Chuck Berry is the greatest of the rock and rollers. Elvis competes with Tom Jones. Little Richard cavorts after hours for, Dick and Johnny. Fats Domino looks old, and Jerry. Lee Lewis looks down his noble honker at diehards who refuse to understand that Jerry Lee has chosen to become a great country singer. But for a fee - only S2.000 until recently Chuck Berry will hop a pi a rip and play some rock and roll. 1

In this year of the boogie the man who used to be the ideal second attraction. drawing a core of'raving fanatics ; like me and a broad base of casual admirers who dug to get off on a legend every once in a while, has come into tnsown Lveryone'. from the fblkies to the -i heavy metal kids claims hiS: songs for encores, and much better than that. Chuck himself is back on top. An album. 77le London Chuck Berry Sessions. has bulleted into the top 10 in the wake of a number-one single, his first certified million-seller.■; ..“My' Ding-aLing. ”

For those who skipped fourth grade, let me make clear that “ding-a-ling” is a play on words that engenders quips like the one Chuck made when he was awarded.... his gold record at Madison Square, Garden on Oct. 13:“I never knew ‘My Ding-a-Ling' .would get so big.” A lot of his raving fanatics are mortified. We've always dreamed 6J. another big single for bur hero his last . was “You Never Ctan Tell" in the Beatles summer of 1964 but “My Ding-aLing"' has been embarrassing us at cencerts ; for years, and not because we wouldn’t sing along. It was just dumb, inappropriate to the sophistication of his, new, collegiate audience. Anyway, that’s how the rationalization went.

Qbviously. what, we meant was that it wasn't sophisticated enough' for us — his other stuff was so much better. But popularity has changed the song. 1 feel sure that it's delighting all the 12-yearolds who get to figure out that they've snuck something dirty onto AM radio a rock and roll tradition that has been neglected since , the concept of dirty became so passe . because I’m fairly delighted myself. Believe me. 21,000 rock and roll revivalists filling Madision Square Garden to shout along with a: fourth-grade. wee-vvee joke const it utes. a. ' cultural event as impressive as it ,is odd,: a magnificent and entirely'apposite triumph in Chuck Berry's very own tradition. For Chuck Berry isn'tmerely the': greatest of the rock and rollers', br.rather. there’s nothing mere about it .Unless we somehow recycle the concept of the great artist so that itosuppofts Chuck Berry as well as it does Marcel Proust we' might as,well trash it altogether. :• C,

Like Charlie Chaplin or Walt Kelly or the Beatles, Chuck Berry’s greatness comes to a blues label to promote a blues song — “It was ‘Wee Wee Hours’ we was proud of, that was our music, ” says Johnny Johnson. But the owner of the label decides that he wants to push a novelty: “The big beat, cars and young love. It was a trend and we jumped on it.” He then trades away a quarter of the blues singer’s creative sweat to the inventor of payola, who hypes it into commercial success and leaves the artist in a quandary. Does he stick with his art, thus foregoing the first real recognition he’s ever had, or does he pander to popular taste?

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The question is loaded, of course. “Ida Red” was Chuck Berry’s music as much as “Wee Wee Hours,” which, in retrospect, seems rather uninspired. In fact, maybe the integrity problem went the other way. Maybe Johnson was afraid that the innovations of “Ida Red” — country guitar lines adapted to bluesstyle picking, with the ceaseless legato of his own piano adding rhythmic excitement to the steady back-beat — were too far out to sell. What happened instead, of course, was that Berry’s limited but brilliant vocabulary of guitar riffs was quickly recognized as the epitome of rock and roll. Ultimately, it was imitated by every great white guitar group of the early ’60s, and Johnson’s piano technique was almost as influential. The audience knew better than the musicians themselves, and Leonard Chess simply functioned as music businessmen should, though only rarely do they combine enough courage and insight to pull it off, even once. He became a surrogate audience, picking up on new music and making sure it received enough exposure for everyone else to pick up on it too.

Obviously, Chuck Berry wasn’t racked with doubt about artistic compromise. A good blues single usually sold around 10,000 copies, and a big hit rhythm-and-blues single might go into the hundreds of thousands, but “Maybellene” probably moved a million, even if Chess never sponsored the audit to prove it. Berry had achieved a grip on the white audience and the solid musical future it could promise and, remarkably, he had in no way diluted his genius to do so. On the contrary, that was his genius.

Berry was the first blues-based performer to .successfully borrow back guitar tracks that country-western innovators had appropriated from black people and converted to their own uses 25 or 50 years before. By adding blues tone to some elemental runs and yoking them to a rhythm-and-blues beat, he created an instrumental style with biracial appeal. Alternating guitar chords augmented the beat while he sang in an insouciant tenor which, while recognizably Afro-American in accent, remained clear of the melisma and blurred overtones of blues singing. His detractors still complain about the repetitiveness of this style but they miss the point. Repetition without tedium is the backbone of rock and roll, and the components of Berry’s music were so durable that they still provoke instant excitement at concerts almost 20 years later. Anyway, the repetition was counterbalanced by unprecedented and virtually unduplicated verbal variety.

Chuck Berry is the greatest rock lyricist this side of Bob Dylan and sometimes I prefer him to Dylan. Both communicate an abundance of the childlike delight in linguistic discovery that page poets are supposed to convey and so often don’t but unlike Dylan, Berry never seems precious or forced. True, his language is ersatz and barbaric, full of mispronounced foreignisms and advertising coinages, but then, so was Whitman’s. Like Whitman, Berry is excessive because he is totally immersed in the America of Melville and the Edsel, burlesque and installment-plan funerals, pemmican and pomade. Unlike Whitman, though, he doesn’t quite permit you to take him seriously — he can’t really think it’s pronounced “a la carty,” can he? He is a little surreal. How else can a black man as sensitive as Chuck Berry respond to the affluence of white America?

