by Mark Dintenfrass
In article <770j4j$6i1@bgtnsc01.worldnet.att.net>, "Bill
Bugge"
<bbugge@att.net> wrote:
> Perhaps Mark Dintenfass will be kind enough to repost his treatise on Chuck's
lyrics from the "Chuck Berry: Rock & Roll Poet" thread for the benefit of
our many new group members.
Well, gee, Bill, I thought you'd never ask. So here, modestly, is my something much less
than a treatise, written in response to a thread you started a long time ago about Chuck's
lyrics).
Bill,
This will be a lot more than you bargained for when you asked us to discuss Chuck as poet, but I've been wanting to talk about Chuck's "poetics" for a long time.
Someday someone might write a fine book about Chuck Berry's lyrics and here, rather hurriedly (and I hope I'm not making too many little errors in the quotations), are just a few of the things such a book might note:
Chuck's clever rhymes, from the famous:
All the way home I held a grudge.
For the safety belt that wouldn't budge
("No Particular Place to Go")
To the relatively obscure:
Everything is wrong since me and my baby parted
All day long I'm walkin' 'cause I can't get my car started
Laid off from my job so I can't afford to check it
I wish someone would come along and run into it and wreck it ("Come On")
His superb similes (a "simile, for you non-English majors, is a comparison):
All dressed up like a downtown Christmas tree ("Sweet Little Rock
and Roller")
I was campaign-shouting like a Southern diplomat ("Nadine")
She moves around like a wayward summer breeze ("Nadine")
His linguistic playfulness and inventiveness:
As I was a-motivatin' over the hill ("Maybelline") I don't
want your botheration, get away, leave me ("Too Much Monkey
Business") That "Coolerator" in "You Never Can Tell" (which,
actual object or not,
is still a fine example of how Chuck sought out that right sound for the
objects in his songs)
His ability to inject subtle social commentary where it's least expected, as in this example, where the first line is practically a nutshell dissertation on the relations between poor blacks and the police:
Arrested on charges of unemployment
He was sitting in the witness stand ("Brown-Eyed Handsome Man")
Or this, which bitingly challenges a standard racist attack on black people:
If I want to drive a Cadillac convertible coupe
And all I've got at home to eat is just onion soup It's my own business . . .
I am not a juvenile and I can go out at my own free will ("It's My Own
Business")
Then there's Chuck's dry and sometimes very subtle wit:
Been to Yokohama
been fightin' in the war.
Army bunk, army chow,
Army clothes, army car, aah! ("Too Much Monkey Business")
(The sly suggestion here is that the worst part of being in the army is having to drive a
drab army car, rather than, say a "coffee-colored Cadillac" or a "Cadillac
convertible coupe.") [Added note: my hearing of this lyric has been challenged, but I
like the point enough to let it stand.]
Chuck is also a master of verbal economy. Each stanza in songs like "Too Much
Monkey Business" and "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" contains the kind of
material another lyricist would save for a whole song:
Working in the filling station
Too many tasks
Wipe the window, check the tires
Check the oil, dollar gas, aah!
("Too Much Monkey Business")
Chuck practically invented the "chase" song, and made driving and cars standard r'n'r subjects. He also was tuned into the railroad rhythms that underpin so much Southern music (listen to "Let It Rock" or the apocalyptic "Downbound Train"). And, as a previous writer noted, he was the first to write songs that defined and celebrated the "new" music called rock 'n' roll. Or, if he wasn't the first, he certainly did it better than anyone else. And that's because of what we are calling here his "poetic" gifts, his ability to see that language is both a series of references AND a series of sounds, his mastery over the connections between the two, and, finally, his mastery over the way the sounds of language and the sounds of music can reinforce or play off against each other.
Three of Chucks's songs seem to me particularly splendid simply for their verbal construction, and maybe most importantly each is splendid in a different way.
