Tracks: 1) Bye Bye Johnny; 2) Worried Life Blues; 3) Down The Road A Piece; 4) Confessin’ The Blues; 5) Too Pooped To Pop; 6) Mad Lad; 7) I Got To Find My Baby; 8) Betty Jean; 9) Childhood Sweetheart; 10) Broken Arrow; 11) Driftin’ Blues; 12) Let It Rock.
REVIEW
Although there are a few critics and fans out there who would, without batting an eye, place Chuck’s fourth LP at the same level of quality as the classic trilogy (including Bruce Eder writing for the All-Music Guide, whose description of the record once again reminds me about the curiously different ways of human brain wiring) — I think it’s fair to say that, on the whole, Rockin’ At The Hops has not gone down in history as a particularly memorable LP of original Chuck Berry material. For that matter, not a single subsequent Chuck Berry LP would go down in history as particularly memorable, with the possible exception of a brief «comeback» with St. Louis To Liverpool after Chuck’s prison term.
The reason for this decline is occasionally indicated to have been the beginning of Chuck’s legal persecution — the infamous «Apache Trials» of the early 1960s, which, back at the time, were commonly perceived as doubly motivated by racism and anti-rock’n’roll sentiment, but today have begun to be re-evaluated as reflecting Chuck’s predatory relations with young ladies (you can read all about it in this detailed write-up of the story of Chuck Berry and Janice Escalanti). All of that, to some degree or other, is probably true — the racism, the hatred for rock’n’roll, and Chuck’s appetite for easily exploitable teenage girls — but as tempting as it would be to just forget all about the music and turn this text into a moral judgement of corrupt Western society, it is more important to note, at this particular juncture, that at least half of the songs that make up Rockin’ At The Hops, had been recorded in mid-1959, at the peak of Chuck’s fame, way before the Escalanti incident even happened (that was in December of the same year), let alone went to trial.
Just look at all those songs recorded at Chess Studios on July 27–29, 1959: ‘Betty Jean’, ‘County Line’ (this outtake stayed unreleased until the 1970s), ‘Childhood Sweetheart’, Count Basie’s ‘One O’Clock Jump’ (another outtake), ‘Broken Arrow’, ‘Let It Rock’, ‘Too Pooped To Pop’, ‘Say You’ll Be Mine’, ‘Let Me Sleep Woman’. Any of these ring a bell? Well, maybe ‘Let It Rock’, which was resurrected by the Stones for their early 1970s tours and has since then been covered by a variety of neo-rockabilly and plain nostalgic artists. But even ‘Let It Rock’ ain’t no ‘Johnny B. Goode’... oh, that’s right: ‘Let It Rock’ is ‘Johnny B. Goode’, only without the hooks.
Considering that the previous Chess session, held in February of that same year, gave us at least two quite memorable classics (‘Almost Grown’ and ‘Back In The USA’), we can now safely identify the time period from February to July as the time frame in which Chuck Berry’s personal muse, which had been so generous to him over the previous four years, packed up her things and quietly left the apartment. Perhaps she got a disturbing premonition that one of these days, her lover boy would decide to traffick her, too, across state borders for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery. But more likely, she simply decided that her mission with this guy was done. They had a 4-year contract going on, and on May 21, 1959, the 4th anniversary of recording ‘Maybellene’ at Chess Studios, it just happened to expire. I have no other explanation, but there you have it — a plain, unadorned, transparent case of the «Fifties’ Curse» in action.
Naturally, some things cannot be simply taken away. The groove, the (sometimes working, sometimes not) humor, the ability to play exciting lead guitar — all of that is evident on ‘Let It Rock’, and Chuck’s little unfinished horror story of a bunch of railroad workers caught by surprise by an off-schedule train nicely reminds you of his taste for combining the mundane, the merry, and the macabre, except that the song is called ‘Let It Rock’ for some reason, and that’s the only message that the absolute majority of listeners shall ever get from it (particularly if you hear the Stones version, where it is impossible to make out a single word of what Mick Jagger is singing).
