— RogerEbert.com (@ebertvoices) March 19, 2017
Excellent read: Luke Dittrich in Esquire, December 2011.
Pierce, on Berry, and another writer who died this week: Chuck Berry and Jimmy Breslin Reinvented the English Language—
I saw her from the corner when she turned and doubled back
And started walkin' toward a coffee colored Cadillac
I was pushin' through the crowd to get to where she's at
And I was campaign shouting like a southern diplomat
There are not five better lyrics in all of American music better than that verse. Hell, I'm not entirely sure if I can come up with five better verses in all of English poetry if you spotted me Mr. Yeats and the entire Oxford Anthology. The comic desperation of the protagonist is impeccably limned. The meter's perfect, the imagery sublime. Have you ever seen a coffee-colored Cadillac? Me, neither, but I have heard Southern diplomats campaign-shoutin'. I surely know what that's about so, yeah, I trust the poet on the Cadillac, too.
Chuck Berry invented the language of rock and roll and, through that, reinvented the English language for several generations. He did it in that most American way possible, the way Mark Twain did it, or Walt Whitman, or Kerouac. He did it by experimenting, by playing with the language as though it were the greatest toy he'd ever found. Consider the other things he did with it.
As I was motorvatin' up over the hill/I saw Maybellene in a Coupe de Ville. (Maybellene)
You'd motorvated in your time, too. You just didn't know the word for it.
Pay phone, somethin' wrong, dime gone, will mail/ I ought to sue the operator for tellin' me a tale
Ah, too much monkey business, too much monkey business/ Too much monkey business for me to be involved in. (Too Much Monkey Business)
Close observation of the human condition. (You had similar botheration last week, didn't you?) And, from it, Bob Dylan was inspired to write "Subterranean Homesick Blues."
They furnished off an apartment with a two room Roebuck sale/ The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale. (C'est La Vie).
Coolerator. It's where you get the cold drink after a hard day of motorvatin' and campaign shoutin', I guess.
And, finally, the restatement of the American Dream for a new century, just the way Walt Whitman yawped it in the streets of Manhattan.
His mother told him, "Someday you will be a man,/ And you will be the leader of a big old band.
Many people coming from miles around/ To hear you play your music when the sun go down.
Maybe someday your name will be in lights/ Saying 'Johnny B. Goode tonight'."
That "maybe" is the poet's touch. It's depthless in its possibilities. It might happen. It might not happen. But it has a chance to happen, and that's all that ever has mattered in America. That chance. Of course, the possibility gets a little brighter when you hang it on that riff. The Riff. The only Riff. The riff that reached across the Atlantic and into Keith Richards and John Lennon and also reached all the way down through the years, like the faint echoes of The Big Bang, unto the generations.
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