When I was in my first year of secondary school we were all tasked with giving a presentation on something. It could be anything we wanted so being of that age i chose guitars. I couldn’t actually play the guitar back then but that wasn’t the point, I was still obsessed by them.
As i gave my talk, the picture I showed to illustrate my love of guitars and guitarists was Chuck Berry. It was a great photo of him wide-eyed with a terrible multi coloured shirt and his trusty 345 around his neck. That photo basically became the template for my whole career as a musician.
A lot of guitarists work backwards to Chuck via the Stones etc. but i didn’t. Even before I learned to play, I loved his songs. His riffs, his lyrics, his stagecraft and that tempo. That awesome rock and roll shuffle. He was the man.
Later on as I got into more music from the 60s it became obvious the huge influence he had. I remember watching the woodstock movie and spotting half a dozen Chuck Berry guitar solos.
When ‘Hail Hail Rock & Roll’ came out I rented it a dozen times from the video shop. Finally I had a chance to watch his fingers and learn some of it. It also made me realise that he wasn’t the nicest chap in the world but I shrugged this off as i was only about 12.
Anyway, my point is that whether you like him or not, if you think his music is old-hat, even if you’d be happy to never hear a bad pub version of Johnny B Goode again; we can all agree that popular music as we know it would not exist without him.
Hail Hail Rock & Roll indeed x
