- Posts tagged Chuck Berry
- Explore Chuck Berry on posterous
Lou Reed pulls no punches: The Glitz & Glam, Grit & Grime of "New York"
It's six minutes past Midnight on Friday night in London. There are two dogs at my feet, I have a tumbler of Wild Turkey on the ready...but, I feel like I am skulking the back alleys and boulevards of New York City.
I'm in the mood to stand in shadows in a drizzling rain, smoke cigarettes and ask strangers for the time. I don't like cigarettes, but I feel like smoking a few right down to the filter. I don't really care what time it is, but I am anxious because I know something is about to happen...and I just don't want to caught by surprise.
Whenever I think of NYC I think about wee hours of the morning and a "real rain that will come and wash all this scum off the streets". I saw Taxi Driver before I ever went to NYC It had a profound effect on me. I can't think about NYC without thinking of those early morning scenes of cabs driving along desperate streets with clouds of steam seeping up from manhole covers and Travis Bickle telling he is "waiting for the sun to shine".
Every time I go to NYC I feel small. When I walk out of Grand Central Station, I get the feeling that I just drank Alice's potion that makes here shrink to the size of a short-stem rose. Though I have been there many times, I am stilled awed by the city and the stories it tells. That is what I find exciting...the stories that come from the glitz and glam, grit and grime dichotomy of this end-all-be-all, King Archetype of the "Big City".
NYC: Iconic. Ironic. Exotic.
You know who spins a true-grit, tell-it-like-it-is NYC story? Lou Reed. He pulls no punches. He walks that glitz-grime dichotomy line like cat burglar.
I am on my third front to back listen of Lou Reed's "New York" album and I can't get off the ride. Actually, I don't want to get off the ride. I don't listen to Lou a lot, but when I do, I get stuck in. Especially into this album. How can I not? Lou tells me that I have to.
On the back of the album (and I am listening to this on vinyl), Lou informs us: "It's meant to be listened to in one 58 minute (14 songs!) sitting as though it were a book or a movie".
Those instructions are printed on there in black and white. Like a book, you can't read just one chapter. Like a play, you can't watch just one act. Like a crime you can't convict on one clue. This is an album. A front to back, start to finish, sum of parts album. Make the time for it...
On the back of the album Lou also tells us, "You can't beat 2 guitars, bass, drum". Damn straight, Lou.
And that is a good way to sum up this album: NYC stories of glitz-grime told in black and white honesty using the bare bones of the rock and roll sound.
"I'll take Manhattan in a garbage bag" - "Romeo and Juliette"
I took Lou's advice and I have been listening back to front and getting caught up in his NYC travelogue. Lou vents harsh on aids, the homeless, political hypocrisy and the zero-empathy, relentless struggle of growing up on the grime side of the NYC equation. It's an intelligent and biting tongue Lou uses with great effect.
The album hit the streets in 1989 (21 years ago!?!). When it was released, Lou said, "this is as good as I get". That is the blunt honesty that runs through all of Lou's work. That blunt honesty is what makes this album work for me.
Does anybody need another million dollar movie.
Does Anybody need another million dollar star
Does anybody need to be told over and over
Spitting in the wind comes back at you twice as hard
- Strawman
Here are a few of my fave bow-down tracks of the album:
_____
There is one other Lou album that forces me to listen to it: "American Poet". It is a 1972 live NYC radio show performance. This is balls-out rock and roll. Lou told us on the back of the New York album jacket: "You can't beat 2 guitars, bass, drum". He's obviously been following that edict for along time. Listen to these '72 performances...they are pure rock and roll!.
"Walk it and Talk It" is Chuck Berry on pills. "White Light/White Heat" straight up Eddie Cochran. And "Rock and Roll" is, well, 2 guitars, bass and drum bare bones R&R truth.
Make sure to have a listen to these as well:
"It Might Get LOUD" (it damn well better be)
I just scored tix to see the UK premier of "It Might Get Loud". It is going to be at the, star-studded, mind you, Hammersmith Apollo on the 15th December.
