Tracks: 1) Almost Grown; 2) Carol; 3) Maybellene; 4) Sweet Little Rock & Roller; 5) Anthony Boy; 6) Johnny B. Goode; 7) Little Queenie; 8) Jo Jo Gunne; 9) Roll Over Beethoven; 10) Around And Around; 11) Hey Pedro; 12) Blues For Hawaiians.
REVIEW
Chess Records had chosen the strategy of summarizing Chuck Berry’s output in LP form on a yearly basis — but as the summer of 1959 rolled along and there still was not enough completely new material to fill up two entire sides, they decided that they had no choice but to go back to the past and complete the record with just about anything that had so far eluded LP representation, even if it meant starting out with Chuck’s very first single from way back in 1955. The result was Berry Is On Top, a much more pompous pun than One Dozen Berrys and a much more chaotic agglomeration of tracks — but also, unquestionably, the most consistent and filler-free release of the original «classic trilogy». At least half of the songs on here were instant classics, quickly adopted by many giants of the British Invasion and familiar even to the most casual customers of rock’n’roll music — I mean, when you have ‘Johnny B. Goode’, ‘Little Queenie’, and ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ sitting on the same record, what’s left but to just give up? In mid-1959, Chuck Berry was on top, and if not for this irresistible attraction to underage Apache waitresses — all part of God’s plan to destroy rock’n’roll music, of course — who knows how much longer the man would have remained there.
To knock the hype down just a little bit, let us first toss out the clunkers — no Chuck Berry album is completely filler-free, though even the man’s misses at the time have an intriguing aspect to them. First on the list is ‘Hey Pedro’, the original B-side to ‘Carol’, a limp, repetitive, utterly passion-free Latin vamp over which Chuck ad-libs some parodic lines in his mock-Cuban accent, already familiar from ‘La Juanda’ — I don’t exactly know what in particular Chuck could have against Cubans (he didn’t spend that much time in Florida, did he?), but once again, his sense of humor totally fails him once he puts aside his rock’n’roll spirits and substitutes them for parodies of stereotypes. And I wouldn’t even mind an offensive parody of a stereotype if the music was up to par — but this shit sounds like it was just quickly tossed off in a couple of minutes when he suddenly realized he’d booked studio time without writing enough material.
Next on the list are two odd, but ultimately not-too-exciting A-sides on which Chuck also tried to do something «different». ‘Anthony Boy’ seems to be picking up the vibe of ‘School Days’ with its all-too-personal tale of an unlucky schoolboy bullied and humiliated by his wicked girl classmates — but if ‘School Days’ was a rebellious anthem of rock’n’roll as a means of liberation from the tyranny of the classroom, then ‘Anthony Boy’ is basically just a joke song; deceptively opening with the exact same guitar trill as ‘School Days’, it then immediately turns into a goofy boy scout marching ditty which has Chuck Berry inventing Herman’s Hermits five years before Herman’s Hermits invented themselves. As a filler B-side, it would have been comprehensible; as an A-side, it was an embarrassment, and predictably opened 1959 as one of Chuck’s biggest flops — what was he even thinking?
Only marginally better — though for completely different reasons — is ‘Jo Jo Gunne’, a very strange rocking tune which opens with the usual ‘Roll Over Beethoven / Johnny B. Goode / Carol’ riff but quickly turns into another repetitive, echoey, muddy vamp over which Chuck tells us a long, long, LONG story of the adventures of... wild animals in Africa "in ancient history, four thousand B.C.". All I remember from the narrative is that there was a monkey, a lion, and a kangaroo (Chuck’s knowledge of African zoology certainly leaves a lot to be desired, but then again, maybe he thought four thousand B.C. was such a long time ago, you couldn’t go wrong even if you threw in some mammoths and dinosaurs), but otherwise, the narrative went absolutely nowhere, the humor was non-existent, the brief in-between verse breaks had the sole purpose of letting Chuck catch a breath, and the entire song seemed to have one and only one purpose — to make you wonder if Chuck Berry had really gone crazy or if he was just throwing one of his pranks on his audiences. (Apparently, it did impress some people — like a few members of the great psychedelic band Spirit, for instance — enough to have them form a band named Jo Jo Gunne in the early 1970s, which was probably the biggest legacy the song left behind).
Finally, the sole LP-only track here, closing off the album, is ‘Blues For Hawaiians’, an instrumental exploring the same moods and techniques that Chuck had already demonstrated earlier on the Hawaiian-influenced ‘Deep Feeling’, except this time he really goes overboard with the «floating» sliding sound. It feels cool for a few seconds, but quickly gets tedious — Chuck is no virtuoso, and he cannot achieve the same level of expressivity with his «Hawaiian guitar» that he can with his rock’n’roll antics, so ultimately it’s just three and a half minutes of lost time for all of us.
