BEFORE: Well, sometimes a film will suggest ITSELF for the chain. I didn't plan on watching this one, but clips of it appeared in "Keith Richards: Under the Influence", and that reminded me that I've heard of this film but never seen it, and if I don't add it in here, when else would I watch it? But once I've decided to watch it, the next question becomes - "Can I add it in to my chain, without the linking falling apart?" Well, yes, in fact though this doesn't link to the next film I had planned, I can move up a documentary about another rock legend that started in the 1950's, and then just move DOWN one other concert film, and the gap will just close up nicely if I do that. And it didn't make sense to have all the 1950's rock so late in the chain anyway, I'd much rather move it up sooner and deal with it now, before moving on to music makers from the 1980's or 1990's.
In retrospect, maybe I should have started the whole thing with Chuck Berry and Elvis, instead of starting with the birth of the Beatles, because that would have been more representative perhaps of the real chronological order of things, but that Beatles film really provided the best link-in. Now, if I had had this film on the list from the beginning, it would have been as easy as pie to go from the Beatles docs to the Clapton doc to this one, and if I had to do it all over again, that would have been a better way - but the die is cast. By the time I finish everything, it's not going to matter.
Except now after adding "Havana Moon" and this one, the rockumentary chain is going to be 52 films instead of 50, and that leaves fewer slots for the rest of the year. I hope I don't need those slots in November or December. 52's almost as good a number as 50, it's not a round number, but it's the number of weeks in a year - as long as the number's not 51...
Next problem - this film's not on Netflix, or premium cable, or even iTunes. And Amazon wants $90 for a copy on DVD, and there's not even time to have that delivered if I'm going to watch it today. But I found it posted on a far corner of the internet - not YouTube, one of the YouTube wannabes, and I don't even want to say which one, for fear it will disappear. (But if you want to watch this film for free, like I did, check out the fourth page of Google's video search results...) Hey, if it had been on iTunes I would have gladly rented it there first.
Keith Richards carries over from "Under the Influence" to this one, where he acted as the leader of Chuck Berry's backing band, complete with powder blue 50's style prom-type suit. And on THIS DAY, July 31, in 1967, Keith Richards' conviction charge for drugs was turned over on appeal and he was released from jail in the U.K.
THE PLOT: This documentary covers two concerts at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis, to celebrate Chuck Berry's 60th birthday, and also discusses his life and career.
AFTER: Already I've learned that the best rock music documentaries cover three bases: interview footage, travelogue and concert performance. Too much focus on any one of these, to the exclusion of the others, and the balance seems off. The first Hendrix film, for example, had too much "talking heads" interview footage, and then some concert footage, but that's just two out of three. Same goes for "How the Beatles Changed the World", it was all interview + archive footage, WHERE WAS THE MUSIC? The "Olé, Olé, Olé" Stones film got it right, there were interviews with the Stones, plenty of exotic travel footage, and then concert performances along the way in various countries. So by the time I got to "Havana Moon", which was nearly a complete concert, then it's more like WHERE ARE THE INTERVIEWS?
So this one was released in 1987, and perhaps it set the standard - there's interview footage with Chuck Berry, and other rock icons from the old days (Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis) to the newer guys (Bruce Springsteen, a sober Eric Clapton). Chuck Berry also goes back to some key locations in his career, like the old Cosmopolitan Club, before preparing for his birthday show at the Fox Theatre. Chuck went on to live another THIRTY YEARS after this concert, he died just last year at the age of 90. But in 1987, people sort of re-discovered 1950's rock again, and there was a wave of these all-star tribute concerts. The line-up put together for this show was fantastic, but then I think it sort of got overshadowed by the one they put together for Roy Orbison's "Black and White Night" that came out a year later (Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Jackson Browne, Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, k.d. lang, Jennifer Warnes).
But maybe that's just me - I'm more of an Orbison guy than a Chuck Berry fan. For the past two years, I've been replacing the cassettes in my music collection (which I can no longer listen to) with digital files, two tapes per week, and if the albums aren't available on iTunes then I buy CDs off of Amazon and rip those. I went alphabetically, staring with Aerosmith, and I'm working my way to ZZ Top. OK, so technically I started with ripping the Beatles CD Box Set, but other than that, I've gone mostly A to Z. Right now I'm on "S", and this week I'll replace the tapes from the Steve Miller Band. In about two weeks my download schedule should line up perfectly with the film I'm watching...
