Podcasts about You Never Can Tell

A bottle of red... a bottle of white... whatever kind of mood you're in, we're talking Billy Joel tonight!Pull up a table and join Kirk for a long look into one of Joel's most enduring songs, the seven-and-a-half minute, five course musical meal that is "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant." The centerpiece on Joel's breakthrough 1977 album The Stranger, Italian Restaurant has got it all: schmaltzy sax, hard rock rhythms, love, heartbreak, and a pair of harmonized clarinets. Written by: Billy JoelProduced by: Phil RamoneAlbum: The Stranger (1977)Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Amazon | SpotifyFEATURED/DISCUSSED:"Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)," "Just The Way You Are," "Vienna," "Only The Good Die Young," and "She's Always a Woman to Me" by Billy Joel from The Stranger, 1977Joel discussing Phil Ramone in The Complete Albums Collection documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm5-oQNENnM“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Freddie Mercury and Queen from A Night at the Opera, 1975“One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” by Ben Folds from Whatever and Ever Amen, 2005“You Never Can Tell” by Chuck Berry, 1964“Jack and Diane” by John Mellencamp from American Fool, 1982“Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen from Born to Run, 1975OUTRO SOLOIST: Steve PardoThis episode's outro soloist is the one and only Steve Pardo. Steve is a Nashville, TN based producer, composer, and saxophonist. You can find out more at his website: https://www.stevepardo.com/STRONG MERCHVisit the Strong Songs merch store for some cool t-shirts, mugs, totes, and more: store.strongsongspodcast.comKEEP IT SOCIALYou can follow Strong Songs on Twitter @StrongSongs: http://twitter.com/strongsongsAnd you can find Kirk on Twitter @Kirkhamilton and on Instagram at @Kirk_Hamilton: https://www.instagram.com/kirk_hamilton/NEWSLETTER/MAILING LISTSign up for Kirk's mailing list to start getting monthly-ish newsletters with music recommendations, links, news, and extra thoughts on new Strong Songs episodes: https://kirkhamilton.substack.com/subscribeSTRONG PLAYLISTSKirk has condensed his Strong Songs picks into a single new list, which you can find on Spotify and Apple Music, and YouTube Music.SUPPORT STRONG SONGS ON PATREON!Thanks to all of Strong Songs' Patrons! You're the reason I'm able to keep the show going strong and ad-free. If you want to join the Patreon, go here: https://Patreon.com/StrongSongsAUGUST 2021 WHOLE-NOTE PATRONS

Rob BosworthJosh PearsonKyle CookeDonald MackieMelissa OsborneChristopher MillerTim ByrnePatrick FunstonJamie WhiteChristopher KupskiChristopher McConnellJoshua JarvisNikoJoe LaskaLaurie AcremanKen HirshJezJenness GardnerSimon CammellGuinevere BoostromNarelle HornNathaniel BauernfeindBill RosingerAnne BrittDavid ZahmErinAidan CoughlanJeanneret Manning Family FourDoug PatonRobert PaulViki DunDave SharpeChrister LindqvistSami SamhuriAccessViolationRyan TorvikMerlin MannFraserGlennJim ChokeyAndre BremerMark SchechterDave FloreyDan ApczynskiAUGUST 2021 HALF-NOTE PATRONSAndy PainterKaren LiuGreg BurgessAilie FraserSimon PrietoBreck JonesPaul McGrealKaren ArnoldNATALIE MISTILISJosh SingerPhino DeLeonSchloss Edward J. MDRhyanon MurrayAmy Lynn ThornsenAdam WKelli BrockingtonStephen RawlingsBen MachtaVictoria YuKevin RiversGray DyerBrad ClarkChristopherMichael J. CunninghamKari KirkMark Boggsmino caposselaSteve PaquinMary SchoenmakerSarahDavid JoskeEmma SklarBernard KhooMarcRobert HeuerMatthew GoldenBrian MeldrumDavid NoahGeraldine ButlerRichard CambierMadeleine MaderFernando RodriguezTimothy DoughertyJason PrattStewart OakCaroline MillerAbbie BergSam NortonNicole SchleicherDoug BelewDermot CrowleyAchint SrivastavaRyan RairighMichael Bermanstephen matthewsBridget LyonsOlivia BishopJohn GisselquistElaine MartinKourothSharon TreeBelinda Mcgrath-steerEoin de BurcaKevin PotterM Shane BordersPete SimmShawn McCarthyDallas HockleyJana JJason GerryRich RoskopfMelissa GalloNathan GouwensWill Dwyer Alethea LeeLauren ReayEric PrestemonCookies250Spencer ShirleyDamian BradyAngela LivingstoneJeffrey C. YarnellDavid FriedmanPhillip DaltonSarah SulanDiane HughesKenneth TiongJo SutherlandMichael CasnerMichael YorkBarb CourtneyDerek BenderJen SmallDon HutchisonLowell MeyerEtele IllesStephen TsoneffLorenz SchwarzBecca SampleWenJack SjogrenBenedict PenningtonGeoff GoldenRobyn FraserAlexander GeddesPascal RuegerRandy SouzaJCBrendan JubbClare HolbertonDiane TurnerTom ColemanMark PerryDhu WikMelEric HelmJake RobertsBriony LeoBill FullerJonathan DanielsMichael FlahertyJarrod SchindlerZoe LittleCaro Fieldmichael bochnerDuncanDavid CushmanAlexanderJeremy DawsonChris KGavin DoigSam FennTanner MortonAJ SchusterJennifer BushDavid StroudAmanda FurlottiAndrew BakerJuan Carlos Montemayor ElosuaMatt GaskellJules BaileyEero WahlstedtBill ThorntonBrian AmoebasBrett DouvilleJeffrey OlsonMatt BetzelMuellerNate from KalamazooMelanie StiversRichard TollerAlexander PolsonEarl LozadaJon O'KeefeJustin McElroyArjun SharmaJames JohnsonAndrew LeeKevin MorrellKevin PennyfeatherNicholas SchechterEmily Williams

