Chuck Berry was never my
favorite musician growing up. As I’ve written before, the first musical artist
I really loved was the Beatles. As I’ve also written before, the first musical
artist I really loved was actually the Monkees, but I’m a revisionist when it
comes to this aspect of my history. But Berry’s music was always around: in my parents' music collection. Or Michael J. Fox’s homage to
Berry in Back to the Future. Or listening to oldies stations, back when “oldies”
meant late 1950s and 1960s – including generous portions of early rock ‘n’
roll. It is fair to say that I grew up on Chuck Berry.
In reality, only a handful
of Berry songs were regularly played on oldies stations (“Rock and Roll Music,”
“Maybellene,” “Nadine” and “No Particular Place to Go”, “School Days,” “Sweet
Little Sixteen,” and of course “Johnny B. Goode”). Instead, I learned much of his
output through the Beatles. The Beatles officially released covers of only two
Berry songs during their time together: “Rock and Roll Music and “Roll Over
Beethoven.” But they had many other songs of his in their repertoire. They recorded
several of these in their many live sessions on the BBC between 1963 and 1965. Judging
by these recordings, almost all included in two Live at the BBC releases, their
setlists included more songs by Berry than by any other artist. I have fond
memories of listening to Beatles’ programs on the weekends in my junior high
and high school years, hearing many of these Berry songs for the first time,
taping them (with other BBC recordings) long before Live at the BBC was
released. In a very real sense, I grew up with Chuck Berry through the Beatles.
The Beatles, too, grew up
with Chuck Berry: his songs clearly played an important role in their formative
years. Their performances on BBC programs make for an interesting measuring
stick against one of their musical idols. I’ve always preferred Beatles’
version of “Rock and Roll Music” to the original. For the simple fact that a
song titled “Rock and Roll Music” should, quite simply, rock – unlike the
Beatles’ version, Berry’s swings more than rocks (the Beach Boys’ hit cover a
decade later, their “comeback” hit, also fails to rock). I also like the
Beatles’ version of “Too Much Monkey Business” better – perhaps for the same
reason, or perhaps simply because it was the first version I heard.
On the other hand, the
Beatles do not do “Johnny B. Goode’s” seminal rock real justice. Then there is
“Memphis, Tennessee”: a well-constructed song, and surprisingly tender for Berry
and his usual teenage tales of school and jukeboxes and cars. The Beatles’ version
fails to capture that tenderness as well as Berry – though not as badly as the recording
I was most familiar with growing up, the hit version released a year later by
Johnny Rivers, who turns it into a dance number.
Given the importance of
Berry to the Beatles’ development – and given that he was still active (and
producing hits) during his comeback in 1964 – it is surprising to note that the
two apparently never met during the Beatles’ lifetime. John Lennon first met
Berry only in February 1972, when Lennon and Yoko Ono co-hosted the Mike
Douglas show for a week. It is fascinating to watch the footage of the two
performing together, Lennon torn between performing for the camera and watching
his musical hero.
The irony is that, at the
time of this performance, Lennon was being sued for infringing the copyright of
one of Berry’s songs. The
tale is really unbelievable: When John Lennon wrote “Come Together” in
1969, he began it with a near-quote from Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me”: “Here
come a flat-top, he was movin’ up with me”. In the early 1970s, Lennon was sued
by Morris Levy, the notorious “Godfather
of the music industry”, who owned the publishing rights to “You Can’t Catch
Me.” (Berry himself was not involved in the suit.) Levy and Lennon settled out
of court in 1973, with Lennon agreeing to record three songs owned by Levy on
his next album. Lennon’s oldies album Rock
‘n’ Roll was recorded in part to fulfill the terms of the settlement – until
an increasingly unstable Phil Spector, the album’s producer, disappeared with
the master tapes. As a result, Lennon’s next release was Walls and Bridges, which violated the terms of the agreement.
Lennon explained the situation to an increasingly anxious Levy, and later gave
him a rough mixes of the recordings (after resuming in New York without
Spector). Levy proceeded to release the mixes as an album on his mail order
label. Levy sued Lennon for breach; Lennon countersued for unauthorized use of
his material and damaging his reputation. (In 1977, after Levy’s appeal was
finally ruled on, Lennon prevailed.)
In an interview in September
1980, Lennon
dismissed the importance of Berry’s influence on his song:
“Come
Together” is me – writing obscurely
around an old Chuck Berry thing. I left the line in “Here comes old flat-top.”
It is nothing like the Chuck Berry
song, but they took me to court because I admitted the influence once years ago.
I could have changed it to “Here comes old iron face,” but the song remains
independent of Chuck Berry or anybody else on earth. (interview with David
Sheff, September 8, 1980; emphasis in original)
But Lennon appears often to
have used others’ composition as a way to start writing songs. His borrowings
appear regularly at the beginnings of songs: besides the opening words of “Come
Together,” there’s the intro to “Revolution” (from Pee Wee Crayton’s “Do Unto Others”); and
the opening lines of “Run for Your Life” (lifted from Elvis’s “Baby Let’s Play
House”). As with these other songs, “Come Together” might never have been
written (or might have been written quite differently) if not for this
inspiration.
This was certainly not the
only legal action involving Berry’s songs. Berry’s regular music publisher Arc
Music (owned by Philip and Leonard Chess from Berry’s label Chess Records along
with Gene and Harry Goodman, younger brothers of Benny) threatened
to sue the Beach Boys along with their label Capitol Records in 1963 over
their hit “Surfin’ USA.” The song consists of new lyrics to Berry’s “Sweet
Little Sixteen,” including a list of beaches where Berry has a list of cities,
down to the phrase “all over x” (not to mention that the guitar intro is taken
directly from Berry’s “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”). Here too there was a
settlement, though this one wasn’t violated: the song was assigned to Berry’s
publishing company, and Berry was eventually given a songwriting credit.
Like the Beatles, the Beach
Boys were greatly influenced by Berry. There is the intro to “Fun, Fun, Fun,”
based on Berry’s guitar intro to “Johnny B. Goode.” But here the irony is that
this, perhaps Berry’s most famous riff, was
actually lifted by Berry from Carl Hogan’s intro to Louis Jordan’s “Ain’t That Just Like a
Woman.” In interviews Berry made a point of singling out
the importance of Hogan and Jordan in influencing his music. “If you can call
it my music,” as Berry
once said, before continuing, “but then there’s nothing new under the sun.”
Berry had his own
influences, which he sometimes lifted. But he stole most often from himself.
There was the intro to “Maybellene,” recycled in his very next single, “Thirty
Days”; the identical guitar solos in “Too Much Monkey Business” and “Roll Over
Beethoven”; the melody and instrumental track of his Christmas song “Run
Rudolph Run” reused in “Little Queenie”; the two best-known hits of his
1964 comeback, “No Particular Place to Go” and “Nadine,” reusing the melodies
of “School Day” and (a slowed down) “Maybellene.” When listening to Berry’s
music it is Berry’s own licks and tunes we hear more than anyone else’s – Berry
was really an original after all. Or, to put it another way, everyone grew up
on Chuck Berry . . . even Chuck Berry.
2 comments:
I also like the Johhny Rivers recording of "Memphi" better than Chuck Berry's recording although I usually listen to Chuck Berry more often.
Thanks for the glimpse into the past, as I grew up in the era of early Berry. He was ever-present on the old R&R stations in NY City; one voice among many. Your Berry-Lennon video reminded me of why I never cared for Lennon. He never had the voice for that kind of music.
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