Chuck Berry - Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade
Pressing: 1967 First Mono Pressing
“If you had to give rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry." - John Lennon
I’ve often joked that best inheritance I’ll leave my son will be my record collection. Wanna know about philosophy, religion, politics, love, heartbreak and life? It’s all there kid. I suppose you could say something similar about Chuck Berry. Rock ‘n’ Roll, R&B, Soul, Punk, Hip-Hop, Country...it’s all there. I don’t really need to describe Chuck Berry’s music here, you know it already. Even if you’ve never listened to a song of his, you know it. It’s threaded through out all popular music.
1. I still think about the fire at the Universal Studios warehouse that destroyed all of those master recordings, including all of Chess Records’ catalog. There’s something really incongruous about being so careless with Chuck Berry’s musical legacy to allow those recordings to be destroyed but simultaneously so reverent that the music was sent it into space on Voyager to represent us as a species.
2. Check out Too Much Monkey Business and you can hear where Bob Dylan got his vocal delivery on Subterranean Homesick Blues.
3. Credit should be given to Chuck’s songwriting partner and piano player, Johnnie Johnson, who was supposedly part of the inspiration for the song Johnny B. Goode.
4. More Voyager stuff because I find it fascinating. Voyager I and the golden record with Johnny B. Goode on it is roughly 13.5 billion miles from earth. In the time it took to read this entry it traveled about 2,500 more miles. I find the likelihood of it still speeding through the cosmos long after we’re gone both incredibly sad and incredibly comforting.
