Today
is the last day of our Chuck Berry Top 25 countdown. We have reached the
all-important Top 10. Here we go!
At
#10 is Brown Eyed Handsome Man: Berry was inspired to write this song while he
was touring through heavily black and Latino areas of California. As Berry put
it, "I didn't see too many blue eyes." He did see a good-looking
Chicano nabbed for loitering until "some woman came up shouting for the
policeman to let him go." Over a manic guitar lick, the song spins a
riotous tale about a dark-eyed loverman.
Glenn
C. Altschuler argued that the lyrics of the song "played slyly with racial
attitudes and even fears." Martha Bayles noted that "Berry's penchant
for bragging about his Brown Eyed Handsome Man’s appeal for white females
outraged a lot of people."
The
song has been covered by many artists, including Buddy Holly, whose recording
was a posthumous top-five hit in the United Kingdom in 1963 and was released on
the album Reminiscing. Johnny Rivers also covered the song on his first album,
At the Whisky à Go Go, in 1964, as did Nina Simone on her 1967 album High
Priestess of Soul and Waylon Jennings on a single from his 1970 album Waylon.
It was also covered by Robert Cray, by Paul McCartney, and by the so-called
"Million Dollar Quartet": Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis,
and Elvis Presley in a jam session on December 4, 1956.
At
#9 we find one of Chuck's earliest hits, the 1955 song Thirty Days: Berry's
upbeat call for a lover to come home in a month shows off both his dexterous
soloing style, in which he plays chords (!) for the duration of the lead break
and his sense of humor. "Gonna put a false charge against ya," he
sings, "That'll be the very thing that'll send ya," and he's not
above bringing it before the United Nations if it will bring his baby back. He
wrote in his autobiography that the song was based somewhat on a true story and
something he'd seen in a movie where a judge granted a defendant leniency up
until he reminded the judge he'd been the one to introduce him to his wife.
"It shows that I have found no happiness in any association that has been
linked with regulations and custom," he wrote. "I was stimulated by
the judge story and found something similar in category yet different in aspect
for a creation of my own."
The
single peaked at #2 on the US R&B Charts:
Sitting
pretty at #8 is You Never Can Tell, a song that was made popular again for a
brand new generation of fans in the mid 90s, as it was the soundtrack of a key
scene is Tarantino's magnum opus, Pulp Fiction.
Chuck
Berry wrote You Never Can Tell, along with No Particular Place to Go and
Nadine, while doing time in Springfield, Missouri's Federal Medical Center
prison for allegedly bringing a 14-year-old across state lines with unsavory
notions in mind – which didn't seem to stop him from writing his ditty about a
"teenage wedding" and skeptical old folks. But perhaps more
interesting is the fact that Rock's great guitar hero hardly plays guitar on
this 1964 single, which sports heaping helpings of Boogie-Woogie piano and sax
solos.
At
#7 is one of Berry's biggest hits, a #1 US R&B hit, also #3 US Hot 100 and
#24 UK. It's School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell).
Chuck
Berry was 30 years old when he sat down to write School Days, a.k.a. School Day
(Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell), but you'd never know it from the song's vivid
evocation of the quotidian experience of high school, from mean-mugged teachers
to crowded lunchrooms ("it's fortunate if you have time to eat!").
Its stop-start chugging, punctuated by Berry’s cheeky guitar fills, is a sound
he'd return to again and again – here, it's propelled by some of the same
musicians who played on Howlin' Wolf’s unearthly singles, including guitarist
Hubert Sumlin. The song's lyrics helped establish Rock & Roll as a direct
chronicler of teen America's experience, especially in its most famous line,
still one of the greatest couplets Rock ever gave us: "Hail, hail Rock
& Roll,” Berry proclaimed, "deliver me from the days of old." The
details in the song come straight from Berry’s own life, as he wrote in his
autobiography: "The lyrics depict the way it was in my time. … The phrases
came to me spontaneously, and rhyming took most of the time that was spent on
the song." And the rhythmic breaks were meant to "emphasize the jumps
and changes I found in classes in high school compared to the one room and one
teacher I had in elementary school."
At
#6 is a twisting little number (less than 2 minutes long), which dealt with the
two most prevalent themes in Rock & Roll: women and automobiles (not
necessarily in that order). It was written and first released in 1961. Come
On failed to chart in the US Top 100, but B-Side Go Go Go reached #38 on UK
charts. If only for the verse:
"Everything is wrong since I've been without you
Every night I lay awake
thinkin' about you
Every time the phone rings it
sounds like thunder
Some stupid jerk tryin' to
reach another number"
...
We've all been there ...
Come
On, however, was chosen as the Rolling Stones' debut single. Released in the
late spring of 1963, it reached #21 on the UK single charts. Mick Jagger found
just the right tone of youthful petulance in the song's typically wry lyric.
Now
it's time for the Top 5; they are all classics...
At
#5 we find Sweet Little Sixteen. The song celebrated kids, America and the
power of Rock & Roll – an ode to an underage Rock fan in high-heeled shoes
that included a roll call of US cities. The Beach Boys fitted the song with new
words and called it Surfin’ USA; Berry threatened to sue and won a writing
credit. It was Berry's second biggest hit (#1 US R&B, #2 US Hot 100, #16
UK). Rolling Stone magazine ranked the song number 272 on its list of the
"500 Greatest Songs of All Time" in 2004.
