Chuck Berry, page 11
Now entering Putnam’s space were three guys from St. Louis. Berry arrived with a blond Gibson ES-350T arch-top hollow body. He huddled with Leonard Chess, and Chess turned his entire focus to the hillbilly song that Berry had included on his demo. It was built on the outline of a fiddle number that western swing star Bob Wills had recorded, “Ida Red.” Berry had reworked it and was singing the name “Ida Mae” in order to distinguish his song from its origins.
Chess brother Phil was at the session, helping the band set up, buzzing around. Musicians on the label could go years without knowing which Chess brother was in charge, but Berry, an astute judge of where the power was in a room, kept his focus on Phil’s older brother. “Leonard Chess was the whole of Chess Records,” Berry declared. “Phil was an associate, he was an aide, and he was on salary. Leonard was the big kingpin. And it was Leonard’s from the beginning and until he died.”11
Also in the room was Willie Dixon, a centerpiece of the Chicago blues scene whom the brothers relied on to manage a session from the floor. Dixon was a kangaroo-sized man who played a stand-up bass, and his embrace of the instrument was a scene unto itself, Berry recalled. Dixon brought a booming, material sound to the session, but the other three didn’t know him, and his presence slowed things down as they tried to get a definitive take.
Leonard Chess was in a small side room looking through a glass window at the musicians as he controlled an Ampex monaural quarter-inch tape recorder. He had no musical background but good ears and vivid communication skills. Chess noted that “Ida Mae” was a problematic title, first because it sounded too rural for the label’s big-city market. Also problematic, it did little to obscure the connection to the popular Wills song. Chess wanted a new number, not a cover whose royalties they would have to share with others. So everybody in the studio started kicking names around for what they were about to record.
They needed a name with the same amount of syllables to fit the beat. Berry says he instantly came up with “Maybellene,” thinking back to a children’s book he knew about a cow. An account accepted by others in the room came from Johnson, who recalled Leonard spotting a bottle of Maybelline brand mascara in the studio, asking, “Why don’t we call the damn thing Maybelline?” and then altering the spelling to avoid a trademark violation lawsuit.
With a fresh name and a day ahead of them, they faced a song that no one knew quite how to recast. The biggest problem was outside the room: how to arrange a number that blurred the lines between country and rhythm and blues, that was neither Black like an Ike Turner record nor white like a Hank Williams one. Was it a goof, a parody? Was it for Muddy Waters’s grown-up fans or for teenagers or… who? Here was a song with numerous possible distinct audiences, and that right there made it unlike most songs. A category fallacy could kill it, and Leonard wasn’t going to spend unlimited time in the studio to plumb its depths. Phil Chess himself admitted they were flying blind. “You have to remember, we didn’t have anything to compare it to. This was an entirely different kind of music.”
Leonard fussed and called for retakes as he tried alterations that didn’t bring it into any better focus. One thing Berry instantly understood from observing him was his innate ability to explain himself across cultural borders. Leonard and his brother had been born in Motol, Poland, and spoke Yiddish in the household. Only after they arrived in Chicago in 1928 did the boys learn English. One word more than any other, Leonard found, helped him get his point across in the studio: motherfucker.
Motherfucker was Leonard’s placeholder and punctuation mark. It was what he said when he was displeased or wanted to keep things moving or when he was excited or didn’t know what else to say. Motherfuckers filled the room as Ida Mae became Maybellene. They did thirty-six takes of the song, with Berry standing and sitting, with Berry altering the twang of his voice, with Berry down the hallway singing from the bathroom. One time Leonard came into the studio himself, waved Ebbie Hardy aside, and beat his drumsticks on a phone book to see if that was what the song was missing. It was not. Motherfucker!
The group took short breaks, during which Johnson occupied himself with a slow piano blues that contrasted with the blazing beat they were wrestling. But after three dozen takes, when Leonard decided whatever they were going to get they had gotten already, Chess noted the obvious: Were they ready to cut the other song, the B side, of the record they were trying to make?
The band hadn’t planned that far ahead. Suddenly the jam Johnson had served up during a previous break, which may have been a song they had played at the Cosmo, was sounding pretty good—a morning-moaner that put a listener in a room where the molecules of smoke and dust had seized up, a grainy photo of eternity. How about that thing? somebody asked.
Berry was adept at turning out rhymes over a blues roll, improvising a new tune on top. And that’s how the blues song they played, “Wee Wee Hours,” came into focus, inspired by Joe Turner’s “Wee Baby Blues” and finished in fifteen minutes. It has some of the burnish of a Nat King Cole ballad, and a lot of the nothing-to-lose slog of Charles Brown’s piano blues. Johnson called it “the first song we did, Chuck and I, that was all our own.”
They celebrated with an order of burgers and a flurry of handshakes, and then came paperwork for Berry to sign in Chess’s office. The Missourians piled into his red station wagon with the mattress in back and headed home.
Berry, Johnson, and Hardy fell back into their regular gig at the Cosmo. On July 5, a song titled “Maybelline,” listing Berry as composer, was registered with the US Copyright Office of the Library of Congress.
