I got sick of “Johnny B. Goode”.
It happens.
Sometimes you can’t hear a song anymore, I can’t hear Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue”. With Holly, I went to “Peggy Sue Got Married”, with Chuck B. I went with “Bye Bye Johnny”.
“B. Goode” was about Chuck himself, a little bit of self-mythology and he deserved it, though myth it was, Berry could certainly “read and write so well”, on the other hand, his rhythmic chugalug sure sounded like “ringing a bell”.
The song is central to Chuck Berry’s astounding oeuvre, and “Johnny B. Goode” got pre-empted by Elvis Presley who covered it (as did another, Johnny, Johnny Lennon, listened to Berry for his kicks till his murder), and was considered to have been written for the King of rock and roll.
It wasn’t.
“Bye Bye Johnny” was.
“Bye Bye Johnny” was 2:05 minutes of POV: Johnny’s Mom gives her son a goodbye kiss and he leaves for Hollywood. The chugalating riff powers the song and by the end, Johnny like Elvis is going to return and build a mansion. Berry, always more interested in the myth of money than the myth of Sisyphus, gave the world the story it wanted and while the song doesn’t have the originals lightning flashes it has the engines movement down perfect. Berry would also write a song about Johnny’s actual trip across the States to Hollywood on “The Promised Land”.
A title Bruce Springsteen would steal some 30 years later.
And for “Johnny Bye Bye” Bruce would share the same opening lines:
“She drew out all her money from a Southern trust and put her little boy on a Grey Hound bus”
But this is a solemn dirgy mystery train… it is the final chapter… “The man on the radio says Elvis Presley died”,
I don’t know how those words hit you but all these years later, I still feel as though I’ve been hit in the stomach. I still remember where I was when I heard about his death: in a Chinese restaurant in Didsbury, England.
“He was found slumped against the drain with a whole lot of trouble running through his veins…”
A black Cadillac takes him to Graceland and in the end, Bruce says what we know, “Bye bye Johnny, Johnny Bye Bye. You didn’t have to die”.