Jimmy Guterman's blog

Chuck Berry is the greatest lyricist in the history of rock and roll. His unprecedented synthesis—blues (especially the jump-band variety), country, and swing funneled through his wry, nonlinear mind—extended ideas about what the new teen form could encompass. Berry took over rock and roll moments after its birth, and anyone who has subsequently picked up a guitar with the desire to write a rock’n'roll song that described real life knows that Berry provided most of the tools. He also coined the word “motorvatin’,” which counts for a lot.

His Chess recordings have a bit of fluff toward the end (Owen and I have already weighed in on “My Ding-a-Ling”), but not much. Those records showcase Berry in his prime, all train-track guitar lines and images of “coffee-colored Cadillacs.” Berry’s prime musical foil is his St. Louis compatriot Johnnie Johnson, a pianist with a blues background whose rhythmic style was so flexible and skeptical that it influenced Chuck’s fret work, not to mention his lyrical world-view. Piano and guitar hop over each other throughout this set, like grinning duelists. Detractors often claim that Berry’s songs “all sound the same,” but they’re referring only to the jump-start guitar introductions that were Berry’s duck-walking trademark—though even those were immediately distinguishable to seasoned fans. There’s a tremendous variety of styles on his Chess tracks: Listen to “Havana Moon,” “School Day,” “Dear Dad,” and “Have Mercy Judge” and hear a performer able to thrive in blues, rhythm and blues, straight rock’n'roll, and his own fusion of them all. The only thing that’s the same is the high quality.

Like Jerry Lee Lewis, Berry alternated between adult and teen topics as surely as he moved from adult to teen beats. Sometimes he could call up lines like the hilarious hyperboles in “No Money Down” (by the end of the song, he has an entire furniture store installed inside his new car) that rang true and immediate to both. Berry’s conversational singing is a major part of his appeal—everyone can understand what he is singing, although some couplets like “it’s way too early for the Congo/So keep a’rockin’ the piano” (from “Rock-and-Roll Music”) have defied attempts at explication for half a century.

Berry presented himself as a guy next door with a penchant for pungent and detailed singing, writing, and guitar-playing. He always considered himself an artist (he allowed none of the usual “It’s junk because it’s for kids” crap), and the most amazing thing about his wildly imaginative work is that there’s no condescension. Although the kids in the audience couldn’t comprehend the singer’s child-custody anguish in “Memphis,” Berry wrote the tune in such an open-ended way that everyone could be included. Everyone could be included: that’s Chuck’s genius in a nutshell.

“They took a light from a honky-tonk/Put the gleam in your eye,” Carl Perkins howls on “Honky Tonk Gal,” one of his many amazing performances on The Classic Carl Perkins, a stellar five-CD boxed set that includes all his recordings for Sun Records and those shortly thereafter. (I just pulled out that box for the first time in many years.) With such a line, Perkins neatly encapsulates rockabilly’s concerns and fears.

Rockabilly, that reckless, primal thrash of honky-tonk country-and-western, is all about conflict—between rural and urban, between barroom adventure and home comfort, between the headfirst sin of Saturday nights and the heartfelt repentance of Sunday mornings. The honky-tonk gal Perkins adores is both his joy (she’s hot stuff and knows it) and his pain (she’s no longer a demure housewife). She’s the conflict of rockabilly personified.

Perkins treats this dilemma the way any self-respecting rockabilly cat would: He blazes out fiery riffs and drives through the quandary in fifth gear. He’ll deal with the consequences of his rampage tomorrow. Even lost in the thrill of taking his Gibson guitar for an unexpected joyride, he knows that somewhere down the road there will be a price to pay. Rockabilly is about release, but its release always has limits—that’s the form’s country birthright. That’s also what makes Perkins, a pure rockabilly performer then and always, different from Elvis Presley or Roy Orbison, rockabilly cats who expanded into straight pop and, in doing so, uprooted themselves. “You could never take the country out of Perkins,” veteran Sun-reissue compiler Colin Escott wrote in one of his many expert liner-note essays, pinpointing what set Perkins apart from Presley and what prevented him from achieving Elvis-like success. Presley, for all his indisputable greatness, sold out for pop success in every way imaginable. Perkins, even in his most banal countrypolitan settings, never surrendered.