First, "School Day," where the structure of the lyric perfectly echoes the
song's theme, which is the way rock 'n' roll means liberation for teenagers in the
repressive atmosphere of the 50s. The repression is beautifully embodied in the cliches of
high school, from the teacher (who doesn't know how "mean she looks") teaching
the "Golden Rule" while the "guy behind you won't leave you alone, to the
crowded lunchroom "where you fortunate if you have time to eat." Then
"three o'clock rolls around," the coin is dropped into the juke box slot (with
Chuck dragging our the 'r' sound to mimic the slide of the coin, as was smartly noted in a
previous
post), and then the great guitar break, preparing us for the most famous celebration of
r'n'r in the whole history of the music.
Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll!
Deliver me from the days of old, etc.
And, as is typical in Chuck, the freedom offered is both sexual and spiritual simultaneously, the beat of the music leading to a celebratory dance of liberation because the "feeling is there body and soul."
Second, "You Can't Catch Me," one of Chucks more under-appreciated songs. The
lyric is a wondrous compendium of the relation between speed and
sound, of a simple ecstasy that is both movement and music. That is, it's about the joy of
"cruisin' and playin' the radio," a joy which I think Chuck was the first to get
into a song. The whole thing is held together by a series of metaphors and allusions that
relate driving to flying, and flying to escape and sex:
I bought a brand new Airmobile
It was custom made
Was a Flight de Ville
With a powerful motor and some hideaway wings
Flying with my baby last Saturday night
Wasn't a gray cloud floatin' in sight'
So I spread my wings and then I blew my horn
Bye bye New Jersey . . .
But, more importantly, the lyric is constructed through a complicated series of long vowel sounds, which the music and the singing both take advantage of to control the headlong rush of the song and the drive. It would take a long technical analysis to do this point justice, and I'll spare you that, but just listen, for example, to the way Chuck sings "gone like a cool breeze" or exaggerates the rhyme in "began to roll/ . . . state patrol" and you'll begin to see what I mean.
Finally, "Promised Land." If "You Can't Catch Me" is all youthful exuberance, a pure exercise in the possibilities of joining vowel sounds to music, Chuck's richest song, from a literary point of view, manages to be simultaneously a celebration of his own personal transformation from "poor boy" to movie star (he not only appeared in several Alan Freed films, he was, I believe, the only black singer to be given a speaking role in any of them) and a mock-epic account, a kind of "Odyssey," of the great migration of blacks from the rural south to the urban north and west. Along the way Chuck also manages to incorporate small but significant allusions to the Civil Rights Movement. For example, the "'Hound" breaks down in Birmingham, site of some of the ugliest confrontations between freedom marchers and segregationists, and it manages to get "across Mississippi clean," reminding us that for blacks merely to travel through what was then the South's most reactionary state could be dangerous. In the last stanza, time slows down after the breakneck cross-country ride, and the references are particularly rich.
Swing low chariot, come down easy
Taxi to the terminal dome
Cut your engines and cool your wings
And let me make it to the telephone
Los Angeles give me Norwalk, Virginia,
Tidewater four ten oh nine
Tell the folks back home this is the promised land calling
And the poor boy is on the line.
The plane has become the "chariot" from the most famous of all "spirituals," and thus Chuck ironically superimposes a religious and a secular version of what the "promised land" might mean, a simple, perfect synopsis of America's historic conflation of religious and materialistic value systems. The arrival at the "terminal dome" [added note: a small mistake here; I now think it's the less poetic "terminal zone"] produces instant homesickness and so the speaker hurries off to call the folks back home in the "tidewater." The "promised land" has been reached, but the ending is filled with ambiguity. Chuck had made it to Hollywood, apparently living out the American dream, but he was soon to be jailed on some fairly flimsy morals charges, and so his personal, and quite unusual personal experience, becomes emblematic of the generations of blacks who discovered in Watts (and the other urban ghettos) that the various spiritual and material"promises" of the "Promised land" of America often turn out empty. That is, at the end of the journey, it still the same old "poor boy" who's on the line.
This is poetry all right. And of a very high order indeed. --
md