But his images and similes are just as impressive, and his sense of control is startling: when Berry shouts to the city bus driver – ‘Hey conductor, you must … slow down!’ – the song slows with him.īerry’s first single, ‘Maybellene’, was loosely based on a country song (‘Ida Red’ by Bob Wills), set against a two-beat country rhythm. Berry is celebrated for his neologisms: ‘botherations’ and ‘coolerators’ (in ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, tears are ‘hurry home drops’). His country folks lived in log cabins ‘made of earth and wood’ and drank their moonshine ‘from a wooden cup’. Berry’s sweet little sixteen-year-olds carried ‘wallets filled with pictures’, and his teenage newlyweds crammed their iceboxes with ‘TV dinners and ginger ales’. But the lyrics were fine-grained and cinematic. The songs were ‘intended to have a wide scope of interest to the general public rather than a rare or particular incidental occurrence that would entreat the memory of only a few’, Berry said. That attention to detail served Berry well when he turned his hand to songwriting – smart and systematic, he plugged every possible variable into the equations at hand and wrote anthems that were reverse-engineered to appeal to rock and roll’s core constituency of disaffected teenagers. ‘I even took the guitar on dates and sang to the girl I’d be with.’ ‘I worked until I had matched over ninety popular songs together with their lyrics and began to sing them before people as often as I had the opportunity,’ he said. So Berry learned enough chords to play ‘almost 80 per cent’ of the songs he had heard. If you ever want to see something that is far out, watch a crowd of coloured folk, half high, wholeheartedly doing the hoedown barefooted.Ī local guitarist had told Berry that 80 per cent of the popular songs out there were based on the chords to George Gershwin’s ‘I Got Rhythm’. ‘The music played most around St Louis was country-western, which was usually called hillbilly music, and swing,’ he wrote in his autobiography.Ĭuriosity provoked me to lay a lot of the country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of the clubgoers started whispering: ‘Who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?’ After they laughed at me a few times, they began requesting the hillbilly stuff and enjoyed trying to dance to it. The instruments may be different but the experiment’s the same.’ An hour later, a friend called to tell me that Berry was dead.Ĭharles Edward Anderson Berry got his start working odd jobs and playing backyard parties and juke joints in East St Louis, and ended up at a club called the Cosmopolitan. It sounds like an old blues jam that BB and Muddy would carry on backstage at the old amphitheatre in Chicago. ‘So this is the so-called new stuff,’ Berry said. But then I was reminded of Berry’s response, in 1980, to recordings by Wire, Joy Division and the Sex Pistols. Weirdly, the words fit the tune perfectly. Midway through, they sang a good portion of Chuck Berry’s mysterious ‘Memphis, Tennessee’. On Saturday, YLT set that medley to the tune of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Sister Ray’. Most of the time, there are too many songs to get to, and so, as the mini-marathon draws to its close, the band does an extended medley. Callers who pledge a hundred dollars get to request a song – any song. The highlight is usually Yo La Tengo’s marathon-within-a-marathon covers session, which lasts for three hours or so. Every year, at around this time, the radio station WFMU hosts a fundraising marathon.
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