What is not at all evident is what precisely motivated Chuck to take the verse melody of ‘Johnny B. Goode’, refill it with new lyrics, completely omit the chorus and re-record the song as it is, replacing the chorus with a couple of off-kilter guitar solos. Yes, some of his B-sides and LP filler tracks in the past might have been like this, but this was the very first time he decided to release a blatantly lazy re-write as an A-side — and although such was his glory at the time that it still somehow managed to chart (in February 1960, one month before the start of the trial), it would be his last entry in the Top 100 before the temporary «comeback» of 1964.
The rest of the session brings no surprises — it is quite consistently lacklustre. ‘Betty Jean’ is a blatant re-write of ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ which turns an originally constructed and humorously uplifting anthem to rock’n’roll into a simplistic love declaration, with corny backing vocals ("sing the song Chuckie boy" is just gross) and a half-baked guitar solo buried deep in the mix. ‘Childhood Sweetheart’ is a formulaic piece of uptempo 12-bar blues on which Chuck is so bored, he even gets to playing the ‘Dust My Broom’ riff for a while. Meanwhile, ‘Broken Arrow’ continues the tradition of ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man’ in giving us several humorous lyrical vignettes connected by a single theme... in this case, the theme being «stupid behavior» where an Indian chief getting into battle with a superior tribe is compared to the idea of sending your lady out shopping and ending up having her spend all your money on "a mink stole here and a chinchilla there". Uh... okay. It’s one thing to have Chuck Berry recycling his own riffs, but when he starts recycling his own sense of humor, that’s where the real trouble begins.
The last song from July 1959 that made it onto the LP is one I’m rather conflicted about: on one hand, ‘Too Pooped To Pop’ at least sounds a little different — it is the first time, if I’m not mistaken, when a Chuck Berry song is driven by sax rather than guitar and piano; it’s also got a moderately catchy chorus, and the lyrics, about an old geezer («Casey» – not Casey Jones, though!) trying to get hip with the kids, are at least funnier than the ones on ‘Broken Arrow’. On the other hand, the song, written by Billy Davis (mostly known at the time for co-writing hits for Jackie Wilson, and later — for the Coca-Cola jingles), is a clear mismatch: its nonchalant attitude and relaxed New Orleanian vibe rather makes it ideal for the likes of warm-climate Huey "Piano" Smith than cold-climate Chuck Berry. Toothless vaudeville like that works best with natural clowns, and while Chuck did enjoy clowning, that’s not quite the same as being a clown, if you get my drift — I’m sure somebody like Pete Townshend would definitely get it, for instance.
As we finally move into 1960, we find that things start to get a little different. The piano on these later tracks is mostly handled by Ellis "Lafayette" Leake instead of Johnnie Johnson; whether this is in any way connected with Chuck’s sudden predilection towards slow blues numbers is questionable (Leake did play on some of his slower numbers earlier on, but he also played on ‘Rock And Roll Music’ and ‘Little Queenie’, so no generalizations here) — but it is possible to assume that by early 1960 Chuck was in a more somber mood than usual, for obvious reasons. Hence, ‘Driftin’ Blues’, recorded on February 12, 1960 in an extremely (for Chuck) self-pitying manner: "if my baby would only take me back again / well you know I ain’t good for nothin’ and I haven’t got a friend" sounds quite convincing under the circumstances. Ironically, even though slow mournful blues is probably one of the last styles we’d ever want to associate Chuck Berry with, at this point in his career he may be doing it better than anything else — it’s definitely got more feeling than the comparatively upbeat, horns-driven take on ‘I Got To Find My Baby’, a song that hearkens back to the days of jump blues and slow Little Richard-style R&B.
From late March and early April of the same year comes the last bunch of songs, spearheaded by ‘Bye Bye Johnny’ — at least this time around, the song does not even pretend to be masquerading as something other than a continuation of ‘Johnny B. Goode’. You could make a case for ‘Bye Bye Johnny’ from the change-of-perspective angle, what with the lyrics focusing on the mother rather than the son this time around ("she remembered taking money out from gathering crop / and buying Johnny’s guitar at a broker shop" — hey, if you’re not tearing up around this point, you got a heart of stone, mister!), but problem A is that an emotional mother’s perspective does not agree all too well with the rock’n’rolling rhythm, and problem B is — do we really give that much of a damn? ‘Bye Bye Johnny’ is simply one of those sequels, like ‘Jim Dandy Got Married’ or ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’, whose only reason of existence is to remind us of the frailty, predictability, and general weakness of the human mind.
