humour to the adolescent topics of school, dancing, cars, and unrequited love, rather than to the more adult topics of jobs, sex, drinking, and rent. But, crucially, at the time we’re looking at, he was not yet doing so. At the session in April 1956 which produced “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Drifting Heart”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, there were still relatively few signs that Berry was appealing to a white adolescent audience. “Very few signs” does not, of course, mean that there were no signs — Berry would have been able to see who it was who was turning up to his live performances — but it seems to have taken him some time to adapt his songwriting to his new audience. Even “Roll Over Beethoven”, which was, after all, a song very specifically aimed at mythologising the new music, had referred to “these rhythm and blues” rather than to rock and roll. Berry was almost thirty, and he was still in a mindset of writing songs for people his own age, for the audiences that had come to see him play small clubs in St. Louis. Indeed, the record industry as a whole still saw the teenage audience as almost an irrelevance – other than Bill Haley and Alan Freed, very few people really realised how big that audience was. The combination of disposable income and the changes in technology that had led to the transistor radio and the 45rpm single meant that for the first time teenagers were buying their own records, and listening to them on their own portable radios and record players, rather than having to listen to whatever their parents were buying. 1956 was the year that this new factor stopped being ignorable, and Berry would become the poet laureate of teenage America, the person who more than anyone else would create the vocabulary which would be used by everyone who followed to write about the music and the interests of white teenagers. But at this point, Berry’s music was very much not that, and both “Too Much Monkey Business” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” address very, very, adult concerns. “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, in particular, loses a lot of its context when heard today, but is an explicitly racialised song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry Combo, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”] Now, it’s worth looking at that opening verse in some detail — “arrested on charges of unemployment” is, first of all, a funny line, but it’s *also* very much the kind of trumped-up charge that black people, especially black men, would be arrested and tried for. And then we have the judge’s wife getting the man freed because he’s so attractive. This is a very, very, common motif in black folklore and blues mythology. For example, in “Back Door Man”, written by Willie Dixon for Howlin’ Wolf and released on Chess a few years after the time we’re talking about, we have the following verse: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Back Door Man”] This is a hugely common theme in the blues — you hear it in various versions of “Stagger Lee”, for example. Later this would become, thanks to these blues songs, a staple of rock and pop music too — you get the same thing in “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” by the Beatles, or Frank Zappa’s “The Illinois Enema Bandit”, but stripped of its original context, both those songs have a reputation, at least partly deserved, for tastelessness and misogyny. But when this motif first came to prominence, it had a very pointed message. There is a terrible stereotype of black men as being more animal than man, and of both having insatiable sexual appetites and being irresistible to white women. This is, of course, no more true of black men than it is of any other demographic, but it was used to fuel very real moral panics about black men raping white women, which led to many men being lynched. The trope of the women screaming out for the man to be set free, in this context, is very, very, pointed, and is owning this literally deadly negative stereotype and turning it into something to boast about. And then there’s this verse: [Excerpt: “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, Chuck Berry Combo] Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play for a major league baseball team, had only started playing for the Dodgers in 1947, and was still playing when Berry recorded this. Robinson was a massively influential figure in black culture, and right from the start of his career, he was having records made about him, like this one by Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?”] It’s almost impossible to state how important Jackie Robinson was to black culture in the immediate post-war period. He was a huge example of a black man breaking a colour barrier, and not only that but excelling and beating all the white people in the field. Robinson was probably the single most important figurehead for civil rights in the late forties and early fifties, even though he was — at least in his public statements — far more interested in his ability to play the game than he was in his ability to affect the course of American politics. While obviously Robinson isn’t mentioned by name in Berry’s lyric, the description of the baseball player is clearly meant to evoke Robinson’s image. None of the men mentioned in the song lyric are specifically stated to be black, just “brown-eyed” — though there are often claims, which I’ve never seen properly substantiated, that the original lyric was “brown-skinned handsome man”. That does, though, fit with Berry’s repeated tendency to slightly tone down politically controversial aspects of his lyrics – “Johnny B Goode” originally featured a “coloured boy” rather than a “country boy”, and in “Nadine” he was originally “campaign shouting like a Southern Democrat” rather than a “Southern diplomat”. But while the men are described in the song in deliberately ambiguous terms, the whole song is very much centred around images from black culture, and images of black men, and especially black men in contexts of white culture, usually high culture, from which they would normally be barred. Much as his idol Jordan had done earlier, Berry is repackaging black culture in a way that is relatable by a white audience, while not compromising that culture in any real way. The flip side of “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” is also interesting. “Too Much Monkey Business” is much more directly inspired by Jordan, but is less obviously rooted in specific black experiences. But at the same time, it is absolutely geared to adult concerns, rather than those of teenagers: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Too Much Monkey Business”] Well, at least six of the seven verses dealt with adult concerns. Over the seven verses, Berry complains about working for the US mail and getting bills, being given the hard sell by a salesman, having a woman want him to settle down with her and get married, having to go to school every day, using a broken payphone, fighting in the war, and working in a petrol station. With the exception of the verse about going to school, these are far more the concerns of Louis Jordan, and of records like the Drifters’ “Money Honey” or the records Johnny Otis was making, than they are of the new white teenage audience. While both “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “Too Much Monkey Business” made the top five on the R&B chart, they didn’t hit the pop top forty — and “Roll Over Beethoven” had only just scraped into the top thirty. It was plain that if Berry wanted to repeat the success of “Maybellene”, he would have to pivot towards a new audience. He couldn’t make any more records aimed at black adults. He needed to start making records aimed at white children. That wasn’t the only change he made. The “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” single was the last one to be released under the name “the Chuck Berry Combo”. There are at least two different stories about how Berry stopped working with Ebby Hardy and Johnnie Johnson. Berry always claimed that his two band members were getting drunk all the time and not capable of playing properly. Johnson, on the other hand, always said instead that the two of them got tired of all the travelling and just wanted to stay in St. Louis. Johnson would continue to play piano on many of Berry’s recordings — though from this point on he would never be the sole pianist for Berry, as many sources wrongly claim he was. From now on, Chuck Berry was a solo artist. The first fruit of this newfound solo stardom was Berry’s first film appearance. Rock! Rock! Rock! is one of the more widely-available rock and roll films now, thanks to it having entered into the public domain — you can actually even watch the film through its Wikipedia page, which I’ll link in the show notes. It’s not, though, a film I’d actually recommend watching at all. The plot, such as it is, consists of Tuesday Weld wanting to buy a new dress for the prom, and her dad not wanting to give her the money, and an “evil” rival for Weld’s boyfriend’s attentions (who you can tell is evil because she has dark hair rather than being blonde like Weld) trying to get her in trouble. You get something of an idea of the quality of the film by the fact that its writer was also its producer, who was also the composer of the incidental music and the title song: [Excerpt: “Rock Rock Rock”, Jimmy Cavallo and the House Rockers] That was co-written by Milton Subotsky, the film’s producer, who would go on to much better and more interesting things as the co-founder of Amicus Films, a British film company that made a whole host of cheap but enjoyable horror and science fiction films. Oddly enough, we’ll be meeting Subotsky again. How important the plot is can be summed up by the fact that there is a fifteen-minute sequence in this seventy-minute film, in which Weld and her friend merely watch the TV. The programme they’re watching is a fictional TV show, presented by Alan Freed, in which he introduces various rock and roll acts, and this is where Berry appears. The song he’s singing in the film is his next single, “You Can’t Catch Me”, which had actually been recorded before “Roll Over Beethoven”. But the story of the song’s release is one that tells you a lot about the music business in the 1950s, and about how little the artists understood about what it was they were getting into. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry: “You Can’t Catch Me”] As we discussed last week when talking about Fats Domino, it wasn’t normal for R&B acts to put out albums, and so it was a sign of how much the film was aimed at the white teenage audience that a soundtrack album was considered at all. It seems to have been Alan Freed’s idea. Freed was the star of the film, and the acts in it — people like Lavern Baker, the Moonglows, Johnny Burnette, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers — were for the most part people he regularly featured on his radio show (along with a handful of bland white novelty acts that were included in the misguided belief that the teenage audience wanted to hear a pre-teen kid singing about rock and roll). But of course, Freed being Freed, what that meant was that the acts he included were from record labels that would bribe him, or with which he had some kind of financial relationship, and as they were on multiple different labels, this caused problems when deciding who got to put out a soundtrack album. In particular, both the Chess brothers, whose labels had provided the Flamingos, the Moonglows, and Berry, and Morris Levy, the gangster who controlled the career of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the single biggest act in the film, wanted the right to put out a soundtrack album and profit from the publicity the film would provide. All of them were “business associates” of Freed — Freed managed the Moonglows, and had been given writing credit on songs by both the Moonglows and Berry in return for playing them on his radio show, while Levy was himself Freed’s manager, and had been largely responsible for getting Freed his unchallenged dominance of New York radio. So they came to a compromise. The soundtrack album would only feature the three Chess acts who appeared in the film, and would include four songs by each of them, rather than the one song each they performed in the film. And the album would be out on Chess. But the album would include the previously-released songs that Freed was credited with co-writing, and the new songs would be published, not by the publishing companies that published those artists’ songs, but by one of Levy’s companies. Chuck Berry was tricked into signing his rights to the song away by a standard Leonard Chess tactic — he was called into Chess’ office to receive a large royalty cheque, and Chess asked him if while he was there he would mind signing this other document that needed signing, only could he do it in a hurry, because Chess had an urgent appointment? It was six months until Berry realised that he’d signed away the rights to “You Can’t Catch Me”, and twenty-eight years before he was able to reclaim the copyright for himself. In the meantime, the rights to that one Chuck Berry song made Levy far more money than he could possibly have expected, because of this one line: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “You Can’t Catch Me”] In 1969, John Lennon took that line and used it as the opening line for the Beatles song “Come Together”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Come Together”] Rather than go through the courts, Levy and Lennon came to an agreement — Lennon was going to make an album of rock and roll covers, and he would include at least three songs to which Levy owned the copyright, including “You Can’t Catch Me”. As a result, even after Levy finally lost the rights to the song in the early 1980s, he still continued earning money from John Lennon’s cover versions of two other songs he owned, which would never have been recorded without him having owned “You Can’t Catch Me”. “You Can’t Catch Me” was a flop, and didn’t even make the R&B charts, let alone the pop charts. This even though its B-side, “Havana Moon”, would in a roundabout way end up being Berry’s most influential song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Havana Moon”] We’ll talk about just how influential that song was in a year or so… Berry knew he had to pivot, and fast. He wrote a new song, “Rock and Roll Music”, which he thought could maybe have the same kind of success as “Roll Over Beethoven”, but used the more currently-popular term rock and roll rather than talking about “rhythm and blues” as the earlier song did. But while he demoed that, it wasn’t a song that he could be certain would directly get right into the head of every teenage kid in America. For that, he turned to Johnnie Johnson again. For years, Johnson had had his own theme song at the Cosmopolitan Club. In its original form the song was based on “Honky Tonk Train Blues” by Meade “Lux” Lewis: [Excerpt: Meade “Lux” Lewis, “Honky Tonk Train Blues”] Johnson’s own take on the song had kept Lewis’ intro, and had been renamed “Johnnie’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnnie’s Boogie”] Johnson suggested to Berry that they take that intro and have Berry play the same thing, but on the guitar. When he did, they found that when he played his guitar, it was like ringing a bell — a school bell, to be precise. And that gave Berry the idea for the lyric: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “School Day”] “School Day” was the pivot point, the song with which Chuck Berry turned wholly towards teenage concerns, and away from those of adults. The description of the drudgery of life in school was not that different from the descriptions of working life in “Too Much Monkey Business”, but it was infinitely more relatable to the new young rock and roll audience than anything in the earlier song. And not only that, the slow trudge of school life gets replaced, in the final verses, with an anthem to the new music: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “School Day”] “School Day” became the biggest-selling single ever to be released by Chess to that point. It hit number one on the R&B charts, knocking “All Shook Up” by Elvis off the top, and made number five on the Billboard pop charts. It charted in the UK, which given Chess’ lack of distribution over here at that point was a minor miracle, and it stayed on the Billboard pop chart for an astonishing six months. “School Day” was successful enough that Berry was given an album release of his own. “After School Session” was a compilation of tracks Berry had released as either the A- or B-sides of singles, including “School Day”, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, and “Havana Moon”, but not including “You Can’t Catch Me” or the other songs on the “Rock Rock Rock” compilation. It was filled out with a couple of generic blues instrumentals, but was otherwise a perfect representation of where Berry was artistically, right at this turning point. And that shows even in the title of the record. The name “After School Session” obviously refers to “School Day”, and to the kids in the song going to listen to rock and roll after school ended, but it was also a tip of the hat to another song, one which may have inspired the lyrics to “School Day” in much the same way that Meade “Lux” Lewis had inspired the music: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “After School Swing Session (Swinging With Symphony Sid)”] Even at his most up-to-date, Chuck Berry was still paying homage to Louis Jordan. “School Day” was the point where Chuck Berry went from middling rhythm and blues star to major rock and roll star, and his next twelve records would all make the Billboard pop charts. 1957 was going to be Chuck Berry’s year, and we’ll hear how in a few weeks time, when we look at another Louis Jordan influenced song, about a kid who played the guitar…

america tv american new york history uk rock british nashville open african americans wolf beatles southern robinson wikipedia elvis rock and roll teenagers los angeles dodgers bob dylan billboard john lennon ludwig van beethoven chess elvis presley hard times levy boogie freed excerpt tom petty dictionary come together george harrison flamingos jackie robinson handsome frank zappa mixcloud chuck berry eyed lux rock music johnnie school days roy orbison drifters calloway howlin money honey coasters everly brothers fats domino weavers weld cab calloway jeff lynne sam phillips bill haley chet atkins johnny b goode catch me all shook up willie dixon louis jordan moonglow bob moore tuesday weld alan freed stagger lee frankie lymon lavern baker roll over beethoven jerry leiber kay starr johnny otis johnny burnette johnnie johnson morris levy monument records maybellene fred foster leonard chess too much monkey business nashville a team

Episode 46: “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” by Chuck Berry

