Thursday, April 10th, 2008

Mojo’s Cold Shot: Chuck Berry, “Deep Feeling”

by Mojo Flucke

Chuck Berry made rock and roll what it is today. This critic would fight — and win — a cage match with any other writer who’d take Elvis as the more significant contributor.

Elvis was a Mount Rushmore figure, for sure, but come on: Berry’s style (oh, and that writing-about-cars-and-girls-thing, which he didn’t invent but made a trademark) launched a million bands and can be heard everywhere from the Beatles to the MC5, from the Dead to the Stones and everyone since.

Ever the ironic bastards, us rock fans gave Berry his first and only #1 hit with “My Ding-A-Ling,” a gawd-awful novelty record. What an embarrassment to the legacy of a player who contributed as much to rock as Monet did to painting.

Which leaves blogs like Popdose to set the record straight, and we’re doing it right here. Not only did Chuck Berry show us how to rock, he was one mean blues slide player, too. Biggest proof of that lies in “Deep Feeling,” here from Rhino’s phenomenal anthology Blues Masters, Vol. 15: Slide Guitar Classics. Subtle, expressive, beautiful. If you can’t dig this — regardless of whether blues turns you on or not — you have no soul. Period.

Musicians who appreciate rock history appreciate Chuck Berry. Stud guitarists Arlen Roth and Sonny Landreth recorded “Deep Feeling” together for Roth’s new record, Toolin’ Around Woodstock with Levon Helm. In the process they lay down their own tribute to Berry and that groove on this YouTube video (we’re not allowed to embed this particular one — apparently Arlen’s worried what kooks like us are gonna do with it — so you’ll have to click and not whine about it, you lazy bum).

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 11:30 am and is filed under Mojo's Cold Shot, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • JonCummings
    Chuck and I appeared together on a panel discussion at a rock-music academic conference back in 1993, at the University of Missouri. The topic of the panel was censorship; I was there representing the ACLU's Arts Censorship Project, for which I was then media director, and Chuck was there because...well, I think it was because the organizers were desperate to get him onto a panel since he was playing in town that night, and mine was the one that fit his schedule.

    I talked about "Cop Killer" and 2 Live Crew and blah blah blah, and some other people talked about some other stuff, and Chuck just kind of nodded along and interjected things like "I just love rock'n'roll music, and I don't think anybody should try to stop it from getting to the people." I tried to draw him out on whether he viewed the ridiculous amount of prison time he got for his Mann Act conviction back in '59 as part of a broader effort to nip rock'n'roll in the bud, but he didn't want to talk about it.

    He put on a rockin' show that night--as is his custom, he performed with a pickup band of local guys that had been hired just for the gig. I gotta be honest, though--my biggest concern in meeting him, having read the Spy magazine piece about his...um...doodysexual proclivities one more time on the way to the conference, was deciding how enthusiastic I was gonna be about shaking his hand. I mean, I figure the guy HAS to wash every day, right? But still...

    Mojo, I agree that Chuck's contributions were massive, but I don't know if the Chuck vs. Elvis argument is winnable. It sure would be a fun argument to have, though--I could argue either side for weeks.
  • Jon:

    Did you happen to notice Chuck getting paid at tht gig? I heard from the director of "Hail Hail Rock & Roll" that Chuck demands to get paid in cash (usually presented to him nonchalantly in a brown paper bag) before he'll start any gig. Obviously, to to a history of getting short-changed and ripped off through bad contracts and broken promises through the years.

    It's real sad how the originators of this music that we write about have been (and often continue to be) f'ed over throughout the years. Meanwhile, people they influenced end up being the ones making most of the money. And while the Stones continue to play arenas, Chuck....well in one case, my friend and I were driving through So Cal a few years ago, and we saw a banner on the side of the road advertising a Chuck Berry concert....at Raging Waters theme park--a placemany of you may know from its appearance (under a different name) in "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure". I said: "Chuck Berry's playing RAGING WATERS?!", to which my friend, a Check Berry worshiper, responded "Oh Jeez! Well, maybe it's Chuck Berry UK."

    I've also heard that Chuck's been working on a new album off & on for the past TWENTY-FIVE years. I told that same friend "I hope he doesn't have any pop culture references in it, or it's going to be dated the second it comes out", as I imagined Chuck singing a song about the Wendy's "Where's the beef?" lady.
  • JonCummings
    I didn't notice him getting paid that way, but I'd heard previously that that's the way he likes to do business. It's quite old-school, isn't it? A holdover from the late '40s-early '50s, I imagine, when a lot of R&B acts probably got paid that way.

    I hear what you're saying about the originators--I'm always amazed when Jerry Lee Lewis' name appears on the marquee at the Malibu Inn--but beyond the irony of it all (and the financial snookering), it must be said that guys like Chuck and Jerry Lee didn't exactly make it easy on themselves. Rock'n'roll careerism hadn't really taken root, and they didn't really grow or stretch the way, say, Ray Charles did (the movie Ray's melodramatics notwithstanding).

    Jerry Lee did have some success in country during the '60s, and Chuck was still a draw overseas into the '70s ("My Ding-a-Ling" was recorded live in England). But they didn't exactly take care of themselves, either, and baby-boomers didn't really start throwing money at their nostalgia habits until it was too late for those guys to really cash in.

    All that said, an afternoon on the waterslides and an evening of Chuck Berry sounds like a nice day's entertainment to me.

    By the way, in the course of reminiscing over that panel discussion I dove into the Internets and plucked a couple of newspaper articles about that conference, which was called "On the Beat: Rock'n'Rap, Mass Media and Society." In the Chicago Sun-Times, Jim DeRogatis noted that Chuck said during our discussion, "If I was a censor, I'd censor some of this (rap) music today. But that's just one person's opinion." I'm sure I was appalled at the time.
  • mojo
    I have to drop something like that in all my popdose entries. If I state the obvious all the time, no one comments. Then I get all sad and dressed, look in the mirror and sigh plaintively, saying to myself that no one loves me. This Disqus system is like crack, I gotta have more. (Now you know my M.O., see if you can spot the "one sentence" that is...in future blogs).
  • mojo
    PS: The "dressed" thing. Uh I meant "depressed." ALthough it coulda been Freudian.
  • outsidecounsel
    Strict chronology doesn't really work when we talk about rock'n'roll emerging from the primordial soup of R&B/Blues/Country. We know that Ike Turner recorded "Rocket 88" at Sun Studio, and we know that Elvis sang "That's All Right" in the same room shortly after. Just a little bit north, in East St Louis, Chuck Berry was working on a few things at about the same time. I think of it as the equivalent of Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz inventing calculus at the same time.
  • mojo
    Rocket 88 and That's All Right were recorded 3 years apart. I get your point, however. Trying to figure out who invented rock is like trying to figure out who discovered America.

    The calculus of rock history (oof) is an inexact science, and back then, no one wanted to cop responsibility for it...back then it was the equivalent of me, now, taking credit for being an early influence on crack smoking.

    Then there's the racial thing: I.E. at the time people stealing from other people and not giving credit where credit was due. And 50 years on, not restoring credit to where it was originally due.

    For Elvis lovers out there, I'm one of you. Esp. 1955 Elvis. I just think Chuckles was that much better and that much more innovative.

    I'm just happy that people are appreciating Chuck today. It's my job today, to point out "Hey, he did a fine blues, too, when he took a notion."
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