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Buried deep in the collective unconscious of rock and roll there's a simple figure drawn from real life: One man, one guitar, singing the blues. But he's not any man. He's black, Southern. poor, and (this is the part that's easiest to miss) dreaming. In many ways, his story is terrible and terrifying. We're speaking after all of someone like Robert Johnson, by all the evidence every bit as sensitive and perceptive as, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald, but rather than pursuing lissome Zeldas through Alabama mansions, enduring the pitiless reality of sharecropping, segregation, the threat of lynching, and all but inescapable twentieth century serfdom in Mississippi.
Chuck Berry's genius lay in his ability to shape those gruesome facts into a story about joy and freedom. Not that he didn't have to make concessions to the reality he was subverting. He says in his auto-biography that he wanted to sing "There lived a colored boy named Johnny B. Goode," rather than the "country boy" we now have, but "I thought it would seem biased to white fans." Especially, no doubt, those white listeners who programmed the radio stations that would determine whether the record became a hit or was not heard at all.
Already a star, Chuck Berry was on intimate terms with the pop game and the limits it imposed on famous men with black skin. Standing at the edge of the rules, Berry shot himself right past one crucial dilemma of American culture into the center of another. By changing "colored" to "country," he found that, instead of speaking for himself alone, he'd created a character who also symbolized the likes of Elvis Presley, another kid whose momma promised that "someday your name will be in lights." Horrible as the source of the compromise may have been, its effect was to treble the song's force. For ultimately, if you could identify with either Presley or Berry, there was a chance you could identify with both. The result is history and not just pop music history.
But that isn't all. "Chuck Berry's gotta be the greatest thing that came along / He made the guitar beats and wrote the alltime greatest songs," the Beach Boys once sang. They knew this better than most since Brian Wilson not only converted "Sweet Little Sixteen" into "Surfin' U.S.A. ," a tale oft-told because it wound up in court, but modernized "Johnny B. Goode," right down to the guitar intro, into that much less ambiguous anthem, "Fun Fun Fun."
You can't copyright guitar licks and maybe that's good, because if you could, Chuck might have hoarded them as he does his Cadillacs,. Without The Chuck Berry Riff, we'd lose not just the Beach Boys, but essential elements of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bob Seger, and Bruce Springsteen -- to mention only the most obvious examples. In a way, what was at the center of the first wave of the British Invasion could be described as a Chuck Berry revival.
In those days, you weren't a rock guitarist if you didn't know the riveting lick that kicks off "Johnny B. Goode." Cut without echo or reverb, a basic progression that still demanded a suppleness that immediately separated the worthy from the merely aspiring, this -- more than any other -- is what people mean when they talk about "The Chuck Berry Riff." Throughout the record, that machine-gun burst of notes never leaves center stage, even after Chuck sprays out those indelible.opening lines, each multisyllabic phrase all one word, a voice in imitation of a guitar:
DeepdowninLouisiana'crossfromNewOrleans,
waybackupinthewoodsamongtheevergreens.
Rattled off in just six seconds, it's the most exciting way that Berry could have found to sing the song, and he slows down only long enough to set the scene. When he hits the chorus, the guitar returns, splitting each phrase, propelling Chuck Berry toward fame, ecstasy, any old place he chooses that's gotta be better than here and now.
In the bridge, the riff -- which by now seems to have its own life, separate from the guitar and whoever plays it -- collaborates with Johnny Johnson's chugging piano to form the kind of solo conceived by guys who had to think on their feet in barrooms night after night, already beat from their day jobs but hoping. It's that hope that "Johnny B. Goode" drives home just like a-ringin' a bell.
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