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 19, 2019

Episode forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” by the Chuck Berry Combo, and how Berry tried to square the circle of social commentary and teen appeal. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr.. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used two main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left Chuck Berry, he had just recorded and released his third single, “Roll Over Beethoven”, the single which had established him as the preeminent mythologiser of rock and roll. Today, we’re going to talk about the single that came after that, both sides of which were recorded at the same session as “Beethoven”. Specifically, we’re going to talk about a single that is as close as Berry got to being outright political. While these days, both sides of his next single — “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “Too Much Monkey Business” — are considered rock and roll classics, neither hit the pop charts in 1956 when they were released. That’s because, although they might not seem it at first glance now, both songs are tied in to a very different culture from the white teen one that was now dominating the rock and roll audience. To see why, we have to look at the R&B tradition which Berry grew up in, and in particular we want to look once again at the work of Berry’s hero Louis Jordan, and the particular type of entertainment he provided. You see, while Louis Jordan was a huge star, and had a certain amount of crossover appeal to the white audience, he was someone whose biggest audience was black people, and in particular black adults. The teenager as a separate audience for music didn’t really become a thing in a conscious way until the mid-fifties. Before the rise of the doo-wop groups, R&B music, and the jump band music before it, had been aimed at a hard-working, hard-partying, adult audience, and at a defiantly working-class audience at that — one that had a hard life, and whose reality involved cheating partners, grasping landlords, angry bosses, and a large amount of drinking when they weren’t dealing with those things. But one mistake that’s always made when talking about marginalised people is to equate poverty or being a member of a racial minority with being unsophisticated. And there was a whole seam of complex, clever, ironic humour that shows up throughout the work of the jump band and early R&B musicians — one that is very different from the cornball humour that was standard in both country music and white pop. That style of humour is often referred to as “hip” or “hep” humour, and the early master of it was probably Cab Calloway, who was also the author of a “hepster’s dictionary” which remained for many years the most important source for understanding black slang of the twenties through forties. Calloway also sang about it: [Excerpt: “Jive: Page One of the Hepster’s Dictionary”, Cab Calloway] This style of humour, specific to the experiences of black people, was also the basis of much of Louis Jordan’s work – and Jordan was clearly influenced by Calloway. You only have to look at songs like “Open the Door Richard”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Open the Door Richard”] Or “What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’ll Only Get Drunk Again?)”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’ll Only Get Drunk Again)?”] Obviously the experience of being drunk is one that people of all races have had, but the language used there, the specific word choices, roots Jordan’s work very firmly in the African-American cultural experience. Jordan did, of course, have a white audience, but he got that audience without compromising the blackness of his language and humour. That humour disappears almost totally from the history of rock music when the white people start showing up, and there are only two exceptions to this. There are the Coasters, whose lyrics by Jerry Leiber manage to perfectly capture that cynical adult humour of the old-style jump bands, even when dealing with teenage frustrations rather than adult ones — and we’ll look at how successfully they do that in a few weeks’ time. The other exception is, of course, Chuck Berry, who would repeatedly cite Jordan as his single biggest influence. As we continue through Berry’s career we will see time and again how things that appear original to him are actually Berry’s take on something Louis Jordan did. Berry would later manage to couple Jordan’s style of humour to the adolescent topics of school, dancing, cars, and unrequited love, rather than to the more adult topics of jobs, sex, drinking, and rent. But, crucially, at the time we’re looking at, he was not yet doing so. At the session in April 1956 which produced “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Drifting Heart”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, there were still relatively few signs that Berry was appealing to a white adolescent audience. “Very few signs” does not, of course, mean that there were no signs — Berry would have been able to see who it was who was turning up to his live performances — but it seems to have taken him some time to adapt his songwriting to his new audience. Even “Roll Over Beethoven”, which was, after all, a song very specifically aimed at mythologising the new music, had referred to “these rhythm and blues” rather than to rock and roll. Berry was almost thirty, and he was still in a mindset of writing songs for people his own age, for the audiences that had come to see him play small clubs in St. Louis. Indeed, the record industry as a whole still saw the teenage audience as almost an irrelevance – other than Bill Haley and Alan Freed, very few people really realised how big that audience was. The combination of disposable income and the changes in technology that had led to the transistor radio and the 45rpm single meant that for the first time teenagers were buying their own records, and listening to them on their own portable radios and record players, rather than having to listen to whatever their parents were buying. 1956 was the year that this new factor stopped being ignorable, and Berry would become the poet laureate of teenage America, the person who more than anyone else would create the vocabulary which would be used by everyone who followed to write about the music and the interests of white teenagers. But at this point, Berry’s music was very much not that, and both “Too Much Monkey Business” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” address very, very, adult concerns. “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, in particular, loses a lot of its context when heard today, but is an explicitly racialised song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry Combo, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”] Now, it’s worth looking at that opening verse in some detail — “arrested on charges of unemployment” is, first of all, a funny line, but it’s *also* very much the kind of trumped-up charge that black people, especially black men, would be arrested and tried for. And then we have the judge’s wife getting the man freed because he’s so attractive. This is a very, very, common motif in black folklore and blues mythology. For example, in “Back Door Man”, written by Willie Dixon for Howlin’ Wolf and released on Chess a few years after the time we’re talking about, we have the following verse: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Back Door Man”] This is a hugely common theme in the blues — you hear it in various versions of “Stagger Lee”, for example. Later this would become, thanks to these blues songs, a staple of rock and pop music too — you get the same thing in “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” by the Beatles, or Frank Zappa’s “The Illinois Enema Bandit”, but stripped of its original context, both those songs have a reputation, at least partly deserved, for tastelessness and misogyny. But when this motif first came to prominence, it had a very pointed message. There is a terrible stereotype of black men as being more animal than man, and of both having insatiable sexual appetites and being irresistible to white women. This is, of course, no more true of black men than it is of any other demographic, but it was used to fuel very real moral panics about black men raping white women, which led to many men being lynched. The trope of the women screaming out for the man to be set free, in this context, is very, very, pointed, and is owning this literally deadly negative stereotype and turning it into something to boast about. And then there’s this verse: [Excerpt: “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, Chuck Berry Combo] Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play for a major league baseball team, had only started playing for the Dodgers in 1947, and was still playing when Berry recorded this. Robinson was a massively influential figure in black culture, and right from the start of his career, he was having records made about him, like this one by Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?”] It’s almost impossible to state how important Jackie Robinson was to black culture in the immediate post-war period. He was a huge example of a black man breaking a colour barrier, and not only that but excelling and beating all the white people in the field. Robinson was probably the single most important figurehead for civil rights in the late forties and early fifties, even though he was — at least in his public statements — far more interested in his ability to play the game than he was in his ability to affect the course of American politics. While obviously Robinson isn’t mentioned by name in Berry’s lyric, the description of the baseball player is clearly meant to evoke Robinson’s image. None of the men mentioned in the song lyric are specifically stated to be black, just “brown-eyed” — though there are often claims, which I’ve never seen properly substantiated, that the original lyric was “brown-skinned handsome man”. That does, though, fit with Berry’s repeated tendency to slightly tone down politically controversial aspects of his lyrics – “Johnny B Goode” originally featured a “coloured boy” rather than a “country boy”, and in “Nadine” he was originally “campaign shouting like a Southern Democrat” rather than a “Southern diplomat”. But while the men are described in the song in deliberately ambiguous terms, the whole song is very much centred around images from black culture, and images of black men, and especially black men in contexts of white culture, usually high culture, from which they would normally be barred. Much as his idol Jordan had done earlier, Berry is repackaging black culture in a way that is relatable by a white audience, while not compromising that culture in any real way. The flip side of “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” is also interesting. “Too Much Monkey Business” is much more directly inspired by Jordan, but is less obviously rooted in specific black experiences. But at the same time, it is absolutely geared to adult concerns, rather than those of teenagers: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Too Much Monkey Business”] Well, at least six of the seven verses dealt with adult concerns. Over the seven verses, Berry complains about working for the US mail and getting bills, being given the hard sell by a salesman, having a woman want him to settle down with her and get married, having to go to school every day, using a broken payphone, fighting in the war, and working in a petrol station. With the exception of the verse about going to school, these are far more the concerns of Louis Jordan, and of records like the Drifters’ “Money Honey” or the records Johnny Otis was making, than they are of the new white teenage audience. While both “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “Too Much Monkey Business” made the top five on the R&B chart, they didn’t hit the pop top forty — and “Roll Over Beethoven” had only just scraped into the top thirty. It was plain that if Berry wanted to repeat the success of “Maybellene”, he would have to pivot towards a new audience. He couldn’t make any more records aimed at black adults. He needed to start making records aimed at white children. That wasn’t the only change he made. The “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” single was the last one to be released under the name “the Chuck Berry Combo”. There are at least two different stories about how Berry stopped working with Ebby Hardy and Johnnie Johnson. Berry always claimed that his two band members were getting drunk all the time and not capable of playing properly. Johnson, on the other hand, always said instead that the two of them got tired of all the travelling and just wanted to stay in St. Louis. Johnson would continue to play piano on many of Berry’s recordings — though from this point on he would never be the sole pianist for Berry, as many sources wrongly claim he was. From now on, Chuck Berry was a solo artist. The first fruit of this newfound solo stardom was Berry’s first film appearance. Rock! Rock! Rock! is one of the more widely-available rock and roll films now, thanks to it having entered into the public domain — you can actually even watch the film through its Wikipedia page, which I’ll link in the show notes. It’s not, though, a film I’d actually recommend watching at all. The plot, such as it is, consists of Tuesday Weld wanting to buy a new dress for the prom, and her dad not wanting to give her the money, and an “evil” rival for Weld’s boyfriend’s attentions (who you can tell is evil because she has dark hair rather than being blonde like Weld) trying to get her in trouble. You get something of an idea of the quality of the film by the fact that its writer was also its producer, who was also the composer of the incidental music and the title song: [Excerpt: “Rock Rock Rock”, Jimmy Cavallo and the House Rockers] That was co-written by Milton Subotsky, the film’s producer, who would go on to much better and more interesting things as the co-founder of Amicus Films, a British film company that made a whole host of cheap but enjoyable horror and science fiction films. Oddly enough, we’ll be meeting Subotsky again. How important the plot is can be summed up by the fact that there is a fifteen-minute sequence in this seventy-minute film, in which Weld and her friend merely watch the TV. The programme they’re watching is a fictional TV show, presented by Alan Freed, in which he introduces various rock and roll acts, and this is where Berry appears. The song he’s singing in the film is his next single, “You Can’t Catch Me”, which had actually been recorded before “Roll Over Beethoven”. But the story of the song’s release is one that tells you a lot about the music business in the 1950s, and about how little the artists understood about what it was they were getting into. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry: “You Can’t Catch Me”] As we discussed last week when talking about Fats Domino, it wasn’t normal for R&B acts to put out albums, and so it was a sign of how much the film was aimed at the white teenage audience that a soundtrack album was considered at all. It seems to have been Alan Freed’s idea. Freed was the star of the film, and the acts in it — people like Lavern Baker, the Moonglows, Johnny Burnette, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers — were for the most part people he regularly featured on his radio show (along with a handful of bland white novelty acts that were included in the misguided belief that the teenage audience wanted to hear a pre-teen kid singing about rock and roll). But of course, Freed being Freed, what that meant was that the acts he included were from record labels that would bribe him, or with which he had some kind of financial relationship, and as they were on multiple different labels, this caused problems when deciding who got to put out a soundtrack album. In particular, both the Chess brothers, whose labels had provided the Flamingos, the Moonglows, and Berry, and Morris Levy, the gangster who controlled the career of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the single biggest act in the film, wanted the right to put out a soundtrack album and profit from the publicity the film would provide. All of them were “business associates” of Freed — Freed managed the Moonglows, and had been given writing credit on songs by both the Moonglows and Berry in return for playing them on his radio show, while Levy was himself Freed’s manager, and had been largely responsible for getting Freed his unchallenged dominance of New York radio. So they came to a compromise. The soundtrack album would only feature the three Chess acts who appeared in the film, and would include four songs by each of them, rather than the one song each they performed in the film. And the album would be out on Chess. But the album would include the previously-released songs that Freed was credited with co-writing, and the new songs would be published, not by the publishing companies that published those artists’ songs, but by one of Levy’s companies. Chuck Berry was tricked into signing his rights to the song away by a standard Leonard Chess tactic — he was called into Chess’ office to receive a large royalty cheque, and Chess asked him if while he was there he would mind signing this other document that needed signing, only could he do it in a hurry, because Chess had an urgent appointment? It was six months until Berry realised that he’d signed away the rights to “You Can’t Catch Me”, and twenty-eight years before he was able to reclaim the copyright for himself. In the meantime, the rights to that one Chuck Berry song made Levy far more money than he could possibly have expected, because of this one line: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “You Can’t Catch Me”] In 1969, John Lennon took that line and used it as the opening line for the Beatles song “Come Together”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Come Together”] Rather than go through the courts, Levy and Lennon came to an agreement — Lennon was going to make an album of rock and roll covers, and he would include at least three songs to which Levy owned the copyright, including “You Can’t Catch Me”. As a result, even after Levy finally lost the rights to the song in the early 1980s, he still continued earning money from John Lennon’s cover versions of two other songs he owned, which would never have been recorded without him having owned “You Can’t Catch Me”. “You Can’t Catch Me” was a flop, and didn’t even make the R&B charts, let alone the pop charts. This even though its B-side, “Havana Moon”, would in a roundabout way end up being Berry’s most influential song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Havana Moon”] We’ll talk about just how influential that song was in a year or so… Berry knew he had to pivot, and fast. He wrote a new song, “Rock and Roll Music”, which he thought could maybe have the same kind of success as “Roll Over Beethoven”, but used the more currently-popular term rock and roll rather than talking about “rhythm and blues” as the earlier song did. But while he demoed that, it wasn’t a song that he could be certain would directly get right into the head of every teenage kid in America. For that, he turned to Johnnie Johnson again. For years, Johnson had had his own theme song at the Cosmopolitan Club. In its original form the song was based on “Honky Tonk Train Blues” by Meade “Lux” Lewis: [Excerpt: Meade “Lux” Lewis, “Honky Tonk Train Blues”] Johnson’s own take on the song had kept Lewis’ intro, and had been renamed “Johnnie’s Boogie”: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnnie’s Boogie”] Johnson suggested to Berry that they take that intro and have Berry play the same thing, but on the guitar. When he did, they found that when he played his guitar, it was like ringing a bell — a school bell, to be precise. And that gave Berry the idea for the lyric: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “School Day”] “School Day” was the pivot point, the song with which Chuck Berry turned wholly towards teenage concerns, and away from those of adults. The description of the drudgery of life in school was not that different from the descriptions of working life in “Too Much Monkey Business”, but it was infinitely more relatable to the new young rock and roll audience than anything in the earlier song. And not only that, the slow trudge of school life gets replaced, in the final verses, with an anthem to the new music: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “School Day”] “School Day” became the biggest-selling single ever to be released by Chess to that point. It hit number one on the R&B charts, knocking “All Shook Up” by Elvis off the top, and made number five on the Billboard pop charts. It charted in the UK, which given Chess’ lack of distribution over here at that point was a minor miracle, and it stayed on the Billboard pop chart for an astonishing six months. “School Day” was successful enough that Berry was given an album release of his own. “After School Session” was a compilation of tracks Berry had released as either the A- or B-sides of singles, including “School Day”, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, and “Havana Moon”, but not including “You Can’t Catch Me” or the other songs on the “Rock Rock Rock” compilation. It was filled out with a couple of generic blues instrumentals, but was otherwise a perfect representation of where Berry was artistically, right at this turning point. And that shows even in the title of the record. The name “After School Session” obviously refers to “School Day”, and to the kids in the song going to listen to rock and roll after school ended, but it was also a tip of the hat to another song, one which may have inspired the lyrics to “School Day” in much the same way that Meade “Lux” Lewis had inspired the music: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “After School Swing Session (Swinging With Symphony Sid)”] Even at his most up-to-date, Chuck Berry was still paying homage to Louis Jordan. “School Day” was the point where Chuck Berry went from middling rhythm and blues star to major rock and roll star, and his next twelve records would all make the Billboard pop charts. 1957 was going to be Chuck Berry’s year, and we’ll hear how in a few weeks time, when we look at another Louis Jordan influenced song, about a kid who played the guitar…

Episode 46: "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" by Chuck Berry

