#jack hamilton

Jack Hamilton from Ar Tonelico

"He's a guy! With guns!"

The Story: The Unknowable Joni Mitchell

Finding the right opener to write about Chuck Berry is a daunting task: After all, among so much else, Berry crafted the greatest “lede” in the history of rock and roll. The furious flurry of twanging, snapping eighth notes that opens Berry’s 1956 hit “Roll Over Beethoven”—and which reappears even more iconically atop 1958’s “Johnny B. Goode”—is to early rock and roll what Louis Armstrong’s trumpet introduction on 1928’s “West End Blues” is to early jazz, a scorched-earth manifesto of craft and virtuosity, laying out the stakes of an audacious new art form. Any consideration of Chuck Berry starts there, with that burst of notes—I count 35 of them, whizzing by in a cool 6 seconds, although I’m on deadline and may have missed a few. Listen closely enough and you’ll hear an entire generation of young people, in the U.S., England, and elsewhere, informing their piano teachers that they’ve decided to switch to electric guitar.

“Who invented rock and roll?” is a truly unanswerable question, but Chuck Berry’s claim is as solid as any. Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88,” the 1951 song most frequently cited as the music’s Big Bang, predates Berry’s emergence by four years, and Lloyd Price, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins, and even Elvis Presley had all made records before Berry broke through with “Maybellene” in 1955, at the shockingly advanced age of 28. But Berry was the first to harness the new and unruly sounds into a sort of mission statement for a generation, and many generations after. Years before Berry Gordy Jr. festooned his fledgling Motown Records with the slogan “the Sound of Young America,” Chuck Berry had worked to make each word of that perfect phrase intelligible. Berry was rock and roll’s first great auteur, blessed with an effortless ability to render the specific into the universal, and vice versa. He wrote songs infused with play, humor, ennui, pain, rage, swagger, and sex. They spoke to a generation who assumed they were about them, which was always only partially true.