Este pasado miércoles Robert Clark Seger cumplía 75 años y hoy queremos rescatar algunas de esas canciones que no suelen programarse cuando se habla de él., aunque hemos elegido "Rock and Roll Never Forgets" para abrir nuestro programa ya que es casi una frase de manual para entender las razones por las que, a veces, miramos por el retrovisor y volvemos a nuestros principios y nuestras raíces. Bob Seger, que esta semana ha cumplido 75 años, lo cantó de esta forma cuando tenía 31 y la incluyó en su noveno álbum de estudio, Night Moves, en 1976. Aquel disco fue su despegue definitivo. Había empezado muy joven, formando su primera banda, los Decibels, pasó por otras muchas y con 22 años firmó con el Bob Seger System con Capitol Records. Hizo algunas cosas en solitario y creó la Silver Bullet Band con una potencia en directo pocas veces vista. “Rock And Roll Never Forgets” fue una forma de agradecer a sus seguidores la fidelidad en sus comienzos y se convirtió en una canción para que la gente de mediana edad recuerde su juventud. Al final de aquel tema mítico había una referencia muy clara a un pionero como Chuck Berry… porque el rock and roll nunca se olvida. Chuck Berry compuso "You Never Can Tell", un tema de rock and roll que ha pasado a la historia como "C'est La Vie" o incluso "Teenage Wedding". Cuando la escribió, estaba ingresado en la prisión federal por haber violado la llamada Ley Mann que hacía referencia al comercio o transporte de mujeres, en muchos casos inmigrantes, para prostituirse. "C'est La Vie" pasó a formar parte de su álbum St. Louis to Liverpool de 1964, aunque su inclusión en la película de Quentin Tarantino Pulp Fiction le dio una enorme relevancia tres décadas más tarde. Precisamente fue en aquel 1994 cuando Bob Seger publicó esta versión, inédita hasta entonces, en su álbum Greatest Hits, que llegó a vender casi 10 millones de discos en aquella temporada. Join The Band fue una idea nacida en 2004, poco después de que Billy Payne, socio fundador de Little Feat, hubiera tocado en el álbum de Jimmy Buffett License To Chill. Este último sugirió convocar a la banda en los estudios Shrimp Boat Sound y poner en marcha un proyecto que contó con la producción de propio Payne junto a Mac McAnally y Alan Schulman, viendo la luz en 2008. Bob Seger fue uno de los grandes veteranos en incorporarse a ese proyecto y dejó clara su vigencia con una versión muy sólida a un tema firmado por Jeffrey Steele y que titulaba su álbum de 2001, “Something In The Water”, con todas las esencias que este legendario country-rocker puede mostrar. Bob Seger llegó a comentar que Ride Out, publicado hace seis años, podría ser su último álbum. Era la 17ª entrega de los trabajos en estudio del veterano artista de Michigan y casi podemos considerarlo así, ya que I Knew You When de 2017, es prácticamente una recopilación de grabaciones inéditas repartidas por distintos años. “The Devil’s Right Hand” es uno de los temas que formaron parte del álbum Copperhead Road de Steve Earle, aunque para Ride Out Bob Seger se recreó en la versión que realizó Waylon Jennings para la escena final de la película Betrayed que protagonizaron Tom Berenger y Debra Winger aquel mismo 1988, y que en España vimos bajo el título de El sendero de la traición. De hecho, el artista de Michigan descubrió que Steve Earle era su compositor cuando lo vio en los créditos de la cinta mientras la visionaba en su hogar poco antes de seleccionarla para ese registro. En 1972, Bob Seger grabó Smokin' O.P.'s, un trabajo cuya portada recordaba un paquete de cigarrillos Lucky Strike y donde versiona algunos clásicos de Bo Diddley, Stephen Stills y Tim Hardin. Este último había llegado a mediados de los 60 a Nueva York desde Eugene y vio como sus primeros intentos discográficos fracasaban. Pero la escena del Greenwich Village le acogió como el fino compositor que era. Aunque murió poco después de cumplir los 39 años, Tim Hardin dejó para la historia de la música popular canciones cargadas de encanto como "If I Were A Carpenter", de la que hizo una excelente versión Bobby Darin en el 66 y nuestro protagonista de hoy, Bob Seger, seis años más tarde. En 2011 Bob Seger, el veterano artista de Dearborn, en Michigan, al que hoy estamos felicitando por sus tres cuartos de siglo, protagonizaba un esperado regreso con una extensa gira de conciertos. Aprovechando esa reaparición, se publicó un single suyo versionando una de las obras maestras de Tom Waits, "Downtown Train", que el cantautor californiano incluyó en aquel soberbio Rain Dogs de 85. No era una grabación reciente, sino la que el artista junto a la Silver Bullet Band realizó en 1989 y supimos que no se publicó en su momento debido a que Rod Stewart había editado la suya antes con un gran éxito. “Shame On The Moon” fue compuesta por Rodney Crowell la había compuesto e incluido originalmente en su tercer álbum, de título homónimo, editado en el 81, para cerrar la primera cara de un LP en el que, bajo un formato campero, se mostraba atraído por todos los estilos e influencias. Bob Seger se dejó seducir por ella para que apareciera en el álbum The Distance de un año más tarde, lanzándola en single y alcanzando el segundo lugar de las listas. Fue la misma temporada en que la versionó el tejano Mac Davis y un año antes de que la grabara también Tanya Tucker. A lo largo del programa de hoy hemos querido rescatar canciones de Bob Seger que no suelen programarse habitualmente cuando se habla de él. Cuando se publicó la banda sonora de la película Hope Floats, la grabación original publicada en Estados Unidos contenía un tema más, precisamente este curioso dúo, casi impensable con Martina McBride. Todos aquellos que compraron en 1998 la edición europea de la banda sonora de aquella cinta protagonizada por Sandra Bullock y Harry Connick, Jr., no pudieron escuchar este “Chances Are”. En el mes de Junio de aquel año, el álbum Hope Floats entraba directamente en el puesto No. 7 de la lista de country, siendo la banda sonora que, por entonces, debutaba en una posición más alta en la historia de la entonces llamada Top Country Albums. Poco antes de terminar 2016, Bob Seger se acercaba a un estudio de Nashville para grabar una canción que él mismo había compuesto sobre su gran amigo Glenn Frey, desaparecido a comienzos de aquel mismo año. Es un tema sin estribillo, lleno de cariño, en en que describe de forma muy personal su primer encuentro, allá por 1966. Fue la primera noticia que tuvimos sobre su último álbum, I Knew You When, que aparecería a finales de 2017. Esta “Glenn Song” fue una de las tres incluidas en la edición de lujo del trabajo, junto a "Forward into the Past" y "Blue Ridge". En realidad, aquel registro era una recuperación de temas grabados años atrás y en diferentes épocas por el veterano artista. I Knew You When se ha convertido en el décimo octavo y último álbum del veterano Bob Seger. Un disco grabado entre Nashville y Detroit y producido por el propio artista, en el que las composiciones del artista fueron escritas y grabadas años e incluso décadas atrás, pero que habían permanecido inéditas hasta entonces. La mortalidad era el tema central de un registro que en su conjunto fue dedicado al miembro de los Eagles fallecido a comienzos de 2016 y que se hace muy presente en “I Knew You When”, la canción que lo dio título. De las canciones incluidas en el álbum Stranger In Town, tan solo hubo cuatro grabadas por Bob Seger con la Silver Bullet Band. Las otras, las grabó en Alabama con los músicos del Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. Una de aquellas cuatro era “Still The Same”, en la que hablaba de ese compuesto de personas de supuesta clase A que tienen demasiado, y que el situaba particularmente en Hollywood, donde vivió durante unos meses mientras grababa aquel álbum. No hay muchos con ese carisma en su natal Michigan. Y ese carisma, además, tiene dos caras. Es un regalo y una maldición. Así lo reflejó Bob Seger a través de un jugador muy hábil que siempre parece estar un paso por delante. Muchos recordamos una canción como "Old Time Rock And Roll" asociada a un baile en el que un juvenil Tom Cruise se deslizaba sobre un suelo de madera. La película era Risky Business, que dirigió Paul Brickman en 1983. Aquellos saltos sobre el sofá y esa guitarra inventada se han convertido en una de las escenas de bailes más memorables de la historia. El pasado miércoles cumplió 75 años, su compositor e intérprete. Es uno de los más aguerridos músicos de todos los tiempos. Es Bob Seger, el veterano artista de Dearborn, en Michigan, que ha firmado algunas de las páginas más poderosas del rock americano y al que hoy hemos querido felicitar en el tiempo de TOMA UNO. Escuchar audio