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 19, 2019 34:39

Episode forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" by the Chuck Berry Combo, and how Berry tried to square the circle of social commentary and teen appeal. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Rock and Roll Waltz" by Kay Starr.. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I used two main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn't shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry's Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry's career up to 2001. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I'd recommend if you don't have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left Chuck Berry, he had just recorded and released his third single, "Roll Over Beethoven", the single which had established him as the preeminent mythologiser of rock and roll. Today, we're going to talk about the single that came after that, both sides of which were recorded at the same session as "Beethoven". Specifically, we're going to talk about a single that is as close as Berry got to being outright political. While these days, both sides of his next single -- "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" and "Too Much Monkey Business" -- are considered rock and roll classics, neither hit the pop charts in 1956 when they were released. That's because, although they might not seem it at first glance now, both songs are tied in to a very different culture from the white teen one that was now dominating the rock and roll audience. To see why, we have to look at the R&B tradition which Berry grew up in, and in particular we want to look once again at the work of Berry's hero Louis Jordan, and the particular type of entertainment he provided. You see, while Louis Jordan was a huge star, and had a certain amount of crossover appeal to the white audience, he was someone whose biggest audience was black people, and in particular black adults. The teenager as a separate audience for music didn't really become a thing in a conscious way until the mid-fifties. Before the rise of the doo-wop groups, R&B music, and the jump band music before it, had been aimed at a hard-working, hard-partying, adult audience, and at a defiantly working-class audience at that -- one that had a hard life, and whose reality involved cheating partners, grasping landlords, angry bosses, and a large amount of drinking when they weren't dealing with those things. But one mistake that's always made when talking about marginalised people is to equate poverty or being a member of a racial minority with being unsophisticated. And there was a whole seam of complex, clever, ironic humour that shows up throughout the work of the jump band and early R&B musicians -- one that is very different from the cornball humour that was standard in both country music and white pop. That style of humour is often referred to as "hip" or "hep" humour, and the early master of it was probably Cab Calloway, who was also the author of a "hepster's dictionary" which remained for many years the most important source for understanding black slang of the twenties through forties. Calloway also sang about it: [Excerpt: "Jive: Page One of the Hepster's Dictionary", Cab Calloway] This style of humour, specific to the experiences of black people, was also the basis of much of Louis Jordan's work – and Jordan was clearly influenced by Calloway. You only have to look at songs like "Open the Door Richard": [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Open the Door Richard"] Or "What's the Use of Getting Sober (When You'll Only Get Drunk Again?)": [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "What's the Use of Getting Sober (When You'll Only Get Drunk Again)?"] Obviously the experience of being drunk is one that people of all races have had, but the language used there, the specific word choices, roots Jordan's work very firmly in the African-American cultural experience. Jordan did, of course, have a white audience, but he got that audience without compromising the blackness of his language and humour. That humour disappears almost totally from the history of rock music when the white people start showing up, and there are only two exceptions to this. There are the Coasters, whose lyrics by Jerry Leiber manage to perfectly capture that cynical adult humour of the old-style jump bands, even when dealing with teenage frustrations rather than adult ones -- and we'll look at how successfully they do that in a few weeks' time. The other exception is, of course, Chuck Berry, who would repeatedly cite Jordan as his single biggest influence. As we continue through Berry's career we will see time and again how things that appear original to him are actually Berry's take on something Louis Jordan did. Berry would later manage to couple Jordan's style of humour to the adolescent topics of school, dancing, cars, and unrequited love, rather than to the more adult topics of jobs, sex, drinking, and rent. But, crucially, at the time we're looking at, he was not yet doing so. At the session in April 1956 which produced "Roll Over Beethoven", "Drifting Heart", "Too Much Monkey Business", and "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man", there were still relatively few signs that Berry was appealing to a white adolescent audience. "Very few signs" does not, of course, mean that there were no signs -- Berry would have been able to see who it was who was turning up to his live performances -- but it seems to have taken him some time to adapt his songwriting to his new audience. Even "Roll Over Beethoven", which was, after all, a song very specifically aimed at mythologising the new music, had referred to "these rhythm and blues" rather than to rock and roll. Berry was almost thirty, and he was still in a mindset of writing songs for people his own age, for the audiences that had come to see him play small clubs in St. Louis. Indeed, the record industry as a whole still saw the teenage audience as almost an irrelevance – other than Bill Haley and Alan Freed, very few people really realised how big that audience was. The combination of disposable income and the changes in technology that had led to the transistor radio and the 45rpm single meant that for the first time teenagers were buying their own records, and listening to them on their own portable radios and record players, rather than having to listen to whatever their parents were buying. 1956 was the year that this new factor stopped being ignorable, and Berry would become the poet laureate of teenage America, the person who more than anyone else would create the vocabulary which would be used by everyone who followed to write about the music and the interests of white teenagers. But at this point, Berry's music was very much not that, and both "Too Much Monkey Business" and "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" address very, very, adult concerns. "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man", in particular, loses a lot of its context when heard today, but is an explicitly racialised song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry Combo, "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man"] Now, it's worth looking at that opening verse in some detail -- "arrested on charges of unemployment" is, first of all, a funny line, but it's *also* very much the kind of trumped-up charge that black people, especially black men, would be arrested and tried for. And then we have the judge's wife getting the man freed because he's so attractive. This is a very, very, common motif in black folklore and blues mythology. For example, in "Back Door Man", written by Willie Dixon for Howlin' Wolf and released on Chess a few years after the time we're talking about, we have the following verse: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Back Door Man"] This is a hugely common theme in the blues -- you hear it in various versions of "Stagger Lee", for example. Later this would become, thanks to these blues songs, a staple of rock and pop music too -- you get the same thing in "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" by the Beatles, or Frank Zappa's "The Illinois Enema Bandit", but stripped of its original context, both those songs have a reputation, at least partly deserved, for tastelessness and misogyny. But when this motif first came to prominence, it had a very pointed message. There is a terrible stereotype of black men as being more animal than man, and of both having insatiable sexual appetites and being irresistible to white women. This is, of course, no more true of black men than it is of any other demographic, but it was used to fuel very real moral panics about black men raping white women, which led to many men being lynched. The trope of the women screaming out for the man to be set free, in this context, is very, very, pointed, and is owning this literally deadly negative stereotype and turning it into something to boast about. And then there's this verse: [Excerpt: "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man", Chuck Berry Combo] Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play for a major league baseball team, had only started playing for the Dodgers in 1947, and was still playing when Berry recorded this. Robinson was a massively influential figure in black culture, and right from the start of his career, he was having records made about him, like this one by Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?"] It's almost impossible to state how important Jackie Robinson was to black culture in the immediate post-war period. He was a huge example of a black man breaking a colour barrier, and not only that but excelling and beating all the white people in the field. Robinson was probably the single most important figurehead for civil rights in the late forties and early fifties, even though he was -- at least in his public statements -- far more interested in his ability to play the game than he was in his ability to affect the course of American politics. While obviously Robinson isn't mentioned by name in Berry's lyric, the description of the baseball player is clearly meant to evoke Robinson's image. None of the men mentioned in the song lyric are specifically stated to be black, just "brown-eyed" -- though there are often claims, which I've never seen properly substantiated, that the original lyric was "brown-skinned handsome man". That does, though, fit with Berry's repeated tendency to slightly tone down politically controversial aspects of his lyrics – "Johnny B Goode" originally featured a "coloured boy" rather than a "country boy", and in "Nadine" he was originally "campaign shouting like a Southern Democrat" rather than a "Southern diplomat". But while the men are described in the song in deliberately ambiguous terms, the whole song is very much centred around images from black culture, and images of black men, and especially black men in contexts of white culture, usually high culture, from which they would normally be barred. Much as his idol Jordan had done earlier, Berry is repackaging black culture in a way that is relatable by a white audience, while not compromising that culture in any real way. The flip side of "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" is also interesting. "Too Much Monkey Business" is much more directly inspired by Jordan, but is less obviously rooted in specific black experiences. But at the same time, it is absolutely geared to adult concerns, rather than those of teenagers: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Too Much Monkey Business"] Well, at least six of the seven verses dealt with adult concerns. Over the seven verses, Berry complains about working for the US mail and getting bills, being given the hard sell by a salesman, having a woman want him to settle down with her and get married, having to go to school every day, using a broken payphone, fighting in the war, and working in a petrol station. With the exception of the verse about going to school, these are far more the concerns of Louis Jordan, and of records like the Drifters' "Money Honey" or the records Johnny Otis was making, than they are of the new white teenage audience. While both "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" and "Too Much Monkey Business" made the top five on the R&B chart, they didn't hit the pop top forty -- and "Roll Over Beethoven" had only just scraped into the top thirty. It was plain that if Berry wanted to repeat the success of "Maybellene", he would have to pivot towards a new audience. He couldn't make any more records aimed at black adults. He needed to start making records aimed at white children. That wasn't the only change he made. The "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" single was the last one to be released under the name "the Chuck Berry Combo". There are at least two different stories about how Berry stopped working with Ebby Hardy and Johnnie Johnson. Berry always claimed that his two band members were getting drunk all the time and not capable of playing properly. Johnson, on the other hand, always said instead that the two of them got tired of all the travelling and just wanted to stay in St. Louis. Johnson would continue to play piano on many of Berry's recordings -- though from this point on he would never be the sole pianist for Berry, as many sources wrongly claim he was. From now on, Chuck Berry was a solo artist. The first fruit of this newfound solo stardom was Berry's first film appearance. Rock! Rock! Rock! is one of the more widely-available rock and roll films now, thanks to it having entered into the public domain -- you can actually even watch the film through its Wikipedia page, which I'll link in the show notes. It's not, though, a film I'd actually recommend watching at all. The plot, such as it is, consists of Tuesday Weld wanting to buy a new dress for the prom, and her dad not wanting to give her the money, and an "evil" rival for Weld's boyfriend's attentions (who you can tell is evil because she has dark hair rather than being blonde like Weld) trying to get her in trouble. You get something of an idea of the quality of the film by the fact that its writer was also its producer, who was also the composer of the incidental music and the title song: [Excerpt: "Rock Rock Rock", Jimmy Cavallo and the House Rockers] That was co-written by Milton Subotsky, the film's producer, who would go on to much better and more interesting things as the co-founder of Amicus Films, a British film company that made a whole host of cheap but enjoyable horror and science fiction films. Oddly enough, we'll be meeting Subotsky again. How important the plot is can be summed up by the fact that there is a fifteen-minute sequence in this seventy-minute film, in which Weld and her friend merely watch the TV. The programme they're watching is a fictional TV show, presented by Alan Freed, in which he introduces various rock and roll acts, and this is where Berry appears. The song he's singing in the film is his next single, "You Can't Catch Me", which had actually been recorded before “Roll Over Beethoven”. But the story of the song's release is one that tells you a lot about the music business in the 1950s, and about how little the artists understood about what it was they were getting into. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry: "You Can't Catch Me"] As we discussed last week when talking about Fats Domino, it wasn't normal for R&B acts to put out albums, and so it was a sign of how much the film was aimed at the white teenage audience that a soundtrack album was considered at all. It seems to have been Alan Freed's idea. Freed was the star of the film, and the acts in it -- people like Lavern Baker, the Moonglows, Johnny Burnette, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers -- were for the most part people he regularly featured on his radio show (along with a handful of bland white novelty acts that were included in the misguided belief that the teenage audience wanted to hear a pre-teen kid singing about rock and roll). But of course, Freed being Freed, what that meant was that the acts he included were from record labels that would bribe him, or with which he had some kind of financial relationship, and as they were on multiple different labels, this caused problems when deciding who got to put out a soundtrack album. In particular, both the Chess brothers, whose labels had provided the Flamingos, the Moonglows, and Berry, and Morris Levy, the gangster who controlled the career of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the single biggest act in the film, wanted the right to put out a soundtrack album and profit from the publicity the film would provide. All of them were "business associates" of Freed -- Freed managed the Moonglows, and had been given writing credit on songs by both the Moonglows and Berry in return for playing them on his radio show, while Levy was himself Freed's manager, and had been largely responsible for getting Freed his unchallenged dominance of New York radio. So they came to a compromise. The soundtrack album would only feature the three Chess acts who appeared in the film, and would include four songs by each of them, rather than the one song each they performed in the film. And the album would be out on Chess. But the album would include the previously-released songs that Freed was credited with co-writing, and the new songs would be published, not by the publishing companies that published those artists' songs, but by one of Levy's companies. Chuck Berry was tricked into signing his rights to the song away by a standard Leonard Chess tactic -- he was called into Chess' office to receive a large royalty cheque, and Chess asked him if while he was there he would mind signing this other document that needed signing, only could he do it in a hurry, because Chess had an urgent appointment? It was six months until Berry realised that he'd signed away the rights to "You Can't Catch Me", and twenty-eight years before he was able to reclaim the copyright for himself. In the meantime, the rights to that one Chuck Berry song made Levy far more money than he could possibly have expected, because of this one line: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "You Can't Catch Me"] In 1969, John Lennon took that line and used it as the opening line for the Beatles song "Come Together": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Come Together"] Rather than go through the courts, Levy and Lennon came to an agreement -- Lennon was going to make an album of rock and roll covers, and he would include at least three songs to which Levy owned the copyright, including "You Can't Catch Me". As a result, even after Levy finally lost the rights to the song in the early 1980s, he still continued earning money from John Lennon's cover versions of two other songs he owned, which would never have been recorded without him having owned “You Can't Catch Me”. "You Can't Catch Me" was a flop, and didn't even make the R&B charts, let alone the pop charts. This even though its B-side, "Havana Moon", would in a roundabout way end up being Berry's most influential song: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Havana Moon"] We'll talk about just how influential that song was in a year or so… Berry knew he had to pivot, and fast. He wrote a new song, "Rock and Roll Music", which he thought could maybe have the same kind of success as "Roll Over Beethoven", but used the more currently-popular term rock and roll rather than talking about "rhythm and blues" as the earlier song did. But while he demoed that, it wasn't a song that he could be certain would directly get right into the head of every teenage kid in America. For that, he turned to Johnnie Johnson again. For years, Johnson had had his own theme song at the Cosmopolitan Club. In its original form the song was based on "Honky Tonk Train Blues" by Meade "Lux" Lewis: [Excerpt: Meade "Lux" Lewis, "Honky Tonk Train Blues"] Johnson's own take on the song had kept Lewis' intro, and had been renamed "Johnnie's Boogie": [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, "Johnnie's Boogie"] Johnson suggested to Berry that they take that intro and have Berry play the same thing, but on the guitar. When he did, they found that when he played his guitar, it was like ringing a bell -- a school bell, to be precise. And that gave Berry the idea for the lyric: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "School Day"] "School Day" was the pivot point, the song with which Chuck Berry turned wholly towards teenage concerns, and away from those of adults. The description of the drudgery of life in school was not that different from the descriptions of working life in "Too Much Monkey Business", but it was infinitely more relatable to the new young rock and roll audience than anything in the earlier song. And not only that, the slow trudge of school life gets replaced, in the final verses, with an anthem to the new music: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "School Day"] "School Day" became the biggest-selling single ever to be released by Chess to that point. It hit number one on the R&B charts, knocking "All Shook Up" by Elvis off the top, and made number five on the Billboard pop charts. It charted in the UK, which given Chess' lack of distribution over here at that point was a minor miracle, and it stayed on the Billboard pop chart for an astonishing six months. "School Day" was successful enough that Berry was given an album release of his own. "After School Session" was a compilation of tracks Berry had released as either the A- or B-sides of singles, including "School Day", "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man", "Too Much Monkey Business", and "Havana Moon", but not including "You Can't Catch Me" or the other songs on the "Rock Rock Rock" compilation. It was filled out with a couple of generic blues instrumentals, but was otherwise a perfect representation of where Berry was artistically, right at this turning point. And that shows even in the title of the record. The name "After School Session" obviously refers to "School Day", and to the kids in the song going to listen to rock and roll after school ended, but it was also a tip of the hat to another song, one which may have inspired the lyrics to "School Day" in much the same way that Meade "Lux" Lewis had inspired the music: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "After School Swing Session (Swinging With Symphony Sid)"] Even at his most up-to-date, Chuck Berry was still paying homage to Louis Jordan. "School Day" was the point where Chuck Berry went from middling rhythm and blues star to major rock and roll star, and his next twelve records would all make the Billboard pop charts. 1957 was going to be Chuck Berry's year, and we'll hear how in a few weeks time, when we look at another Louis Jordan influenced song, about a kid who played the guitar...

