Review: Chuck Berry - After School Session (1957)
Tracks: 1) School Day (Ring Ring Goes The Bell); 2) Deep Feeling; 3) Too Much Monkey Business; 4) Wee Wee Hours; 5) Roly Poly; 6) No Money Down; 7) Brown Eyed Handsome Man; 8) Berry Pickin’; 9) Together (We Will Always Be); 10) Havana Moon; 11) Down Bound Train; 12) Drifting Heart; 13*) You Can’t Catch Me; 14*) I’ve Changed.
REVIEW
If you look up «singles artist» in the dictionary, Chuck Berry should be grinning right straight in your face — more than any other artist from the 1950s, perhaps, is the man associated with the jukebox rather than the phonograph. Consequently, reviewing his output through his LPs on the Chess label feels exceedingly weird, largely because the sequencing throws chronology out the window and may easily concatenate tracks separated from each other by three or four years — not so big a deal, perhaps, as it would be in the 1960s, but still disorienting.
On the other hand, some part of me insists that discussing Chuck Berry is quite necessary in terms of LPs, because it is only those LPs — rather than singles, or even best-of compilations — that give you a wholesome picture of Chuck Berry the Artist rather than merely Chuck Berry the Founding Father of Rock’n’Roll. Nobody could ever deny that ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ and ‘Johnny B. Goode’ are the exact reasons why Chuck Berry was sent down to Earth; but after you have properly sat through the majority of Chuck’s output from his peak years, you might get a deeper and juicier appreciation for these rock’n’roll classics by placing them in the wider context of Berry’s musical hobbies, interests, and emotions. Maybe he was not that much more than ‘Johnny B. Goode’, but much of that extra territory is still worth an excursion or two, and I will be more than happy to serve as your humble guide for it.
By the time Chess had decided that their most rambunctious artist deserved his own LP, Chuck had already spent almost two years on the label and had seven singles, most of them Top 10 R&B hits, under his belt. The biggest ones (‘Maybellene’, which put him on the radar; ‘Thirty Days’, an homage to Hank Williams; and ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, an homage to the heroes of classical music whom Chuck politely asked out the door) are not included here, presumably because they had only recently been included on Rock, Rock, Rock!, the soundtrack to a famous early rock’n’roll musical and Chess Records’ very first LP, on which Chuck Berry shared the bill with the Moonglows and the Flamingos, decent R&B ensembles in their own right but quickly eclipsed by the genius of Mr. Berry. Other than that, After School Session does a fairly decent job of collecting all the other A- and B-sides from 1955 to early 1957, and throws a couple of previously unreleased instrumental tracks to complete the picture.
The title of the LP is a fairly obvious reference to Chuck’s latest single at the time, which is also the first track here — ‘School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes The Bell)’ — but it is actually more symbolic than that. Leonard Chess and his people very quickly understood that, by signing Chuck to their label, they were tapping into a completely new target group: where Chess Records’ usual music, the slow, dark, heavy Chicago blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, largely appealed to black and/or «mature» white audiences, Berry’s faster, lighter, and generally funnier music with its casually mundane topics would first and foremost appeal to bored teenagers, looking for a ray of hope. So it is hardly surprising that the first song on Chuck’s first LP is the straightforward schoolroom anthem of 1957; in fact, it is the very first song in a long series of school-bashing anthems which goes all the way to ‘School’s Out’ and ‘Another Brick In The Wall, Pt. 2’ — except that, unlike Alice Cooper and Roger Waters, Chuck Berry is a friendly and humorous guy, and instead of spewing active hatred, he poeticizes passive boredom, the only salvation from which is, of course, the juke joint.
In a way, ‘School Day’, though certainly not the most famous Chuck Berry song (too slow!), might be the quintessential Chuck Berry song — and not just because it is so anthemic (no coincidence that "hail, hail, rock’n’roll!" was adopted for the title of the famous concert film), but because there are few other songs in the man’s catalog matching the total and absolute adoration for his guitar displayed in this performance. I mean, Chuck loved his guitar —L-O-V-E-d it to the heights of absurdity, more so than any other guitar hero in the 1950s and possibly more than anybody else until Hendrix came along and kicked that love into an even more modern age. The very first ringing riff in ‘School Day’, of course, imitates the school bell — but that is just the beginning of the story, because the rest of it consists of a long, engaging, immersive dialog between Chuck Berry, the singer, and his faithful instrument. Chuck may be one of the earlier Riffmeisters, but just like the best Riffmeisters of the 1960s, such as Keith Richards and Pete Townshend, he is too easily bored to pin down an entire performance to just one repetitive riff. Instead, his guitar here follows all the minor nuances and inclinations of his voice: "Up in the morning and out to school!" (upbeat, rousing, get-up-and-shine high-pitched riff), "the teacher is teaching the Golden Rule" (gruff, stern, low-pitched riff — teachers are no fun), "American history, practical math" (nagging, sneering, nasal twang riff — yadda yadda yadda), "you studying hard and hoping to pass" (repeat nagging, sneering riff, but now it’s mocking you, the wretched protagonist), and so on.
But the coolest thing about the song is how it actually goes from a symbolic condemnation of the American school system, with the repetitive one-note riffs mocking the monotonous boredom of the classroom, to a laudatory hymn on the liberating power of rock music — without changing the melody even once. Somewhere along the way, "Ring! Ring! Goes the bell" becomes "Hail! Hail! Rock and roll", and the exact same riffs that, just a minute ago, were used to vent your negative feelings, take on a powerful, celebratory nature. It’s like a goddamn optical illusion — you know that, of course, your brain is driven by Chuck’s words which convey extra meaning to his notes, but it still feels weirdly unexplainable. "The feeling is there, body and soul" indeed.
