Disgraceland by Jake Brennan

Author:Jake Brennan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: None
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2019-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chuck Berry: Stone alone en route to the next gig.

Even before he was “Chuck Berry,” he was Chuck Berry, which is to say he was a tall, charismatic, brown-eyed handsome man. And he invented rock ’n’ roll.

It started at the Crank Club on Venderventer in St. Louis, Missouri, back in 1954 with the Chuck Berry Combo: Chuck on guitar and vocals, drummer Ebby Hardy, and piano player Johnnie Johnson. The sets were long and the audiences were a demanding mix of black and white country and blues fans. For musicians at the time, if you wanted to keep the gig, you needed to keep the patrons dancing. Make them thirsty enough to keep buying drinks. Chuck caught on quick. When it came to music, Missouri was largely hillbilly country. So Chuck laid it down for the white audience. He overemphasized his diction like the country artists he’d heard on the radio and projected his voice hard over that fast country backbeat. When it came time for a break, Chuck leaned on his hero Nat King Cole’s repertoire. St. Louis wasn’t entirely unsophisticated, and Nat’s songs were well known to both black and white music fans. Chuck’s voice and personality were naturally suited to deliver Nat’s velvety melodies. And to bring it on home again, Chuck dug down into the Delta for those Muddy Waters songs that got him at his core. The band’s regular weekend performances had a predictable rhythm to them. The audience loved it and continuously came back for more.

His band took it all in stride. Understanding that it was the Chuck show. That it was his name in lights. They backed him with the requisite balance of group support and individual personality, but long sets coupled with even the most diverse repertoire of traditional blues, country, and jazz can get stale for the musicians playing it over and over again. The Chuck Berry Combo began to experiment.

Chuck and Johnnie developed a natural call-and-response on guitar and piano. The crowd ate it up. Particularly on the fast numbers. Chuck grew bored with the songs from other artists that he was covering and began putting his own words to the familiar country and blues chord progressions. Within no time, Chuck was writing his own tunes. His poetry now had a beat.

The combo stretched out in these originals in front of the crowd at the Crank Club. Johnnie would eventually tire of playing the rhythm on piano (keeping that left hand pulsing along all night was real work). He’d give it a rest and let his right hand drift lazily along the high keys in response to whatever Chuck was spitting out for vocals. In effect, they created a vacuum. A rhythm vacuum. And without a bass player in the combo, there was a void where there was once a piano pounding out the rhythm in tandem with the drums. The audience picked up on the letdown. Their disinterest was palpable to Chuck. Rather than lay it all back on Johnnie, Chuck figured out how to play Johnnie’s piano rhythm by himself, on guitar.

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