All Blues for International Blues Music Day 2019/ Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour 07-29-19

Salty Dog Blues N Roots Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 29, 2019 57:01

The 7th annual International Blues Music Day is August 3, 2019 so we dedicate Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour this show to all blues music! Dion is in our Five Year Flashback with a blues cover and our Rockabilly N Blues Time Machine goes back to week ending May 21, 1955 to hear the top 3 Rhythm & Blues Records (Big Joe Turner, Bo Diddley and Little Walter)! Plus, hear NEW tunes from Billy F. Gibbons, Kim Wilson, Jontavious Willis, Jimmie Vaughan, a recently released Keith Richards track (with Johnnie Johnson on piano), recent rockers from Big Jon Atkinson, Buddy Guy and classics from Howlin' Wolf, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin' Hopkins and B.B. King! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Intro Music Bed: Brian Setzer- "Rockabilly Blues" Robert Johnson- "Cross Road Blues" Lightnin' Hopkins- "Had A Gal Called Sal" Jimmie Vaughan- "Baby, Please Come Home" John Lee Hooker- "Big Legs, Tight Skirt" B.B. King- "Shake It Up & Go" Billy Gibbons- "Crackin' Up" Muddy Waters- "Got My Mojo Workin'" Kim Wilson (with Big Jon Atkinson)- "You've Been Goofin'" Big Jon Atkinson (with Kim Wilson)- "Hold Out" Buddy Guy (with Kim Wilson)- "Too Late" Keith Richards (with Johnnie Johnson)- "Big Town Playboy" Howlin' Wolf- "Howlin' For My Darlin'" Rockabilly N Blues Time Machine Top 3 played in Jukeboxes Rhythm & Blues: #2 tied Big Joe Turner- "Flip, Flop & Fly" #2 tied Bo Diddley- "I'm A Man" #1 Little Walter- "My Babe" Five Year Flashback: Dion on Lightnin' Hawkins Dion- "Katie Mae" Jontavious Willis- "The Blues Is Dead" Outro Music Bed: Kim Wilson- "Smokin' Joint"

DESIGN Blues N Roots - Salty Dog (June 2019)

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 23, 2019 123:09

Salty Dog's DESIGN Podcast, June 2019 Visit: www.salty.com.au This time we've designed a show around some great Australian talent appearing at the Echuca Winter Blues Festival end of July. Kicking off with some edgy cuts, then sixteen originals from the southern hemisphere's music capital and beyond. Digs these from Paul Oscher, Amnesia Blues Band, Johnnie Johnson, Son Volt, Mutton Birds, The Streamliners, Bob Dylan, Cash Box Kings, Anna Sconti, 8 Ball Aitken, Opelousas, Barren Spinsters, Broderwick Smith, Rhythm X Revival, White Lightning, Jess Parker, Nathan Beretta, Three Kings, Bill Barber, Werewolves of Melbourne, Cass Eager, Mojo Corner, 19 Twenty. ----------- ARTIST / TRACK / ALBUM ** Australia 1. Paul Oscher / Blues And Trouble / Cool Cat 2. ** Amnesia Blues Band / Two Trains / Hailstone 3. Johnnie Johnson / Tanqueray / Johnnie B. Bad 4. Son Volt / Livin On / Honky Tonk 5. Mutton Birds / As Close As This / Rain, Steam, Speed 6. ** The Streamliners / Willow Woman / House Of Fire 7. Bob Dylan / Isis / Live Rolling Thunder Revue - Montreal 1975 8. Cash Box Kings / Back Off / Hail To The Kings 9. ** Anna Sconti / You're My Keeper / Orphan Diary 10. ** 8 Ball Aitken / High Water / Swamp Blues 11. ** Opelousas / Dear John / Dear John 12. ** Amnesia Blues Band / Nullabour / Hailstone 13. ** The Barren Spinsters / West Of The Happiness / Ten Steps to Cynical Thinking 14. ** Broderick Smith / Living Above The Law / Man Out Of Time 15. ** Rhythm X Revival / Hit The Road / Rhythm X Revival 16. ** White Lightning / What I Need / Mongrel Blood 17. ** The Streamliners / House Of Fire / House Of Fire 18. ** Jess Parker And Troubled Waters / Hurricane / Goin' Swimming 19. ** Nathan Beretta / Really Are Through / Where I Belong 20. ** Three Kings / I Know You Wanna Rock / Here It Is 21. ** Bill Barber / Leaving Trunk / Thanks For Your Consideration 22. ** Werewolves Of Melbourne / East Coast Highway / Crossing The River 23. ** Cass Eager N The Velvet Rope / Get Me Loose / Down On My Knees 24. ** Mojo Corner / Homeward Bound / Bullett On A Train 25. ** 19 Twenty / Hips / Snow In Soho

Episode 29: “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 22, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I reference three previous episodes here — last week’s, the disclaimer episode, and the episode on Ida Red. I used three main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. And for information on Chess, I used The Record Men: Chess Records and the Birth of Rock and Roll by Richard Cohen. I wouldn’t recommend that book, however — while it has some useful interview material and anecdotes from those involved, Cohen gets some basic matters of fact laughably wrong, and generally seems to be more interested in showing off his prose style than fact-checking. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler. And if you want to check out more of Willie Dixon’s material, this four-CD set contains a hundred records he either performed on as an artist, played on as a session player, wrote, or produced. It’s the finest body of work in post-war blues. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Intro: Alan Freed introducing Chuck Berry and Maybellene] Welcome to the second part of our trilogy on Chess Records. This week, we’re going to talk about the most important single record Chess ever put out, and arguably the most important artist in the whole history of rock music. But first, we’re going to talk about something a lot more recent. We’re going to talk about “Old Town Road,” by Lil Nas X. For those of you who don’t follow the charts and the music news in general, “Old Town Road” is a song put out late last year by a rapper, but it reached number nineteen in the country charts. Because it’s a country song: [Excerpt: “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X] That’s a song with banjo and mandolin, with someone singing in a low Johnny Cash style voice about riding a horse while wearing a cowboy hat. It’s clearly country music if anything at all is country music. But it was taken off the country music charts the week it would otherwise have made number one, in a decision that Billboard was at pains to say was nothing at all to do with his race. A hint — if you have to go to great lengths to say that the thing you’re doing isn’t racist, it’s probably racist. Because genre labels have always been about race, and about policing racial boundaries in the US, since the very beginning. Remember that when Billboard started the R&B charts they were called the “race music” charts. You had the race music charts for black people, the country charts for lower-class whites, and the pop charts for the respectable white people. That was the demarcation, and that still is the demarcation. But people will always want to push against those constraints. And in the 1950s, just like today, there were black people who wanted to make country music. But in the 1950s, unlike today, there was a term for the music those people were making. It was called rock and roll. For about a decade, from roughly 1955 through 1965, “rock and roll” became a term for the music which disregarded those racial boundaries. And since then there has been a slow but sure historical revisionism. The lines of rock and roll expand to let in any white man, but they constrict to push out the women and black men who were already there. But there’s one they haven’t yet been able to push out, because this particular black man playing country music was more or less the embodiment of rock and roll. Chuck Berry was, in many ways, not at all an admirable man. He was one of all too many rock and roll pioneers to be a sex offender (and again, please see the disclaimer episode I did close to the start of this series, for my thoughts about that — nothing I say about his work should be taken to imply that I think that work mitigates some of the awful things he did) and he was also by all accounts an unpleasant person in a myriad other ways. As I talked about in the disclaimer episode, we will be dealing with many awful people in this series, because that’s the nature of the history of rock and roll, but Chuck Berry was one of the most fundamentally unpleasant, unlikeable, people we’ll be looking at. Nobody has a good word to say about him as a human being, and he hurt a lot of people over his long life. When I talk about his work, or the real injustices that were also done to him, I don’t want to forget that. But when it comes to rock and roll, Chuck Berry may be the single most important figure who ever lived, and a model for everyone who followed. [Excerpt: “Maybellene”, just the intro] To talk about Chuck Berry, we first of all have to talk about Johnnie Johnson. Johnnie Johnson was a blues piano player, who had got a taste of life as a professional musician in the Marines, where he’d played in a military band led by Bobby Troup, the writer of “Route 66” among many other songs. After leaving the Marines, he’d moved around the Midwest, playing blues in various bands, before forming his own trio, the Johnnie Johnson Trio, in St Louis. That trio consisted of piano, saxophone, and drums — until New Year’s Eve 1952, when the saxophone player had a stroke and couldn’t play. Johnson needed another musician to play with the trio, and needed someone quick, but it was New Year’s Eve — every musician he could think of would be booked up. Except for Chuck Berry. Berry was a guitarist he vaguely knew, and was different in every way from Johnson. Where Johnson was an easy-going, fat, jovial, man, who had no ambitions other than to make a living playing boogie-woogie piano, Chuck Berry had already served a term in prison for armed robbery, was massively ambitious, and was skinny as a rake. But he could play the guitar and sing well enough, and the customers had hired a trio, not a duo, and so Chuck Berry joined the Johnnie Johnson Trio. Berry soon took over the band, as Johnson, a relatively easy-going person, saw that Berry was so ambitious that he would be able to bring the band greater success than they would otherwise have had. And also, Berry owned a car, which was useful for transporting the band to gigs. And so the Johnnie Johnson trio became the Chuck Berry Trio. Berry would also play gigs on the side with other musicians, and in 1954 he played guitar on a session for a calypso record on a local independent label: [Excerpt: “Oh Maria”, Joe Alexander and the Cubans] However, when Berry tried to get that label to record the Chuck Berry Trio, they weren’t interested. But then Berry drove to Chicago to see one of his musical heroes, Muddy Waters. We’ve talked about Waters before, but only in passing — but Waters was, by far, the biggest star in the Chicago electric blues style, whose driving, propulsive, records were more accessible than Howlin’ Wolf but still had some of the Delta grit that was missing from the cleaner sounds of people like T-Bone Walker. Berry stayed after the show to talk to his idol, and asked him how he could make records like Waters did. Waters told him to go and see Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Berry went to see Chess, who asked if Berry had a demo tape. He didn’t, but he went back to St Louis and came back the next week with a wire recording of four newly-recorded songs. The first thing he played was a blues song he’d written called “The Wee Wee Hours”: [excerpt: Chuck Berry, “The Wee Wee Hours”] That was too generic for Chess — and the blues they put out tended to be more electric Chicago blues, rather than the Nat Cole or Charles Brown style Berry was going for there. But the next song he played had them interested. Berry had always been interested in playing as many different styles of music as he could — he was someone who was trying to incorporate the sounds of Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Charlie Christian, and Nat “King” Cole, among others. And so as well as performing blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues music, he’d also incorporated a fair amount of country and western music in his shows. And in particular, he was an admirer of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and he would perform their song “Ida Red” in shows, where it always went down well. We already had an entire episode of the podcast on “Ida Red”, which I’ll link in the liner notes to this, but as a quick reminder, it’s an old folk song, or collection of folk songs, that had become a big hit for Bob Wills, the Western Swing fiddle player: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys] Berry would perform that song live, but messed around and changed the lyrics a lot — he eventually changed the title to “Ida May”, for a start — and when he performed the song for Leonard Chess, Chess thought it sounded great. There was only one problem — he thought the name made it too obvious where Berry had got the idea, and he wanted it to sound more original. They tried several names and eventually hit on “Maybellene”, after the popular cosmetics brand, though they changed the spelling. “Ida Red” wasn’t the only influence on “Maybellene” though, there was another song called “Oh Red”, a hokum song by the Harlem Hamfats: [Excerpt: “Oh Red”, the Harlem Hamfats] Larry Birnbaum, in “Before Elvis”, suggests that this was the *only* influence on “Maybellene”, and that Berry was misremembering the song, as both songs have “Red” in the titles. I disagree — I think it’s fairly clear that “Maybellene” is inspired both by “Ida Red”s structure and patter-lyric verse and by “Oh Red”s chorus melody. And it wasn’t just Bob Wills’ version of “Ida Red” that inspired Berry. There’s a blues version, by Bumble Bee Slim, which has a guitar break that isn’t a million miles away from what Berry was doing: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bumble Bee Slim] And there’s another influence as well. Berry’s lyrics were about a car chase — to try to catch up with a cheating girlfriend — and are the thing that makes the song so unique. They — and the car-horn sound of the guitar — seem to have been inspired by a hillbilly boogie song called “Hot Rod Racer” by Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys: [Excerpt: “Hot Rod Racer”, Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys] That had been a successful enough country song that it spawned at least three hit cover versions, including one by Red Foley. Berry took all these Western Swing, blues, and hillbilly boogie influences and turned them into something new: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Maybellene”] Even this early, you can already see the Chuck Berry style fully formed. Clean blues guitar, as clean as someone like T-Bone Walker, but playing almost rockabilly phrases — this is closer to the style of Elvis’ Sun records than it is to anything else that Chess were putting out — and punning, verbose, witty lyrics talking about something that would have a clear appeal to people half his age. All of future rock is right there. The lineup on the record was the Chuck Berry trio — Berry on guitar, Johnson on piano, and Ebby Hardy on drums — augmented by two other musicians. Jerome Green, the maraca player, is someone we’ll be talking about next week, but we should here talk a bit about Willie Dixon, the bass player, because he is probably the single most important figure in the whole Chess Records story. Dixon had started out as a boxer — he’d been Joe Louis’ sparring partner — before starting to play a bass made out of a tin can and a single string for him by the blues pianist Leonard Caston. Dixon and Caston formed an Ink Spots-style group, “The Five Breezes”: [Excerpt: “Sweet Louise”, the Five Breezes] But when America joined in World War II, Dixon’s music career went on hold, as he was a conscientious objector, unwilling to fight in defence of a racist state, and so he spent ten months in prison. He joined Chess in 1951 shortly after Leonard Chess took over full control of the company by buying out its original owner — right after the club Chess had been running had mysteriously burned down, on a day it was closed, giving him enough insurance money to buy the whole record company. And Dixon was necessary because among Leonard Chess’ flaws was one fatal one — he had no idea what real musical talent was or how to find it. But he *did* have the second-order ability to find people who could recognise real musical talent when they heard it, and the willingness to trust those people’s judgment. And Dixon was not only a real talent himself, but he could bring out the best in others, too. Dixon was, effectively, the auteur behind almost everything that Chess Records put out. As well as a session bass player who played on almost every Chess release that wasn’t licensed from someone else, he was also their staff producer, talent scout, and staff songwriter, as well as a solo artist under his own name. He wrote and played on hits for Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, Bo Diddley, Elmore James… to all intents and purposes, Willie Dixon *was* the Chicago blues, and when the second generation of rock and rollers started up in the 1960s — white boys with guitars from England — it was Willie Dixon’s songs that formed the backbone of their repertoire. Just a few of the songs he wrote that became classics include “Little Red Rooster” for Howlin’ Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Little Red Rooster”] “Bring it on Home” for Sonny Boy Williamson II [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II, “Bring it on Home”] “You Need Love” for Muddy Waters [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “You Need Love”] You get the idea. In any other session he played on — in any other room he ever entered — Dixon would be the most important songwriter in the room. But as it turned out, on this occasion, he was only the second-most important and influential songwriter there, as “Maybellene” would be the start of a run of singles that is unparalleled for its influence on rock and roll music. It was the debut of the single most important songwriter in rock and roll history. Of course, Chuck Berry isn’t the only credited songwriter — and, separately, he may not have been the song’s only writer. But these two things aren’t linked. Leonard Chess was someone who had a reputation for not being particularly fair with his artists when it came to contracts. A favourite technique for him was to call an artist and tell him that he had some new papers to sign. He would then leave a bottle of whisky in the office, and not be in when the musician turned up. His secretary would say “Mr. Chess has been delayed. Help yourself to a drink while you wait in the office”. Chess would only return when the musician was totally drunk, and then get him to sign the contract. That wouldn’t work on Berry, who didn’t drink, but Chess did manage to get Berry to sign two thirds of the rights to “Maybellene” over to people who had nothing to do with writing it — Russ Fratto and Alan Freed. Freed had already taken the songwriting credit for several songs by bands that he managed, none of which he wrote, but now he was going to take the credit for a song by someone he had never met — Chess added his name to the credits as a bribe, in order to persuade him to play the song on his radio show. Russ Fratto, meanwhile, was the landlord of Chess Records’ offices and owned the stationery company that printed the labels Chess used on their records. It’s been said in a few places that Fratto was given the credit because the Chess brothers owed him money, so they gave him a cut of Berry’s royalties to pay off their own debt. But while Freed and Fratto took unearned credit for the song, it’s at least arguable that so did Chuck Berry. We’ll be looking at several Chuck Berry songs over the course of this podcast, and the question of authorship comes up for all of them. After they stopped working together, Johnnie Johnson started to claim that he deserved co-writing credit for everything that was credited to Berry on his own. Johnson claimed that while Berry wrote the lyrics by himself, the band as a whole worked out the music, and that Berry’s melody lines would be based on Johnson’s piano parts. To get an idea of what Johnson brought to the mix, here’s a performance from Johnson, without Berry, many years later: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnny’s Boogie”] It’s impossible to say with certainty who did what — Johnson sued Berry in 2000, but the case was dismissed because of the length of time between the songs being written and the case being brought. And Johnson worked with Berry on almost all his albums before that so we don’t have any clear guides as to what Berry’s music sounded like without Johnson. Given Berry’s money-grubbing, grasping, nature, and his willingness to see every single interaction as about how many dollars and cents were in it for Chuck Berry, I have no trouble believing that Berry would take the credit for other people’s work and not think twice about it, so I can fully believe that Johnson worked with him on the music for the songs. On the other hand, most of the songs in question were based around very basic blues chord changes, and the musical interest in them comes almost solely from Berry’s guitar licks — Johnnie Johnson was a very good blues piano player just like a thousand other very good blues piano players, but Chuck Berry’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and unlike anything ever recorded before. But the crucial evidence as to how much input or lack of it Johnson had on the writing process comes with the keys Berry chose. Maybellene is in B-flat. A lot of his other songs are in E-flat. These are *not* keys that any guitarist would normally choose to write in. If you’re a guitarist, writing for the guitar, you’d probably choose to write in E or A if you’re playing the blues, D if you’re doing folkier stuff, maybe G or C if you’re doing something poppier and more melodic. These are easy keys for the guitar, the keys that every guitarist’s fingers will automatically fall into unless they have a good reason not to. E-flat and B-flat, though, are fairly straightforward keys on the piano if you’re playing the blues. And they’re keys that are *absolutely* standard for a saxophone player — alto saxes are tuned to an E-flat, tenor saxes to B-flat, so if you’re a band where the sax player is the most important instrumentalist, those are the keys you’re most likely to choose, all else being equal. Now, remember that Chuck Berry replaced the saxophone player in Johnnie Johnson’s band. Once you know that it seems obvious what’s happened — Berry has fit himself in around arrangements and repertoire that Johnson had originally worked up with a sax player, playing in the keys that Johnson was already used to. When they worked out the music for Berry’s songs, that was the pattern they fell into. So, I tend to believe Johnson that the backings were worked out between them after Berry wrote the lyrics. Johnson’s contribution seems to have come somewhere between that of an arranger and of a songwriter, and he deserves some credit at least morally, if not under the ridiculous legal situation that made arrangements uncopyrightable. [Excerpt: “Maybellene” guitar solo showing interplay of Berry and Johnson] “Maybellene”’s success was in part because of a very deliberate decision Berry had made years earlier, having noted the success of white performers singing black musicians’ material, and deciding that he was going to try to get the white people to buy his recordings rather than the cover versions, by singing in a voice that was closer to white singers than the typical blues vocalist. While it caused him problems in early days, notably with him turning up to gigs only to be told, often with accompanying racial slurs, that they’d expected the performer of “Maybellene” to be a white man and he wasn’t allowed to play, his playing-down of his own blackness also caused a major benefit — he became one of the only black musicians to chart higher than the white cover version. It would normally be expected that “Maybellene” would be overshadowed on the charts by Marty Robbins’ version, especially since Marty Robbins was a hugely popular star, and Berry was an unknown on a small blues label: [excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Maybellene”] Instead, as well as going to number one on the R&B charts, Berry’s recording went to number five on the pop charts. And other recordings by him would follow over the next few years. He was never a consistent chart success — in fact he did significantly less well than his reputation in rock and roll history would suggest — but he notched several top ten hits on the pop charts. “Maybellene” did so well that even “Wee Wee Hours”, released as the B-side, went to number ten on the R&B charts. And Berry’s next single was a “Maybellene” soundalike — “Thirty Days” [Excerpt: “Thirty Days”, Chuck Berry] It’s a great track, but it didn’t do quite so well on the charts — it went to number two on the R&B charts, and didn’t hit the pop charts at all. The single after that, “No Money Down”, did less well again. But Berry was about to turn things around again with his next single: [excerpt: *just the guitar intro* of “Roll Over Beethoven” by Chuck Berry] You don’t need anything more, do you? That’s the Chuck Berry formula, right there. You don’t even need to hear the vocals to know exactly what the record is. That record is, of course, “Roll Over Beethoven”. It’s worth listening to the lyrics again just to see what Berry is doing here. [Excerpt: “Roll Over Beethoven”, Chuck Berry] What we have here is, as far as I can tell, the first time that rock and roll started the pattern of self-mythologising that would continue throughout the genre’s history. Of course, there had been plenty of records before this that had talked about the power of music or how much the singer wanted to make you dance, or whatever, but this one is different in a couple of ways. Firstly, it’s talking about *recorded* music specifically — Berry isn’t wanting to go out and listen to a band play live, but he wants to listen to the DJ play his favourite record instead. And secondly, he’s explicitly making a link between his music — “these rhythm and blues” — and the music of the rockabilly artists from Memphis — “don’t step on my blue suede shoes”. And Berry’s music did resemble the Memphis rockabilly more than it resembled anything else. Both had electric lead guitars, double bass, drums, and reverb, and no saxophone and little piano. Both sang sped-up hillbilly boogies with a hard backbeat. Rock and roll was, as we have seen, a disparate genre at first, and people would continue to pull from a whole variety of different sources. But working independently and with no knowledge of each other, a white country hick from Tennessee and a sophisticated black urbanite from the Midwest had hit upon almost exactly the same formula, and Berry was going to make sure that he made the connection as clear as possible. If there’s a moment that rock and roll culture coalesced into a single thing, it was with “Roll Over Beethoven”. And Berry now had his formula worked out. The next thing to do was to get rid of the band. “Roll Over Beethoven” was the penultimate single credited to Chuck Berry & His Combo, rather than to just Chuck Berry. We’ll look at the last one, recorded at the same session, in a few weeks’ time.