The second of two episodes paying tribute to John Prine. In this one, we look at the covers John recorded, diving into You Never Can Tell, originally by Chuck Berry, Lulu Walls, originally by The Carter Family, and Cold Cold Heart, originally by Hank Williams. Outro music is Burn One With John Prine by Kacey Musgraves.

In this episode I present some songs from some of my favourite motion picture soundtracks. Here is the list of the songs and artists in order, as well as the films they can be heard in. Click on the track title/film title to be linked to the songs and trailers on Youtube.Intro Song - "The Sensual Woman" by The Herbaliser    From the motion picture "Snatch" (2000) directed by Guy Ritchie 1. "Unchained Melody" by The Righteous Brothers    "You Can't Hurry Love" by The Supremes     From the motion picture "Bad Times at the El Royale" (2018) directed by Drew Goddard2. "Little Green Bag" by George Baker Selection    "I Gotcha" by Joe Tex & The Vibrators    From the motion picture "Reservoir Dogs" (1992) directed by Quentin Tarantino 3. "Hot Pants... I'm Coming, I'm Coming" by Bobby Byrd    "Ghost Town" by The Specials    From the motion picture "Snatch" (2000) directed by Guy Ritchie 4. "Red Rubicon" by Cloudboy    "You're Dead" by Norma Tanega    From the motion picture "What We Do in the Shadows" (2014) directed by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement5. "The Man in Me" by Bob Dylan    "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)" by Kenny Rogers and The First Edition    From the motion picture "The Big Lebowski" (1998) directed by Joel and Ethan Coen6. "You Never Can Tell" by Chuck Berry    "Rumble" by Link Wray    From the motion picture "Pulp Fiction" (1994) directed by Quentin Tarantino Also mentioned: "Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World" directed by Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana    

  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.

  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.

  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.

