Well, did Rolling Stone Mag. get it right?

[porterburst]

Chuck berry was extremely influential and all but just as a plain guitarist I'd have to question his place, but other than that, can't argue too much really.

Without Chuck there wouldn't be Rock N' Roll period. It's like trying to learn to read without the alphabet.

 

[Chilli]

Silly lists are made by lazy journalists, this article could have been written in the pub

while drinking a few beers.This is just another reason why I don't really buy music rags

any more, I'd rather read what you lot have to say, in the end you're all easily as

entertaining as them.Plus you will trawl through the Internet search out the interesting

crap for me.

 

[Thumpalumpacus]

Without Chuck there wouldn't be Rock N' Roll period. It's like trying to learn to read without the alphabet.

Not at all. There were plenty of artists all pushing in that direction, and many of them doing damn near the same thing Chuck was doing ... and more. Notice the distorted guitar on this one:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbfnh1oVTk0&feature=related]Rocket 88 (Original Version) - Ike Turner/Jackie Brenston - YouTube[/ame]

Check out the great fills in the original "Hound Dog":

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_nNNIYTy9g&feature=related]Big Mama Thornton Sings "Hound Dog" - YouTube[/ame]

Ole John Lee knew what the hell rock and roll was, too:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSnQ0bdHW0s&feature=related]Boom! Boom! - John Lee Hooker - YouTube[/ame]

The rough beast was already slouching towards Bethlehem ... its hour had come, and Chuck was only its avatar, not its essence.

 

[mgenet]

The rough beast was already slouching towards Bethlehem ... its hour had come, and Chuck was only its avatar, not its essence.

Great quote, Thumpa.

Feeling poetic today are we?

Words and music can be sweet sounds.

 

[Thumpalumpacus]

I get in them high-falutin' moods on occasion.

 

[mgenet]

I get in them high-falutin' moods on occasion.

Your mojo-muse is working today Thump.

 

[Thumpalumpacus]

Dude, I'm getting all googly-eyed. Are you sure this is okay?

 

[milkjam]

it's not a case of wether i like it or not, and no it's not a list of songwriters but Keith hasn't written an iconic riff and a song or two. he has written several iconic riffs and songs, written as in, invented them on his guitar. you are saying he don't deserve to be on the list because what he plays isn't difficult enough ?
Keith doesn't know as many chords as Joe Pass, or scales like satch. he can't play fast like yngwie and he's not as "out there" as jeff beck. so what ?
these lists are stupid anyway...we mostly seem to agree. what does rolling stone know about anything.
what makes Duane Allman or Clapton more worthy than Keith ? Pagey too for that matter.
Keith really ain't that good...he told me he don't wanna be on no stupid list anyway.
but i'll tell ya what...y'all gonna miss him when he's gone.

 

[FrankieOliver]

it's not a case of wether i like it or not, and no it's not a list of songwriters but Keith hasn't written an iconic riff and a song or two. he has written several iconic riffs and songs, written as in, invented them on his guitar. you are saying he don't deserve to be on the list because what he plays isn't difficult enough ?
Keith doesn't know as many chords as Joe Pass, or scales like satch. he can't play fast like yngwie and he's not as "out there" as jeff beck. so what ?
these lists are stupid anyway...we mostly seem to agree. what does rolling stone know about anything.
what makes Duane Allman or Clapton more worthy than Keith ? Pagey too for that matter.
Keith really ain't that good...he told me he don't wanna be on no stupid list anyway.
but i'll tell ya what...y'all gonna miss him when he's gone.

Who?

 

[EasyAce]

I haven't heard any of his post-Mann act stuff, Ace.

You have if you remember "Nadine" and "You Never Can Tell," both of which charted high enough in 1964-65.

Got any nuggets?

You can (should) probably begin by smoking out Live at the Fillmore Auditorium, captured at a series of 1967 shows he played with the original Steve Miller Band (when Boz Scaggs was still in the lineup and they were still a solid blues group) backing him, a set on which he played very little if anything of his vintage stuff and dug back into the blues. (It's often forgotten now, but "Wee Wee Hours"---the B side to "Maybelline"---was probably more representative of who he was at the outset, since he intended "Maybelline" as a parody and then struck huge gold with it.)

That was the first of his sets on Mercury after he left Chess in 1966; his so-called "lost" Chess albums like Chuck Berry in London (don't confuse it with the later The London Chuck Berry Sessions), St. Louis to Liverpool, and Fresh Berrys (his last Chess album before the Mercury years, and a set featuring Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield hinting at the bluesman to which he'd mostly revert in his Mercury years), are also well worth the hunt. St. Louis to Liverpool probably has the most familiar music of Berry's post-prison period, including "Nadine" and "You Never Can Tell" but also "No Particular Place to Go," "The Promised Land," and a beautiful "Memphis" followup called "Little Marie," not to mention a killer remake of "The Things I Used to Do."