Episode 29: "Maybellene" by Chuck Berry

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 22, 2019 36:14

Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on "Maybellene" by Chuck Berry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I reference three previous episodes here -- last week's, the disclaimer episode, and the episode on Ida Red. I used three main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn't shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry's Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry's career up to 2001. And for information on Chess, I used The Record Men: Chess Records and the Birth of Rock and Roll by Richard Cohen. I wouldn't recommend that book, however -- while it has some useful interview material and anecdotes from those involved, Cohen gets some basic matters of fact laughably wrong, and generally seems to be more interested in showing off his prose style than fact-checking. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I'd recommend if you don't have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler. And if you want to check out more of Willie Dixon's material, this four-CD set contains a hundred records he either performed on as an artist, played on as a session player, wrote, or produced. It's the finest body of work in post-war blues. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Intro: Alan Freed introducing Chuck Berry and Maybellene] Welcome to the second part of our trilogy on Chess Records. This week, we're going to talk about the most important single record Chess ever put out, and arguably the most important artist in the whole history of rock music. But first, we're going to talk about something a lot more recent. We're going to talk about "Old Town Road," by Lil Nas X. For those of you who don't follow the charts and the music news in general, "Old Town Road" is a song put out late last year by a rapper, but it reached number nineteen in the country charts. Because it's a country song: [Excerpt: "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X] That's a song with banjo and mandolin, with someone singing in a low Johnny Cash style voice about riding a horse while wearing a cowboy hat. It's clearly country music if anything at all is country music. But it was taken off the country music charts the week it would otherwise have made number one, in a decision that Billboard was at pains to say was nothing at all to do with his race. A hint -- if you have to go to great lengths to say that the thing you're doing isn't racist, it's probably racist. Because genre labels have always been about race, and about policing racial boundaries in the US, since the very beginning. Remember that when Billboard started the R&B charts they were called the "race music" charts. You had the race music charts for black people, the country charts for lower-class whites, and the pop charts for the respectable white people. That was the demarcation, and that still is the demarcation. But people will always want to push against those constraints. And in the 1950s, just like today, there were black people who wanted to make country music. But in the 1950s, unlike today, there was a term for the music those people were making. It was called rock and roll. For about a decade, from roughly 1955 through 1965, "rock and roll" became a term for the music which disregarded those racial boundaries. And since then there has been a slow but sure historical revisionism. The lines of rock and roll expand to let in any white man, but they constrict to push out the women and black men who were already there. But there's one they haven't yet been able to push out, because this particular black man playing country music was more or less the embodiment of rock and roll. Chuck Berry was, in many ways, not at all an admirable man. He was one of all too many rock and roll pioneers to be a sex offender (and again, please see the disclaimer episode I did close to the start of this series, for my thoughts about that -- nothing I say about his work should be taken to imply that I think that work mitigates some of the awful things he did) and he was also by all accounts an unpleasant person in a myriad other ways. As I talked about in the disclaimer episode, we will be dealing with many awful people in this series, because that's the nature of the history of rock and roll, but Chuck Berry was one of the most fundamentally unpleasant, unlikeable, people we'll be looking at. Nobody has a good word to say about him as a human being, and he hurt a lot of people over his long life. When I talk about his work, or the real injustices that were also done to him, I don't want to forget that. But when it comes to rock and roll, Chuck Berry may be the single most important figure who ever lived, and a model for everyone who followed. [Excerpt: “Maybellene”, just the intro] To talk about Chuck Berry, we first of all have to talk about Johnnie Johnson. Johnnie Johnson was a blues piano player, who had got a taste of life as a professional musician in the Marines, where he'd played in a military band led by Bobby Troup, the writer of "Route 66" among many other songs. After leaving the Marines, he'd moved around the Midwest, playing blues in various bands, before forming his own trio, the Johnnie Johnson Trio, in St Louis. That trio consisted of piano, saxophone, and drums -- until New Year's Eve 1952, when the saxophone player had a stroke and couldn't play. Johnson needed another musician to play with the trio, and needed someone quick, but it was New Year's Eve -- every musician he could think of would be booked up. Except for Chuck Berry. Berry was a guitarist he vaguely knew, and was different in every way from Johnson. Where Johnson was an easy-going, fat, jovial, man, who had no ambitions other than to make a living playing boogie-woogie piano, Chuck Berry had already served a term in prison for armed robbery, was massively ambitious, and was skinny as a rake. But he could play the guitar and sing well enough, and the customers had hired a trio, not a duo, and so Chuck Berry joined the Johnnie Johnson Trio. Berry soon took over the band, as Johnson, a relatively easy-going person, saw that Berry was so ambitious that he would be able to bring the band greater success than they would otherwise have had. And also, Berry owned a car, which was useful for transporting the band to gigs. And so the Johnnie Johnson trio became the Chuck Berry Trio. Berry would also play gigs on the side with other musicians, and in 1954 he played guitar on a session for a calypso record on a local independent label: [Excerpt: "Oh Maria", Joe Alexander and the Cubans] However, when Berry tried to get that label to record the Chuck Berry Trio, they weren't interested. But then Berry drove to Chicago to see one of his musical heroes, Muddy Waters. We've talked about Waters before, but only in passing -- but Waters was, by far, the biggest star in the Chicago electric blues style, whose driving, propulsive, records were more accessible than Howlin' Wolf but still had some of the Delta grit that was missing from the cleaner sounds of people like T-Bone Walker. Berry stayed after the show to talk to his idol, and asked him how he could make records like Waters did. Waters told him to go and see Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Berry went to see Chess, who asked if Berry had a demo tape. He didn't, but he went back to St Louis and came back the next week with a wire recording of four newly-recorded songs. The first thing he played was a blues song he'd written called "The Wee Wee Hours": [excerpt: Chuck Berry, "The Wee Wee Hours"] That was too generic for Chess -- and the blues they put out tended to be more electric Chicago blues, rather than the Nat Cole or Charles Brown style Berry was going for there. But the next song he played had them interested. Berry had always been interested in playing as many different styles of music as he could -- he was someone who was trying to incorporate the sounds of Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Charlie Christian, and Nat "King" Cole, among others. And so as well as performing blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues music, he'd also incorporated a fair amount of country and western music in his shows. And in particular, he was an admirer of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and he would perform their song "Ida Red" in shows, where it always went down well. We already had an entire episode of the podcast on "Ida Red", which I'll link in the liner notes to this, but as a quick reminder, it's an old folk song, or collection of folk songs, that had become a big hit for Bob Wills, the Western Swing fiddle player: [Excerpt: "Ida Red", Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys] Berry would perform that song live, but messed around and changed the lyrics a lot -- he eventually changed the title to "Ida May", for a start -- and when he performed the song for Leonard Chess, Chess thought it sounded great. There was only one problem -- he thought the name made it too obvious where Berry had got the idea, and he wanted it to sound more original. They tried several names and eventually hit on "Maybellene", after the popular cosmetics brand, though they changed the spelling. "Ida Red" wasn't the only influence on "Maybellene" though, there was another song called "Oh Red", a hokum song by the Harlem Hamfats: [Excerpt: "Oh Red", the Harlem Hamfats] Larry Birnbaum, in "Before Elvis", suggests that this was the *only* influence on "Maybellene", and that Berry was misremembering the song, as both songs have "Red" in the titles. I disagree -- I think it's fairly clear that "Maybellene" is inspired both by "Ida Red"s structure and patter-lyric verse and by "Oh Red"s chorus melody. And it wasn't just Bob Wills' version of “Ida Red” that inspired Berry. There's a blues version, by Bumble Bee Slim, which has a guitar break that isn't a million miles away from what Berry was doing: [Excerpt: "Ida Red", Bumble Bee Slim] And there's another influence as well. Berry's lyrics were about a car chase -- to try to catch up with a cheating girlfriend -- and are the thing that makes the song so unique. They -- and the car-horn sound of the guitar -- seem to have been inspired by a hillbilly boogie song called "Hot Rod Racer" by Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys: [Excerpt: "Hot Rod Racer", Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys] That had been a successful enough country song that it spawned at least three hit cover versions, including one by Red Foley. Berry took all these Western Swing, blues, and hillbilly boogie influences and turned them into something new: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Maybellene"] Even this early, you can already see the Chuck Berry style fully formed. Clean blues guitar, as clean as someone like T-Bone Walker, but playing almost rockabilly phrases -- this is closer to the style of Elvis' Sun records than it is to anything else that Chess were putting out -- and punning, verbose, witty lyrics talking about something that would have a clear appeal to people half his age. All of future rock is right there. The lineup on the record was the Chuck Berry trio -- Berry on guitar, Johnson on piano, and Ebby Hardy on drums -- augmented by two other musicians. Jerome Green, the maraca player, is someone we'll be talking about next week, but we should here talk a bit about Willie Dixon, the bass player, because he is probably the single most important figure in the whole Chess Records story. Dixon had started out as a boxer -- he'd been Joe Louis' sparring partner -- before starting to play a bass made out of a tin can and a single string for him by the blues pianist Leonard Caston. Dixon and Caston formed an Ink Spots-style group, "The Five Breezes": [Excerpt: "Sweet Louise", the Five Breezes] But when America joined in World War II, Dixon's music career went on hold, as he was a conscientious objector, unwilling to fight in defence of a racist state, and so he spent ten months in prison. He joined Chess in 1951 shortly after Leonard Chess took over full control of the company by buying out its original owner -- right after the club Chess had been running had mysteriously burned down, on a day it was closed, giving him enough insurance money to buy the whole record company. And Dixon was necessary because among Leonard Chess' flaws was one fatal one -- he had no idea what real musical talent was or how to find it. But he *did* have the second-order ability to find people who could recognise real musical talent when they heard it, and the willingness to trust those people's judgment. And Dixon was not only a real talent himself, but he could bring out the best in others, too. Dixon was, effectively, the auteur behind almost everything that Chess Records put out. As well as a session bass player who played on almost every Chess release that wasn't licensed from someone else, he was also their staff producer, talent scout, and staff songwriter, as well as a solo artist under his own name. He wrote and played on hits for Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, Bo Diddley, Elmore James... to all intents and purposes, Willie Dixon *was* the Chicago blues, and when the second generation of rock and rollers started up in the 1960s -- white boys with guitars from England -- it was Willie Dixon's songs that formed the backbone of their repertoire. Just a few of the songs he wrote that became classics include "Little Red Rooster" for Howlin' Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Little Red Rooster"] "Bring it on Home" for Sonny Boy Williamson II [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II, "Bring it on Home"] "You Need Love" for Muddy Waters [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "You Need Love"] You get the idea. In any other session he played on -- in any other room he ever entered -- Dixon would be the most important songwriter in the room. But as it turned out, on this occasion, he was only the second-most important and influential songwriter there, as "Maybellene" would be the start of a run of singles that is unparalleled for its influence on rock and roll music. It was the debut of the single most important songwriter in rock and roll history. Of course, Chuck Berry isn't the only credited songwriter -- and, separately, he may not have been the song's only writer. But these two things aren't linked. Leonard Chess was someone who had a reputation for not being particularly fair with his artists when it came to contracts. A favourite technique for him was to call an artist and tell him that he had some new papers to sign. He would then leave a bottle of whisky in the office, and not be in when the musician turned up. His secretary would say "Mr. Chess has been delayed. Help yourself to a drink while you wait in the office". Chess would only return when the musician was totally drunk, and then get him to sign the contract. That wouldn't work on Berry, who didn't drink, but Chess did manage to get Berry to sign two thirds of the rights to "Maybellene" over to people who had nothing to do with writing it -- Russ Fratto and Alan Freed. Freed had already taken the songwriting credit for several songs by bands that he managed, none of which he wrote, but now he was going to take the credit for a song by someone he had never met -- Chess added his name to the credits as a bribe, in order to persuade him to play the song on his radio show. Russ Fratto, meanwhile, was the landlord of Chess Records' offices and owned the stationery company that printed the labels Chess used on their records. It's been said in a few places that Fratto was given the credit because the Chess brothers owed him money, so they gave him a cut of Berry's royalties to pay off their own debt. But while Freed and Fratto took unearned credit for the song, it's at least arguable that so did Chuck Berry. We'll be looking at several Chuck Berry songs over the course of this podcast, and the question of authorship comes up for all of them. After they stopped working together, Johnnie Johnson started to claim that he deserved co-writing credit for everything that was credited to Berry on his own. Johnson claimed that while Berry wrote the lyrics by himself, the band as a whole worked out the music, and that Berry's melody lines would be based on Johnson's piano parts. To get an idea of what Johnson brought to the mix, here's a performance from Johnson, without Berry, many years later: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnny's Boogie”] It's impossible to say with certainty who did what -- Johnson sued Berry in 2000, but the case was dismissed because of the length of time between the songs being written and the case being brought. And Johnson worked with Berry on almost all his albums before that so we don't have any clear guides as to what Berry's music sounded like without Johnson. Given Berry's money-grubbing, grasping, nature, and his willingness to see every single interaction as about how many dollars and cents were in it for Chuck Berry, I have no trouble believing that Berry would take the credit for other people's work and not think twice about it, so I can fully believe that Johnson worked with him on the music for the songs. On the other hand, most of the songs in question were based around very basic blues chord changes, and the musical interest in them comes almost solely from Berry's guitar licks -- Johnnie Johnson was a very good blues piano player just like a thousand other very good blues piano players, but Chuck Berry's guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and unlike anything ever recorded before. But the crucial evidence as to how much input or lack of it Johnson had on the writing process comes with the keys Berry chose. Maybellene is in B-flat. A lot of his other songs are in E-flat. These are *not* keys that any guitarist would normally choose to write in. If you're a guitarist, writing for the guitar, you'd probably choose to write in E or A if you're playing the blues, D if you're doing folkier stuff, maybe G or C if you're doing something poppier and more melodic. These are easy keys for the guitar, the keys that every guitarist's fingers will automatically fall into unless they have a good reason not to. E-flat and B-flat, though, are fairly straightforward keys on the piano if you're playing the blues. And they're keys that are *absolutely* standard for a saxophone player -- alto saxes are tuned to an E-flat, tenor saxes to B-flat, so if you're a band where the sax player is the most important instrumentalist, those are the keys you're most likely to choose, all else being equal. Now, remember that Chuck Berry replaced the saxophone player in Johnnie Johnson's band. Once you know that it seems obvious what's happened -- Berry has fit himself in around arrangements and repertoire that Johnson had originally worked up with a sax player, playing in the keys that Johnson was already used to. When they worked out the music for Berry's songs, that was the pattern they fell into. So, I tend to believe Johnson that the backings were worked out between them after Berry wrote the lyrics. Johnson's contribution seems to have come somewhere between that of an arranger and of a songwriter, and he deserves some credit at least morally, if not under the ridiculous legal situation that made arrangements uncopyrightable. [Excerpt: “Maybellene” guitar solo showing interplay of Berry and Johnson] “Maybellene”'s success was in part because of a very deliberate decision Berry had made years earlier, having noted the success of white performers singing black musicians' material, and deciding that he was going to try to get the white people to buy his recordings rather than the cover versions, by singing in a voice that was closer to white singers than the typical blues vocalist. While it caused him problems in early days, notably with him turning up to gigs only to be told, often with accompanying racial slurs, that they'd expected the performer of "Maybellene" to be a white man and he wasn't allowed to play, his playing-down of his own blackness also caused a major benefit -- he became one of the only black musicians to chart higher than the white cover version. It would normally be expected that "Maybellene" would be overshadowed on the charts by Marty Robbins' version, especially since Marty Robbins was a hugely popular star, and Berry was an unknown on a small blues label: [excerpt: Marty Robbins, "Maybellene"] Instead, as well as going to number one on the R&B charts, Berry's recording went to number five on the pop charts. And other recordings by him would follow over the next few years. He was never a consistent chart success -- in fact he did significantly less well than his reputation in rock and roll history would suggest -- but he notched several top ten hits on the pop charts. "Maybellene" did so well that even "Wee Wee Hours", released as the B-side, went to number ten on the R&B charts. And Berry's next single was a "Maybellene" soundalike -- "Thirty Days" [Excerpt: "Thirty Days", Chuck Berry] It's a great track, but it didn't do quite so well on the charts -- it went to number two on the R&B charts, and didn't hit the pop charts at all. The single after that, "No Money Down", did less well again. But Berry was about to turn things around again with his next single: [excerpt: *just the guitar intro* of "Roll Over Beethoven" by Chuck Berry] You don't need anything more, do you? That's the Chuck Berry formula, right there. You don't even need to hear the vocals to know exactly what the record is. That record is, of course, "Roll Over Beethoven". It's worth listening to the lyrics again just to see what Berry is doing here. [Excerpt: "Roll Over Beethoven", Chuck Berry] What we have here is, as far as I can tell, the first time that rock and roll started the pattern of self-mythologising that would continue throughout the genre's history. Of course, there had been plenty of records before this that had talked about the power of music or how much the singer wanted to make you dance, or whatever, but this one is different in a couple of ways. Firstly, it's talking about *recorded* music specifically -- Berry isn't wanting to go out and listen to a band play live, but he wants to listen to the DJ play his favourite record instead. And secondly, he's explicitly making a link between his music -- "these rhythm and blues" -- and the music of the rockabilly artists from Memphis -- "don't step on my blue suede shoes". And Berry's music did resemble the Memphis rockabilly more than it resembled anything else. Both had electric lead guitars, double bass, drums, and reverb, and no saxophone and little piano. Both sang sped-up hillbilly boogies with a hard backbeat. Rock and roll was, as we have seen, a disparate genre at first, and people would continue to pull from a whole variety of different sources. But working independently and with no knowledge of each other, a white country hick from Tennessee and a sophisticated black urbanite from the Midwest had hit upon almost exactly the same formula, and Berry was going to make sure that he made the connection as clear as possible. If there's a moment that rock and roll culture coalesced into a single thing, it was with "Roll Over Beethoven". And Berry now had his formula worked out. The next thing to do was to get rid of the band. "Roll Over Beethoven" was the penultimate single credited to Chuck Berry & His Combo, rather than to just Chuck Berry. We'll look at the last one, recorded at the same session, in a few weeks' time.

