(Roughly) Daily

Alex Abramovich with a dispatch on the headwaters of rock and roll…

‘There are ten thousand freedoms,’ the late Joshua Clover once said, ‘but rock freedom is definitely set – in the first instance – in a car, when it’s late outside. It can be ecstatic, it can be boring, it can be adjectiveless freedom, but you have reached escape velocity, faster miles an hour, you have no particular place to go, and you have the radio on.’

Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’ recently turned seventy. Recorded on 21 May 1955 in a studio on the South Side of Chicago, it tells the story of a man chasing his girlfriend down the highway. He’s in a Ford V8, she’s driving a Cadillac. She’s cheating, the car’s overheating, he’s trying to catch her before she gets away for good. ‘Maybellene’ isn’t Chuck Berry’s best song but it was his first single. Without it there’d be no Bob Dylan. No rock and roll as we know it. It’s a miracle.

There’s a story about the song, too….

Read on: “Escape Velocity” (archived link), from @lrb.co.uk‬.

* John Lennon

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As we roll over, we might send tuneful brithday greetings to Steve Young, a musical pioneer who followed Berry (the first singer-songwriter in the new era of popular music, Roy Orbison suggested)… and took a different path; he was born on this date in 1942. A singer, songwriter, and guitarist, known for his song “Seven Bridges Road” (on Young’s albums Rock Salt & Nails & Seven Bridges Road, but probably best known in the version by The Eagles). He was a pioneer of the country rock, Americana, and alternative country sounds– a vital force behind the outlaw movement.

source

Oh, and in 1979 this was also “‘The Night Disco Died’ — Or Didn’t.”