Johnny B. Goode, Chuck Berry’s tale of a country boy axe hero was so sensational that NASA sent it into space just in case extraterrestrials were tuning in…
Seventh on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time and included as one of the 27 musical pieces to represent humanity on the Voyager 2, it’s safe to say that Johnny B. Goode is a little bit special.
In fact, few songs are as exhilarating and so godammned urgent as Johnny B. Goode sounds nearly 70 years after they were recorded. Maybe because it is, in many ways, the ultimate rock’n’roll track. Those lyrics about “a country boy named Johnny B. Goode/ Who never ever learned to read or write so well/ But he could play a guitar just like a-ringin’ a bell”, well, that’s the spirit of rock’n’roll right there, isn’t it? That a working-class kid can pick up a guitar and change the world. No wonder Chuck Berry sang the hell out of that song, he was singing about himself and every rock’n’roller around him.
Though it’s clearly autobiographical, Berry did modify some details. The name ‘Johnny’ came from Johnnie Johnson, Berry’s go-to pianist who’d pounded the ivories on such classics as Maybellene, Roll Over Beethoven and Sweet Little 16, and that line about “deep down in Louisiana, close to New Orleans”? Well, Berry actually hailed from St Louis, Missouri (in fact, the ‘Goode’ came from the street he’d grown up on – 2520 Goode Avenue). Oh, and he could read and write just fine.
Go Johnny, Go, Go
People might have cottoned on to the fact that Berry was singing about himself had he kept his original line about “a coloured boy named Johnny B. Goode”. He altered it so as to not alienate his white fans, figuring that “country boy” made the song more universal (and, as he admitted to Rolling Stone later, “I changed it to ‘country boy’ – or else it wouldn’t get on the radio”).
Music critic Greil Marcus once wrote that the start of Johnny B. Goode is “the most deliciously explosive opening in rock’n’roll”, yet listen closely and you’ll hear something of another song in that blast-off. Berry lifted the intro to Johnny B. Goode from a 1946 number by Louis Jordan titled Ain’t That Just Like A Woman (They’ll Do It Every Time). And that guitar break around the halfway mark? There’s a dash of T-Bone Walker’s Strollin’ With Bones in there. But who cares, right? Rock’n’roll often poached from the past, and any pilfered elements have been thoroughly ‘Berryfied’ in the final product. Though switched-on listeners might have recognised parts of Johnny B. Goode, the reality is that nothing in 1958 had ever sounded like that.
Since its release, Johnny B. Goode has proved to be one of the most hard-wearing and cherished songs from the rock’n’roll era. It’s no surprise that director Robert Zemeckis chose it as the number Marty McFly belts out to that school hall of 50s students in Back To The Future (the scene ends with one of the musicians on a phone, exclaiming, “Chuck, it’s Marvin! Your cousin, Marvin Berry! You know that new sound you’re looking for? Well, listen to this!”), and even when it was dropped into the setlists of the artists that came after Chuck – The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Buck Owens, the Grateful Dead, Judas Priest, Sex Pistols – it never sounded out of place or out of time. In his book, Lipstick Traces, Marcus even identifies Johnny B. Goode as an antecedent to punk.
Back To The Future
However, not everyone was a fan. When NASA chose the song in 1977 as the only rock’n’roll number on the Voyager Golden Record (of which there were two phonograph discs designed to represent the best in American culture), many threw their arms up in horror that something so ‘lowbrow’ had been included. In response, cosmologist Carl Sagan, who’d chaired the committee that chose the pieces, simply said: “There are a lot of adolescents on the planet.”
Yet while Berry soared to sky-scraping heights after Johnny B. Goode, the man it was named after wasn’t so lucky. Johnson, a notoriously hard drinker, played with Chuck from 1952 to 1973 yet by the 1990s, was reduced to driving a bus in St. Louis.
Discussing Johnny B. Goode to Doug Donnelly of The Monroe News in 1998, Johnson said: “I played no part in nothing of Johnny B. Goode. On other songs, Chuck and I worked together, but not that one. We were playing one night, I think it was Chicago, and he played it. Afterwards, he told me it was a tribute to me. He did it on his own. I didn’t know nothing about it. It was never discussed.”
Cosmic Classic
Three years on, Johnson filed a lawsuit against Berry seeking co-authorship of over 50 songs. The complaint alleged Berry took advantage of Johnson’s alcoholism and lack of business nous. “[Johnson] was unable to appreciate the value of his contribution,” stated the pianist’s lawyer. “Berry misled him into believing he was only entitled to a studio musician’s fee.”
“Mr Berry knows there’s no basis in fact for this suit and is disappointed that it has been filed,” countered Berry’s attorney. Dismissed in 2002, the judge ruled that too much time had passed since the writing of the songs and the lawsuit. Johnson died three years later.
While Johnson and Berry are both no longer with us, Johnny B. Goode very much is. And not only is it Spotify’s most-played Chuck Berry track (having notched up 652 million listens at the time of going to press), it’s also the only rock’n’roll song to be floating somewhere in space.
Somewhere out there, there could very well be an alien race listening to Johnny B. Goode for the first time. And we can only say, lucky them.
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