| Ike Bana |
03-22-2017 11:50 PM |
I was 9 years old in 1955 the first time I ever heard Chuck Berry on the radio. I had heard "Rock Around The Clock" maybe a month earlier, but this was different...the first time I heard "Maybelline." I have this purely emotional memory of it. It's pretty close to the intensity of the emotional memory I have of the time eight years or so later, the first time a girlfriend ever dropped her pantyhose. And then it was "School Days", "Rock and Roll Music", "Sweet Little Sixteen", and "Johnny B. Goode". Obviously I had never heard anything like it. Nobody had ever heard anything like it. There had been a few songs on the radio before this...things that were different, like Bill Haley's "Crazy, Man Crazy" and Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle, and Roll." But nothing like this. Why? Because Chuck Berry, was IMO, the greatest lyricist in the history of popular music, but mostly because he was the first real, revolutionary rock and roll guitarist. Nobody had ever played rock and roll rhythm guitar like this before in the history of music. It changed everything.
This is worse than losing Leon Russell, breaks my heart.
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