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGnS9-io7dQ]Chuck Berry, "Little Marie"[/ame]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_rVjPPS09g]Chuck Berry, "The Promised Land"[/ame]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC7r_qYU6WE]Chuck Berry, "I Want to Be Your Driver"[/ame]

Among the rest of the Mercury years (he went back to Chess in the early 1970s, after co-founder Leonard Chess died), the other one to hunt down is Concerto in B Goode, with side one a solid set of blues and side two a side-long jam on themes based, as the title suggests, off and around "Johnny B. Goode"'s elementary structure, and if it seems to meander here and there it a) still beats the living crap out of anything the Grateful Dead was squeezing off, and b) acquits him a helluva lot better than those stupid psychedelicised albums young scion Marshall Chess was jamming down Howlin' Wolf's (This is Howlin' Wolf's New Album. He Doesn't Like It. He Didn't Like His Electric Guitar at First, Either) and Muddy Waters's (Electric Mud and After the Rain) throats at about the same time.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKoySHowMvk]Chuck Berry, "Concerto in B Goode (Part Two)"[/ame]

He went back to Chess in 1970; the first album he cut in his homecoming, Back Home, is the best of the three by far.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u0HlsmbEBw]Chuck Berry, "Tulane"[/ame]

The London Chuck Berry Sessions may have been a massive hit thanks to "My Ding-a-Ling" but it's not as solid as Back Home, and Bio is somewhere between them. After that, he got plucked into the oldies circuit for keeps for the most part, but there was an awful lot of good music coming out of the man between 1964 and 1971, and it's a shame that so many people seemed to miss the best of it.

 

[EasyAce]

Without Chuck there wouldn't be Rock N' Roll period. It's like trying to learn to read without the alphabet.

I think there would have been rock and roll without him, but it might not have become what it became without him. The familiar thematic guitar licks and compressing rockabilly's clip-cop into the solid 4/4, and the songwriting and the wordsmithing he brought to the music, made his difference. That plus his own rather eclectic influences---he grew up loving both the blues and poetry as well as country music, though his anchor had always been the blues. Muddy Waters (one of his idols) had no idea just how he was about to slit his own throat when he encouraged Berry in Chicago to approach Chess Records cold with a homemade demo tape, after Berry had just spent several years slogging the St. Louis bar circuits . . .

The case can be made that Chuck Berry made rock and roll both a guitar music (what preceded him was as much dominated by keyboards and horns as by guitars; Ike Turner's rep in those years sit as much on his piano pumping and his arranging as it did his guitar playing---it wasn't one of Ike Turner's guitar licks that became the elementary template of the music, alas, though he was a great one in those years) and a writer's music (he saw and raised the like of Lieber and Stoller about tenfold and beyond, as even they knew it).

I still remember an old book collecting assorted era's rock lyrics, The Poetry in Rock, and it launched with a few of Berry's songs, with the author (Richard Goldstein) introducing that section this way: How could we have faced the '50s without Chuck Berry? He was sex, speed, and see-you-later-alligator jive. About the only one who could have topped that definition pretty much did, when John Lennon made his comment about if you could call rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry.

 

[mgenet]

Dude, I'm getting all googly-eyed. Are you sure this is okay?

It's all okay, just appreciatin' your prose.

 

[SteveGangi]

How about Andres Segovia? BEST? Again, are we talking best, or most influential? Or most famous? Best, in my opinion, has to do with being a virtuoso. I think one could make a top 100 list without ever getting into rock guitarists at all. But if we must stick to rock guitarists, how about Steve Howe or Jan Akkerman, or Hank Garland or hundreds of others? I mean if Tommy Emmanuel is not on the list, what credibility can this list have?


There are probably MILLIONS of Asian guitarists who can play all of these guys under the table:

Simpsons Guitar - YouTube

Andres Segovia, Julian Bream, Tommy Emmanuel, Laurindo Almeida, Joe Pass, Chet Atkins, Jerry Reed, Kaki King, Luis Bonfa, Dajango Rhinehart, Earl Klugh, Charlie Byrd, and hundreds of other geniuses never make it onto these "rock-centric" lists. It's just a popularity/beauty contest and nothing more.

 

[H.E.L.Shane]

Ever since Heavy Metal evovled from Rock and Roll.. Rolling Choad has been pretty much pissing all over it...

Some of the most talented guitar players that have ever weilded a pick fall under the genre...

And because they do.... they get overlooked by the bee boppers at RS..

I haven't opened a rolling stone poll since Jack Ass White was put on the list above Tony Iommi back when the White Stains first came out...

THe cover of rolling stone is the Bridge that Trolls Hide under