Chuck Berry turns 80 tomorrow, and here at Living in Stereo we continue our tribute to the Brown Eyed Handsome Man. Today’s post comes from Living in Stereo’s Best Friend, Roy Kasten, who offers the liner notes he penned for an excellent 2004 tribute record, Brown Eyed Handsome Man: St. Louis Salutes the Father of Rock and Roll. The album raised money for KDHX, the St. Louis community radio station where Roy hosts the Wednesday morning program Feel Like Going Home.

I’d highly recommend the disc, even if it weren’t for a good cause. Besides the Berry covers from Fontella Bass and the Rockhouse Ramblers below, the album includes contributions from the Bottlerockets, Jay Farrar, the Skeletons and 14 other St. Louis-based acts. Buy it.

Roy Kasten writes:

Chuck Berry has been called the poet laureate of rock & roll but that doesn’t go far enough. Dramatist, historian, philosopher and sociologist, Berry can tell you more about the promise of rock & roll than any music critic. “Hail, hail rock & roll/Deliver me from the days of old,” he sang. Berry didn’t bluff. He gave voice to a new culture with wit, word play and narratives that trumped catchy novelties, though he could write those too. His greatest songs, so full of life, so affectionately detailed, so rhythmically natural, so observant and so playful, rock for the sake of rocking, for how good it feels to have no particular place to go because that means you can go anywhere.

Berry wrote some fine blues–especially “Have Mercy Judge” and “Why Should We End This Way?”–but he paid no mind to fate and received repetition. His verbal ingenuity is spectacular; a souped-up groove is all it takes to let the imagination rip. All the junk and jewels of America–the glory is you can’t tell them apart–are packed into the most compressed form. His songs move, the rhymes rocking in perfect time, the stories grabbing you from the get-go: “Tulane and Johnny opened a novelty shop/Back under the corner was the cream of the crop/Everything was clickin’ and the business was good/’Till one day, lo and behold, an officer stood.” His style isn’t inimitable and it isn’t precisely original; it’s archetypal and American. Once that would have been a contradiction, but that was before Berry turned the sound of a sub-culture into a universal lingo and made three minute dance numbers into comprehensive portraits of life.

Berry’s characters–the mysterious Brown-Eyed Handsome Man, Memphis Marie, Tulane & Johnny, and Sweet Little Sixteen, with her grown up blues and fan club photos–resonated with an audience hip to the cinematic realism of On the Waterfront and Giant but even hipper to the wave of rocking rhythm and blues cresting before them. Years before he walked into Chess studios to record “Maybellene,” Berry was integrating country and blues in St. Louis bars. When he changed Johnny B. Goode from a “coloured boy” to a “country boy” he wasn’t pandering; he was stretching his audience and his art. His songs rarely confronted class and color lines directly; they made an end run to the wide open space on the other side.

Once asked to name his favorite cover version, Berry grinned and replied, “All of them.” To cover Chuck Berry is to find the abracadabra of rock & roll, to open a thousand creative doors. Our lives are never so open-ended, our possibilities never really endless. But punch up the juke box and for three minutes “Around and Around,” “Come On” and “Little Queenie” present more freedom, more truth, and more delight than you could otherwise hope for. It just goes to show that with a great rock & roll song, and with the artist who set the gold standard, you really never can tell.

Fontella Bass “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” from Brown Eyed Handsome Man: St. Louis Salutes the Father of Rock & Roll (Undertow, 2004)

Rockhouse Ramblers “Tulane” from Brown Eyed Handsome Man: St. Louis Salutes The Father of Rock & Roll (Undertow, 2004)

*****

Speaking of Berry and St. Louis, the city’s Riverfront Times celebrates Berry’s 80th with some nice commentary (collected by Roy Kasten) from several locals, including Bass and Farrar.

For more on Chuck Berry and his decision to change “Johnny B. Goode” from colored to country , see Dave Marsh’s Johnny B. Goode entry in his essential The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1,001 Greatest Singles Ever Made.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 2:17 pm 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.