Episode 29: “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 22, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I reference three previous episodes here — last week’s, the disclaimer episode, and the episode on Ida Red. I used three main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. And for information on Chess, I used The Record Men: Chess Records and the Birth of Rock and Roll by Richard Cohen. I wouldn’t recommend that book, however — while it has some useful interview material and anecdotes from those involved, Cohen gets some basic matters of fact laughably wrong, and generally seems to be more interested in showing off his prose style than fact-checking. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without any of the filler. And if you want to check out more of Willie Dixon’s material, this four-CD set contains a hundred records he either performed on as an artist, played on as a session player, wrote, or produced. It’s the finest body of work in post-war blues. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Intro: Alan Freed introducing Chuck Berry and Maybellene] Welcome to the second part of our trilogy on Chess Records. This week, we’re going to talk about the most important single record Chess ever put out, and arguably the most important artist in the whole history of rock music. But first, we’re going to talk about something a lot more recent. We’re going to talk about “Old Town Road,” by Lil Nas X. For those of you who don’t follow the charts and the music news in general, “Old Town Road” is a song put out late last year by a rapper, but it reached number nineteen in the country charts. Because it’s a country song: [Excerpt: “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X] That’s a song with banjo and mandolin, with someone singing in a low Johnny Cash style voice about riding a horse while wearing a cowboy hat. It’s clearly country music if anything at all is country music. But it was taken off the country music charts the week it would otherwise have made number one, in a decision that Billboard was at pains to say was nothing at all to do with his race. A hint — if you have to go to great lengths to say that the thing you’re doing isn’t racist, it’s probably racist. Because genre labels have always been about race, and about policing racial boundaries in the US, since the very beginning. Remember that when Billboard started the R&B charts they were called the “race music” charts. You had the race music charts for black people, the country charts for lower-class whites, and the pop charts for the respectable white people. That was the demarcation, and that still is the demarcation. But people will always want to push against those constraints. And in the 1950s, just like today, there were black people who wanted to make country music. But in the 1950s, unlike today, there was a term for the music those people were making. It was called rock and roll. For about a decade, from roughly 1955 through 1965, “rock and roll” became a term for the music which disregarded those racial boundaries. And since then there has been a slow but sure historical revisionism. The lines of rock and roll expand to let in any white man, but they constrict to push out the women and black men who were already there. But there’s one they haven’t yet been able to push out, because this particular black man playing country music was more or less the embodiment of rock and roll. Chuck Berry was, in many ways, not at all an admirable man. He was one of all too many rock and roll pioneers to be a sex offender (and again, please see the disclaimer episode I did close to the start of this series, for my thoughts about that — nothing I say about his work should be taken to imply that I think that work mitigates some of the awful things he did) and he was also by all accounts an unpleasant person in a myriad other ways. As I talked about in the disclaimer episode, we will be dealing with many awful people in this series, because that’s the nature of the history of rock and roll, but Chuck Berry was one of the most fundamentally unpleasant, unlikeable, people we’ll be looking at. Nobody has a good word to say about him as a human being, and he hurt a lot of people over his long life. When I talk about his work, or the real injustices that were also done to him, I don’t want to forget that. But when it comes to rock and roll, Chuck Berry may be the single most important figure who ever lived, and a model for everyone who followed. [Excerpt: “Maybellene”, just the intro] To talk about Chuck Berry, we first of all have to talk about Johnnie Johnson. Johnnie Johnson was a blues piano player, who had got a taste of life as a professional musician in the Marines, where he’d played in a military band led by Bobby Troup, the writer of “Route 66” among many other songs. After leaving the Marines, he’d moved around the Midwest, playing blues in various bands, before forming his own trio, the Johnnie Johnson Trio, in St Louis. That trio consisted of piano, saxophone, and drums — until New Year’s Eve 1952, when the saxophone player had a stroke and couldn’t play. Johnson needed another musician to play with the trio, and needed someone quick, but it was New Year’s Eve — every musician he could think of would be booked up. Except for Chuck Berry. Berry was a guitarist he vaguely knew, and was different in every way from Johnson. Where Johnson was an easy-going, fat, jovial, man, who had no ambitions other than to make a living playing boogie-woogie piano, Chuck Berry had already served a term in prison for armed robbery, was massively ambitious, and was skinny as a rake. But he could play the guitar and sing well enough, and the customers had hired a trio, not a duo, and so Chuck Berry joined the Johnnie Johnson Trio. Berry soon took over the band, as Johnson, a relatively easy-going person, saw that Berry was so ambitious that he would be able to bring the band greater success than they would otherwise have had. And also, Berry owned a car, which was useful for transporting the band to gigs. And so the Johnnie Johnson trio became the Chuck Berry Trio. Berry would also play gigs on the side with other musicians, and in 1954 he played guitar on a session for a calypso record on a local independent label: [Excerpt: “Oh Maria”, Joe Alexander and the Cubans] However, when Berry tried to get that label to record the Chuck Berry Trio, they weren’t interested. But then Berry drove to Chicago to see one of his musical heroes, Muddy Waters. We’ve talked about Waters before, but only in passing — but Waters was, by far, the biggest star in the Chicago electric blues style, whose driving, propulsive, records were more accessible than Howlin’ Wolf but still had some of the Delta grit that was missing from the cleaner sounds of people like T-Bone Walker. Berry stayed after the show to talk to his idol, and asked him how he could make records like Waters did. Waters told him to go and see Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Berry went to see Chess, who asked if Berry had a demo tape. He didn’t, but he went back to St Louis and came back the next week with a wire recording of four newly-recorded songs. The first thing he played was a blues song he’d written called “The Wee Wee Hours”: [excerpt: Chuck Berry, “The Wee Wee Hours”] That was too generic for Chess — and the blues they put out tended to be more electric Chicago blues, rather than the Nat Cole or Charles Brown style Berry was going for there. But the next song he played had them interested. Berry had always been interested in playing as many different styles of music as he could — he was someone who was trying to incorporate the sounds of Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Charlie Christian, and Nat “King” Cole, among others. And so as well as performing blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues music, he’d also incorporated a fair amount of country and western music in his shows. And in particular, he was an admirer of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and he would perform their song “Ida Red” in shows, where it always went down well. We already had an entire episode of the podcast on “Ida Red”, which I’ll link in the liner notes to this, but as a quick reminder, it’s an old folk song, or collection of folk songs, that had become a big hit for Bob Wills, the Western Swing fiddle player: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys] Berry would perform that song live, but messed around and changed the lyrics a lot — he eventually changed the title to “Ida May”, for a start — and when he performed the song for Leonard Chess, Chess thought it sounded great. There was only one problem — he thought the name made it too obvious where Berry had got the idea, and he wanted it to sound more original. They tried several names and eventually hit on “Maybellene”, after the popular cosmetics brand, though they changed the spelling. “Ida Red” wasn’t the only influence on “Maybellene” though, there was another song called “Oh Red”, a hokum song by the Harlem Hamfats: [Excerpt: “Oh Red”, the Harlem Hamfats] Larry Birnbaum, in “Before Elvis”, suggests that this was the *only* influence on “Maybellene”, and that Berry was misremembering the song, as both songs have “Red” in the titles. I disagree — I think it’s fairly clear that “Maybellene” is inspired both by “Ida Red”s structure and patter-lyric verse and by “Oh Red”s chorus melody. And it wasn’t just Bob Wills’ version of “Ida Red” that inspired Berry. There’s a blues version, by Bumble Bee Slim, which has a guitar break that isn’t a million miles away from what Berry was doing: [Excerpt: “Ida Red”, Bumble Bee Slim] And there’s another influence as well. Berry’s lyrics were about a car chase — to try to catch up with a cheating girlfriend — and are the thing that makes the song so unique. They — and the car-horn sound of the guitar — seem to have been inspired by a hillbilly boogie song called “Hot Rod Racer” by Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys: [Excerpt: “Hot Rod Racer”, Arkie Shibley and his Mountain Dew Boys] That had been a successful enough country song that it spawned at least three hit cover versions, including one by Red Foley. Berry took all these Western Swing, blues, and hillbilly boogie influences and turned them into something new: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Maybellene”] Even this early, you can already see the Chuck Berry style fully formed. Clean blues guitar, as clean as someone like T-Bone Walker, but playing almost rockabilly phrases — this is closer to the style of Elvis’ Sun records than it is to anything else that Chess were putting out — and punning, verbose, witty lyrics talking about something that would have a clear appeal to people half his age. All of future rock is right there. The lineup on the record was the Chuck Berry trio — Berry on guitar, Johnson on piano, and Ebby Hardy on drums — augmented by two other musicians. Jerome Green, the maraca player, is someone we’ll be talking about next week, but we should here talk a bit about Willie Dixon, the bass player, because he is probably the single most important figure in the whole Chess Records story. Dixon had started out as a boxer — he’d been Joe Louis’ sparring partner — before starting to play a bass made out of a tin can and a single string for him by the blues pianist Leonard Caston. Dixon and Caston formed an Ink Spots-style group, “The Five Breezes”: [Excerpt: “Sweet Louise”, the Five Breezes] But when America joined in World War II, Dixon’s music career went on hold, as he was a conscientious objector, unwilling to fight in defence of a racist state, and so he spent ten months in prison. He joined Chess in 1951 shortly after Leonard Chess took over full control of the company by buying out its original owner — right after the club Chess had been running had mysteriously burned down, on a day it was closed, giving him enough insurance money to buy the whole record company. And Dixon was necessary because among Leonard Chess’ flaws was one fatal one — he had no idea what real musical talent was or how to find it. But he *did* have the second-order ability to find people who could recognise real musical talent when they heard it, and the willingness to trust those people’s judgment. And Dixon was not only a real talent himself, but he could bring out the best in others, too. Dixon was, effectively, the auteur behind almost everything that Chess Records put out. As well as a session bass player who played on almost every Chess release that wasn’t licensed from someone else, he was also their staff producer, talent scout, and staff songwriter, as well as a solo artist under his own name. He wrote and played on hits for Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Little Walter, Koko Taylor, Bo Diddley, Elmore James… to all intents and purposes, Willie Dixon *was* the Chicago blues, and when the second generation of rock and rollers started up in the 1960s — white boys with guitars from England — it was Willie Dixon’s songs that formed the backbone of their repertoire. Just a few of the songs he wrote that became classics include “Little Red Rooster” for Howlin’ Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin’ Wolf, “Little Red Rooster”] “Bring it on Home” for Sonny Boy Williamson II [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II, “Bring it on Home”] “You Need Love” for Muddy Waters [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “You Need Love”] You get the idea. In any other session he played on — in any other room he ever entered — Dixon would be the most important songwriter in the room. But as it turned out, on this occasion, he was only the second-most important and influential songwriter there, as “Maybellene” would be the start of a run of singles that is unparalleled for its influence on rock and roll music. It was the debut of the single most important songwriter in rock and roll history. Of course, Chuck Berry isn’t the only credited songwriter — and, separately, he may not have been the song’s only writer. But these two things aren’t linked. Leonard Chess was someone who had a reputation for not being particularly fair with his artists when it came to contracts. A favourite technique for him was to call an artist and tell him that he had some new papers to sign. He would then leave a bottle of whisky in the office, and not be in when the musician turned up. His secretary would say “Mr. Chess has been delayed. Help yourself to a drink while you wait in the office”. Chess would only return when the musician was totally drunk, and then get him to sign the contract. That wouldn’t work on Berry, who didn’t drink, but Chess did manage to get Berry to sign two thirds of the rights to “Maybellene” over to people who had nothing to do with writing it — Russ Fratto and Alan Freed. Freed had already taken the songwriting credit for several songs by bands that he managed, none of which he wrote, but now he was going to take the credit for a song by someone he had never met — Chess added his name to the credits as a bribe, in order to persuade him to play the song on his radio show. Russ Fratto, meanwhile, was the landlord of Chess Records’ offices and owned the stationery company that printed the labels Chess used on their records. It’s been said in a few places that Fratto was given the credit because the Chess brothers owed him money, so they gave him a cut of Berry’s royalties to pay off their own debt. But while Freed and Fratto took unearned credit for the song, it’s at least arguable that so did Chuck Berry. We’ll be looking at several Chuck Berry songs over the course of this podcast, and the question of authorship comes up for all of them. After they stopped working together, Johnnie Johnson started to claim that he deserved co-writing credit for everything that was credited to Berry on his own. Johnson claimed that while Berry wrote the lyrics by himself, the band as a whole worked out the music, and that Berry’s melody lines would be based on Johnson’s piano parts. To get an idea of what Johnson brought to the mix, here’s a performance from Johnson, without Berry, many years later: [Excerpt: Johnnie Johnson, “Johnny’s Boogie”] It’s impossible to say with certainty who did what — Johnson sued Berry in 2000, but the case was dismissed because of the length of time between the songs being written and the case being brought. And Johnson worked with Berry on almost all his albums before that so we don’t have any clear guides as to what Berry’s music sounded like without Johnson. Given Berry’s money-grubbing, grasping, nature, and his willingness to see every single interaction as about how many dollars and cents were in it for Chuck Berry, I have no trouble believing that Berry would take the credit for other people’s work and not think twice about it, so I can fully believe that Johnson worked with him on the music for the songs. On the other hand, most of the songs in question were based around very basic blues chord changes, and the musical interest in them comes almost solely from Berry’s guitar licks — Johnnie Johnson was a very good blues piano player just like a thousand other very good blues piano players, but Chuck Berry’s guitar style is absolutely distinctive, and unlike anything ever recorded before. But the crucial evidence as to how much input or lack of it Johnson had on the writing process comes with the keys Berry chose. Maybellene is in B-flat. A lot of his other songs are in E-flat. These are *not* keys that any guitarist would normally choose to write in. If you’re a guitarist, writing for the guitar, you’d probably choose to write in E or A if you’re playing the blues, D if you’re doing folkier stuff, maybe G or C if you’re doing something poppier and more melodic. These are easy keys for the guitar, the keys that every guitarist’s fingers will automatically fall into unless they have a good reason not to. E-flat and B-flat, though, are fairly straightforward keys on the piano if you’re playing the blues. And they’re keys that are *absolutely* standard for a saxophone player — alto saxes are tuned to an E-flat, tenor saxes to B-flat, so if you’re a band where the sax player is the most important instrumentalist, those are the keys you’re most likely to choose, all else being equal. Now, remember that Chuck Berry replaced the saxophone player in Johnnie Johnson’s band. Once you know that it seems obvious what’s happened — Berry has fit himself in around arrangements and repertoire that Johnson had originally worked up with a sax player, playing in the keys that Johnson was already used to. When they worked out the music for Berry’s songs, that was the pattern they fell into. So, I tend to believe Johnson that the backings were worked out between them after Berry wrote the lyrics. Johnson’s contribution seems to have come somewhere between that of an arranger and of a songwriter, and he deserves some credit at least morally, if not under the ridiculous legal situation that made arrangements uncopyrightable. [Excerpt: “Maybellene” guitar solo showing interplay of Berry and Johnson] “Maybellene”’s success was in part because of a very deliberate decision Berry had made years earlier, having noted the success of white performers singing black musicians’ material, and deciding that he was going to try to get the white people to buy his recordings rather than the cover versions, by singing in a voice that was closer to white singers than the typical blues vocalist. While it caused him problems in early days, notably with him turning up to gigs only to be told, often with accompanying racial slurs, that they’d expected the performer of “Maybellene” to be a white man and he wasn’t allowed to play, his playing-down of his own blackness also caused a major benefit — he became one of the only black musicians to chart higher than the white cover version. It would normally be expected that “Maybellene” would be overshadowed on the charts by Marty Robbins’ version, especially since Marty Robbins was a hugely popular star, and Berry was an unknown on a small blues label: [excerpt: Marty Robbins, “Maybellene”] Instead, as well as going to number one on the R&B charts, Berry’s recording went to number five on the pop charts. And other recordings by him would follow over the next few years. He was never a consistent chart success — in fact he did significantly less well than his reputation in rock and roll history would suggest — but he notched several top ten hits on the pop charts. “Maybellene” did so well that even “Wee Wee Hours”, released as the B-side, went to number ten on the R&B charts. And Berry’s next single was a “Maybellene” soundalike — “Thirty Days” [Excerpt: “Thirty Days”, Chuck Berry] It’s a great track, but it didn’t do quite so well on the charts — it went to number two on the R&B charts, and didn’t hit the pop charts at all. The single after that, “No Money Down”, did less well again. But Berry was about to turn things around again with his next single: [excerpt: *just the guitar intro* of “Roll Over Beethoven” by Chuck Berry] You don’t need anything more, do you? That’s the Chuck Berry formula, right there. You don’t even need to hear the vocals to know exactly what the record is. That record is, of course, “Roll Over Beethoven”. It’s worth listening to the lyrics again just to see what Berry is doing here. [Excerpt: “Roll Over Beethoven”, Chuck Berry] What we have here is, as far as I can tell, the first time that rock and roll started the pattern of self-mythologising that would continue throughout the genre’s history. Of course, there had been plenty of records before this that had talked about the power of music or how much the singer wanted to make you dance, or whatever, but this one is different in a couple of ways. Firstly, it’s talking about *recorded* music specifically — Berry isn’t wanting to go out and listen to a band play live, but he wants to listen to the DJ play his favourite record instead. And secondly, he’s explicitly making a link between his music — “these rhythm and blues” — and the music of the rockabilly artists from Memphis — “don’t step on my blue suede shoes”. And Berry’s music did resemble the Memphis rockabilly more than it resembled anything else. Both had electric lead guitars, double bass, drums, and reverb, and no saxophone and little piano. Both sang sped-up hillbilly boogies with a hard backbeat. Rock and roll was, as we have seen, a disparate genre at first, and people would continue to pull from a whole variety of different sources. But working independently and with no knowledge of each other, a white country hick from Tennessee and a sophisticated black urbanite from the Midwest had hit upon almost exactly the same formula, and Berry was going to make sure that he made the connection as clear as possible. If there’s a moment that rock and roll culture coalesced into a single thing, it was with “Roll Over Beethoven”. And Berry now had his formula worked out. The next thing to do was to get rid of the band. “Roll Over Beethoven” was the penultimate single credited to Chuck Berry & His Combo, rather than to just Chuck Berry. We’ll look at the last one, recorded at the same session, in a few weeks’ time.