Playlist: Paul Gabriel, I Feel Good, Jaqui Brown, Brought The House Down, Sean Poluk, Never Going To Lose, Ramon Taranco, Take Her Dancing, Rae Gordon Band, Got To Have You, Angel Forrest, Grace, Popa Chubby, Let Love Free The Day, Jay Gordon & Blues Venom, Lucky 13, 11 Guys Quartet, Road Trippin’, Bywater Call, Arizona, Jack Mack And The Heart Attack, Livin’ It Up, Paul Edelman & Jangling Sparrows, Joshua Chamberlain, Jim Roberts And The Resonants, Skeeters, Sugar Blue, Downhill, Black Cat Bones, Lowdown, Tom Baker, Cancel It, Davina and The Vagabonds, Little Miss Moonshine, Matty T. Wall, I’m Tore Down, Diane Blue, That’s A Pretty Good Love, Christina Crofts, Voodoo Queen, Lizanne Knott, Emmylou, Murali Coryell, All I Ever Needed, Dave Specter, Asking For A Friend, Mike Zito feat. Robben Ford, You Never Can Tell, Breezy Rodio, Pick Up Blues, Johnny Burgin, California Blues, Screamin’ John & TD Lind, Shame, Shame, Shame, Joanna Connor, Blues Tonight, Joey Batts & Them, 860, Mojomatics, Soy Baby Many Thanks To: We here at the Black-Eyed & Blues Show would like to thank all the PR and radio people that get us music including Frank Roszak, Rick Lusher ,Doug Deutsch Publicity Services,American Showplace Music, Alive Natural Sounds, Ruf Records, Vizztone Records,Blind Pig Records,Delta Groove Records, Electro-Groove Records,Betsie Brown, Blind Raccoon Records, BratGirl Media, Mark Pucci Media, Mark Platt @RadioCandy.com and all of the Blues Societies both in the U.S. and abroad. All of you help make this show as good as it is weekly. We are proud to play your artists.Thank you all very much! Blues In The Area: AND VENUE LOCATION THURSDAY 12/12 HIP HOP FOR THE HOMELESS BLACK EYED SALLY'S HARTFORD ROCKY LAWRENCE THE CRAVE (6:30 PM ) ANSONIA WENDY MAY OPEN MIC THE BLACK DUCK CAFÉ WESTPORT JIMI PHOTON JAM HUNGRY TIGER MANCHESTER KEN SAFETY OPEN MIC CJ SPARROWS CHESHIRE MIKE ZITO (Tribute to Chuck Berry) DARYL'S HOUSE PAWLING NY ANTHONY GERACI/JIMMY CARPENTER DARYL'S HOUSE PAWLING NY RYAN HARTT & BLUES HEARTS PHOENIX DINING & ENTERTAINING PAWCATUCK BALKUN BROTHERS THE PICKLE BARREL KILLINGTON VT LIA MARIE & JOHN JUXO PERKS AND CORKS WESTERLY RI PROFESSOR HARP START LINE BREWING CO (7 TO 10 PM ) HOPKINTIN MA ERAN TROY DANNER GOLF CLUB WATERTOWN MIKE AND CARL OPEN MIC ARCH STREET TAVERN HARTFORD ALL STAR JAM NIGHT SHAMROCK PUB WATERBURY OPEN MIC SHEA'S RESTAURANT MANCHESTER THE DEAD DAWGZ (Dead Tribute) HOG RIVER BREWERY HARTFORD OPEN MIC MOONLIGHT CAFÉ (6 PM ) BREWSTER NY ERAN TROY DANNER GOLF CLUB WATERTOWN LONNIE GASPERINI CHICKEN SHACK AT CARTER HILL FARM MARLBOROUGH OPEN MIC FAST EDDIE'S BILLARDS NEW MILFORD GREG SHERROD OPEN MIC THE BLACK SHEEP NIANTIC OPEN MIC PINE LOFT BERLIN OPEN MIC BONGO RON'S CIGAR & LOUNGE OLD SAYBROOK FRIDAY 12/13 PAULGABRIELwLIVIU, WALLY & LONNIE THEODORE'S SPRINGFIELD MA POPA CHUBBY CHAN'S