The covers are generally just as devoid of interest as the self-rewrites: ‘Worried Life Blues’, on which Chuck struggles to find a common language with Matt Murphy on lead guitar, is worthless next to Ray Charles’ soulful version from the same year, and ‘Confessin’ The Blues’ is equally worthless next to Little Walter’s soulful version from 1958. The best of these recordings is probably ‘Down The Road A Piece’, which is also a cover of a pretty old tune (by Don Raye, from 1940) that Chuck most likely adapted from the Amos Milburn boogie-woogie version (he even adapts some of Amos’ piano licks for his guitar); it features Berry’s best soloing on the entire album, although the tempo is a little slovenly — something the Stones understood well enough when covering the song in 1964 at Chess Studios, under Chuck’s very eyes.
Come to think of it, it is quite telling that the Stones played so many songs off this very album — ‘Bye Bye Johnny’, ‘Down The Road Apiece’ and ‘Confessin’ The Blues’ ended up on their early studio records (although the latter rather follows Little Walter’s version than Chuck’s), while ‘Let It Rock’, as I already said, ended up in their live set later on in the game. In addition, the Animals played ‘Worried Life Blues’ (though, again, they probably were more inspired by Ray Charles than Chuck), and the Beatles covered ‘I Got To Find My Baby’ for their BBC sessions. One might think that this was all due to Rockin’ At The Hops being such a great album — but in reality, it was precisely because these songs were so relatively inferior that the white British kids hoped to be better able to put their own stamp on them. And ‘Down The Road Apiece’ is a classic example of that — with all due respect to Chuck, the Stones’ version really flies where Chuck’s barely finds the strength to get off the ground.
Naturally, if you lower your expectations low enough, Rockin’ At The Hops is still quite a classic Chuck Berry experience, perhaps a little bit overloaded with slow blues songs, but still featuring that inimitable late-Fifties Chicago sound in all of its atmospheric glory. I’d be lying if I said that ‘Let It Rock’ and ‘Bye Bye Johnny’ do not «rock». But all through the mid-1950s, Chuck Berry amazed the world by constantly finding new ways to make his stuff «rock» — different chord changes, different vocal hooks, different theatrical approaches — and this here is the breaking point when he simply ran out of those new ways, fair and square. I’d honestly trade a couple of years of my current life for a chance to have been his roadie from early to mid-1959, just to be able to see how exactly he «lost the way». Too much money? Too many fast cars or young Apache girls? Too much pressure from the industry? Too tired from touring? Too pooped to pop? Or was that simply a case of, you know — creative exhaustion, when the pool of potential ideas that your brain has been given at birth has been drained and there’s absolutely no way to refill it from the outside?..
Only Solitaire reviews: Chuck Berry
Enjoyed your take on this phase of CB’s career. A further point of interest: there’s a good case to make (based on my research/analysis) that we’re talking not just about CB’s muse leaving him, but also JJ’s (see https://theconversation.com/amp/was-chuck-berry-the-lone-genius-hes-made-out-to-be-75442 and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3226721).
Just about every composer/performer of music of any kind has run up against a wall at some point, usually sooner than later. It's almost maddingly unnatural to expect a musical artist to keep mining the same creative spring that, by some mysterious alchemy, he was endowed with. This goes for just about any modern composer of the last 100+ years, with very few exceptions (the classical music greats like Bach, Beethoven et al are in a realm of their own, and were clearly powered by very different creative batteries!) Chuck Berry was gifted with a unique talent for inventing seminal riffs on the relatively new electric guitar, which spawned all manner of rock songs for decades to come. It's a sure sign of our very modern gluttony that we demand more from someone who had patently given his all, and in this case the very bricks (not forgetting Blues music!) with which the richest explosion of music of all time were put in place.