Chuck Berry Could Be a Sacred Bones Recording Artist

Chuck Berry, I am pleased to say, has still (to use showbiz parlance) “got it.”

He’s 84 now, and in some ways, he’s at his peak. Seeing him at the Congress Theatre on New Year’s Day confirmed this.

He can barely play his instrument now, the jobbers he hired to back him up lurched and fumbled through tempos and keys, it took an eternity for everyone to get in tune, Berry asked the keyboard player to get up and walk away so he could play the thing at one point, songs unseamlessly switched from one to the next in the middle of other songs, endings were looser than the elastic waistband on your Mom’s sweatpants. Oh, and not only were the jobbers backing him up in different keys and tempos, but songs were in different keys and tempos between the jobbers and Berry!

My point is this: It was beautifully discordant arty garage rock that was better than 98% of the practitioners of the genre.

It was outrageous. It was a disaster. It was a mess. It was a tragicomical trainwreck. It was rock and roll at its rawest and most dangerous—at least as dangerous as Chuck Berry could make it at 84 years old.

I mean, he could’ve hired a real tight backing band and done some hokey 50’s nostalgia trip easily enough, and everyone would have left feeling like their $30 admission fee was worthwhile. But instead, he stumbled into the atonal mess of 21^st Century noise every 21 year old with a 12 pack of PBR, what remains of their backstock of 4-Loko, and a 4-track aspires to. As Peppermint Patty once said: Way to go, Chuck!

And stupid me, I left for the Bottle five minutes before he passed out on the keyboard. I really don’t want to sound glib here (and I am beyond glad that Chuck Berry was alright in the end), but aren’t some of the most legendary shows in rock and roll history based on members passing out/falling apart on stage? Keith Moon, Darby Crash, Iggy, Bob Stinson, GG, Slash, Keef, (to name a few)…that Clone Defects show at the Beat Kitchen when Timmy couldn’t tune his guitar and Ross took over for him from the front of the stage and played the thing with the band. Legendary!

I spent a few days pondering all of this, too cranky from the inevitable NYE hangover the night before (and having to stand in dehydrated misery through the 90’s reggae/ska of the opening act)(Yeah, I wasn't sure how that happened either, but it seems a fine example of clout—in facets that extend well beyond City Hall--superseding logic in the City by the Lake) and full of expectation that maybe—just maybe—reputation aside—Chuck would actually bring it in the first wave of rock and roll sense and certainly not in the neo-no-wave sense of the Year of Our Lord Twenty Eleven. But Chuck…he was really free to do what he wanted. We were all there for Tribute anyways. Thousands of us gathered together to say: Way to go, Chuck. Thanks for giving us more happiness than we deserve. Thanks for being one of the few surviving pillars of this music we love. And yes, you should be twice as rich as McCartney for doing so. All you had to do was smile, all you had to do was play just a smidge of your trademark solos, to sing just a line, and the audience was yours. I’ve never seen an audience so on the side of the performer, no matter what they were doing on stage. It wasn’t about the Sound anyway. It was about the Sight. The Living Legend. In the flesh.

Will the Rolling Stones sound this raw, chaotic, outré, in their eighties? I doubt it. Mick will cover the beautiful madness up with a symphony, all the brass in New Orleans, and enough black lady singers to fill a Harlem church.

So yeah. Chuck Berry, in the sunset of his life, can still make some confrontational noise. A pleasant surprise, for anyone of the mind that rock and roll has long been a safe slice of retrograded Americana.

Post Script: Here’s Flaiztube’s documentation of Chuck Berry’s return to the stage after falling ill at the keys. It’s profound, poignant, and goes well with the Dylan Thomas poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22hg9na8o2c&feature=related