THE TERMINAL GATES

 

 

So, Chuck Berry died today. Ninety, Gawd, bet he never thought he would reach such an old age.

One thing that is seldom said about Chuck Berry is that he had a direct appeal to young men who really found nothing appealing about the middle-of-the-road pop drivel that was marketed to teenage girls [and to a large extent their parents] in the 1950s and early 60s. Songs about cars, girls and guitars were things boys understood. I must have read dozens of articles and listened to just as many BBC docs about him, across the years. Was I a fan? Absolutely. And I was there at the time . . . this is first-hand nostalgia talking . . .

I was just a kid in 1956 but can vividly recall my friend Paul Leith and I running down to the fairground on a Saturday morning and pumping all of our weekly pocket-money into the best Juke-box in town. We had to change the three-shillings and sixpence we got into sixpences and then we would pump the whole lot in and listen to Schoolday seven-times in a row. Our weekly fix.  ‘If you tried to give rock-and-roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry’. Indeed.

For us not-quite-teenagers yet, in those days everything American was glitzy and so, so, different to our own experience. It was unthinkable that kids drove their own cars to school; burgers and Coke were unearthly, outrageous treats let alone the everyday parlance of the classroom. Tucson? Route 66? Amarillo and Gallup, New Mexico? I mean what kind of place is Amarillo? It would be forty years before I found out.

His career faltered fairly quickly. We moved on . . . to what? The Stones and then Dylan and the West Coast sound of Jefferson Airplane I suppose and then we moved on again. Genius though the lyrics of Little Queenie were, that wasn’t where we were at any more. We had jobs and girlfriends; fiancés in some cases and the imperative was to get away . . . the world’s ever-changing substance.

I never saw him live. He toured a lot when My Ding-a-Ling was a hit but I hated that song so much and hated what it represented . . . The Day the Music Died? . . . that I gave his tours and live appearances a miss. Never saw any of them: Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee. Seemed pointless. The Internet is full of tributes to him today and the Tweeters are out in force; God knows how one can say anything meaningful about Chuck Berry in 140-characters.

‘. . . pushing through the crowd trying to get to where she's at/I was campaign shouting like a Southern diplomat . . .’ Brilliant, on any level.