Leonard Chess, meanwhile, went out on the road, making agreements with distributors, bartering with DJs to get the music on the air. He took “Maybellene” with him on a trip to New York, playing it for influential DJ Alan Freed, whose Rock & Roll Party was heard in markets around the country. Freed’s show was listened to closely by record people because it routinely introduced Black music to white ears.
Freed didn’t just play the record Chess gave him; he was bumper to bumper, side to side with it, spinning “Maybellene” for two hours straight one night and giving it an emphatic send-off. “Maybellene,” released in July and buoyed by airplay Freed and then others gave it, elevated fast.
Phil Chess was visiting his daughter at summer camp in Wisconsin. He heard the song on the radio and rushed to call his brother. Leonard cut him off. “You better get your butt back here,” he barked. “We got so much order—we don’t have any records.”
Berry was walking past a tailor shop in the Ville when he heard the song playing from a storefront. Not wanting people to notice him listening, he kept walking back and forth on the sidewalk until the song was finished. Then he ran home and told his family.
And when the man known in the Ville as “Charles” and at the Crank Club as “Berryn” held his record in his hands, the name on it was “Chuck Berry.” He tried to establish a distance between “Charles” and “Chuck Berry”: “Chuck Berry, that means it’s all music, because Chuck Berry is music. But Charles Berry is a man who has certain things that he wants to keep to himself,” he explained later.12
“Maybellene” was the first of what he called “the car songs.” It was “a yearning which I had since I was aged seven to drive about in a car. I first started driving at 17—one year earlier than I should have. It was my fascination for the roads, for driving, motoring, which prompted me to write those songs.”13
Chuck Berry wasn’t a hot-rodder, but he was a total gearhead, a rebel who saw technological expertise as the great leveler. You may have money, you may be white, but if you were up against somebody who knew how to make the most of their tools, you had a fight on your hands. And if you were up against Berry, you were going to lose. That’s what “Maybellene” is about.14
The story is elemental. A poor man in a Ford with a V-8 engine racing a wealthy man in a Cadillac for the right to be with the woman who goes to the victor. Maybellene is the storyteller’s girlfriend, but she loves the race.
The singer is jousting, but he’s behind when his V-8 overheats, and he slows down to let a sudden cloudburst cool it off. There’s something magical about this moment, the singer controlling nature and his materials. When this crafty wheelman spots the Cadillac struggling up the next hill, he makes his move. He catches her, end of song, Berry’s guitar cooing in the fade-out as he’s rolling in his sweet baby’s arms.
It’s a drive-in movie for all of America. Later, after everybody knew what Berry looked like, thoughtful writers would examine how, besides being a song about class pride, it was a song about racial equality. An ambitious, fast-thinking Black kid with gifts challenges assumptions of what could happen in America.
But at the time few knew who he was, and the song itself had a special rapport with the southern white consciousness. Weeks after it was released, a twenty-year-old white singer from Tupelo, Mississippi, put “Maybellene” in his show, Elvis Presley performing it live on the Louisiana Hayride radio broadcast August 20, 1955. “We only learnt it a couple of days ago,” he told the Shreveport Municipal Auditorium crowd. “It’s a song about…,” and he pauses, trying to explain it. “A song about…,” the audience is wondering now. “It goes something like this.” And when he shouts, “Maybellene!” they start screaming because they had just learned Berry’s song too, and they all knew what it was about.
Radio was voracious, playing more records than ever, and records stoked the ongoing transformation of an audience: young people were tuning in, eager to hear music from distant places, from people unlike themselves, when presented the opportunity.
There was a new fluidity, shaped by strangers. “Maybellene,” a song about blurring white lines, marked this upheaval.
Simultaneous with its release in July 1955, the Sydney, Australia, Morning Herald reported a fireball falling from the sky and landing in Chicago. Six young children playing in their yard were nearly hit, said their father, Jim Gutillo. He described to a reporter “a blue thing with a yellow tail” landing at his feet,
right in the middle of my kids. The children thought it was a message container from a flying saucer.
I told them they had been reading too many comic books.
The meteor was accompanied by a noteworthy odor.15
Gutillo said he feared the impact would obliterate his family. However, all escaped injury, according to the newspaper. The kids were alright.
In his September 3, 1955, Rhythm–Blues Notes column, Billboard’s Paul Ackerman wrote, “The ‘Maybellene’ Sweepstakes shifted into high gear the past week.” As labels raced to get competing versions out, Ackerman underscored a key sign of the record’s importance: that an original song by a Black artist was doing better on the pop charts (number twelve that week) than the covers of it that were rushed out by white singers (Jim Lowe on Dot, Johnny Long on Coral). Berry’s song had just topped the rhythm and blues chart. Ackerman also noted that jump boogie singer and saxophonist Big John Greer had an answer record out, “Come Back Maybellene.”
At the same moment, Cash Box, a music-business trade journal, published a startling special editorial titled “What Is Pop?”16 America’s compartmentalized sense of itself was breaking open, and white Americans were forced to take at least fleeting glances at how others outside their immediate experience lived. “What is happening more and more in our national life is also happening in our music,” Cash Box’s editorial voice declared.
