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Tag: Chuck Berry

  • Better Late Than Never, Final Recordings from Rock and Roll Icon Johnnie Johnson are Released

    The history of rock and roll is populated with any number of “unsung heroes,” musicians who made  significant contributions to the art form but received little credit or recognition. One such individual is Johnnie Johnson.  Which is why those in the know are excited about the recent release of I’m Just Johnnie, a collection of songs recorded over 20 years ago which have been gathering dust in a closet near St. Louis.

    Johnson was Chuck Berry’s piano player during the ‘50s, when songs like “Johnny B. Goode,” “Maybellene” and “Roll Over Beethoven” were blasting out of transistor radios. While Berry commanded the stage, duckwalking and strutting while playing some really wild guitar, Johnson sat in the background, providing a solid musical foundation for songs that described a life full of cute girls, snazzy cars and fuse-blowing juke boxes in postwar America.

    Not only did Johnson anchor Berry’s band, but it is argued that he contributed mightily to Berry’s revolutionary musical approach that codified much of the rock and roll that came after it. Some (including Chuck Berry scholar Keith Richards) believe that many of Berry’s signature guitar riffs were actually adapted from Johnson’s piano figures. Johnson brought a lawsuit against Berry in 2000, claiming that he was due a cowriter’s credit on over 50 songs. A judge, however, dismissed the case, ruling that too much time had passed since the original copyrights were filed under Berry’s name alone.

    After splitting with Berry in 1973, Johnson played with blues legend Albert King while also performing periodic solo gigs. Eric Clapton and Richards championed Johnson in his later years, hiring him for various musical projects and contributing to his most noteworthy solo release, Johnnie B. Bad, in 1991. Johnson continued to live in his longtime home of St. Louis until his passing in 2005.

    But, thanks to St. Louis musician Gene Ackmann, the Johnnie Johnson story doesn’t end there. Ackmann met Johnson in 1979, when the latter was playing at a small blues club. The two musicians stayed in touch, with Johnson occasionally  playing with Ackmann’s band, notably at St. Louis sporting events, including the Cardinals’ baseball home openers and a parade in 2000 celebrating the Rams’ Super Bowl victory.

    “I was – and still am – a huge fan of Johnnie’s,” says Ackmann, speaking from his home near St. Louis. “Initially, I sought him out because I was a big fan of Chuck Berry, and then I started digging in and realized everything Johnnie was doing on [those records].

    “He would play at these little blues clubs, so I would go out and listen to him. But he also played at this place – it was called the Lemp Mansion – on Sunday nights, and he had a little trio with an upright bass and drums, and he was playing Great American Songbook type stuff. He was playing ‘Sunny Side of the Street,’ ‘Canadian Sunset,’ ‘Misty’ and stuff.”

    After Johnson began to sit in with Ackmann’s band, their friendship truly blossomed when the two discovered that they had not only a love of music in common but also one of fishing. “We were bumming around, he was coming out and playing with my band, and somehow or another I mentioned that I had a lake at my house and that I liked to fish. And Johnnie was so excited to know that. He said, ‘I want to come out and go fishing sometime.’
    “Johnnie lived about an hour and a half away from me, down by the Arch in St. Louis. So I would drive down early in the morning and pick him up, drive back out to my house, and we would fish all day. It was making his day, so it was making my day. It was like getting to spend the day with your grandfather again. I would have done anything for Johnnie.” One day, after another fishing outing, Johnson told Ackmann that he would like to record an album and wondered if Ackmann could produce it. Ackmann quickly assembled a group of local musicians, along with guest stars like Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Hornsby, Johnny Rivers and John Sebastian.

    “I just wanted to put something together that would be really good and represent what Johnnie did,” Ackmann says. “I used some of the guys in my band, and then we used some of the guys who had played with Johnnie for a long time. We wrote some songs, and we did some cover songs.” Work took place primarily in the music room at Ackmann’s house. “Most of what Johnnie and I did, when we put all the arrangements together, was done during rain delays from fishing.”

    Johnson died not long after the album was completed, and this development made it difficult for Ackmann to find a company willing to release the record. So the master tapes sat in a closet at Ackmann’s house. “Then, about a year and a half ago, which would have been Johnnie’s 100th birthday, I was out cutting the grass or something, and I thought, “I need to dig back into this thing and see if we can’t get something going,’” Ackmann recalls.
    After a bit of studio tinkering, Ackmann assembled a collection of songs that included five Johnson vocals, five songs with guest artists and two instrumentals. The music business had changed markedly since the original recordings were made, leading Ackmann to head in a different direction with regard to the release of the album. “I said, ‘You know what? I’m just going to do my own thing. Because I don’t want to give the master tapes to everybody. I don’t want to do all that. I’ll just do it myself.’”  Hence the release of I’m Just Johnnie on Ackmann’s Missouri Morning Records.

