Christmas Music Video Of the Week: December 1, 2023

"Run Rudolph Run" by Chuck Berry  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Christmas Music Video Of the Week - December 16, 2022

"Run Rudolph Run" by Chuck Berry  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

 

Christmas Music Video Of the Week - December 20, 2019

"Run Rudolph Run" by Chuck Berry  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Here Come Old Flat Top

Wen the Beatles began recording Abbey Road in earnest in July of 1969, John Lennon mostly kept to himself and didn't contribute much at first, as he and Yoko had been in a car accident when they were on vacation with their respective children (John's son Julian and Yoko's daughter Kyoko, both six years old then), and both were still recovering. (Yoko was still bedridden, so John had Yoko, bed and all, moved into the studio, much to the shock of EMI staff.) But by late July, John (below, during the recording of Abbey Road) went full tilt boogie with a new song that hit the senses with as much force as John's insatiable appetite for old-fashioned guitar rock, and it makes sense that it was selected to open Abbey Road.

"Come Together" is a steamy, dirty song about sex, drugs and rock and roll - and John Lennon's obsession with all three.  It's a cheeky self-portrait in which John winks and nods as he describes himself as a cokeheaded holy roller who's "one spinal cracker," whose sexual prowess is so great that when he "hold you in his armchair, you can feel his disease."  He's Bag Productions, he's the walrus, he's Yoko's man, he's all of that.  And his fantastically bad grammar, topped with with a guitar and piano arrangement that goes for the burn, is the icing on the cake.  

The song started out as something entirely different.  Acid guru Timothy Leary had asked Lennon to write a song for his planned candidacy for governor of California against Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan in 1970.  John tried, staring with the phrase "Come together," but he couldn't think of anything else to say about Leary's politics or positions that could get people to vote for him, and so, as a campaign song, "Come Together" never got off the ground.  Neither did Leary's campaign for governor of California; he was later arrested for marijuana possession, ending his bid for the governorship of California, so the song never became a campaign tune.  (For the record, Reagan was re-elected governor in 1970 handily over Democratic candidate Jesse Unruh, making Reagan a Republican presidential prospect for 1976 at the earliest.)

So, "Come Together" could have been the first of several anti-Reagan songs that Lennon would have undoubtedly written had he lived to see the Gipper's Presidency.  But the phrase "Come together" was not wasted, as it had another meaning.  Let's just say that it involves two lovers having the same experience simultaneously in the heat of the moment.  (Which is why Walter Mondale would likely not have asked Lennon in 1984, had Lennon lived, to write a song for his effort to make Reagan a one-term President like Leary wanted to make him an one-term California governor - though, by 1984, Mondale's fellow Minnesotan Prince was writing stuff that made "Come Together" sound tame by comparison.)

There was just one thing; "Come Together" wasn't a totally original song.  John had based the opening line - "Here come old flat top, he come grooving up slowly" from a lyric from Chuck Berry's fast-car song "You Can't Catch Me."  (The original lyric - "Here comes a flat top, he was movin' up with me" - refers to a motorist in a low, flat-roofed car trying to pass the narrator's car on the New Jersey Turnpike.)  John and Paul McCartney changed the melody and modified the bass line so it wouldn't sound like the original Berry song.  (Berry - below, with Lennon in 1972 on "The Mike Douglas Show" - may not have minded, but his publisher did, and it led to an ugly episode of suits and countersuits that Lennon ultimately came out of victorious.)

The result was a mean, guttural vibe that Ringo Starr's drums add extra bite to as the song creeps along like a pickpocket in a back alley.  The final touch on "Come Together" was John's repetitive whisper "Shoot me!" As on "Happiness Is a Warm Gun," the reference is not about firearms, and in this case it's a reference to a narcotic firing in the arm.  It makes "Come Together" sound more unsettled than it already is without going over the edge.

Not surprisingly. "Come Together" led to even harder-edged covers.  One of the best known remakes of the song came from Aerosmith, who recorded "Come Together" in 1978 for - shhh!  - the universally and deservedly loathed Sgt. Pepper movie.  Aerosmith's cover takes the Beatles' tough rock into heavy-metal territory, and Steven Tyler's over-the-top vocals are priceless.  When he sings the opening lyric,  he slurs it to the point where he sounds like he's singing "Yeah, come on, flat jaw, he come oozing out soda." More recently, Texas blues-rock guitarist Gary Clark Jr., with help from Dutch producer Tom Holkenborg, recorded a cover of "Come Together" for the 2017 comic-book superhero movie Justice League.  Clark's cover brings the Beatles' music back to the roots of rock and roll in a devastatingly fresh twenty-first-century sound - proof that, if you want to make rock and roll go forward, you have to go to back to its beginnings.

