Rock & Roll Will Never Die

Chuck Berry lives.

He lives in everything we love. If Chuck Berry never existed, neither would Back To The Future. Neither would you.

The Rolling Stones wouldn’t exist if Chuck Berry hadn’t. Life without the Rolling Stones is unfathomable. Nearly everyone’s parents fucked during or after Rolling Stones songs. Without them, the human race would have blinked out long ago.

Every jukebox in every bar in America has Rolling Stones songs on it. If not, the bar goes out of business. Recreation in our lifetime requires music descended from the work of Chuck Berry. He was the rock & roll genome. His influence upon American culture exceeds all measure. It is comparable to Ben Franklin or William Shakespeare.

Without Chuck Berry, music and life as you know it would be null and void. His songs, and those of his imitators, are ones we still listen to, over half a century after they were minted. That’s priceless. No band of the last ten years will enjoy that longevity. Musicians merely play the forms that this one man created.

Chuck Berry’s music was featured in Back To The Future, performed by Michael J. Fox, because everyone was familiar with it. Everyone knows “Johnny B. Goode”. It’s the Yggdrasil of Rock. Elvis Presley went to his grave wishing he was a fraction as good as Chuck Berry. It’s what killed him in the first place.

Let me spin you a yarn.

Blaize Dwitliss, the newscaster in my movie, is played by my friend Adam; we graduated high school together. He was ahead of the music curve even then; he’s the one who dragged me to most of the concerts I write about here and in comics. In 1990, we went to see Chuck Berry. At the Ritz, in New York City.

This was a 64-year-old man. He performed every song you’d expect him to, with the vitality and vigor of someone half his age. I was flabbergasted. We were on the floor of the club, roughly twenty feet from the raised stage. Suddenly I looked up, and Chuck Berry was looking right back at me.

Direct eye contact, for what felt like a billion years, with the father of rock & roll. His expression said, “You can’t even believe it, can you?”

Twenty-seven years later, I still can’t believe it. But I do believe one thing.

Chuck Berry lives. As does rock & roll, forevermore.