america new year history chicago england dj home tennessee nashville birth world war ii sun wolf midwest cd delta elvis rock and roll waters route bob dylan billboard marines st louis chess elvis presley hard times lil nas x dixon johnny cash freed excerpt tom petty george harrison mixcloud chuck berry rock music muddy waters old town road roy orbison howlin bo diddley everly brothers no money down weavers jeff lynne sam phillips joe louis thirty days chet atkins marty robbins willie dixon charles brown western swing louis jordan bob wills bob moore chess records koko taylor little walter cast on elmore james ink spots t bone walker alan freed charlie christian richard cohen fratto roll over beethoven texas playboys red foley johnnie johnson rock and rollers monument records maybellene joe alexander bobby troup fred foster ida red little red rooster leonard chess before elvis nashville a team

Episode 29: “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry

racism chuck berry rock music plagiarism muddy waters willie dixon bob wills chess records alan freed country and western johnnie johnson maybellene leonard chess

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 22, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. This is the second of our three-part look at Chess Records, and focuses on “Maybellene” by Chuck Berry. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

BWT shorts: stories by Johnnie Johnson, Linda Rondeau, Terry Ambrose

Bailey's Writing & Editing Tips

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 7, 2019 25:22

The eighteenth in the Bailey's Writing Tips series of short story episodes which includes either Morgen’s own writing or guest pieces read out by Morgen. We hope you enjoy them! Originally released in 2010-2011 and rereleased in 2019 with new material ongoing. For more details, go to www.morgenbailey.wordpress.com (or www.morgenbailey.com and it'll take you there). NB. I'm Morgen with an E. :)

stories shorts nb ambrose rondeau johnnie johnson

Especial johnnie johnson

pittsburgh tambi fairmont art tatum dawn patrol johnnie johnson meade lux lewis

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 2, 2018 70:17

ESPECIAL JOHNNIE JOHNSON El pianista Johnnie Clyde Johnson nació un 8 de julio de 1924, en Fairmont, al oeste de Virginia. Su padre era un minero del carbón y cuando Johnson tuvo cuatro años, nos se sabe muy bien como ni porque sus padres compraron un piano. De esta manera, Johnson empezó relativamente pronto a tocar y a imitar a los músicos que escuchaba en el tocadiscos de casa, gente como Art Tatum, el maestro del boogie woogie Meade Lux Lewis. También sintonizaba un programa llamado Dawn Patrol de una emisora de Pittsburgh, total que a los nueve años ya hacia sus pinitos en la radio y podemos decir que Johnson fue un autodidacta total del piano.

Especial johnnie johnson

pittsburgh tambi fairmont art tatum dawn patrol johnnie johnson meade lux lewis

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 2, 2018 70:17

ESPECIAL JOHNNIE JOHNSON El pianista Johnnie Clyde Johnson nació un 8 de julio de 1924, en Fairmont, al oeste de Virginia. Su padre era un minero del carbón y cuando Johnson tuvo cuatro años, nos se sabe muy bien como ni porque sus padres compraron un piano. De esta manera, Johnson empezó relativamente pronto a tocar y a imitar a los músicos que escuchaba en el tocadiscos de casa, gente como Art Tatum, el maestro del boogie woogie Meade Lux Lewis. También sintonizaba un programa llamado Dawn Patrol de una emisora de Pittsburgh, total que a los nueve años ya hacia sus pinitos en la radio y podemos decir que Johnson fue un autodidacta total del piano.