But once we have sacrificed all that stuff to the hungry God of Filler, there are still eight absolutely indispensable classics left on the platter — songs that I am really reluctant to comment upon, because what sort of new things under the sun could be said about ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ or ‘Johnny B. Goode’? Well, since pretty much all of these are known from multiple cover versions as well, let me just run a brief comparative analysis to see if any of those had made the original «expendable» or if there are certain elements about Chuck’s own versions that still kick the shit out of everybody else. Starting off in chronological order, we have...
...well, ‘Maybellene’, of course, Chuck’s very first single that put him on the map. Never, as of yet, heard it done better by anybody — perhaps the original is grossly lo-fi even compared to Chuck’s later recordings, with the lead guitar sounding as if it were played out of a tightly zipped suitcase, but the tempo, the jackhammer, proto-Motörhead percussion, the rapid fire passion in the vocals; all of these elements create a feel of overdrive which often, though not always, characterizes a great artist’s first offering, when he knows it’s now or never, it’s gonna make him or break him, and gives out 200%. Listen to that guitar break — the mad flurry of Berry-licks loosed like shrapnel on the audience. Not only did nobody play guitar like this back in 1955, but I don’t think even Chuck himself played it quite like that again ever after. Who’s gonna kick his ass over this one? Gerry and the Pacemakers? Don’t make me laugh.
‘Roll Over Beethoven’ — I think the one «alternate» version we all have in mind is the Beatles’, with George Harrison taking lead vocals. (Well, there’s also ELO, of course, but any version of ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ that crosses Chuck Berry with actual Beethoven has to be regarded from a «meta» perspective, so we’ll leave that one out). Beatles’ covers of Chuck Berry are not to be laughed off — remember how they so fully realized the anthemic potential of ‘Rock’n’Roll Music’ — but what they always tend to do is make the songs sound more serious than they were originally intended. Here, for instance, they (a) slightly slow down the tempo, so that you might get a little more inclination to listen and a little less to dance, (b) give the song a grumbly, distorted, vampy riff which makes it feel busier and more insistent, if not outright aggressive, (c) have George deliver the message in an almost wartime-proclamation tone, without the slightest hint of humor contained in Chuck’s original delivery. So you could think of the Beatles’ version as ‘Roll Over Beethoven With A Ball And Chain’, whereas Chuck does that with more of a feather-tickle touch. I’ll take both and choose one depending on how pissed off I feel at this particular time of day.
‘Johnny B. Goode’ — forget it. Not even Marty McFly does a ‘Johnny B. Goode’-enough to replace the original version. Not a single artist in the world has ever managed to come up with a way to steal that song from Chuck. It’s been imitated, mutated, mutilated (Hendrix played some totally crazyass live versions), but nobody ever made it more exciting than the combination of Chuck’s guitar, Chuck’s vocals, and Johnnie Johnson’s barrelhouse blues piano rolls. If not the sole, then the primary reason for Chuck Berry being put on Earth was to give us ‘Johnny B. Goode’, and nobody can take it away. Not even worth discussing.
‘Around And Around’, the B-side to ‘Johnny B. Goode’, is another matter. Of the two British Invasion bands who laid their grubby hands on the song — the Animals and the Stones — I unquestionably select the Stones’ version as definitive, and I think they annihilated Chuck with their performance. Perhaps he just did not give it enough attention, being so busy with ‘Johnny’ and all, but the original is a little underdeveloped: the vocals feel slightly tired, the piano is stuck too deeply into the background, and while the classic guitar riff is already there, it feels thin and wimpy. The impression is that the Stones put more soul and belief in the song than Chuck did himself, making it their definitive early rock’n’roll anthem — no wonder they used it to open their famous performance on the T.A.M.I. Show. Great rock’n’roll performance from all parties involved, but in the event of a need to score, it’s one less for Chuck and one more for the British boys.
The Stones present an equally serious challenge to ‘Carol’, which they also tightened up and made far more dangerous and ballistic than the original, but this is the same case as with ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ — one might argue that they made it a bit too serious, taking out the goofy humor of Chuck’s story about a guy who has to learn to dance in order to keep his girl safe from competitors. The best thing about the song is the exciting, unpredictable dialog between Chuck and his own lead guitar — echoing each of his vocal lines with a subtle mood twist — but the clinch here is that Keith Richards totally got that, and made his guitar engage in an equally meaningful dialog with Jagger’s delivery. (He would explore that dialog even further when the Stones would seriously slow the song down on their 1969 American tour, as captured on the Ya-Ya’s album). Ultimately, it’s a tie.