In three of his next four singles, Berry amplified the black half of his persona, the brown-eyed handsome man who always came up short in his quest for the small-time hedonism America promises everyone. By implication, Brown-Eyes’ sharp eye for life’s nettlesome and even oppressive details provided a kind of salvation through humor, especially in “Too Much Monkey Business,” a catalog of hassles that included work, school and the Army. But only “Roll Over Beethoven,” which introduced his other half, the rock and roller, achieved any real success among the white teenagers to whom he was obliged to sing. Chuck got the message. His next release, “School Days,” was another complaint song, but this time the complaints were specifically adolescent and were relieved by the direct action of the rock and roller. In fact, the song has been construed as a prophecy of the Free Speech Movement: “Close your books, get out of your seat/ Down the halls and into the street.”

Although he scored lots of minor hits, Chuck Berry made only three additional top 10 singles in the ’50s — “Rock and Roll Music,” “Sweet Little 16” and “Johnny B. Goode” — and every one of them ignored the browneyed hahdsome man for the assertive, optimistic and somewhat simpleminded rock and roller. In a pattern common among popular artists, his truest and most personal work didn’t flop, but it wasn’t overwhelmingly popular, either. Overwhelming popularity is definitely what Chuck Berry wanted, and the craving proved dangerous. At the same time he was enlivening his best songs with faintly Latin rhythms, which he was convinced were the coming thing, he was also writing silly exercises with titles like “Hey Pedro.”

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Chuck Berry

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But his pursuit of the market was also a rapprochement with his audience, with \yhom he seemed to have instinctive rapport remarkable in a 30-year-old black man. The reason Berry’s rock and roller was capable of such insightful excursions into the teen psyche — “Sweet Little 16,” a celebration of everything lovely about fanhood, or “Almost Grown,” a first-person expression of adolescent rebellion that ’60s youthcult pundits should have studied some — was that he shared a crucial American value with the brown-eyed handsome man. That value was fun.

Even among rock critics, who ought to know better, fun doesn’t have much of a rep, so that they commiserate with a La Vern Baker, a second-rate blues and gospel singer who felt she was selling her soul every time she launched into a first-rate whoop of nonsense like “Jim Dandy” or “Bumble Bee.” But fun was what teen revolt was all about — inebriated affluence versus the hangover of the work ethic. It was the only practicable value in the Peter Pan utopia of the American dream. Because black music had always thrived on exuberance — not just the other-worldly transport of gospel, but the candidly physical good times of the great ’30s pop blues singer, Washboard Sam — it turned into the perfect vehicle for teen rebellion. Black musicians, however, had never been capable of optimism that was cultural as well as personal — those few who were, like Louis Armstrong, left themselves open to charges of tomming. Chuck Berry never tommed. The trouble he’d just seen made his sly, bad-boy voice and the splits and waddles of his stage show that much more credible.

Then, in late 1959, fun turned into trouble. Berry had imported a Spanishspeaking Apache prostitute he’d picked up in Juarez to check hats in his St. Louis nightclub, and then had fired her. She went to the police and Berry was indicted under the Mann Act. After two trials, the first so blatantly racist that it was disallowed, he went to prison for two years. When he got out, in February of 1964, his marriage had ended, apparently a major tragedy for him. He had a few hits, but it seems likely that they were written before he went in. In any case, the well was dry. Between 1965 and 1970, he didn’t release one even passable new song, and he died as a recording artist.

In late 1966, Berry left Chess for a big advance from Mercury Records. Working alone with pick-up bands, he still performed a great deal, mostly to make money for Berry Park, a recreation haven 30 miles from St. Louis. But he found that something had happened to his audience — it was getting older, with troubles of its own, and it dug blues. At auditoriums like the Fillmore, where he recorded a generally disappointing LP with the Steve Miller Blues Band, Chuck was more than willing to stretch out on a blues. One of his favorites was from Elmore James: “When things go wrong, wrong with you, it hurts me too.”

In 1970, he went home to Chess Records and suddenly his new audience called forth a miracle. Berry was a natural head — no drugs, no alcohol — and most of his attempts to cash in on freak talk had been abject failures. But “Tulane,” one of his greatest story songs, was the perfect fantasy. It was about two dope dealers: “Tulane and Johnny opened a novelty shop/ Back under the counter was the cream of the crop.” Johnny is n§bbed by narcs, but Tulane escapes, and Johnny confidently predicts a fix. But there is a sequel. In “Have Mercy Judge,” Johnny has been caught again, and this time he expects to be sent to “some stony mansion.” He devotes the last stanza to Tulane, who is “too alive to live alone.” The last line makes you wonder how he felt about his own wife when he went to prison: “Just tell her to live, and I’ll forgive her, and ever) love her more when I come back home.”

“Have Mercy Judge” is the first good blues Berry ever wrote, and like alf his best work, it isn’t quite traditional, utilizing an abc line structure instead of the standard aab. Where did it come from? Is it unreasonable to suspect that part of Berry had been a blues man all along, and that this time, instead of going to his audience, his audience came to him and provided enough juice for one final masterwork? A year ago, the answer would have been yes and that’s that. But now there is a new audience. Chances are it isn’t a good enough audience to inspire great work, and that Berry’s vision, prophetic in the ’50’s, doesn’t really speak to the reality of the ’70s. “My Ding-a-Ling” is probably just one more hit in a sated market. But all of us raving Chuck Berry fanatics will be keeping an eye on him, hoping for yet another miraculous surprise. ¶||^

©;1972 Newsday, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.