Jimmy Vivino Interview - Late Night w/ Conan O’Brien - Everyone Loves Guitar

Everyone Loves Guitar

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 15, 2018 138:40

Jimmy went from playing keyboards in small, dark New Jersey bars to being the lead guitarist and Music Director at The Bottom Line nightclub in NYC, to doing the same on one of the top television shows on late night TV. He’s also played with Johnnie Johnson, Chuck Berry, Hubert Sumlin, Levon Helm, Al Kooper, Gov’t Mule, Phoebe Snow, Laura Nyro, Jon Sebastian, Donald Fagen and loads of others. Plus, he plays in several of his own projects, including the successful Beatles tribute band, The Fab Faux, with Will Lee Jimmy shares some amazing stories about Joe Walsh, James Brown, Al Kooper, Robin Trower, Bob Dylan, Felix Cavaliere, John Sebastian, Levon Helm, Donald Fagen, Warren Haynes, Mike Bloomfield and others. Also, some inside early scoop about the Conan O’Brien show. Jimmy played other instruments until he was 22 years old and decided to focus on guitar at this point. What he’s accomplished and the time he accomplished it in, is phenomenal. Incredibly sincere and selfless guitar hero, and super high energy levels to boot. So listen NOW: Subscribe https://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/subscribe/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EveryoneLovesGuitar/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everyonelovesguitar/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ELovesGuitar

Ep 2018:10 - L.A. Rams great Johnnie Johnson talks about his career and life after football

Rams Talk Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 30, 2018 29:02

Derek Ciapala sits down with L.A. Rams great Johnnie Johnson to discuss his career in the NFL and what he's doing to make an impact today with the Moving Families Initiative.

nfl career rams los angeles rams life after football johnnie johnson

What Podcasters Can Learn From Chuck Berry

School of Podcasting

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 3, 2017 55:50

Chuck Berry died last month at the age of 90. I saw him four years ago at a special event that honored him with tons of musicians (Merle Haggard, Ronnie Hawkins, Darryl "DMC" McDaniels, Joe Bonamassa and Lemmy Kilmister) coming to play his music and honor him. At the end of the night, Berry accepted the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's American Masters of Music Award, wrapping the Hall of Fame's weeklong celebration of Berry's life. In the end, they brought Chuck out with a band consisting of a lot of his children who knew how to follow their father's (at times) unpredictable behavior (Chuck got confused in the middle of song two, and restarted it). Chuck got us smiling from the very first moment. He said, "It's great to be here. Then again, I'm 86; I'm glad to be anywhere." So here are some things, on Episode 560, that podcasters can learn from Chuck Berry. Now as a guitar player myself, you start playing the guitar hoping to play Stairway to Heaven, Iron Man, Smoke on the Water, you want to be Van Halen, but you don't start there. You start with Chuck Berry, and you start with Johnny B Goode. In the same way that every band has to learn Mustang Sally and Brown Eyed Girl, every guitar player has to learn how to play Johnny B Good. I am no exception. It's not about the tech. Keep it Simple Other musicians had pedalboard were made of technology on top of technology. They could do the river dance as they changed the tone of their guitar with each tap of their foot. Chuck came out with his trusty guitar and plugged into a single amplifier. He hit the opening riff of Roll Over Beethoven, and you could not help but smile. Chuck had one tone, it was Chuck Berry. This was not a drill, this was not a test, right there in front of my was Chuck Berry. He had a smile on his face, and by the third beat, the whole place was clapping along to the music, dancing, or both. 2. Give the People What They Want. Chuck Berry had many styles. Some of his songs had remnants of country music. He played slow blues., You probably don't know most of those songs. If you wanted airplay, you had to play something kids (teenagers) wanted, and could dance to. One other thing, the teenagers were the ones buying the music. Rock and Roll music was new. It was a great way for being rebellious, and the fact that this was Rock and Roll from a BLACK MAN, made it even more revolutionary (this was the 1950s). You will notice that Roll Over Beethoven, Johnny B Goode, Rock and Roll Music and many other Berry titles are pretty much the same song. When he appeared on the Johnny Carson show, he said to the band leader, "It's the same as the last song" as they prepared to play another song. However, those songs like Sweet Little Sixteen, School Days, and others were instantly relatable to his audience. He also had suggestive lyrics which probably made parents offended. Here is a verse from Roll Over Beethoven: Well, if you feel and like it Go get your lover, then reel and rock it Roll it over and move on up just A trifle further and reel and rock with one another, Roll over Beethoven dig these rhythm and blues. 3. Chuck Was Engaging Chuck made sure you were looking at him. in the early days of his career he usually wore black or white suits, but his eyes, mouth, and hands, and especially his legs demanded attention. He would strum his guitar in a way that has hand moved from the back to guitar toward to top. As a guitar player, I can tell you it makes almost no difference where you strum an electric guitar, but it looks cool (and yes, I've borrowed that move). His "Duck Walk" he said in a CBS interview was a mistake. He had slipped and fallen and the "Duck Walk" happened as he was trying to get back up. He noticed the ovation and worked it into his act. Chuck paid attention to what made the audience go wild. 4. Charge What Your Worth There is only one Chuck Berry. Sure everyone from the Beatles, Stones, Elvis, Duan Alman, The Kinks, John Lennon, Simon and Garfunkle, Bruce Springsteen, and David Bowie, they all have covered his music. There is only ONE Chuck Berry. Consequently, Chuck knew this and after being ripped off in the early part of his career, he started demanding that he get paid up front, in cash. 5. Chuck Got the Audience Involved Most of his big hits made it super easy to make them "sing-alongs." All Chuck had to say was "Go!" and put his hand up to his ear and the audience would sing "Go Johny Go, Go.." 6. A Little Planning Up Front Saves Some Editing Time Later Post-1970 Chuck didn't tour with a band. He brought his guitar and whoever was promoting his concert was in charge of putting together a band. On a tonight show appearance, he said, "well everybody knows my music." This was true, but they all sounded the same. While they are not obvious, when you see Chuck perform with these acts, the intros are a little sloppy, and the endings were often train wrecks as the band didn't know that when Chuck kicks his leg up that meant stop. 7. Don't Break The Law Chuck had issues with the law about every 15-20 years. One involved him putting cameras in the women's bathroom. While he was never convicted of wrongdoing, he did settle out of court, and it cost him 1.2 million dollars. 8. Take Care of Your Team / Get Things in Writing One of the reasons Chuck insisted on being paid in cash is he had been swindled out of money by promoters and clubs in the past. One key player in Berry's band was Johnnie Johnson (his piano player). In November 2000, Johnson sued Berry, alleging he deserved co-composer credits (and royalties) for dozens of songs, including "No Particular Place to Go," "Sweet Little Sixteen," and "Roll Over Beethoven," which credit Berry alone. The case was dismissed in less than a year because too many years had passed since the songs in dispute were written. 9. Don't Spend all Your Money on Gear A recent report estimated Chuck's estate is worth 50 million. While some of this is from record royalties, Chuck invested in Real Estate. When you start making money with your podcast (if that is something you choose to do) spend some on your family, put some in the bank (and avoid the stress of worrying about money). 10. While You Can Give Them Something Similar, it Still Has to Be Good Did you know there was a sequel to Johnny B Good? Me neither. According to Wikipedia it never charted in any country. So in the same what that creating a song about Johnny B Good isn't going to equal chart success, creating a podcast with the phrase "On Fire" (or whatever is hot at the moment ) does not mean you will get chart success. Why People Remember Chuck Berry There is a famous quote by Maya Angelou, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Chuck Berry's music made people smile, it made them want to dance, and they lead to them having fun, and in some cases there was realin' and rockin'. Podhero Review What is Podheri.io? Podhero is described as a swiss army knife for podcasters with a goal of making podcast creation and promotion easier. Audio Processing The site describes it as "Automate the technical hurdles to make your vocals sound amazing." So I compared it to Auphonic.com as they both level out the volume, and remove noise (hiss and hum). If I were to judge the output, I would say it's very close (if not a tie). In looking at the wav forms, it appears auphonic might have an ever so slight edge, but keep in mind, my ears didn't' notice anything. The only true advantage (depending on your attitude) is Auphonic has more configuration options (so you can set loudness levels if you want to just level volume and not remove noise). But I was impressed with the audio processing. This opinion is based upon testing one file. Podcast To Video If can take your audio podcast and send it to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. It also gives you a basic tool to create a custom artwork. You can do this if you are using Libsyn and Spreaker. Blubrry does some distribution (but they only do the first few minutes of your show). The tool for creating an image is really basic and is better than nothing. When there are tools such as canva.com as a free option, I could see using Canva to create the image, and then use the "upload your own" option here to make your video. Is video worth it? My last episode from the School of Podcasting had 26 views, and I was surprised that the analytics show people were watching a majority. My advice would be to open this tool in a new window as the processing of audio to video is going to take some time. Currently, you can have the tool automatically post to YouTube (with plan of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium) Website Widget Review This tool will put a small pop-up on your website. You just copy and paste some code. For me, I find this tool "meh" because ratings in iTunes are great social proof, they don't help you advance up the charts (I thnk people put too much emphasis on them as a "must do"). My Podcast Reviews This tool brings you all of your reviews from all of the stores. This is a free tool. This does have a feature that I found interesting. It shows you your reviews across a period. I found that interesting. They attempt to show you (on a map) where the reviews come from, but besides getting the country correct, I wouldn't count it accurate from a geographic standpoint. iTunes Keyword Tracking This allows you to put in your (or your "Competition's") iTunes link and enter a keyword. So I can see where The Audacity to Podcast Ranks higher than my show, but I rank higher than the Podcast Report. That's interesting. There is no way to say "who is #1?" I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to with this information. Many moons ago I had a program called Webmaster Gold, and it would track your website and let you know where you ranked. This lead to people writing articles more for the Google Web crawler instead of the humans who were reading it. Also, when I was a teacher in the corporate world, I would do my best every day. Every day I got scored by my students. While I always feel there is room for improvement, I'm not sure there was anything I would change (in most cases) if someone gave me an average score. So for me, I see this as a set of interesting statistics, that people can obsess over, but in the end, may not lead to any value being delivered to your audience. Episode Media Kits If you do a lot of interviews, this could be your favorite feature. Here you upload promotional images, create messages to go to Twitter, Facebook Google+, and LinkedIn. You upload pictures, create your tweets, and copy and link and send that to your guest. They can send a message with a single click. For me, this is the most useful tool (again, if you're doing interviews, but don't limit your thinking, why not put the link in your post and give your audience access to promote your episode. Do You Need This? Much of this you can get for free for example: Canva.com - free image creation tool Podcast Rankings - have them emailed to you see Regan Star If you're using Libsyn, you can automatically have your show syndicated to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (with video, and you can add a custom image), iHeart Radio, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Blogger, and more. Podcast Reviews - You can get this feature free in Podhero, as well as My Podcast Reviews Audio Processing - You can get 2 hours free each month at auphonic. Things Unique To Podhero If you're not using Libsyn or Spreaker, it will create a video for you It shows you your podcast reviews over time. The podcast review widget. The podcast media kit. How Much Does it Cost? There is a free version that includes: Worldwide iTunes Review Tracking (2 podcasts) iTunes Keyword Tracker (1 keyword) Measures how visible your podcast is on iTunes for any search term over time. iTunes Review Website Widget (1 website) The paid version is $20/month Audio Enhancer Tool Social Video Creator Episode Media Kits Podcast to Youtube iTunes Keyword Researcher iTunes Keyword Tracker (15 keywords) Measures how visible your podcast is on iTunes for any search term over time. Worldwide iTunes Review Tracking (5 podcasts) When you get a new review on iTunes, from any country, you will be notified. New & NoteworthyAlerts iTunes Review Website Widget (unlimited) Mentioned In This Podcast What is the smallest amount you would take for advertising? (POLL) Chuck Berry on the Johnny Carson Show (YouTube Video) Podhero.io Libsyn.com (Liberated Syndication) Use the coupon code sopfree to get a free month Canva.com - free image creation tool Podcast Rankings - have them emailed to you see Regan Star Dave's Patreon Accounts see http://supportthisshow.com/ Start your podcast by joining the School of Podcasting go to www.schoolofpodcasting.com/start

Woodsongs 838: Michael Martin Murphey and The Kentucky Headhunters from WoodSongs

Woodsongs Vodcasts

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 11, 2016 80:33

MICHAEL MARTIN MURPHEY has left an indelible mark on the American Music. In the early 1970s, Rolling Stone Magazine called Michael Martin Murphey “one of the best songwriters in America.� Since that time, Murphey has left an indelible mark on the American Music Landscape crafting and recording such iconic hits as “Wildfire,� “Carolina In The Pines�, “Geronimo�s Cadillac�, “Cowboy Logic,� “Cherokee Fiddle�, “Boy From The Country� and more. In the process, he has topped the Pop, Country, Bluegrass and Western Music charts, earned six gold albums and multiple Grammy nominations. His latest release is 'High Stakes'. THE KENTUCKY HEADHUNTERS are known as “Southern Rock Royalty� and the “great American rock �n� roll band.� With a GRAMMY Award, CMA Album of the Year Award, two CMA Vocal Group of the Year Awards, two Top 10 charting albums, and four consecutive Top 40 hits, the “Heads� are credited for creating a unique blend of honky-tonk, blues, and southern rock that appeals to the toughest music critics and listeners of all kinds. Their newest album, 'Meet Me In Bluesland', is a collaboration between the band and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame pianist Johnnie Johnson. WoodSongs Kid: Jonathan Wilson Rader is a 10-year-old Elvis tribute artist from Wilmore, Kentucky. He is known as Little E and has released a tribute CDs to the King.

Jimmy Vivino interview part 1/ Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour 03-14-16

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 14, 2016 59:26

Jimmy Vivino is seen nightly heading up the Jimmy Vivino & The Basic Cable Band on Conan with his spectacular guitar playing. He's also one of the most respected musicians around and we begin part 1 of our chat with him talking about producing and playing on the latest from Dion, working with Johnnie Johnson, playing with Chet Atkins on Conan and lots more! We also hear from The Neanderthals (featuring Eddie Angel and covering David Bowie), new Jack Rabbit Slim, The Barley Hoppers, Nick Curran, Head Cat and Cousin Harley on this week's Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey The Neanderthals- "Space Oddity" Jack Rabbit Slim- "Next Time" Jimmy Vivino interview Johnnie Johnson- "I'm Mad" Segment 1 Chet Atkins- "I Still Write Your Name In The Snow" Dion- "I Wonder Why" (live New York City) Segment 2 Conan O'Brien & The Legally Prohibited Band- "Too Much Monkey Business" Segment 3 Dion- "All Rocked Up" Segment 4 Chuck Berry- "Almost Grown" Segment 5 Johnnie Johnson (w/ Jimmy Vivino on vocals)- "She Called Me Out Of My Name" The Barley Hoppers- "Doghouse Boogie" Nick Curran & The Nitelifes- "Player" Head Cat- "Love's Made A Fool Of You" Cousin Harley- "Dust Bowl Devil"

david bowie conan neanderthals chuck berry rockabilly chet atkins jimmy vivino nick curran johnnie johnson blues radio eddie angel

Roadhouse 573

The Roadhouse

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 20, 2016 57:08

Take a good breath before this edition of The Roadhouse - you'll need all the oxygen you can get. For the 11th anniversay edition of the show, I've got an hour of show-openers from the previous year. Mississippi Heat, Dave Alvin & Phil Alvin, Andy Santana & The West Coast Playboys, Kentucky Headhunters with Johnnie Johnson, and Bill Perry make for the most upbeat edition of the past 12 months. It's the 573rd Roadhouse and the 11th anniversary of the finest blues you've never heard.

road house kentucky headhunters johnnie johnson bill perry mississippi heat

Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour 08-17-15, new Annie Marie Lewis, more

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2015 60:32

Summer continues to heat up as we hear a hot new track from Annie Marie Lewis titled "Memphis Stroll" as part of Lanark Records' "52 Singles In 52 Weeks" campaign! We also get another new track from The BellFuries and rockers from Johnny Horton, Robert Gordon, The Sabres, Reverend Horton Heat, JD McPherson, Southern Culture On The Skids, Kentucky Headhunters with Johnnie Johnson, a new "Ask The Clowns" segment with Reach Around Rodeo Clowns and so much more on this week's Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour!! Intro Voice Over- Rob "Cool Daddy" Dempsey Ritchie Valens- "Cry, Cry, Cry" Reverend Horton Heat- "Rock The Joint" Jittery Jack- "Tell Your Story Walking" Furious- "Bad News" JD McPherson- "Dimes For Nickels" The Sabres- "Stink Bomb" Cash O'Riley & The Down Right Daddies- "I Love Rock 'N' Roll" Stray Cats- "I Fought The Law" Southern Culture On The Skids- "Mojo Box" Shawn Camp & Billy Burnette- "Big Hunk Of Love" Kim Lenz- "Pay Dearly" Annie Marie Lewis- "Memphis Stroll" Kentucky Headhunters with Johnnie Johnson- "Little Queenie" Big Mama Thornton- "I Smell A Rat" BellFuries- "Bad Seed Sown" Ask The Clowns Reach Around Rodeo Clowns- "I Got The Shakes" Robert Gordon- "Lonely Blue Boy" Johnny Horton- "One Woman Man" Little Richard- "Good Golly Miss Molly"

cry sabres rockabilly robert gordon reverend horton heat kentucky headhunters jd mcpherson johnny horton johnnie johnson blues radio southern culture on the skids bellfuries annie marie lewis

Rockabilly N Blues Radio Hour 6-29-15