For
the sake of comparison, here's the The Beach Boys' Surfin’ USA:
Sitting
pretty at #4 is Rock and Roll Music: Berry's 1957 tribute to the music he loved
most, with its swinging piano and forceful guitar, still stands as one of the
most passionate declarations of the power of Rock. He made playful jabs at Jazz,
Mambo and Tango, styles that were popular at the time, and clearly outlined
what Rock was, from its backbeat to its wailing saxes. "I was heavy into Rock
& Roll even then and had to create something that hit the spot without
question," he wrote in his autobiography. "I wanted the lyrics to
define every aspect of its being and worded it to do so." It was such a
potent summary, the song was covered by the Beatles in 1964 and the Beach Boys
in 1976.
In
2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Berry's version number 128 on its list of
the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time". The song is also included in
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.
The
Beatles also did a wonderful job with the song (not the greatest quality audio/video, but still the best I could find):
At
#3 is the song with which it all began for Berry: Maybellene was written and recorded in 1955, and was his first hit, #1 US
R&B and #5 US Hot 100.
Rock
& Roll guitar starts here. The pileup of Hillbilly Country, Urban Blues and
Hot Jazz in Chuck Berry's electric twang is the primal language of Pop-music
guitar, and it's all perfected on his first single. The entire song is a
two-minute chase scene packed with car-culture vernacular and Berry's
hipster-lingo inventions ("As I was motorvatin' over the hill ...").
Its groove comes from Ida Red, a 1938 recording by Bob Wills and His Texas
Playboys (of a song that dates back to the 19th century). By the time of the
May 21st, 1955, session, Berry had been playing Country tunes for black
audiences for a few years – "After they laughed at me a few times, they
began requesting the hillbilly stuff," he has said. Leonard Chess came up
with the title, inspired by a Maybelline mascara box lying on the floor at the
Chess studio. DJ Alan Freed had nothing to do with writing Maybellene, although
he got co-credit and royalties for years in return for radio airplay: payola in
all but name.
The
song is ranked number 18 on Rolling Stone's list of "500 Greatest Songs of
All Time.
There are cover versions by more than 70
performers, including Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, Paul Simon (in a
medley with Kodachrome), Marty Robbins, George Jones, Carl Perkins, Johnny
Cash, Bubba Sparks, Foghat, Gerry & the Pacemakers, Johnny Rivers, and
Chubby Checker. Here's Elvis:
At #2 is the song that most lists have at
#1. This 1958 song was a major hit among both black and white audiences, peaking
at #2 on Billboard magazine's Hot R&B Sides chart and #8 on its Hot 100
chart. The song is also ranked 7th on Rolling Stone's list of the "500
Greatest Songs of All Time".
The opening guitar riff of Johnny B. Goode
is essentially a note-for-note copy of the opening single-note solo on Louis
Jordan's Ain't That Just Like a Woman (1946), played by guitarist Carl Hogan.
Johnny B. Goode was the first Rock &
Roll hit about Rock & Roll stardom. It is still the greatest Rock &
Roll song about the democracy of fame in Pop music. And Johnny B. Goode is
based in fact. The title character is Chuck Berry – "more or less,"
as he told Rolling Stone in
1972. "The original words [were], of course, 'That little colored boy
could play.' I changed it to 'country boy' – or else it wouldn't get on the
radio." Berry took other narrative liberties. Johnny came from "deep
down in Louisiana, close to New Orleans," rather than Berry's St. Louis.
And Johnny "never ever learned to read or write so well," while Berry
graduated from beauty school with a degree in hairdressing and cosmetology.
But the essence of Berry's tale – a guitar
player with nothing to his name but chops goes to the big city and gets his
name in lights – is autobiographical. In 1955, Berry was working as a
beautician in St. Louis when he met Chess Records' biggest star, Muddy Waters,
who sent him to the label's co-founder Leonard Chess. By 1958, Berry was Rock
& Roll's most consistent hitmaker after Elvis Presley. Unlike Presley,
Berry wrote his own classics. "I just wish I could express my feelings the
way Chuck Berry does,"' Presley once confessed.
Johnny B. Goode is the supreme example of
Berry's poetry in motion. The rhythm section rolls with freight-train momentum,
while Berry's stabbing, single-note lick in the chorus sounds, as he put it,
"like a-ringin' a bell" – a perfect description of how Rock &
Roll guitar can make you feel on top of the world.
There are dozens of cover versions, the
best being the one by Jimi Hendrix:
Finally, here's our #1: Roll Over
Beethoven is a 1956 single (#2 US R&B, #29 US Hot 100, #31 Germany). Rolling
Stone magazine ranked it number 97 on its list of the "500 Greatest Songs
of All Time".
"I wanted to play the blues,"
Chuck Berry told Rolling Stone.
"But I wasn't blue enough. We always had food on the table." Berry
originally wrote this guitar anthem as an affectionate dig at his sister Lucy,
who spent so much time playing classical music on the family piano that young Chuck
couldn't get a turn. But Roll Over Beethoven became the ultimate Rock &
Roll call to arms, declaring a new era: "Roll over, Beethoven/And tell
Tchaikovsky the news." Berry announced this changing of the musical guard
with a blazing guitar riff and pounding piano from sidekick Johnnie Johnson.
Here's a live version, recorded in France:
As with every Berry classic, this has been
recorded over and over by a multitude of artists. The most successful versions
were the ones by the Beatles and by the Electric Light Orchestra. Since we've
already heard the Beatles, here are the ELO:
