100 Songs: "Bye Bye Johnny" (Chuck Berry)

Today I'd like to talk a little about storytelling.  It seems to me that it's probably the oldest human art from, but lately I feel like it's probably gotten a bit of a bad rap.  Contemporary literary theory teaches that narrative, the story that a piece of writing tells, is at best a secondary consideration.  It teaches that we should focus on the language itself, and evaluate the writing based on the words it uses to tell the tale, rather than the tale itself.  This is not, in and of itself, an outlandish idea.  After all, the traditional rule of thumb for evaluating young poets is to focus on the technique employed by the poet rather than the ideas that the poet is expressing, and I absolutely agree that this is the best way to tell whether or not the poet has real talent.  It seems to me that these two ideas are somehow related, and like I said, there's nothing wrong with either.  But to gloss over the story being told altogether seems foolish.  After all, how many people can there possibly be who read books or watch films in order to revel in the technical brilliance of the piece of art, rather than to enjoy the story?  I have a little theory that somehow this is all tied up with Shakespeare, although almost certainly subconsciously.  I figure that it goes something like this: 1-Shakespeare was the greatest writer that world has ever produced.  2-Shakespeare only invented about two or three original stories in all of his thirty-seven or so plays.  3-The reason why Shakespeare is the greatest writer of all time must be unrelated to the stories he told.  4-Ergo, the story is not what really matters.  I have no idea if this is true or not, as I said, it's just a theory I came up with.  It doesn't really matter.  And at any rate, I'm taking longer to get to the point than usual.  I'm supposed to be saying something about pop music, Chuck Berry in particular.  

But first, another digression.  Early rock and roll music is not a fertile ground for songs with strong narratives.  "Rock Around The Clock" basically just says that at various different times of the day, we'll be rocking.  "Tutti Fruiti" is mostly glorious nonsense.  "That's Alright Mama" never goes much past Elvis explaining that "that's all right".  Eddie Cochran's "Twenty Flight Rock" has a sort of story about dating a girl who lives on the twentieth floor of a building with a broken elevator, but I basically just recapped the entire narrative (the ending?  he gets tired climbing all of those steps.)  There were stories in music before rock and roll.  Folk music, for example often features stories (and generally very odd stories at that), and a significant percentage of the blues, although certainly not all of the blues, tells a story.  But early rock music (and, come to think of it, much of rock music in general) ignores narrative.  Chuck Berry is an exception.  A lot of Chuck Berry songs tell stories- "Maybellene", "You Can't Catch Me" and "You Can Never Tell" for example.  But his epic also be his most famous song (you might thank Michael J. Fox for that), "Johnny B. Goode".  

There is a healthy debate about exactly who "Johnny B. Goode" is meant to represent.  Some say it's meant to be about Berry himself (apparently, in early versions of the song the reference to "country boy" is actually "colored boy").  Others say that it is a reference to Berry's early collaborator (who would, four or five decades later, try to sue Berry for not giving him writing credits on several songs, in a case that was thrown out of court) Johnnie Johnson.  And then, there's a school of thought that holds the song is actually about Elvis Presley.  Now granted, most of the details of the song don't suggest Elvis as the subject.  Elvis was from Mississippi and then moved to Memphis, while Johnny is from Louisiana.  Johnny lived in a log cabin, while Elvis lived in a shotgun shack in Mississippi and in public housing in Memphis.  Johnny was noteworthy for his guitar playing, while Elvis's big breakthrough was mostly in the way he sang.  But perhaps the details don't matter.  And anyway, I'm here to talk about the song's sequel, "Bye Bye Johnny".

"Bye Bye Johnny" was released in 1960, two years after "Johnny B. Goode", which confuses me, since if he wasn't in jail on a Mann Act charge then, he was certainly on trial then.  I really must find a good biography of Berry at some point.  The song takes up the story of the young guitar genius, as his momma takes her money of the bank to pay for Johnny to go to Hollywood.  But where the first song was exuberant, "Bye Bye Johnny" is more restrained- the opening guitar riff is pared down, slower than the classic Berry guitar riff.  Instead of the rollicking "Go Johnny Go" chorus, here Berry stretches out the "Bye Bye"s in "Bye Bye Johnny".  The lyrics suggest that this should be a happy song- Johnny makes it to Hollywood, falls in love and promises his mother that he was going to bring his bride back home and build a mansion alongside the same railroad tracks where he taught himself the guitar.  But the song never feels happy, and the lyrics' references to Johnny's mama's tears don't help.  Gone altogether are the references to Johnny's skill at the guitar.  And here the Elvis comparisons seem to come sneaking back in- the talented young man leaves his southern home to make movies, and suddenly his music loses its importance.  But perhaps this is too prescient of an interpretation, given that in 1960 the King was just getting out of the army, but it's also true that his first singles after his discharge are hardly sterling stuff.  At any rate, the link between these songs and Elvis become solidified forever in 1983.  Oddly enough, this time it wasn't Chuck Berry, but Bruce Springsteen, who finished the trilogy of Johnny songs with "Johnny Bye Bye", a song essentially explicitly about Elvis' death, and more or less fixing a meaning for Berry's songs, at least among the people who heard Springsteen's song (it wasn't officially released until 1998, unless I'm very much mistaken, and only then on a box set of rarities) and have a certain kind of adaptive mindset for reality.

But back to the...strangeness, maybe, of Berry's "Bye Bye Johnny".  In a song that should be happy, why doesn't it feel that way?  Where does the tinge of melancholy come from?  It must be from the chorus- after all, why is it "Bye Bye Johnny" throughout the song?  At the end, Johnny promises to return to his mother, right?  After all, when Berry had written the song, Elvis had already purchased Graceland and moved his parents in with him, so that makes sense, right?  It seems like the chorus is suggesting that Johnny's promise to come home and build that mansion to replace the log cabin might be one more promise than Johnny can keep.  Or is it simply because I feel like the song is somehow about Elvis, even if it isn't (if you can follow that) and we all know how that story ended, that I find it sadder than its predecessor? 

The video isn't an ideal version, especially given my oddly bleak look at the song, but it seems to be the best that the youtubes have to offer.