Review: Chuck Berry - New Juke Box Hits (1961)

Tracks: 1) I’m Talking About You; 2) Diploma For Two; 3) Thirteen Question Method; 4) Away From You; 5) Don’t You Lie To Me; 6) The Way It Was Before; 7) Little Star; 8) Route 66; 9) Sweet Sixteen; 10) Run Around; 11) Stop And Listen; 12) Rip It Up.

REVIEW

The title of this LP is a downright lie, or, to put it more mildly, a classic example of wishful thinking. Only one song on New Juke Box Hits could have really squeezed inside a juke box — ‘Little Star’, released as a single in early 1961 — and it was anything but a hit. In fact, even if Chuck’s reputation had not plummeted because of the «Apache Trials», I have a hard time imagining anybody getting particularly excited by this somnambulant doo-wop waltz, replete with corny backing female vocals and an uninspired guitar solo, lost somewhere deep in the mix. About the only thing here that could raise some empathy are Chuck’s own vocals, unusually tender, vulnerable, and pleading: "Although you are so very far / Please help me, help me, little star".

As we have already established with the previous review, Chuck’s slide from creative genius to self-plagiarizing mediocrity started quite some time before his legal misfortunes; however, there is still a fuzzy atmospheric line that separates New Juke Box Hits from Rockin’ At The Hops, namely, an all-pervading atmosphere of misery, depression, and bitterness, and this is most certainly due to the fact that all of these songs come from sessions extended over the period of early 1960 to early 1961, all through which Chuck was busy getting tried, convicted, and then waiting for his appeal, before finally accepting his fate and heading to jail in early 1962. Admittedly, it would be unreasonable to expect too many of those songs to even try to sound happy — and when they do, it would be reasonable to expect that we wouldn’t be too convinced. Case in point: ‘Thirteen Question Method’, a little romantic dance number with a tinge of bossa nova that feels like a loose rewrite of ‘Thirty Days’. The lyrical challenge is amusing — you’re supposed to guess the nature and intentions of the «thirteenth question» yourself — but Chuck’s singing and playing feel totally off, as if his mind was really elsewhere at the time. (And how could it not be? The recording session was held exactly one month after his original conviction). Play it next to ‘Reelin’ And Rockin’ and feel the difference — this here is the sound of a man who has no strength to simulate vivaciousness.

It is telling that two more «rockers» here date from a special recording session held in January ’61: my guess is that either Chuck himself, or the people at Chess, were so alarmed at the overall morose nature of most of the stuff he’d recorded in 1960 that at least a couple more «classic Chuck Berry-style» rock’n’roll songs were required to make the next LP a viable commercial proposition. By then, however, he’d completely run out of inspiration, so both numbers are covers — and ‘Rip It Up’, at the very least, ends up being Chuck at his least convincing. Next to Little Richard, Elvis, or even Bill Haley, all of whom produced rip-roaring versions of this Saturday night anthem, Chuck’s performance is sluggish, lazy, and showing minimal interest. Rarely do you get to hear a "Saturday night and I’m feelin’ fine" that is less believable than this one.

Bobby Troup’s old travelogue ‘Route 66’ fares a little better, because the song is essentially just a love letter to American toponymics, not necessarily requiring the artist to be jubilant about it; still, next to something like ‘Back In The USA’, Chuck’s one and only true love letter to his home country, there is something monotonously perfunctory in the way he checks off those names one by one — Amarillo, Flagstaff, Barstow — and his piano player, Lafayette Leake, seems to be infected with the same languidness as he plays the keys without any serious emotions. Consequently, the best thing about this recording is that it would be later picked on by the Rolling Stones — to whom all of these mysterious town names were probably like Middle-earth back in early 1964, and who transformed Chuck’s insipid cover into one of the most snappy, tight, killer pieces of nascent British rhythm’n’blues.

Not surprisingly, Chuck fares here a little better with those rockers that trade in his most common stuffing — giddiness and happiness — for anger and bitterness, emotions that he tended to use much more sparingly while being «on top». ‘Don’t You Lie To Me’, a cover of an old blues song, may be understood as a secret message to Janice Escalanti: "You know there’s two kinds of people that I just can’t stand / That’s a lying woman and a cheating man". Regardless of who was in the right and who was in the wrong here, there is no denying, I think, that on this track, at least, Chuck’s singing is far more spirited and infectious than on any of the «happy» rockers. The grumbly «brass farts» that echo each of his lines reinforce the pissed-off feeling, and you can feel some real snap coming out of his fingers for the guitar solo.