WOONSOCKET RI THE COFFEE GRINDERS CAMBRIDGE BREW PUB GRANBY JOHNNY & EAST COAST ROCKERS STEAK LOFT MYSTIC THE BALKUN BROTHERS BISHOPS LOUNGE NORTHAMPTON MA VITO PETROCCITTO & LITTLE ROCK FALCON UNDERGROUND MARLBORO NY GENE DONALDSON & STINGRAYS BIDWELL TAVERN COVENTRY 8 TO THE BAR MADISON BEACH HOTEL (6 TO 10 PM ) MADISON KATHY THOMPSON BAND BEACHCOMBER CAFÉ MILFORD COTTON GIN & SWAMP YANKEES WALRUS + CARPENTER BLACK ROCK WATKINS GLEN HUNGRY TIGER MANCHESTER ALBINO TREE (Christmas Show) MAPLE TREE CAFÉ SIMSBURY THE KINGS SOUTHWICK INN SOUTHWICK MA ERAN TROY DANNER ELECT TRIO COALHOUSE PIZZA STAMFORD THE CARTELLS LA VITA EAST HADDAM CARRIE JOHNSON CROWN AND HAMMER COLLINSVILLE MYSTIC DEAD / WOOLY MAMMOUTH KNICKERBOCKER MUSIC CENTER WESTERLY RI MATT HELM EXPERIENCE THE ACOUSTIC BRIDGEPORT THE 5 O'CLOCKS GREY GOOSE SOUTHPORT SHAWN TAYLOR REDDING ROADHOUSE REDDING CENTER LINE WINCHESTER CAFÉ PORTLAND RICH BADOWSKI BLUES BAND BRASS HORSE BARKHAMSTED B-SIDE MULLIGAN'S TORRINGTON MURRAY THE WHEEL MAG'S SEYMOUR ADAM FALCON TOWN CRIER CAFÉ (Saloon Stage) BEACON NY TWO SHOTS OF BLUE MOHANSIC GRILL & LOUNGE YORKTOWN HEIGHTS SONIA PLUMB FAIRIES (The Busted Nut) BLACK EYED SALLY'S HARTFORD SATURDAY 12/14 MIKE ZITO with A GERACI,J CARPENTER NARROW ARTS CENTER FALL RIVER MA SIX PACK OF BLUES RIC'S PLACE STAFFORD SPRINGS RICH BADOWSKI BLUES BAND CAMBRIDGE BREW HOUSE GRANBY PROFESSOR HARP BRACK'S GRILLE & TAP BROCKTON MA COLD SHOT SOUTHWICK INN SOUTHWICK MA BLACK CAT ZYDECO/OTIS & HURRICANES MACTIVITY (7:30 PM ) EAST HAVEN TIM McDONALD & GHOSTONES MAPLE TREE CAFÉ SIMSBURY GHOST TOWN BLUES CADY'S TAVERN CHEPACHET RI WONDERING ROOTS BILL'S SEAFOOD (7:30 PM ) WESTBROOK THROUGH THE DOORS CHAN'S WOONSOCKET RI ERIN MICHELE & COLORFUL CHAOS HUNGRY TIGER MANCHESTER THE SIDEWINDERS DADDY JACKS NEW LONDON GEORGE T GREGORY QUARTET FLYING MONKEY (7 TO 10 PM ) NEWINGTON DAN WATSON ROCKS 21 MYSTIC HOWIE AND THE SOUL POTATOES HOOK, LINE, AND SINKER (7:30 PM ) SHELTON THE CARLEANS (Christmas Show) STRANGE BREW PUB NORWICH MUSICIANS SHOWCASE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH (6 TO 8 PM ) ESSEX JASON CARDINAL KNICKERBOCKER MUSIC CENTER WESTERLY RI B SIDE SAILS ROWAYTON SHUFFLEBONE BILL'S CROSSROADS CAFÉ FAIRFIELD ORB MELLON HOUSATONIC RIVER BREWERY NEW MILFORD TERRI AND ROB DUO HIGHER GROUND (11 AM ) EAST HADDAM MICHAEL CLEARY BAND SCOTCH PLAINS TAVERN ESSEX TSC ACOUSTIC URBAN LODGE BREWING CO MANCHESTER MURRAY THE WHEEL THE OFFICE OXFORD SCREAMIN EAGLE BAND PR'S BAR & GRILL THOMASTON ERAN TROY DANNER (Solo ) THE ROCK GARDEN WATERTOWN CHRIS STOVAL BROWN STOMPING GROUND (1 PM ) PUTNAM CLASSIC STONES TARRYTOWN MUSIC HALL TARRYTOWN NY FRONT ROW BAND JAM MALONEY'S PUBLIC HOUSE (4 PM ) MERIDEN SONIA PLUMB FAIRIES (The Busted Nut ) BLACK EYED SALLY'S HARTFORD SUNDAY 12/15 MIKE ZITO with ANTHONY GERACI FTC (Stage One ) FAIRFIELD CHRISTINE