    According to Ackmann, Johnson maintained a positive attitude throughout his life, despite an initial lack of credit and later periods when he wasn’t working much. “He was incredibly humble and gentle and just a joy to be around. He could have been a little bit bitter. Could have been. But he was not. He was not. Because as time went on, after [the Chuck Berry documentary] Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, people discovered him, and he started working more. He got better gigs. He got an agent. He started playing better places. And all of a sudden, Johnnie rose to be an elder statesman of the blues.”

    Tom Richards

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  • Review: Tom Petty doesn’t back down in 1997 Fillmore shows

    Review: Tom Petty doesn’t back down in 1997 Fillmore shows

    “Live at the Fillmore (1997),” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (Warner Records)

    Listening to “Live at the Fillmore (1997)” it’s easy to see why Tom Petty said at the time he thought it was a career highpoint.

    This archival release pulls highlights from the final six shows of Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 20-show residency at the Fillmore 25 years ago. It serves as a live tour, of sorts, through rock history, with a heavy emphasis on the influences that shaped Petty’s musical DNA.

    Anyone expecting a rundown of Petty’s top 40 hits should look elsewhere. Some of his most loved songs are here, of course, most notably a 10-minute jammed out version of “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.” But this set is more about Petty and the Heartbreakers going farther afield from what made them famous.

    Petty cuts a wide swath, covering songs by collaborator and friend Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Chuck Berry, Bill Withers, the Grateful Dead and more. On the expanded edition, spread over four CDs or six albums, 35 of the 58 tracks are covers.

    There is also a two CD set with 33 songs, 18 of which are covers.

    Blues legend John Lee Hooker and Roger McGuinn, founder of the Byrds, a seminal influence on Petty and his early sound, also make guest appearances.

    It’s easy to hear the joy in Petty’s voice both in the songs and in the breezy on-stage banter, most hilariously his announcement that the show was live on the internet: “Whatever that is.”

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    For more AP Music reviews, go to: https://apnews.com/hub/music-reviews

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  • Jerry Lee Lewis, outrageous rock ‘n’ roll star, dies at 87

    Jerry Lee Lewis, outrageous rock ‘n’ roll star, dies at 87

    Jerry Lee Lewis, the untamable rock ‘n’ roll pioneer whose outrageous talent, energy and ego collided on such definitive records as “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and sustained a career otherwise upended by personal scandal, died Friday morning at 87.

    The last survivor of a generation of groundbreaking performers that included Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, Lewis died at his Mississippi home, south of Memphis, Tennessee, representative Zach Farnum said in a release. The news came two days after the publication of an erroneous TMZ report of his death, later retracted.

    Of all the rock rebels to emerge in the 1950s, few captured the new genre’s attraction and danger as unforgettably as the Louisiana-born piano player who called himself “The Killer.”

    Tender ballads were best left to the old folks. Lewis was all about lust and gratification, with his leering tenor and demanding asides, violent tempos and brash glissandi, cocky sneer and crazy blond hair. He was a one-man stampede who made the fans scream and the keyboards swear, his live act so combustible that during a 1957 performance of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” on “The Steve Allen Show,” chairs were thrown at him like buckets of water on an inferno.

    “There was rockabilly. There was Elvis. But there was no pure rock ’n ’roll before Jerry Lee Lewis kicked in the door,” a Lewis admirer once observed. That admirer was Jerry Lee Lewis.

    But in his private life, he raged in ways that might have ended his career today — and nearly did back then.

    For a brief time, in 1958, he was a contender to replace Presley as rock’s prime hit maker after Elvis was drafted into the Army. But while Lewis toured in England, the press learned three damaging things: He was married to 13-year-old (possibly even 12-year-old) Myra Gale Brown, she was his cousin, and he was still married to his previous wife. His tour was canceled, he was blacklisted from the radio and his earnings dropped overnight to virtually nothing.

    “I probably would have rearranged my life a little bit different, but I never did hide anything from people,” Lewis told the Wall Street Journal in 2014 when asked about the marriage. “I just went on with my life as usual.”

    Over the following decades, Lewis struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, legal disputes and physical illness. Two of his many marriages ended in his wife’s early death. Brown herself divorced him in the early 1970s and would later allege physical and mental cruelty that nearly drove her to suicide.

    “If I was still married to Jerry, I’d probably be dead by now,” she told People magazine in 1989.

    Lewis reinvented himself as a country performer in the 1960s, and the music industry eventually forgave him, long after he stopped having hits. He won three Grammys, and recorded with some of the industry’s greatest stars. In 2006, Lewis came out with “Last Man Standing,” featuring Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, B.B. King and George Jones. In 2010, Lewis brought in Jagger, Keith Richards, Sheryl Crow, Tim McGraw and others for the album “Mean Old Man.”

    In “The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll,” first published in 1975, he recalled how he convinced disc jockeys to give him a second chance.

    “This time I said, ‘Look, man, let’s get together and draw a line on this stuff — a peace treaty you know,’” he explained. Lewis would still play the old hits on stage, but on the radio he would sing country.

