{"id":1111,"date":"2016-05-13T07:00:12","date_gmt":"2016-05-13T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=1111"},"modified":"2017-03-19T10:09:08","modified_gmt":"2017-03-19T14:09:08","slug":"much-monkey-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/much-monkey-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Too Much Monkey Business (Chuck Berry)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/3MW_VFqWz_k\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Another from the brilliant Chuck Berry &#8212; I first heard it from Tom Rush, but quickly hunted up the original, and it started me on a\u00a0 never-ending Berry binge. I eventually had every album he made between 1957 and 1964, which is testimony in itself, because the fifties was not a decade of great rock &#8216;n&#8217; roll albums. Rock &#8216;n&#8217; roll was teen music, which at that point meant singles, since teens were assumed not to have the money for LPs. <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1113 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/chuck-berry-after-school-300x299.jpg?resize=300%2C299\" alt=\"chuck berry after school\" width=\"300\" height=\"299\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/chuck-berry-after-school.jpg?w=300&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/chuck-berry-after-school.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>Rock &#8216;n&#8217; roll LPs were either hit anthologies or teen-idol pin-up souvenirs, destined to be mooned over by adoring fans, not listened to as serious collections of great tracks. (A few rockers also made LPs for the adult market, separate from their teen hits, but they were people like Connie Francis and Pat Boone.) Or they were simply attempts to cash in on transitory popularity, with a couple of hits and a lot of filler.<\/p>\n<p>As a result, Chuck Berry&#8217;s first album, <em>After School Session<\/em> bids fair to being the first great rock &#8216;n&#8217; roll auteur LP. Released in 1957, it included none of the hits that had already made him a breakaway star: &#8220;Maybelline,&#8221; &#8220;Johnny B. Goode,&#8221; &#8220;Roll Over Beethoven,&#8221; or &#8220;Rock and Roll Music.&#8221; Apparently Chess figured that putting the big hits on an album would cut into singles sales, so instead they pulled together a bunch of B-sides and singles that hadn&#8217;t hit big &#8212; in other words, filler&#8230; but at that point Chuck Berry was so prolific that his filler beat virtually anyone else&#8217;s best work, whether your standard is quality, variety, or just plain entertainment.<\/p>\n<p><em>After School Session<\/em> has blues instrumentals, country music, the pseudo-Caribbean novelty &#8220;Havana Moon,&#8221; and several of Berry&#8217;s greatest compositions: this one, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/no-money-down\/\">No Money Down<\/a>,&#8221; and his &#8220;black is beautiful&#8221; masterpiece, &#8220;Brown Eyed Handsome Man,&#8221; with the unforgettable verse:<\/p>\n<p>Milo Venus was a beautiful girl,<br \/>\nShe had the world in the palm of her hand.<br \/>\nShe lost both her arms in a wrestling match<br \/>\nOver a brown-eyed handsome man.<\/p>\n<p>Who the hell else ever wrote like that? Or, in this one, check out the way he inverts &#8220;working hard&#8221; and places the &#8220;yet&#8221; in the first verse:<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been running to and fro,<br \/>\nHard-working at the mill,<br \/>\nNever fail, in the mail, yet<br \/>\nCome a rotten bill.<\/p>\n<p>The rhythm of his lines is perfect, propulsive, and feels like natural speech, but when you look at them closely, he is constantly inverting and inserting words in unlikely places to get that effect &#8212; and it never feels strained or calculating, because his ideas and phrases are so fresh and surprising, and yet so simple and accurate. The litany of complaints in this one range from school to work to the army to marriage, to the phone company. Who ever composed a more compact and instantly relatable narrative than:<\/p>\n<p>Pay phone, something wrong, dime gone, will mail&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>He was simply the best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An early masterpiece from Chuck Berry and one of the most brilliantly composed lyrics I know, with some further thoughts on his genius.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - 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He was a phenomenal writer, with a gift for fitting words together so they scanned, rhymed, and still felt like normal human speech spiked with flashes of wry humor: As I got on a city bus and\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Flamingoes49.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Flamingoes49.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Flamingoes49.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":891,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/no-money-down\/","url_meta":{"origin":1111,"position":3},"title":"No Money Down (Chuck Berry\/John Hammond)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"April 29, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"One of Chuck Berry's less familiar masterpieces, going back to his roots in Muddy Waters, which I originally picked up from John Hammond's Newport Festival recording.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"blues at newport","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/blues-at-newport.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4863,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/promised-land\/","url_meta":{"origin":1111,"position":4},"title":"Promised Land (Chuck Berry\/Freedom Riders)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"February 17, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been playing Chuck Berry's \"Promised Land\" for years, and always loved it, but I recently learned that it had a deeper level of meaning, related to a historic moment in the Civil Rights movement. Berry isn't usually thought of as a political or protest songwriter, but that's one of\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2030\/07\/Rock-Hill-incident.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2030\/07\/Rock-Hill-incident.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2030\/07\/Rock-Hill-incident.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2030\/07\/Rock-Hill-incident.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":5446,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/north-country-girl\/","url_meta":{"origin":1111,"position":5},"title":"Girl from the North Country (Bob Dylan)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"November 2, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"This is another one I've known forever, and don't even remember learning. It's kind of an anomaly in Dylan's oeuvre, since\u00a0 he tended to be better at break-up songs, and in particular nasty break-up songs (\"Don't Think Twice,\" for example), than at love songs. I've already posted one noteworthy exception\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Echo-Helstrom-e1730414234748.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1111"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2696,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111\/revisions\/2696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}