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Up to the minute notes on the current state of free thinking and free living: Kentucky moonshine - original analysis and reporting from MoreThings, and all round pop culture museum of sight and sound - photo galleries, mp3 and video downloads.
Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
Live free or die!
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October 18, 2002
Chuck Berry, Brown Eyed Handsome Man
Chuck Berry was born October 18, 1926. Happy number 76!
Among several possible names, Chuck Berry most deserves the title of being the architect of rock and roll. More than anything, this means he wrote some classic songs which became the models for how others did it. The basic guitar moves and structure of a thousand others can be traced right back to Uncle Chuck.
Chuck Berry didn't play the hottest, fanciest guitar around, but he's the model others used to learn their trade. Jimi Hendrix was playing Chuck Berry songs, not the other way around. Much less for other fancy boy guitar players. Some conservatory jackleg from the accounting firm of Emerson, Lake and Palmer could probably play circles around Berry technically, but did any of them play a lick that anybody now remembers? Chuck Berry didn't play as many notes, but his notes by gummy MEANT something.
Uncle Chuck also taught the Stones how to be dirty old men. He was already thirtysomething when he wrote the original definitive groupie anthem "Sweet Little Sixteen." The Stones were just being slightly more explicit with, say, the "Stray Cat Blues."
Moreover, he created real poetry in his lyrics long before Dylan. His use of language was years ahead of his peers. He didn't have fakey French symbolist name dropping tricks that Dylan was prone too, though. He just had a real eye for lyrical detail, and subtle and unforgettable ways of putting things, such as the baby daughter with "hurry home drops on her cheeks".
One thing not noted so much about Berry's songs has been the distinctly adult nature of many of them. Rock and roll supposedly was created as music for the kids, but Chuck was singing about harsh marital disagreements ["30 Days"] and the heartache of divorce and custody problems ["Memphis"].
He also created the definitive rock icon in "Johnny B Goode," with the little coloured boy playing guitar by the railroad tracks and dreaming of making the big time.
If there was just one definitive rock and roll black pride anthem, it has to be "Brown Eyed Handsome Man." He wasn't concerned with fake niceness in the way he expressed it, either. He had a way of sticking in the hardcore stuff in subtle ways.
Arrested on charges of unemployment,
He was sitting in the witness stand
The judge's wife called up the district attorney
Said you free that brown eyed man
You want your job you better free that brown eyed man
The unemployed negro is doing the [presumably white] judge's wife. Sweet. This was a major hit single during 1956 with Jim still a-Crowing, and I've never heard of anyone having objected to or even having noticed the obvious implications. Chuck was "that kind of guy" long before LL Cool J. You go, bad boy.
posted by Al at 10/18/2002 10:31:00 PM
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