But let's get back to Chuck Berry. I already know that Keith Richards put this great jam band together, and that he said working with Chuck was even worse than working with Jagger - rock stars, am I right? What are you gonna do with them? He even punched Keith one time for touching his guitar without permission, and Keith did not retaliate. Chuck was a charter member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and on the other side of the scale, served three terms in jail. So he's really the original "bad boy" of rock, in addition to being one of its founding fathers. But as I learned in this film, he's also the original singer-songwriter, because he wrote all of his music, unlike Elvis, who mostly sang songs written by others (a lot of Leiber-Stoller tunes).
At least when Chuck Berry ripped off the country song "Ida Red" to turn it into "Maybellene" he had the decency to change the name. But that sort of puts him in the same boat as Led Zeppelin ripping off the old blues numbers, right? I think in time this maybe sort of evens out, because Chuck's song "Sweet Little Sixteen" got ripped off when the Beach Boys made "Surfin' U.S.A.", and then Berry's lyric "Here come a flat-top, he was movin' up with me" morphed into the opening line of "Come Together" by the Beatles, turning into "Here come old flat-top, he come groovin' up slowly". Everybody seems to steal from (sorry, "pay homage to") everyone else. But Berry's music publisher sued John Lennon over this, which forced Lennon to cover THREE Chuck Berry songs on future solo albums so that he could get a share of that album's royalties.
Of course, plenty of people have covered Berry's songs legally, from the Beatles ("Rock and Roll Music") to ELO ("Roll Over Beethoven"), and even David Bowie ("Around and Around"). The Stones covered quite a few of his songs, from "You Can't Catch Me" and "Little Queenie" to "Bye Bye Johnny" and "Carol". Which is ironic, because this film shows Chuck Berry berating Keith Richards over and over about the proper way to play the whammy sound in "Carol", to the point where Keith looks like he's ready to explode. (Who else would have the nerve to tell Keith Richards the "proper" way to play a riff?) And what band HASN'T covered "Johnny B. Goode", it's the most classic rock song.
But how many songs did Berry really write? He says that once he made contact with Chess Records in Chicago, he wrote four songs in one week - but I bet those songs sounded a LOT alike, I'll wager he wrote the same song four times with different lyrics. I get the feeling he had only three or four different song templates, and just kept re-working them over and over. Aren't "Johnny B. Goode" and "Little Queenie" really the same song, in the end? I mean, he talk-sings the verse in the second song so you might not notice, but the choruses are virtually identical - "Go, Go, Johnny Go" overlaps with "Go, Go, Little Queenie".
From the story that Bruce Springsteen tells, it seems that for years Chuck would make bookings, show up 5 minutes before he was set to go on stage (thus ensuring that the promoter couldn't back out of their deal, since a bustling audience was already in place, waiting to see Chuck Berry) and then with no rehearsal, he'd expect whatever band was hired to already know all of his songs, with zero rehearsal together. That's ballsy, and if anything went wrong in the performance, Berry would just blame the backing band for not knowing his songs, and still collect his money. One night that backing band happened to be the E Street Band, and fortunately Springsteen's bass player was something of a Chuck Berry historian and was able to tell the other band members what key to play in. But overall, it can't be THAT hard to back up Chuck Berry, if he expected any given band to already know the chord changes.
Bringing out Julian Lennon to sing the harmony on "Johnny B. Goode" here was so smart, especially after running the footage of Chuck and John Lennon performing the song together on TV in 1972. Julian's voice sounded so much like his father's that it made me wish he could get together with Dhani Harrison and Zack Starkey and some McCartney offspring to form some 2nd generation version of the Beatles. Wouldn't that be great?
If you have time, check out the full John Lennon/Chuck Berry TV performance on YouTube. They also sang another song, "Memphis, Tennessee" which was nearly spoiled by Yoko Ono's weird howler-monkey noises. Why Chuck Berry allowed that to happen, I have no idea.
Also starring Chuck Berry, Steve Jordan, Johnnie Johnson, Bobby Keys, Chuck Leavell, Joey Spampinato, Little Richard (all carrying over from "Keith Richards: Under the Influence"), Eric Clapton (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"), Robert Cray, Bo Diddley, Don Everly (last seen in "The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir"), Phil Everly (ditto), Etta James, Julian Lennon (last seen in "It Was Fifty Years Ago Today"), Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Robbie Robertson, Linda Ronstadt, Bruce Springsteen, Ingrid Berry, with archive footage of John Lennon (last seen in "Janis: Little Girl Blue").
RATING: 7 out of 10 one-nighters
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