The writer might have had in mind how 1954’s Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was, by the summer of 1955, reshaping American institutions large and small. Interstate travel was becoming a way for those interested in advancing racial equality to hold out for equal treatment under the law—why did people have to move to the back of the bus when they crossed a geographic line on a cross-country trip?
Cash Box acknowledged that the world was theirs too. In the world of record buyers, “An integration is taking place so that we are developing a taste which is a combination of all the regions of the United States rather than have different tastes kept exclusively for one area, one group of people.”
The established practice of whites covering rhythm and blues songs and landing them in the pop charts disempowered Black labels and artists. Black creativity was used to move money into white pockets. New Orleans musician Dave Bartholomew put it as well as anyone could: “There was no way I could overcome that,” he said. “That was actually a segregation move. It was actually the whites covering the black music.”17
Cash Box: “Since the war there have been two distinct factors affecting our pop music.” The first was country songs crossing into the pop fields. (That would have included the likes of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s cover of Merle Travis’s “Sixteen Tons” and Mitch Miller’s smash “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”) The other factor, noted the writer, “was the still continuing impact of Rock ‘n Roll on the pop field.” Black regional sounds were being embraced by the pop charts. And those sounds were here identified by a term unfamiliar to most Americans, even to many musicians who made the music in question: rock & roll.
Cover songs from marginalized fields were now taking the main stage, and after a period when folks like the Fontane Sisters and Pat Boone could make money with inferior versions of Black songs, the music was being embraced in its original form. By asking “What is pop?” the Cash Box writer was getting as close to asking “What is America?” as the magazine’s readers would let it get in 1955, but the question remains a good one. If pop was formerly whatever white artists and labels took and repackaged and said it was, a new definition was now needed. Cash Box offered one: pop is America without borders.
With no more physical frontiers left to conquer, it almost seems as though we have set out to conquer our regional frontiers, make the advantages of each part of our country available to all the others.
This can only mean a greater appreciation of music and songs on the part of all our people and wider, expanding horizons for the music business as a whole.
Meanwhile, in August 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago, was murdered in Money, Mississippi, after a white woman fabricated the story that he had flirted with her.
In September, rising country music star Marty Robbins released his cover of “Maybellene.”
What was pop? The sounds that had been shunted from the mainstream. The music finding a home in places where the folks who made it would still not be invited. “Maybellene” was in the top five on the pop charts by the fall of 1955, and none of the white acts who tried to ride his song could touch his success. Black acts were crossing over, and Chuck Berry was doing it in the boldest manner of all. Not with vocal group politeness and good manners; not with strings and impeccable musicianship, refinement and superb engineering. Not by representing himself as anything other than human, not a cartoon, not a clown. He wasn’t trying to court you, please you, or reason with you, he was exactly like the singer in “Maybellene”—fixing to blow you away. There was no appeal, except for this: Follow me!
6
CHESSONOMICS
Chess’s business was built on hits, and by following a hit with fresh product while listeners still remembered the singer’s name. The Chess brothers impressed on Berry their interest in recording a follow-up to “Maybellene.” And so, in September 1955, Berry headed back to Chicago.
To be under the sign of Chess Records in the mid-1950s was to be touched by the Maxwell Street Market. It was a West Side gathering place, a nine-block open-air bazaar buttressed by retail shops. Maxwell Street ran east–west, and at the intersection of Maxwell and Halsted, the spindle of its havoc, much was for sale.
Starting in the 1880s the neighborhood around Maxwell Street was settled by eastern European Jews fleeing the pogroms. Peddlers sold from wooden carts, and the street turned into a gathering spot where deals were made. It became a congested thrum, especially on Sunday, after the Jewish Sabbath had ended. On Sunday the market was best navigated on foot, a loud, brash exchange place where diverse tongues were spoken.
By the 1920s the businesses around Maxwell Street were still largely Jewish-owned, but the people living there were increasingly Black and Mexican. In the 1940s upwards of seventy thousand bargain hunters would visit on a given Sunday. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Maxwell Street was a sensory overload, a smell that hung in your nostrils, a soundbath, an emulsion stuck to the bottom of your shoes. It rewired the creativity of the writers, musicians, and artists who were drawn to the scene.
Art critic Jerry Saltz went there a lot growing up in Chicago in the 1960s. “It was a door to another world that was living parallel to ours and—what’s the word? Adjoined. There are adjoined rooms to life, and the gates between them seemed to be lifted once every week. Sunday.”1
A tableful of mix-and-match brown shoes
Cheese graters and egg beaters
Girdles, neck braces, zippers
Old bottles
78 rpm records
Turtles
Rusting carburetor parts
Things had been sold at one point, and then moved around and sold again, and again. Years might go by but the stuff remained, and here it finally landed on Maxwell Street, sold one final time.
Here’s a job you can’t do anymore. They had pullers on Maxwell Street. Meaty figures who blocked foot traffic while picking off strays from the human stream, shoving them in the direction of a rack of suits or the entry to a jewelry shop. Hey, this was Chicago; pulling was a union job (Retail Clerks Association). Pullers were just more proof that on Maxwell Street, capitalism was a full contact sport.