The White Album 50 Project: "Back In the U.S.S.R."

So off we go with the first song on the Beatles' White Album . . . "Back In the U.S.S.R."

For those of you Beatles fans too young to remember . . . the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a country comprised of numerous eastern European and northern and central Asian ethnic homelands.  The fifteen largest of them, including Russia, were separate states in a federation ruled by a central government in Moscow under the auspices of communism, an economic order in which everything is owned by the state.  It was created from the remains of the old Russian Empire.  The Soviet Union broke up in December 1991; three of the republics, the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, had already seceded, and calls for independence within the remaining twelve republics led the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to dissolve the union, resulting in fifteen countries where there had once been one.  Russia, the largest Soviet republic, then assumed the U.S.S.R.'s place on the United Nations Security Council.  "Back In the U.S.S.R." is probably the only Beatles song not from the group's psychedelic period to become dated and obsolete.   

Paul McCartney got the idea for the song from the Beatles' visit to India to study Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.  Mike Love of the Beach Boys was another student at the Maharishi's retreat, and he and the Beatles spent their free time playing music and jamming together. McCartney and Love had a common affinity for Chuck Berry (above), whose 1959 single "Back In the U.S.A." had inspired the Beach Boys' "California Girls," about the geographic diversity of young American women, and the melody of the "Beach Boys' "Surfin' U.S.A." borrowed the melody of Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen."  Over breakfast at the Maharishi's retreat, Mike Love thought it would be fun to do a Soviet version of "Back In the U.S.A."

"Back In the U.S.A." celebrated uniquely American cultural icons such as hamburgers, skyscrapers, and superhighways, but Berry was simultaneously showing patriotism for his homeland and expressing frustration over all the freedoms and possessions that a black man like himself could not enjoy in America.  (As rock critics Greil Marcus and Tim Riley suggested, when Berry sang about how glad he was to be living in the U.S.A., he was being racially ironic.)  "Back In the U.S.S.R." turned Berry's song around completely, celebrating a country that made no pretense of guaranteeing freedom to anyone and was personified by cultural artifacts that no one would ever desire, such as bugged telephones and collective farms - and Russian balalaikas in place of American guitars.

The Beach Boys themselves, at Love's suggestion, got satirized when Paul recast "California Girls" to a Soviet setting in the bridge of "Back In the U.S.S.R.", celebrating the girls of Moscow and the Ukrainian Republic.  He even threw in a reference to Ray Charles with a reference to "Georgia On My Mind," the song written by Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell that Charles recorded the definitive version of in 1960, taking note of the fact that Georgia was both the name of a Soviet republic and an American state.  George Harrison (below, with Love), a Hoagy Carmichael fan, must have loved that.

The song convinced the American conservative movement what they'd suspected all along - that the Beatles espoused communism and anti-Americanism.  (Right-wing paranoia hit an all-time peak in 1968, with the Vietnam War going badly against the Communist insurgency and the Soviets invading Czechoslovakia.)  The memoir writer John Paul Godges recalled his Polish immigrant father breaking his copy of the White Album because he couldn't tolerate a song that sounded pro-Soviet, as the Soviet Union dominated Poland at the time.  Ironically, the Beatles had been banned in the Soviet Union because the Kremlin thought they promoted Western capitalist decadence that took attention away from the struggle against those controlling the means of production. 

The song itself was recorded by the Beatles in the style of Chuck Berry with a Fats Domino-style piano riff and Beach Boys-style backing harmonies.  John Lennon played six-string bass. George later revealed that the song was also a cheeky take on British Prime Minister Harold Wilson's "I'm Backing Britain" economic campaign. 

"I wrote that as a kind of Beach Boys parody," Paul said in 1984.  "And 'Back In the U.S.A.' was a Chuck Berry song, so it kinda took off from there. I just liked the idea of Georgia girls and talking about places like the Ukraine as if they were California, you know? It was also hands across the water, which I'm still conscious of. 'Cause they like us out there, even though the bosses in the Kremlin may not. The kids from there do. And that to me is very important for the future of the race."

