Arts Speak

HAILING BERRY

By Bryan A. Hollerbach | Images courtesy of Blueberry Hill, Dualtone Records

“Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans – ”

Those eight words, the first line of a song turned anthem, conquered the world in 1958, and they and the rest of “Johnny B. Goode” grace a new musical valedictory from the late, great Chuck Berry streeting in two weeks: Live From Blueberry Hill.

Nashville’s Dualtone Records will issue the 10-track release on Dec. 17, and “Johnny B. Goode” closes it – likely not by accident. Most, if not all, rock ’n’ roll aficionados, after all, can’t hear the first half of its initial couplet without adding the second half (“Way back up in the woods among the evergreens”), then the remainder of that sonic romp.

In fact, in Greil Marcus’ seminal Lipstick Traces, his 1989 “Secret History of the Twentieth Century,” that cultural polymath christens the intro to “Johnny B. Goode” “the most deliciously explosive opening in rock ’n’ roll.”

Berry strutted his last duckwalk less than five years ago, dying at his Wentzville-area home on March 18, 2017 – with The New York Times, in its obituary of him two days later, characterizing the St. Louis native as rock’s “master theorist and conceptual genius.”

An October press release devoted to Live From Blueberry Hill notes that its tracks come from gigs between July 2005 and January 2006 at Joe Edwards’ landmark restaurant, lounge and concert venue in the University City sector of the Delmar Loop. The same press release also notes that Berry performed 209 times in 17 years in the Duck Room at Blueberry Hill.

Beyond “Johnny B. Goode,” tracks on the forthcoming Dualtone release include such classics as “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Sweet Little Sixteen” and, of course, “Nadine.”

In his 1998 Grown Up All Wrong, influential (if often controversial) music critic Robert Christgau dubs Berry “the greatest rock lyricist this side of Bob Dylan” – before adding “and sometimes I prefer him to Dylan.”

Somewhat later in that glorious musical omnium-gatherum, Christgau continues about Berry: “So is he, was he, will he be a great artist? It won’t be us judging, but perhaps we can think of it this way. Maybe the true measure of his greatness was not whether his songs ‘lasted’ – a term that as of now means persisted through centuries instead of decades – but that he was one of the ones to make us understand that the greatest thing about art is the way it happens among people.”

In that regard, collectively, Berry fans may find themselves wistfully harking back to the maestro’s 1957 “School Day,” a song (alas) excluded from Live From Blueberry Hill: “Hail, hail rock ’n’ roll.” ln