Do you know of it? It is a documentary about three guitar players from three generation and three very different backgrounds. Maybe you heard of these guys: Jimmy Page, The Edge & Jack White. The scene is set for these three gun slingers to meet on an empty sound stage, start talking about their own story about how got into the guitar and then, [cue the spontaneity] hopefully a three-pronged jam will breakout.
Here is the trailer:
I like rock documentaries much better than I like straight-up rock concert films. I want to learn something when I watch music. I love the stories behind songs and albums and artists. I sued to love the Behind the Music series on VH1. Even when they had an artist on I didn't particularly like, I still watched for the story. Too bad it got drunk on hubris. I kept watching until I could no longer stand to see its show formula dry hump the legs of the performers until it turned into a parody of its former self.
Rock-Docco best done by someone who is passionate about the subject. Taylor Hackford is a great rock-docco/film director. He did Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll, the biting look the life and (fucked up) times of Chuck Berry. He did his best to make a glory film about Chuck even thought Chuck gave him a shit fight of a time. The deluxe version has loads of great interviews with rock and blues legends.
There is a GREAT interview with a very, very drunk...absolutely shitfaced...Jerry Lee Lewis on the deluxe version that is worth the extra bread (couldn't find it anywhere on the web).
Scorsese is another one. While I didn't really like all that he did with his latest on the Stones ("Shine a Light"), he has done some damn good work, a la The Last Waltz" and the Bob Dylan docco, "No Direction Home".
If you want to see a PHENOMENAL music documentary, watch "Respect Yourself: The Story of Stax Records" RIGHT NOW! If you don't fall in love with this, you have no soul. Here is a promo clip for it. When I saw Steve Cropper & Duck Dunn (remaining MGs) in Sydney two years ago, they played this clip from the movie before the show. The MGs were opening for this young Aussie wanker-pop-star. He went to Memphis to blood suck the soul music legacy to supplement his lack of creative song-writing talent. Cropper produced his album and was supporting it on this punk's Aussie tour.
I guess you know who I was there to see.
They showed this to make sure the Aussie audience knew that they knew just who the hell was up there...MUSIC LEGENDS. My old buddy Nev, owner of Mojo Music in Sydney, used to say about Cropper (one of his heroes): "Steve Cropper...never played a bumb note in his life. Agreed, Nev.
Here is a list of all of my music DVDs. You'll see that the majority of them are rock-doccos:
Stolen Melodies, Copped Riffs and Royalty Robberies: What do T-Bone Walker, Chuck Berry & Keith Richards Have in Common? (The RIff)
My wife is nowhere near the music fan that I am. She does not know (or care to know) a fraction of what I do about the songs and the story behind them are concerned. She does, though, have quite an ear for music.
She regularly surprises me when she will say, "hey, this sounds exactly like such-and-such". She asked me one time, "don't these people get mad when someone else plays their song and claims it as their own"?
Oh, boy. That is a can of worms I'm not sure I want to open up?! On second thought, why the hell not...
The history of recorded music is full of various stories about stolen melodies, copped riffs and royalty robberies. Some of the stories are legendary:
John Fogerty was sued (unsuccessfully) by his old CCR label, Fantasy Records, for sounding too much like himself! Fantasy said that "Old Man Down the Road" sounded too much like "Run Through the Jungle" and that Fogerty was plagiarising himself. What a joke. Fogerty had to go to court to defend his style. Hear for yourselves:
In an even more maddening example, Neil Young was sued by Geffen Records for not sound like himself enough. How can anyone say this about Ol' Neil?! They way the man shifts musical directions, you'd think the moon is controlling him as it does the tides (I love Neil for this reason). When Neil put out "Everybody's Rockin", Geffen sued him for making "uncharacteristic and uncommercial records". Ok, ok, maybe "Ol' '80's Cantankerous Neil" wasn't trying to break new ground with this one, but to be sued by his label...? Here is a little ditty from that album:
And then there is this story about the Aussie band, Men at Work, that is making the headline news. You all remember their 80's hit, "Land Down Under", right? How could you not remember that jaunty, lilting, flute melody in it? Larrikin Music Publishing managing director, Norm Lurie, remembers it to...from his childhood. Larrikin is now suing Men At Work for back & future royalties on the song. They claim the flute part comes from the refrain of an old Aussie children's song, the "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree".