‘Sweet Little Rock’n’Roller’ probably has its main competitor in Rod Stewart’s 1974 hit version — though I have always preferred his live performance of the song with the Faces and guest star Keith Richards which, captured on video, is like the ultimate embodiment of the garishness, flamboyance, narciccism, drugged-out nonchalance, reckless abandon and total excitement of the glammy mid-Seventies. The funny thing is that Rod had to change Chuck’s original lyric of "she’s nine years old and sweet as she can be" to "nineteen years old" — apparently, in 1959 it was still possible to sing the song as if it were really innocently describing the joy of a little girl discovering the excitement of rock’n’roll music, but in 1974, the sexual revolution imposed certain rules of its own. Anyway, I’m torn here, but ultimately ‘Sweet Little Rock’n’Roller’ feels like something that is best experienced in an exorbitantly inebriated state of mind, so I’m giving the nod to Stewart, the Faces, Keith, and whoever else was rocking the glamhouse down with the song in the most decadent years of the Me decade. It almost feels as if Chuck was seeing far ahead into the future when he wrote about "five thousand tongues screamin’ more, more! and about fifteen hundred waitin’ outside the door" — predicting arena-rock way before it happened.
Next to this, ‘Almost Grown’ feels almost hush-hushy, a quiet little tale about a teenage guy who doesn’t really want to do much — just a perfect little bourgeois anthem for all those kids who don’t want to break down windows and knock down doors, but would rather just get their eyes on a little girl (ironically, the backing vocals keep chanting "night and day, night and day", which is clearly a stylistic reference to Ray Charles’ ‘The Night Time Is The Right Time’, which goes to show that even unpretentious, non-rebellious quiet bourgeois kids can still have their natural urges like everybody else). But unlike something like ‘Anthony Boy’, the song is quite rock’n’roll in essence, catchy, fun, and memorable — although I can certainly understand why, unlike the previous six, it was hardly ever covered by anybody of importance, meaning that Chuck wins by definition through total lack of competition. Night and day.
Finally, there’s ‘Little Queenie’, possibly the last great classic to come out of Chuck Berry’s songbook — and one of his most compositionally complex, going from a sung blues verse to a spoken bridge section before erupting in the rock’n’roll chorus. Again, it’s a triumphant show of Chuck’s subtle, but always relevant psychologism as he describes, page by page, all the stages of inviting an unknown attractive girl to dance — and maybe a little something extra — and the song is totally made by that quiet, half-spoken bridge ("meanwhile... I was thinkin’... she’s in the mood... no need to break it...") which finally turns deliberation into decisiveness. This magic has no equals, although Jerry Lee Lewis, another master of rock’n’roll suspense (in fact, mood-wise ‘Little Queenie’ shares a lot with ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’), came pretty close. (So did the Stones on the 1969 tour, though they also slowed down the song, giving it a wholly different flavor). The almost desperate guitar breaks at the end of the song are the ultimate kicker — some of those licks would later end up on the Stones’ cover of ‘Down The Road Apiece’ — so chalk one more up for Chuck here.
The one single from 1959 that did not manage to make it onto the album was ‘Back In The U.S.A.’, coupled with ‘Memphis Tennessee’ — repeating the theme of «bourgeois contentment» with the former and Chuck’s somewhat creepy fascination with little kids on the latter. Neither of the two is a particular favorite of mine, but both are classics all the same, and I’d certainly rather have the Chuck Berry original of ‘Back In The U.S.A.’, with its sincere giddiness of realization how lucky one is, after all, to live in a first world country, even despite all of its well-known problems, to Linda Ronstadt’s cover from the sickly hedonistic year of 1978. As for ‘Memphis Tennessee’... everybody covered it and nobody could ever do anything interesting with it (though I like the little guitar riff that the Animals appended to the end of each verse on their version), so, again, consider the original unsurpassed.
This concludes our little game which didn’t really have much of a purpose to it other than to loyally support the greatness of Berry Is On Top with loads of text. But if you don’t need a load of text to get the idea that something can be really great, and prefer instead to go with something ultra-laconic, then how about this: the rock’n’roll of Chuck Berry is the thickest foundational pillar of 20th century pop culture, and Berry Is On Top has the densest concentration of Chuck Berry’s rock’n’roll anywhere other than on an extensive compilation. What else really needs to be said?..
Regarding Chuck and Johnnie, here’s a fun in-depth investigation into whether JJ played on the JBG recording: http://www.crlf.de/ChuckBerry/blog/archives/174-The-Johnny-B.-Goode-Session.html. Btw, George, I love the original v. covers contest here. One of my favorite things you’ve done, and that’s saying something.