As you move on to the man’s other brilliant singles, such as ‘Too Much Monkey Business’, one more thing that catches the eye is the excellency of Chuck’s backing band. Although he never made it big as a proper electric blues artist, he did record at Chess, where the resident bass player, for instance, was the great Willie Dixon, and when you hear the big man slap that big bass, one thing you totally get is that we ain’t in Nashville any more — most of Chuck’s classic hits have a tougher, grittier «bottom» sound than that of the white boys’ rockabilly bands. And while the song is usually remembered for its lyrics — an innovative, beatnik-ish approach to phrase crafting as well as an early milestone in the history of rap — for me the song really gets cooking during the instrumental break, with Chuck’s machine-gun licks blasting over Dixon’s wobbly echo chamber and Johnnie Johnson’s smooth, but inobtrusive piano playing in the background.
The B-side to ‘Too Much Monkey Business’ was even better, though. ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man’ has two things in its favor — (a) it arguably has the single juiciest guitar sound in Chuck Berry history, a perfect combination of slightly crackling distortion with a bit of extra treble presaging the legendary «woman tone» and (b) it features Chuck’s poetry at its most inventive and symbolic (forgive the man for misspelling Milo Venus as Marlo Venus, it actually makes the song a bit more quizzical). The feeling is clearly narcissistic — I bet Chuck was quite counting on attracting the ladies with the tune — but it is narcissistic in a most charming and friendly way, loaded with a powerful optimistic charge right from the opening notes. The man may have been quite well-known for having a bad temper, but one place where he never let it show was on his recordings: each single Chuck Berry song is always life-affirming, even when he enters critical mode (‘Too Much Monkey Business’ just has him shrug off all the innumerable life's problems like so much water off a dog’s back).
Actually, come to think of it, this record does feature at least one exception, which is exactly why Chuck’s LPs, or at least some of his lesser known tracks, are worth studying. ‘Down Bound Train’, one of the first known rock songs to open with a fade-in and close with a fade-out, is a fast, terse, one-note rockabilly stomper threatening alcohol abusers with fire and brimstone, and its proto-punkish melodic structure and moody atmosphere make it a unique standout. If Nick Cave ever joins a Chuck Berry tribute somewhere, this is definitely the song for him to cover — Chuck himself does not quite have the imposing voice to properly convey all the terror of the lyrical imagery. No idea why he had chosen such a morose subject for the B-side to ‘No Money Down’, which was in itself a rather forgettable effort to turn ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ / ‘I’m A Man’ / ‘Mannish Boy’ etc. into a car-themed piece of slow rock’n’roll.
But even if not all the songs here work on an equally impressive level, I would still ask not to ignore Chuck’s instrumentals. On ‘Deep Feeling’, he uses a simple and minimalistic, but efficient slide-playing technique which somehow manages to infuse a bit of rock’n’roll sharpness into this seemingly inoffensive Hawaiian lullaby, cleverly playing with sharp tones, dissonance, and distortion to sting you in the face in your hammock every few seconds or so. On ‘Berry Pickin’, he carries out a key-changing experiment, alternating the tune between a happy Latin jingle and a driving piece of rock’n’roll — not sure if it actually «works», but at least it is not generic. And ‘Roly Poly’ is just a cool three-minute jam where you get to enjoy all of Chuck’s — and Johnnie Johnson’s, for that matter — trademark licks in one go.
All of these great-to-nice moments easily wipe out the negative effects from a few pieces of obsolete filler, e.g. ‘Havana Moon’, one of Chuck’s less convincing genre experiments — not because he sucks at impersonating Caribbean accents (he does, though), but because impersonating a Caribbean accent seems to be the song’s only point, as it is essentially a very repetitive joke tune about an unlucky Cuban guy failing to make it with an American girl. Also, ‘Wee Wee Hours’ is a good example of why Leonard Chess actually pushed Chuck away from recording stereotypical slow 12-bar blues — Dixon and Johnson are always a gas to listen to, but Chuck Berry as a deep blues howler just does not cut the mustard. Of course, maybe he just had too many teeth for that kind of business — I couldn’t say for certain that Sonny Boy Williamson had a better singing voice, but Sonny Boy could pull off that kind of schtick convincingly and Chuck... well, not after ‘Brown-Eyed Handsome Man’ he couldn’t.
Still, After School Session shows that the place is often every bit as important as the time: I can’t help but wonder if Chuck’s talents would be just as appreciated, or if Chuck, rather than just about anyone else, could have become the major, the quintessential rock’n’roll idol for an entire generation of British kids overseas, if he had exercised his songwriting talents somewhere other than Chicago. Even if the cheery nature of his songs, on the surface, seems the farthest thing away from the solemnity and gloominess of Chicago’s blues greats, the music still bears that seal, and in the end it is the volatile combination of seemingly incompatible ingredients that does the trick. In the world of 1950s rock’n’rollers where about half of the guys had their roots in the country sounds of Nashville, and the other half in the jump blues and R&B sounds of popular African-American entertainment, Chuck pretty much stood alone with his influences and environment — and as far as I am concerned, those were the best possible influences and environment. Which is why, you know, there’s Chuck Berry, and then there’s everyone else, as good as they are. Period.
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