Check out this link to see/hear the similarities between the two. When done watching, please proceed to vomit in your lap. This lawsuit is a joke, too. Post Script: I lived in in Sydney for five years...Vegamite sandwiches are good.
Crazy stories, hunh? Can you imagine if the guy that wrote "Happy Birthday" had it copyrighted!?! We'd all be in court!
There are many, many, MANY other examples like this. Sadly, most of them are about money. What I want to do is celebrate influence. A few months ago I wrote a post about artists wearing their influences on their sleeves.This may be a quasi-Part II to that one. In that post I quoted two people:
Neil Young: "It's all one song". (read here for the story behind that quote)
Hunter S. Thompson: "I've been plagiarising all my life. Its called learning".
And that is exactly what it is, isn't it...learning. You like/listen to someone. They have an impact on you. You are influenced by them. You take on some of the characteristics in your own playing. You develop your own sound from this. Is this stealing or is this influence?
Case in point: where would we be without T-Bone Walker, Chuck Berry and Keith Richards? My guess is the insane asylum from having to listen to Pat Boone for a decade longer than we should have.
Let's have some good ol' music fun with influence using these three R&R behemoths.
T-Bone Walker was an early pioneer (in the truest sense of the word) with the electric guitar sound. Once he plugged it in, he made that fiddle squeal and sing out like no one had ever heard before. Surely that would influence young hot-shot guitarists; and it did. Hendrix stated that T-Bone was a big influence. Even more importantly, Chuck Berry sites T-Bone as one of his two biggest influences (Louis Jordan being the other). We all know Chuck's sound, right? Yes, but was it really Chuck's in the first place? Listen to this T-Bone cut, "T-Bone Boogie", that predates any Chuck recordings:
"WOW", right? Chuck has bitched and moaned for years about how he got robbed by people stealing his sound. Most famously, he sued the Beach Boys for stealing the riff from "Sweet Little Sixteen" and won (check out this cool site called, "Sounds Just Like" for a Berry/Beach Boys comparison). Yeah, Chuck, I guess you were influenced by T-Bone. Have a listen to one of Berry's Great 28, "Bye, Bye Johnny". Sound a little like, "T-Bone Boogie"? Hell, yes.
Now we all know that there are a lot of "Chuck's children out there playin' his licks" (thanks for that lyric, Bob Seeger), none more famously than Keith Richards. Keith is an unabashed Chuck disciple. Keith has said that all he wanted to do when he started out playing was, "to sound like Chuck Berry". Chuck's riffs are found all throughout Keef's playing with the Stones and with his solo band, the X-Pensive Winos. Here is a track off his first solo album, "Talk is Cheap". Listen for those Chuck riffs like they "were ringing a bell". Also, Johnny Johnson, Chuck's long-time pianist is on this track pounding out on the 88's.
There are way too many Chuck/Keef stories to talk about here. You should watch the most excellent movie, "Hail, Hail Rock & Roll" to get a feel for the relationship Master and Pupil had. Here is a clip of the two Gunslingers "learning" how to play "Carol".
There you have it: influence in all it's rock and roll glory. It is cool to listen to those three songs in succession to see how that guitar riff has evolved. Can you think of any other great cascading riff lineage?
_____
Bonus Cut:
While we're at it, here is one last example: the Bo Diddley Beat. Bo's Beat was the new sliced-bread and may never be topped. Here is an early Bo classic and a song by the Allman Brothers from the same name:
