On Easter Monday 2008, Chuck Berry, one of the founding fathers of rock and roll, played a concert in The Grill music venue in Letterkenny. Berry, who made his name writing three minute pop songs about driving his automobile along the open roads of America, must have travelled to the Donegal town from London by a budget airline such as Ryanair, an airline that flies to Derry from its teeming hub in the Essex countryside, Stansted Airport. The image of Berry catching a Ryanair flight from Stansted is not one I can readily imagine. However, at that same airport, I did once stare agape at the Dutch soccer ace Ruud Gullit, who was standing in the same queue as me for a flight to Dublin with that same plucky budget airline, so maybe it’s not all that unlikely.
The Beatles, for whom international air travel became a commonplace during the height of their fame, wrote their song, ‘Back in the USSR’ about a BOAC flight from the USA to the USSR. This was partially a tribute to the Beach Boys song ‘California Girls’, but for the most part was based on Chuck Berry’s song ‘Back in the USA’, a 1959 composition where he sings, as his jet comes in to land, of how much he missed the highways and skyscrapers of America.
Cadillac Coupe de Ville, 1950
The thing is, Chuck Berry didn’t really write about going places by plane; he was mostly concerned with getting back to his beloved America, with its drive-ins and jukeboxes; his subjects were always about having cars and girls – or getting more cars and girls. (One lyric painstakingly documents Chuck’s attempt at trading in his ‘broken-down raggedy Ford’ for a ‘yellow convertible four-door’ Cadillac Coupe de Ville; he even goes as far as specifying the kind of insurance cover he requires for his new vehicle.)
His obsessions weighed heavily upon his real life too: in 1959 he was arrested under the Mann Act – which banned the interstate transport of females for ‘immoral purposes’ – for an incident involving a 14 year old girl he had brought from Mexico to work in his nightclub in St. Louis. Berry vehemently denied the charges, but was sentenced to five years for the incident, and wrote some of his best songs while incarcerated. He was released from prison at the end of 1963, and a subsequent single, ‘No Particular Place To Go,’ was an instant hit, getting to number ten in the Billboard Hot 100.
Berry’s songs were forged in an era when the rhythm and blues of black musicians was being reshaped into the rough and ready melodic form that became known as rock and roll. Berry was signed to Chess Records in Chicago, a renowned blues label that recorded artists such as John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson. Although Chuck Berry has been called one of the originators of rock and roll, it is hard to place when exactly it began, but there is much agreement that it started with a single record.
The record is called ‘Rocket 88’, and it was recorded in March 1951 by two rock and roll legends: Ike Turner and Sam Phillips. Accounts differ as to which was the actual day of recording, but many historians agree that the melding of distorted guitar and galloping drums with twelve-bar blues was the beginning of something bigger.
Ike Turner would later record classic tracks with his wife Tina, such as ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ and ‘Nutbush City Limits’; Sam Phillips was the man behind Sun Studios, run out of a small corner unit on a street in Memphis, Tennessee. Phillips would later discover the young Elvis Presley, and produce his early records.
‘Rocket 88’ was credited to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, but was actually performed by Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm. Jackie Brenston was the band’s saxophonist who added his urgent plaintive vocals to the track. Ike Turner played piano on the song, coming up with a staccato introduction that would later be lifted note-for-note by Little Richard for ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’.
Like many of Berry’s compositions, the song was effectively a hymn to a car: in this case the Oldsmobile ‘Rocket’ 88, a model that had only recently gone into production, at the end of the 1940s. Driven by a powerful engine, it was fast and efficient – the song praises the Oldsmobile’s ‘V-8 motor’ and its ‘modern design,’ contrasting it with rickety old ‘jalopies… and the sound they make’.
The song had been recorded for Chess Records by Sam Phillips, who worked out of the studio he had built the year before in a converted radiator shop at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis. The premises was so small there was no room for an office, and he had to conduct business in Miss Taylor’s Restaurant next door (usually at the ‘third booth by the window’, Phillips told writer Peter Guralnick).
Rock and roll went on to become a multi-million dollar industry, and some of the originators felt, inevitably, that they never got what they thought due to them. Sam Phillips sold Elvis Presley’s contract to RCA for what turned out to be a derisory sum, but made money elsewhere with some canny investments. Ike Turner felt demonised for his mistreatment of Tina, and in his later years (he died in December 2007) he found refuge in his status as one of the founders of rock and roll. But Chuck Berry is still on the road, keeping it rolling, not behind the wheel of a Cadillac, but by short-haul flight.
Rocket 88 – Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats by dumbriffs