Roll over, Beethoven

Any day now, a bug-eyed, green-complexioned civilization in a galaxy far, far away should be intercepting one of the Voyager space probes launched from Earth back in 1977. The aliens, depending on how far they’ve developed technologically, will either marvel or chuckle at the tangle of wires beneath Voyager’s hood. They’ll study with either great amazement or great amusement the computer system that guided the spacecraft throughout its celestial journey. Then they’ll discover the gold-plated copper record inside: an LP featuring the most impressive musical achievements of mankind, a sort of “Humanity’s Greatest Hits.” Assuming they can figure out how to work the accompanying cartridge and needle, they’ll experience Bach and Mozart and Beethoven for the very first time.

And then, eventually, they’ll hear it -- one of the most instantly identifiable musical passages in all of modern history: the opening guitar riff of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” If these extraterrestrials are made from any of the same stuff as we are, they’ll immediately feel the visceral thrill that comes with hearing this explosive intro, the calling card of rock ‘n’ roll. In this sequence of cascading runs and blues-note bends, one encounters the seeds not only of a style of music, but of a cultural revolution that would eventually cohere into one of the most electrifying forces of the 20th century.

John Lennon suggested that Berry and rock ‘n’ roll were virtually synonymous; the teenage Keith Richards built his guitar sound, the gritty foundation for the Rolling Stones, from a handful of Berry licks he copped as a rhythm-and-blues cultist growing up in England. Some dispute whether Berry invented rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1950s; historians with bones to pick are always citing this or that obscure pre-Berry recording as its true origin. But few contest that Berry did more than anyone else to infuse rock ‘n’ roll with the wit, originality and energy that would take it from an interesting experiment in musical cross-pollination to a powerful, liberating art form.

The line that passes through Lennon and Richards to contemporary popular music begins with Berry, and given his importance it’s hard to believe that we’ve had to wait practically half a century for his biography. (Berry’s 1987 autobiography seemed designed to obscure as many facts about his life as it illuminated.) Now Bruce Pegg, assistant director of the Syracuse University writing program, gives us “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” the first book to provide an objective, comprehensive look at Berry’s life. Pegg is clearly a fan, but his book is by no means a starry-eyed hagiography. In his acknowledgments, he expresses his great regret that Berry, 76, chose not to “be a part of this project,” resulting in a decidedly unauthorized affair. As it turns out, Pegg probably couldn’t have presented us with anything approaching the true story of Berry’s life and exploits had his subject cooperated -- though the result might have been a richer study of Berry’s profound effect on American music.

Raised in the Ville, a segregated neighborhood in Jim Crow-era St. Louis, Charles Edward Anderson Berry nonetheless had a middle-class upbringing that afforded him the opportunity to attend one of the nation’s most prestigious black high schools. His first tangle with the law, which would result in the first of several jail sentences, occurred just before his 18th birthday, when Berry and two friends went on an armed-robbery spree. While incarcerated he formed a band; when he got out three years later, he would perform a number of jobs before finally leading several groups in the St. Louis area.

By mid-1955, Berry had gone to Chicago and met Leonard Chess, the Polish-born record impresario whose eponymous label specialized in electric blues by the likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Chess thought that he heard in Berry’s melding of fast urban blues and countrified skiffle something new; together, over the next five years, they would release many of the songs that make up the early rock ‘n’ roll canon: “Maybellene,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “School Day,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Sweet Little Sixteen” and “Johnny B. Goode,” among many others.

When disc jockey Alan Freed entered the picture -- promoting Berry’s records, arranging concerts and putting him in a string of music-oriented films -- the artist’s popularity soared. By 1957, Berry was at the top of the singles charts and playing sold-out shows all over the country with Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and Jerry Lee Lewis.

By 1962, however, Berry was creating fewer and fewer three-minute masterpieces, essentially rewriting old hits and coasting off past triumphs. Rock ‘n’ roll was about to change significantly; the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Berry’s British disciples, were just around the corner. But more than anything else, it was Berry’s conviction in federal court in 1962, after a series of appeals, of violating the Mann Act -- a Progressive Era law prohibiting the transportation of a female across state lines for “immoral purpose” -- that put an end to his reign. Even though the government had all but stopped prosecuting Mann Act violations by the 1950s, the law was still on the books and could, as Pegg notes, “be used to entrap any citizen of the United States who traveled from one state to another with a member of the opposite sex.”

The law, in other words, was only pulled out when circumstances raised the ire of prosecutors. Pegg is not the first to suggest that in Berry’s case those circumstances included -- in the eyes of zealous U.S. attorneys and at least one clearly racist judge -- the fact that the teenager whom Berry took across state lines wasn’t black and wasn’t yet 18. Berry served 20 months in federal prison; when he got out, he discovered that he was an elder statesman at age 37. Though he would continue to have hits, he would no longer be the dominant force whose songs ruled the airwaves and filled stadiums with screaming teenagers.

Pegg’s scholarship is tidy; his writing is clear and straightforward. Why, then, does this biography seem so hollow at times? The answer may be that Pegg never takes any leaps, only prudent baby steps, toward understanding Berry’s complicated character or his role in history. We never learn, for instance, what led Berry to start playing music in the first place. For so many rock musicians that came after him, everything began upon hearing that opening riff from “Johnny B. Goode.”

But what was Berry’s rock ‘n’ roll epiphany? Pegg doesn’t even speculate; he just notifies us that after working at a series of odd jobs, “Berry began to turn his attention to music.” Pegg can tell us everything we could ever want to know about where the young Berry performed, on which night and with whom. The problem is, that’s not all that we want to know. He never shows us the steps Berry took in building some of the very first rock ‘n’ roll songs, just as he never explores the origins of Berry’s distinctive guitar sound, about which entire volumes could be written. It’s as if Thomas Jefferson’s biographer had failed to mention where Jefferson got his ideas on democracy, noting only that one day he “began to turn his attention to declaring independence from Great Britain and creating a sovereign nation.”

As brilliant a songwriter and performer as Berry was, his creative star hasn’t really burned since 1960. Any biography that spends half its time focusing on Berry’s life since -- his legal troubles, his woman troubles, his taxman troubles -- is perhaps misspending its energies. One of the best books written about popular music is still Greil Marcus’ “Mystery Train.” What made that book so unique was that its writer didn’t spend too much time relaying details of the record deals or concert dates of those he profiled (Sly Stone, Randy Newman and the Band, among others). Instead, he intensified his focus, taking as his subject a particular body of work he considered seminal and studying how it changed music, changed the culture, changed us.

If any one of rock ‘n’ roll’s forefathers deserves the Marcus treatment, it’s Chuck Berry. “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” is a valuable resource, but for all of the facts contained in its pages, the book doesn’t even attempt to answer the most important question of all: Why is Chuck Berry included along with Bach, Mozart and Beethoven on Voyager? Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait for a rock ‘n’ roll-loving alien to give the man his due.