OHLMAN & REBEL MONTEZ CAFÉ NINE (4 PM ) NEW HAVEN GEORGE LESIW JAM CAFÉ NINE (8:30 PM ) NEW LONDON THE COFFEE GRINDERS LITTLE RED BARN BREWERY WINSTED WILLIE J LAWS STOMPING GROUND (1 PM ) PUTNAM MIGHTY SOUL DRIVERS BRASS HORSE (3 TO 7 PM ) BARKHAMSTED BIG JOE FITZ BRUNCH THE FALCON ( 11 TO 2 PM ) MARLBORO JOHNNY & THE EAST COAST ROCKERS DONAHUE'S BEACH BAR (4:30-4:30 ) MADISON CHRIS ALONE MAPLE TREE CAFÉ (5 PM ) SIMSBURY SUNDAY BLUES FLYING MONKEY (4 TO 7 PM ) NEWINGTON THE CARTELLS MUNICIPAL AUDITORIUM GROTON ERAN TROY DANNER (Solo ) BRASS WORKS BREWERY (1:30 - 4:30 ) WATERBURY OPEN MIC STOMPING GROUND (7 PM ) PUTNAM ACOUSTIC JAM (Cornbread Jam ) DARYL'S HOUSE PAWLING NY AMERICANA (Wallach, Sinetti, Friends) MAIN PUB MANCHESTER BLUES JAM THE HILLS AT CLUB ONE (6 TO 9 PM) FEEDING HILLS WHAMMER JAMMER OPEN MIC VFW PRESTON ROBIN AND FRIENDS NARRAGANSETT CAFÉ JAMESTOWN RI BLUES JAM STONEHOUSE BALTIC RICK HARRINGTON JAM CADY'S TAVERN CHEPACHET RI BLUES ROUND UP AMERICAN POLISH CLUB (4 PM ) JEWITT CITY BLUES JAM GREENDALE'S PUB WORCESTER MA SUNDAY BLUES BOUNDARY BREWHOUSE PAWTUCKET RI ELECTRIC BLUES SULLY'S PUB HARTFORD REDLINERS JAM JUNE'S OUTBACK PUB (4 PM ) KILLINGWORTH MONDAY 12/16 GREG PICCOLO STEAK LOFT (8 PM ) MYSTIC GEOFF WILLARD OPEN MIC HUNGRY TIGER MANCHESTER STEVE DUHAMEL OPEN MIC STRANGE BREW PUB NORWICH TERRI AND ROB DUO BUTTONWOOD TREE MIDDLETOWN OPEN MIC NOTE KITCHEN BETHEL TON CRIVELLONE BLUES JAM THE ACOUSTIC BRIDGEPORT BLUES JAM STRANGE BREW PUB NORWICH OPEN MIC JUNE'S OUTBACK PUB KILLINGWORTH BLUES JAM THE BAYOU MOUNT VERNON NY TUESDAY 12/17 RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS NIGHTINGALES (Pickin Party 6 pm ) OLD LYME DAVE SADLOSKI HUNGRY TIGER MANCHESTER GERRY MOSS THEODORE'S SPRINGFIELD MA MICHAEL PALIN'S OTHER ORCHESTRA BLACK EYED SALLY'S HARTFORD OPEN MIC CROWN AND HAMMER COLLINSVILLE HAPPY HOUR MARRIOTT FARMINGTON WEDNESDAY 12/18 RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS STEAK LOFT MYSTIC THE CARTELLS KNICKERBOCKER MUSIC CENTER WESTERLY RI ERAN TROY DANNER (Solo ) THE MARKET PLACE (6:30 TO 9:30 PM ) LITCHFIELD FRIENDS DAY OPEN MIC THEODORE'S SPRINGFIELD MA COMMUNITY JAM f GENE DONALDSON BLACK EYED SALLY'S HARTFORD LONNIE GASPERINI B-3 JAM DADDY JACKS NEW LONDON SANDY CONNOLLY OPEN MIC COUNTRY TAVERN CAFÉ GUILFORD CODA BLUE BEST VIDEO HAMDEN JUKE JOINT WEDNESDAY PEACHES SOUTHERN PUB NORWALK LAMB JAM SEAGRAPE CAFÉ FAIRFIELD WACKY BLUES JAM GREENDALE'S PUB WORCESTER MA FREE FUNK WEDNESDAY ARCH STREET TAVERN HARTFORD PETEY HOP ROOTS AND BLUES SESSIONS FALCON UBDERGROUND MARLBORO NY OPEN MIC DONAHUE'S BEACH BAR MADISON OPEN MIC MAPLE TREE CAFÉ SIMSBURY MURRAY THE WHEEL (Solo) TOOTZY PIZZA WILTON VRBE (Christmas Party ) PUB ON PARK CRANSTON RI OPEN MIC YANTIC INN YANTIC OPEN MIC TOBACCO SHED WINDSOR https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id502316055