This massive set has no fluff. Perkins’s gracious, quavering tenor carries some magnificent country ballads; among the most noteworthy are “Turn Around,” his first professional recording, and “Let the Jukebox Keep on Playing,” the most understated expression of honky-tonk regret and paralysis in post-Hank Williams country music. But Perkins’s meat is his rockabilly, “Blue Suede Shoes” and all that, in which he repeatedly drives full speed to the edge of his world, leans over the cliff to enjoy the view for a brief second, and then, as he knows he must, pulls back and carefully heads home.

“Rockabilly sure takes me over the edge,” top Stray Cat Brian Setzer countered when I threw that idea at him a long time ago, in suburban Massachusetts. “It’s the most menacing music. Heavy metal is kid’s stuff compared to it.” Yes, but Setzer and the many legions who adopted pompadours in the late seventies discovered the music and the accoutrements, not the culture. It’s no accident that most of the rockabilly revivalists came from northern urban areas. To them, rockabilly is Gene Vincent’s leer and Eddie Cochran’s shake without regard for the honky-tonk imperatives behind them. The Stray Cats, since reduced to beer commercials, can afford to shoot over the edge; Perkins and his contemporaries, who didn’t have the luxury of growing up in a society that had already been liberated by rock and roll, had no such romantic alternative.

Yet on “Dixie Fried,” his greatest uptempo composition, Perkins comes as close as any rockabilly performer to going over the edge and living to tell about it. His guitar flashes like the barroom-fight switchblades his tale chronicles; his voice dances with the wobbly exuberance of his brazen, drunken protagonist. “Let’s all get Dixie fried!” he screams, shattering any pretensions to caution, or civilized behavior. The violence escalates and the song smashes to its head-on conclusion, not with the law, but with the inevitable. Perkins may have the gleam of the honky-tonk in his eye, but his eye is fixed on home, where he prays his honky-tonk gal has returned.

Sure, Paul Kelly’s influences keep popping up. Kelly sometimes seems like a rock-critic-invented mixture of Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Graham Parker, Bruce Springsteen, and a half-dozen other significant white male rockers, but this is not why he is so little known in the U.S. (I don’t think that Post, one of his early records, ever came out Stateside. Please let me know in the comments if I’m wrong.) Maybe his eclectic arrangements (Kelly seems to be a big fan of Sandinista!) and leanings toward literature (he named an album after a Raymond Carver story) have seemed forbidding to many. Yet there is nothing dense about Kelly, a Woody Guthrie fan who aspires to similar plainspokenness. His gestures and observations are tiny, unexpected, perfect motions.

Post is Kelly’s third album. He normally records with a band, once called the Messengers. Before then its members answered to the Dots and the Coloured Girls, but Post is a solo acoustic album that emphasizes the dark side of life. Before you start yelling Nebraska, know that the pessimism here is more specific than the broad-minded Springsteen would ever allow. (Also know that Kelly gives himself the marvelous luxury of occasional accompaniment, however spare.) Many of the songs here are lyrically grounded in the first stages of recovery from drug addiction. “White Train” and “Blues for Skip” are explicitly about heroin, and all sorts of junk—drugs and otherwise—thwart the soft vocalist throughout the record.

The soft singing is never intended as quiet comfort. The singer in “Adelaide” rethinks his childhood, all detail and foreboding (“Dad’s hands used to shake but I never knew he was dying/I was thirteen, I never dreamed he could fall”), and when he stumbles into the present as if it is a bad dream, he tosses off lines like “I own this town” to convince himself that someone is listening to him. In “Incident on South Dowling,” a junkie helplessly watches his lover overdose before him, and then he ponders the layout of the tiny apartment they shared. Precise observations, punctuated by tragedy.

The meanest song on Post is its truest. A self-satisfied rock-god-in-training sings “Look So Fine, Feel So Low,” the tale of an up-and-comer living off the kindness of an innocent (“She buys me things/She wants to take care of me/And all I gotta do is sing, sing, sing”) while a millimeter under the surface he detests her (“She’s so easy to impress/When she asks me dumb questions/All I gotta do is say ‘yes, yes, yes’”) for his predicament. Kelly’s character signs in a voice so drenched in derision he is oblivious to his inhumanity. The title lines are attempts to show remorse, but the kid is kidding. What the kid doesn’t know is that revealing himself ensures his eventual eviction. He looks so wise, but he’s really a fool. These deceptively complex characters are the folks Kelly wants to write about, and their multidimensional nature is part of why their stories don’t ring on radios from coast to coast. Kelly subsequently rerecorded rousing full-band versions of many of the songs on Post, and those takes are often exhilarating. They’re great performances. But on Post, they’re revelations.