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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Hail, hail rock 'n' roll
New York Daily News
May 28, 2006
Three pop pioneers bring their timeless tunes to NYC
James Brown ...
... Little Richard ...
... and Chuck Berry make rare pit stops in the city next month.
Three pioneer rock 'n' rollers who are making rare visits to New York in the next couple of weeks make the Rolling Stones look like pups.
But then, that's what the Rolling Stones were when they first sat around their British bedrooms being blown away by the likes of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and James Brown.
"You have to remember what England was like in the '50s," said Stones guitarist Keith Richards a few years ago. "We were still on rationing. It was very gray. And so was the music.
"Then this new sound started trickling over from America - Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Elvis, Little Richard. It was like a thousand volts of electricity. You mean, this is possible?"
Apparently it was. Kids all over the world picked up guitars and found microphones. Within a decade, it all added up to rock 'n' roll, the dominant popular music of the last 50 years.
Rock 'n' roll also moved fast. Its sound mutated every few years, each new phase growing from what came before.
Artists understand that. Deejays know that. Rap mixers know James Brown's music as well as they know their sneakers. Fans, however, are tuned in less. Since cultural memory is not a strong suit for Americans - if we don't remember it personally, it didn't happen or doesn't matter - the originators of rock 'n' roll are now often seen as historical abstractions.
That's ironic, because dozens of Brown songs have been sampled into rap records. "Funky Drummer" alone has made it into more than a hundred.
Chuck Berry guitar riffs aren't in vogue on rock records at the moment, but trace the guitar work on any Pearl Jam or Green Day record and somewhere in its DNA are traces of Berry, whose clean mix of country and blues - some of it lifted from his pianist, Johnnie Johnson - became the signature sound for all of rock 'n' roll when he started dropping it into songs like "Johnny B. Goode" 50 years ago.
Meanwhile, every time L.L. Cool J takes off his shirt on stage and approaches his audience with a gleam in his eye, he's working the legacy of Little Richard, who could stand on a piano and do a 15-minute striptease in the middle of "Lucille." (For that matter, Madonna is a child of Little Richard, with that same churning, grinding mix of the sacred and the secular.)
When Little Richard plays the Apollo next Saturday night, he's unlikely to do any stripteases. He turns 74 this year, and that's one of the concessions he's made to the passage of time.
But he's still working on the whole sacred-secular thing.
"It will always be one of the great struggles of my life," he said a few years ago. While he loves the Lord, he remains "the originator, the emancipator, the quasar of rock 'n' roll."
Along with his Apollo show, by the way, he will also be inducted into the Apollo Hall of Fame.
Speaking of the Apollo, James Brown almost defines the place, since that's where he cut the most famous live album ever.
But both he and Berry will be working downtown this trip, at B.B. King's Blues Club on W. 42nd St.
Brown plays there June 8 and 9, Berry on June 16. Neither gets to New York too often these days, which is understandable since Brown admits to turning 73 this year, and Berry turns 80 in October.
To answer the obvious questions, no, Brown no longer throws himself around the stage like a rag doll in a tornado and Berry has cut back on the duckwalks.
But they still do a helluva show.
Brown's backup singers and dancers take a lot of the load off him, allowing him to stay strong when he steps to the good foot.
Berry still performs all the hits, and if he could sing "Sweet Little Sixteen" in his sleep, his shows are a reminder that in music, as in "Casablanca," the fundamental things apply. No slick marketing product here, just rock-solid rock 'n' roll.
None of these three guys has led a simple life. Little Richard has spent a lot of time on the edge, and both Brown and Berry have spent time in jail.
So they're not jolly old troubadours who hang out at the bar after the show. They're thoroughbreds, high-strung. They've been known to be difficult.
But so what? Their music sounds as fresh and powerful on a 2006 car radio as it did in Keith Richards' flat back in 1956.
Little Richard, James Brown and Chuck Berry are all in numerous halls of fame. Seeing their lives presented there is remarkable. More remarkable is that they still climb on stages to show us why.
What they don't do is climb coconut trees. That one, Keith Richards has all to himself. |
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| glencar |
Has anybody seen Chuck Berry lately? I could make the show but is it worth it? |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
quote:
glencar wrote:
I could make the show but is it worth it?
Does a bear shit in the woods?  |
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| sammy davis jr. |
Do we really have to use the word "shit" in a Chuck Berry thread? |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
quote:
sammy davis jr. wrote:
Do we really have to use the word "shit" in a Chuck Berry thread?
LOL. Are you talking about the cameras that got installed in his restaurant's restrooms? No need to make a big deal of it. Everyone's got their own gig, you know? Besides he was only trying to catch people stealing. Nothing more. |
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| Fadeout_Freedom |
quote:
glencar wrote:
Has anybody seen Chuck Berry lately? I could make the show but is it worth it?
Somebody posted on YouTube a few low-fi clips from Chuck's April 12 gig at Blueberry Hill in St. Louis.. you might get an idea from those..
I was there that night too, he played about an hour.. pretty cool to see him in that intimate of a setting. Still a pretty good showman, he had a real friendly rapport with the crowd. Occasionally he got almost crazy loose with his vocal phrasing, but I was impressed considering some of his songs have a zillion words and he never dropped a line. I tried unsuccessfully to sing along with "Nadine" and of course I got lost and Mr. Berry did not.
Musically, on a number of songs, the band carried most of the load, and it occurred to me there simply was a 79-year-old guitarist onstage... then on other songs it seemed like Chuck channeled something out of nowhere, and the room got pretty darn electric. For me to be standing twenty feet from that, was definitely worth it. |
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| Kilroy |
quote:
glencar wrote:
Has anybody seen Chuck Berry lately? I could make the show but is it worth it?
You're kidding right? I saw him a couple of years ago and it was one of the top ten shows of my Life. The Stones Being #1
Go see the show, have fun, keep in mind that you are in the presence of greatness. Just think how many young guitarist tried their best to get that amazing lick.....................Go Johnny go go go................And thank you also Mr Johnson, for the lick.. |
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| Soldatti |
quote:
glencar wrote:
Has anybody seen Chuck Berry lately? I could make the show but is it worth it?
I didn't see a pic of Chuck on the last 6-7 months. How is he? |
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