Nous avons demandé à Larry de nous composer une playlist à partir de ses chanteurs préférés, merci à lui. « The Most Beautiful Girl » et « Big Boss Man » (version 1968) par Charlie Rich, « I Believe In You » et « Some Broken Hearts Never Mend » par Don Williams, la version originale de « That's How I Got To Memphis » par Tom T. Hall, « You Never Can Tell » chanté par Emmylou Harris, « Lonesome Me » par Don Gibson, « Too Gone, Too Long » et « Honky Tonk Moon » par Randy Travis, « Blue Nun Café » et « Romping Stomping Blues » par les Judds, « Traveling Man » et « It's So Easy to Be Free » par Rick Nelson, « Are You Lonesome Tonight ? », « Long Lonely Highway », « Trying To Get To You », « Suspicious Minds » par Elvis.

Professional storyboarder, artist, and dipshit Charlie (@colorpulp) hops on the pod with us as Chance has a three-day drinking, drug, and sex binge that ends with a totally real heroin overdose that totally happened for real, you guys. As Chance subjects us to what is probably his fakest chapter yet, and horrible recollections of his new friends' even more horrible freestyles, we too subject our guest Charlie to the Moore Variation of the Cube Routine. Charlie's original swag shop: https://www.snot.zone/ Charlie on Twitter: https://twitter.com/colorpulp Intro Music: "Drill Time" by Slim Jesus: https://soundcloud.com/imslimjesus/drill-time Outro Music: "You Never Can Tell" by Chuck Berry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoDPPgWbfXY Fucqboi Book Club on Twitter: twitter.com/FucqboiBookClub Fucqboi Book Club on Youtube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCoUoqOn7ODGDt0u4KgOMlDw Cover art by Rachel: twitter.com/angrymaxfuryst

Ally's got those entitled Thanksgiving blues! She's also getting stuck in bowling balls, and dodging homophobic blind dates. UGHHHH. Meanwhile, John is struggling to act on his feelings towards Nelle, and Billy takes it upon himself to get involved and get hold of the wrong end of everything. But its ok, because Nelle suffers no fools. This episode, we're discussing s2e9: You Never Can Tell. ***  Find Bygones: On TWITTER! @bygonespodcast On FACEBOOK! Search Bygones Podcast On INSTA! @bygonespod  On EMAIL! bygonespodcast@gmail.com   ***  

Author, journalist and broadcaster David Hepworth joins us today to discuss his new book – A Fabulous Creation – charting the history of the LP from Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to Thriller. A former editor of Smash Hits, and presenter of The Old Grey Whistle Test, he was also front of camera on the BBC for Live Aid and shares his memories of that day of days 34 years ago. Oh, and we also learn why Chuck Berry's ‘You Never Can Tell' is probably the greatest single ever made. Links Buy David's new book here: https://tinyurl.com/y3kdhs4k A Pint With Seaniebee Please subscribe to support the podcast: www.patreon.com/seaniebee Audible Feast list of Best Podcast Series of 2016 & 2017: https://tinyurl.com/ya5yj9vs 50 Best Podcast Episodes list 2016 &2017: https://tinyurl.com/y7ryajat Release date: June 10th 2019 Runtime: 30m Recorded: London