Ray Stevens later recorded his own Beach Boys parody, "Surfin' U.S.S.R.", about a Soviet naval squadron that parties with Americans when their submarine runs aground in California.  A master satirist in his own right, Stevens was off his game this time; by 1988, when "Surfin' U.S.S.R." was released, the joke was old and the Beach Boys (then enjoying a hit single with "Kokomo") were parodying themselves unintentionally.    

The legacy of "Back In the U.S.S.R." came full circle when the Beach Boys performed on the National Mall in Washington for the 1984 Independence Day celebration.  Drummer Dennis Wilson had died in an accident the previous December, so Ringo Starr sat in with them.  Inevitably, the Beach Boys and Ringo performed "Back In the U.S.S.R." in the concert.  Ironically, Ringo hadn't actually played on the Beatles' recording of "Back In the U.S.S.R."; he had walked out on the group, frustrated by Paul's perfectionism and his own lack of faith as a drummer.  He eventually returned to the group, but the Beatles went ahead and recorded this song without him.  The drumming on "Back In the U.S.S.R." was Paul's.  

Once you hear the airplane sound effect that begins (and also ends) the original Beatles recording, you know that the White Album is going to take you for the ride of your life. :-)

Bye Bye Johnny

Hail, hail, and farewell to one of the founding fathers of rock and roll.

Chuck Berry, who died this past weekend at the age of ninety, was the man who put the the rhythm and the blues into a new sound that was different from rhythm and blues.  He gave rock and roll the crisp, electric, intensely fun sound that defines it, and from three little chords he produced songs about everything from teen romance and cars to paternity issues and rock stardom.  Every rock and  roll star from the Beatles to the Black Keys could and can trace the origins of their sound to him.  As Robert Christgau once said, Berry taught a whole generation of rock and rollers how to play guitar before he ever met any of them.  Keith Richards gives Berry credit for everything he knows about rock and roll, and John Lennon once said that if rock and roll had another name, it would be Chuck Berry.

I  don't think I can say anything about Chuck Berry that hasn't already been said by everyone else . . . in fact, my review of his compilation album The Great Twenty-Eight says it all.  Needless to say, rock and roll, already in bad shape these days, has suffered its biggest loss in decades, the loss of one of its progenitors.  RIP. :-(      

Chuck Berry - The Great Twenty-Eight (1982)

Chuck Berry, who just turned ninety years old, invented rock and roll.  Period.  Despite its country origins and the hillbilly sensitivity that Bill Haley and Elvis Presley brought to the nascent form back in the fifties, Berry created the blues-based template that the best rockers have adhered to for the past six decades.  The proof is in these twenty-eight songs that were released between 1955 and 1965 and featured in this 1982 compilation.

The Great Twenty-Eight doesn't assemble all of Berry's greatest songs, but it comes damned close.  All of these songs crackle with energy and sizzle with wit, and many of them derive from three simple chords.  When Berry illustrates the more innocuous scenes in life, from dating pretty girls to rocking out in the dance halls, he provides the most detailed descriptions in only a few words.  The sexual tension of the car-chase song "Maybelline," the innocence of "Sweet Little Sixteen," and the teenage rituals of "School Days" all feel like a release.  But many times Berry's words leave us with something to think about as well as entertain us - the parables of rock and roll dreams and stardom in "Johnny B. Goode" and its sequel "Bye Bye Johnny," the sense of freedom in the road trip song "You Can't Catch Me," the racial pride of "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man," the ironies of "Back In the U.S.A." -  while getting us to dance, or at least play air guitar. Now that's genius.

Berry has always considered himself an artist, something Elvis was never able to consider himself so long as Colonel Tom Parker directed his career.  Only a sharp observer like Berry could come up with something as perfect as "Memphis," a heart-rending tale of a man separated from the love of his life (and if you've never heard it, you'll be in for a surprise), or explore what happens after high school and the pleasures of youth in "Too Much Monkey Business."  The deceptive simplicity of his music and the bite of his impeccable guitar set the standard for rock and roll - a standard that still shines under the dross of overproduction and hyperprofessionalism that has long since overtaken pop.  Although rock and roll is going to a tough period these days, the best way to resuscitate it is to get today's kids to hear The Great Twenty-Eight . . . and all of Chuck's children will continue to play his licks.      

Music Video Of the Week - October 21, 2016

"Roll Over Beethoven" by Chuck Berry (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)