    Lewis had a run of top 10 country hits between 1967-70, and hardly mellowed at all. He performed drinking songs such as “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)”, the roving eye confessions of “She Still Comes Around” and a dry-eyed cover of a classic ballad of abandonment, “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye.” He had remained popular in Europe and a 1964 album, “Live at the Star Club, Hamburg,” is widely regarded as one of the greatest concert records.

    A 1973 performance proved more troublesome: Lewis sang for the Grand Ole Opry and broke two longstanding rules — no swearing and no non-country songs.

    “I am a rock and rollin’, country-and-western, rhythm and blues-singin’ motherf—–,” he told the audience.

    Lewis married seven times, and was rarely far from trouble or death. His fourth wife, Jaren Elizabeth Gunn Pate, drowned in a swimming pool in 1982 while suing for divorce. His fifth wife, Shawn Stephens, 23 years his junior, died of an apparent drug overdose in 1983. Within a year, Lewis had married Kerrie McCarver, then 21. She filed for divorce in 1986, accusing him of physical abuse and infidelity. He countersued, but both petitions eventually were dropped. They finally divorced in 2005 after several years of separation. The couple had one child, Jerry Lee III.

    Another son by a previous marriage, Steve Allen Lewis, 3, drowned in a swimming pool in 1962, and son Jerry Lee Jr. died in a traffic accident at 19 in 1973. Lewis also had two daughters, Phoebe and Lori Leigh, and is survived by his wife Judith.

    His finances were also chaotic. Lewis made millions, but he liked his money in cash and ended up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Internal Revenue Service. When he began welcoming tourists in 1994 to his longtime residence near Nesbit, Mississippi — complete with a piano-shaped swimming pool — he set up a 900 phone number fans could call for a recorded message at $2.75 a minute.

    The son of one-time bootlegger Elmo Lewis and the cousin of TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart and country star Mickey Gilley, Lewis was born in Ferriday, Louisiana (Swaggart and Lewis released “The Boys From Ferriday,” a gospel album, earlier this year). As a boy, he first learned to play guitar, but found the instrument too confining and longed for an instrument that only the rich people in his town could afford — a piano. His life changed when his father pulled up in his truck one day and presented him a dark-wood, upright piano.

    “My eyes almost fell out of my head,” Lewis recalled in “Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story,” written by Rick Bragg and published in 2014.

    He took to the piano immediately, and began sneaking off to Black juke joints and absorbing everything from gospel to boogie-woogie. Conflicted early on between secular and sacred music, he quit school at 16, with plans of becoming a piano-playing preacher. Lewis briefly attended Southwestern Assemblies of God University in Waxahachie, Texas, a fundamentalist Bible college, but was expelled, reportedly, for playing the “wrong” kind of music.

    “Great Balls of Fire,” a sexualized take on Biblical imagery that Lewis initially refused to record, and “Whole Lotta Shakin’” were his most enduring songs and performance pieces. Lewis had only a handful of other pop hits, including “High School Confidential” and “Breathless,” but they were enough to ensure his place as a rock ‘n’ roll architect.

    “No group, be it (the) Beatles, Dylan or Stones, have ever improved on ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’’ for my money,” John Lennon would tell Rolling Stone in 1970.

    A roadhouse veteran by his early 20s, Lewis took off for Memphis in 1956 and showed up at the studios of Sun Records, the musical home of Elvis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash. Told by company founder Sam Phillips to go learn some rock ‘n roll, Lewis returned and soon hurried off “Whole Lotta Shakin’” in a single take.

    “I knew it was a hit when I cut it,” he later said. “Sam Phillips thought it was gonna be too risque, it couldn’t make it. If that’s risque, well, I’m sorry.”

    In 1986, along with Elvis, Chuck Berry and others, he made the inaugural class of inductees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and joined the Country Hall of Fame this year. The Killer not only outlasted his contemporaries but saw his life and music periodically reintroduced to younger fans, including the 1989 biopic “Great Balls of Fire,” starring Dennis Quaid, and Ethan Coen’s 2022 documentary “Trouble in Mind.” A 2010 Broadway music, “Million Dollar Quartet,” was inspired by a recording session that featured Lewis, Elvis, Perkins and Cash.

    He won a Grammy in 1987 as part of an interview album that was cited for best spoken word recording, and he received a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2005. The following year, “Whole Lotta Shakin’” was selected for the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry, whose board praised the “propulsive boogie piano that was perfectly complemented by the drive of J.M. Van Eaton’s energetic drumming. The listeners to the recording, like Lewis himself, had a hard time remaining seated during the performance.”

    A classmate at Bible school, Pearry Green, remembered meeting Lewis years later and asking if he was still playing the devil’s music.

    “Yes, I am,” Lewis answered. “But you know it’s strange, the same music that they kicked me out of school for is the same kind of music they play in their churches today. The difference is, I know I am playing for the devil and they don’t.”

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    This story has been updated to clarify where Lewis’ home is located.

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