Caoimhe can now be seen on screen in RTÉ’s Fair City. Caoimhe most recently appeared in the feature film The Randomer written by Gerry Stembridge, which premiered in the Galway Film Fleadh in 2016. Onstage she recently appeared in The Constant Wife, in the Gate Theatre, directed by Alan Stanford. Recent theatre credits include Lisa in the highly successful Unmanageable Sisters at the Abbey Theatre, as well as Gloria in You Never Can Tell, at the Abbey Theatre, directed by Conall Morrison, and Mary Boyle in Juno and the Paycock, directed by Mark O’Rowe at the Gate Theatre. She recently completed filming on Soulsmith, a feature film, written and directed by Kevin Henry and The Wave, written and directed by TJ O’Grady Peyton and Oscar Winning director Benjamin Cleary. Caoimhe is from Dublin and graduated from the Gaiety School of Acting Full Time Acting Course in June 2011, and was awarded the Gaiety School Theatre Bursary in 2010. While at the Gaiety School she appeared in Macbeth and Twelfth Night directed by Liam Halligan and in Little Gem directed by Paul Brennan. On screen she has appeared in the role of Elizabeth in Reign a CW Network produced TV Series directed by Brad Silberling, in the award winning short film Whatever Turns You On (TimeSnap Production) and in Rent A Friend (Kite Entertainment) as part of RTE’s Storyland competition. Caoimhe appeared as Baba in two productions of The Country Girls, written and adapted for the stage by Enda O’Brien, and directed by Mikel Murfi for Red Kettle Theatre Company in the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, in Garter Lane Theatre and on tour. Other theatre work include Major Barbara, directed by Annabelle Comyn at the Abbey Theatre, and The Far Off Hills directed by Mikel Murfi for NOMAD productions at the Hawkswell Theatre, Sligo and on national tour. Caoimhe also appeared as Honor in Paul Howard’s hit play Breaking Dad directed by Jimmy Fay (Landmark productions) at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. In early 2015, she reprised her role as Honor, in the sell-out remount of Breaking Dad in the Gaiety Theatre Dublin and in Cork Opera House. Caoimhe appeared as Vera in Brien Friel’s version of A Month In The Country, directed by Ethan McSweeny, at The Gate Theatre.

A cantora e compositora Elise LeGrow presta uma homenagem aos inovadores dos antigos soul e rock com interpretações pessoais, em sua forma mais simples, de seus sucessos. Ouça como ela e sua banda apresentam duas dessas interpretações comoventes: "You Never Can Tell", de Chuck Berry, e "Over the Mountain, Across the Sea", que se tornou popular com o dueto Johnnie & Joe.

In this episode of the Chasing the Chords podcast, Brian Jump and Jonny Southern discuss the complicated dealings and elaborate interactions that occur when writing, rehearsing, and performing with other people. Famous band dynamics, like that of The Beatles, The Band, and Metallica, are covered for scope and context. Also included in this episode is a performance of the Chuck Berry song called "You Never Can Tell."

Recorded May 10th, 2017 Dan and Seamus sit down with Mike Makowski to discuss the Mental Health resources available to Penn State Students, both with personal anecdotes and general statistics. The three talk about the funding of the CAPS program and the stigma associated with mental health on a college campus. Intro Song Credit: "You Never Can Tell" - made famous by Chuck Berry, performed by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (1964) performed 2013

Recorded May 9th, 2017 Dan and Seamus sit down to look at Congressional elections and international elections after the Trump victory in November to gain a sense of voters attitudes. Intro Song Credit: "You Never Can Tell" - made famous by Chuck Berry and performed by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (1964), Performed in 2013

Con l’arrivo della primavera portiamo un po’ d’allegria in studio, parlando dei musical più famosi: cantate con noi! Vince la classifica della settimana “You Never Can Tell” di Chuk Berry! Facebook: Otherside – Radio Statale Twitter: @OthersideRadioS Instagram: otherside_radiostatale

September 24, 2016 - I first met Simon Templeman at an L.A. Theatre Works production of George Bernard Shaw's play You Never Can Tell. He charmed me then, and even more now in the current L.A. Theater Works production of Amadeus. He gave me an excellent interview after a performance of the show.

Efter fire år og 99 podcasts tænkte vi, at det var på tide at lave et podcast, der taler til alle ægte filmnørder. Da vi fandt ud af, at vi var endda meget filmnørdede og måske endda lidt ekstra gnavne nu 100 podcasts ældre, så blev vi enige om at lave to jubilæumspodcasts. Det første podcast er et all star podcast, hvor vi går all in på "ananas i egen juice", som de betegner det i "Natholdet". Vi har samlet stjernerne fra tidligere sæsoner og har krævet omdans med Gert og Maria. Gert ville gerne danse tango med Maria, men hun var mest til at danse Travolta/Thurman-style til "You Never Can Tell". Her går vi tilbage til rødderne og ser, hvad der egentlig skete dengang i 2011. Kunne det have været undgået? Var der nogen tegn på himlen, der kunne have givet hints om den forestående begivenhed? Og ikke mindst: hvem var manden, der sad og trak i trådene som en anden Hannibal Smith og samlede et elite-hold af filmnørder, der er blevet smidt ind i alskens krigssituationer (som f.eks. "Ghost" og "Battlefield Earth") siden dengang. Vi afslører alle vores pinlige hemmeligheder og ikke mindst: hvad er bedst? "Wild Wild West" med Will Smith eller Morten Korch-film fra 50erne/60erne? Så spænd sikkerhedsselerne: it's going to be a nerdy ride. God fornøjelse.

This week on the Talk Theatre In Chicago podcast Tom Williams talks with Nick Sandys -- the artistic director at Remy Bumppos think theatre. Nick talks about their new show You Never Can Tell as well as Remy Bumppo and the mission of the theatre company.