Danny Alexander from Take Em As They Come writes:

I met Chuck Berry once.  Yep, sat on a panel with him at a music conference where we both defended pop music from those who would censor it.  He did a great job…

Afterward, I had a moment to introduce myself and shake his hand.  I blurted out something about writing the best songs about being a teenager ever, and he was polite as he could be, a gentleman—a genteel man—just as he’d been throughout the panel, but I saw that flash in his eye.

It wasn’t the conspiratorial wink that normally goes with that smile and that dimple.  It could have been angry.  It definitely said, “Is this guy for real?”

If he’d asked me, I would have cried out, “No, no, I’m not.”  Like Chris Farley, my inner self was slapping my forehead and raking my fingers through my hair and thinking, “Stupid, stupid—teenagers!?  I’m talking to the very symbol of rock and roll since before I was born, and I say teenagers?”

Oh, sure, that would be one of the claims to fame of anyone who wrote “School Days” or “No Particular Place to Go” or “Almost Grown,” but to stop there is to tell a lie.  It wasn’t enough, and I knew it.  If only I’d told him even that much…

It’s hard to know what to say about—much less to—Chuck Berry.

Was it George Harrison who said Chuck Berry only wrote one song, but it was the greatest song ever written?  That’s got a nice hook, and a fine payoff, but “one song” doesn’t even superficially begin to describe a canon that includes “I Wanna Be Your Driver,” “The Promised Land,” “Come On,” “Downbound Train,” and “Havana Moon”—not structurally, not lyrically and certainly not in effect.

But the greatest song ever written, yeah.  You throw on any Chuck Berry collection, and it’s hard not to admit that one at any point along the line.  It’s all there in one place.  That guitar, so elemental and raw that it’s the grail punk guitarists claw for, what DJs scratch records and layer beats to try to recreate.  At the same time, Berry’s nimble fingers turn that guitar into a weapon as grand and sure as the hardest rock gunslinger’s axe.

His lyrics go where they want, watching a woman walking across the desert from a TWA window one second, jumping 3000 years in the past the next.  One song describes a single night going nowhere; another lays out a place for rock and roll at the head of the table of Western Civilization.  (Or is it turning over the damn table?)

And those lyrics come with a voice confident enough to captivate whether it’s narrating the contents of a young couple’s refrigerator or coming unhinged as the overlapping thoughts of a street racer embracing an obsession and chasing down a betrayal.  It’s a voice that remains as unique and liberating as the rule breakers that followed—from Bob Dylan to Eric B’s Rakim to Andre 3000 (and Big Boi, too).

When Chuck Berry cheers Johnny to “go,” he cheers himself and his fans (all of the brothers and sisters and children of rock and roll) on at the same time.  Directly and indirectly, his eye and ear and axe and walk have shown and continue to show so many of us a way to the break of dawn—motorvating us over one hill after another that we didn’t think we could make.

I’d like to think that if I got another chance to talk to him I could say something like that, but I know it wouldn’t do.  He knows what he’s done, and I just hope he knows we know.  The world he gave us is infinitely better than the one he was born into 80 years ago this week.  In that sense, a piece of every happy birthday belongs to Chuck Berry.

Read more from Danny Alexander at his blog Take Em As They Come.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 15th, 2006 at 2:46 am and is filed under Guest Writers. 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.