Somewhere in the middle stands ‘I’m Talking About You’, another «middling» Chuck original later tried on by the Stones: not exactly an «angry» one, but not exactly «happy», either. The lyrics deal with a story of communication breakdown — Chuck’s protagonist is desperately courting a girl without too much luck — and it is possible that the atmosphere of nervous tension and irritated waiting that permeates the song indirectly correlates with Chuck’s own waiting for the fate of his appeal. In any case, next to ‘Rip It Up’ and ‘Route 66’, recorded at the same session, ‘Talking About You’ is a stand-out, with Chuck’s nervous and irritated "come on and give me a cue, so I can get a message to you!" checking the right emotional box and the guitar solo, again, showing signs of life (although musically, I think, it is Reggie Boyd on bass who is the real hero here — it was a real cool touch to not have him stop along with the rest of the band for the last line of each verse, so that the bass tension of the song could be continuous).

Alas, apart from the small bunch of failed «happy» rockers and the even smaller bunch of semi-successful «pissed-off» rockers, New Juke Box Hits is crammed from top to bottom with slow, dreary, atmospheric blues ballads. And the problem here is that, as much as you might like to disagree with me, Chuck Berry can’t really do «sad». Being moody, pensive, and melancholic simply does not come to him naturally — not in the recording studio, at least. I have already mentioned the disappointing effect of ‘Little Star’; but other broken-hearted ballads like ‘Away From You’ or ‘Stop And Listen’ sound every bit as amateurish. If I want truly crushing soul-blues like that, I just go all the way to Otis Rush, whose voice and guitar are God’s true gift to every broken-hearted loner; Chuck Berry sounds about as natural being Otis Rush as Meatloaf covering J. J. Cale. Nobody remembers any of those ballads and for a damn good reason. And what’s up with those awful backing vocals all over the place? They sound like they’re taken from some old Andrews Sisters recordings.

A particularly silly decision was to cover Big Joe Turner’s (and B. B. King’s) ‘Sweet Sixteen’ — perhaps triggered by the title’s proximity to ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, in which case it’s a bit of a manipulative trick; Chuck tries to put his own stamp on the song by playing it in a more quiet, hush-hush way than the big, soulful belts of his predecessors, but his attempts at sounding «subtle» are too generic to raise interest. He might not be hitting any bum notes, and his subdued guitar soloing may be technically OK, but how exactly is he going to outplay B. B. King at his own game? And how exactly would his singing here be distinguishable from a veritable horde of plaintive blues crooners who came before him?

Many are the famous cases in the history of rock music when people were able to convert their personal temporary troubles into beautiful and timeless art; New Juke Box Hits should not be included on that list — honestly, it should be locked up in the archives along with Chuck’s court protocols, as little more than a historical document reflecting a particular state of mood at a particular time. With the exception of ‘Talking About You’ and ‘Don’t You Lie To Me’, there is really nothing here worth salvaging, and what else there is only betrays Chuck’s artistic limitations: he is not a natural crooner, not an out­standing bluesman, not a particularly good interpreter of other people’s songs, and not the kind of artist who works well under heavy pressure.

Curiously, Chuck’s last gift to us before heading off to serve his sentence was not half-bad. ‘Come On’, released as a single in October 1961, is both melodically more interesting and emotionally more satisfying than any one tune on New Juke Box Hits. It’s almost unusually poppy for Chuck (a bit influenced by the ongoing twist craze, probably), it features an unusually «colorful» guitar tone (as compared to the more typical ragged and distorted vibe), it has his sister Martha supporting him on backing vocals, and it resonates pretty damn well with his then-current situation: "Everything is wrong since me and my baby parted / All day long I’m walking ’cause I couldn’t get my car started / Laid off from my job and I can’t afford to check it / I wish somebody’d come along and run into and wreck it" feels pretty personal, and the nervous tension feels pretty palpable. When, two years later, the Stones selected the song for their first single, they did a good job with it, but Mick Jagger would deliver the lyrics in the intonation of a dissatisfied mama’s boy — Chuck here sings it with all the heavy load of a grown-up man who’s getting a little tired from being kicked around by life. Unlike the album, ‘Come On’ is a decent enough farewell to the first phase of Chuck Berry’s musical career, brought to an abrupt end by his prison term — from which Mr. Berry would already be emerging into a completely different musical world, one that would, at the very least, want to think twice before deciding to re-embrace the father of rock’n’roll with the same degree of warm welcome as it did before the «Apache Trials».

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