Old Gods Almost Dead Read Free Page A

“Mona,” a love call to a young stripper Bo liked. Most of these were recorded later by the Rolling Stones, and Bo Diddley probably would have been their biggest influence if the Chess brothers hadn’t released “Maybellene” only two months after they put out “Bo Diddley.”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    Chuck Berry was born in St. Louis in 1926, a carpenter’s son, and he grew into a tall, handsome young man with a quick wit and huge hands capable of really strangling a guitar. When he was eighteen, a judge gave him ten years for a robbery spree across Missouri. Doing his time, he began to entertain the other prisoners with music, impressed the warden, and eventually got paroled.
    In late 1952, Chuck met piano player Johnnie Johnson and joined his band, Sir John’s Trio. Three years later, in 1955, he visited Chicago for the first time. He went to hear the greats: Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, his hero, Muddy Waters. When Chuck pushed his way through the crowd to ask Muddy whom he should see in Chicago about cutting a record, Muddy told him about Leonard Chess.
    Two weeks later, Chuck Berry walked into the Chess studio, tape reel in hand. “Leonard listened to my tape,” Berry later wrote, “and when he heard one hillbilly selection I’d included called ’Ida Red’ played back on the one-mike, one-track home recorder, it struck him most as being commercial. He couldn’t believe that a ’hillbilly song’ could be written and sung by a black guy. He said he wanted us to record that particular song, and he scheduled a recording session for May 21, 1955, promising me a contract at that time.” They cut “Ida Red,” but Leonard Chess told Chuck to come up with a better title. So Ida Red became a car and got her name changed to Maybelline.
    â€œMaybelline” was a national hit record, and Chuck Berry never looked back. His humor and wit overlaid a light, swinging kind of rockabilly that teenagers liked to dance to. “Around and Around,” “Reelin’ and Rockin’,” “Carol,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “School Days,” “Little Queenie”: over the next five years, Chuck Berry wrote thirty-five songs that became the cornerstone of the new pop music, a huge influence on John Lennon and the Beatles, and the main inspiration of Keith Richards’s drive to power up the early Stones.

----
    The Blitzkrieg and the Blues
    And the guns start to roar / From the ship to the shore /
    And the bombs start to fall / As we crouch in the hall . . .
    â€œWar Baby,” Mick Jagger
    Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany declared war on England in 1940 and began bombing English cities and the countryside. English children born during the war spent their earliest years stressed and sleepless because of the banshee air-raid sirens, bursting incendiary and high-explosive bombs, wailing fire engines and ambulances. Charlie Watts (born June 2, 1941), Brian Jones (February 28, 1942), Mick Jagger (July 26, 1943), and Keith Richards (December 18, 1943) heard the fuzz-toned reverb of the Luftwaffe’s buzz bombs and doodlebugs, the chugging AA batteries, the wild feedback of V-1 flying bombs, and the almost silent whoosh of V-2 missiles. Overhead, the insect whines of Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes could be heard as they dueled with Messerschmidts and the German bombers. Bill Wyman, older than the rest (born October 24, 1936), remembers hearing Winston Churchill on the radio: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Commonwealth and its Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, ’This was their finest hour.’”
    Keith’s family’s house in Dartford, Kent, was badly bombed. His father was wounded in Normandy later in the war. Food was scarce and heavily rationed. Meat, eggs,