I spent last weekend comfortably ensconced at the family country house in Burnaby while the clan patriarch visited his estates on the Island. I feasted on a variety of foodstuffs, including the inevitable frozen scones and no-name brand oatmeal cookies. The biggest difference between that place and my own, though, other than its tidiness, is the presence of cablevision.

It wasn’t easy, but at one point I actually found something worth watching. It was a film called “Hail Hail Rock ‘n’ Roll,” made in 1986, a tribute to Chuck Berry on his 60th birthday. The birthday bash was held in a theatre in St. Louis, Berry’s home town, and involved an all-star band put together by Berry’s most prominent disciple, Rolling Stone Keith Richards.

Naturally there were interviews with various rock notables, including Little Richard, Bo Diddly, Eric Clapton and Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen had a particularly amusing story of being asked to back up Berry in 1974 or so. Berry walked into the auditiorium about ten minutes before he was supposed to go on. Springsteen’s band members asked Berry what songs they were expected to play, to which Berry replied “we’re gonna play some Chuck Berry songs.”

Simple songs perhaps, but Springsteen noted that a lot of them were in wierd keys. Not the usual open string E, A, D anchors of guitar rock, but oddball sharps and flats and so on. Obviously, this made the whole business of keeping up with the duckwalking dervish (or should that be ‘detonous duckwalking dervish’?) a bit of a challenge.

The most interesting comments in the whole thing, though, came from Keith Richards. There are few things I like more than listening to Keef rambling off his slurred musings on all things rocking. I’ve discovered that if you can actually make out what the fuck he’s saying it’s often quite interesting.

According to Richards, Berry’s songs are only in wierd keys if you look at them from a guitarist’s perspective. If you look at them from a piano player’s point of view, they make complete sense. The songs, says Richards, are in ‘piano keys,’ and not ‘guitar keys,’ because a piano player wrote much of the music.

The piano player he was talking about is a guy named Johnnie Johnson. Johnson actually started Chuck Berry off, bringing him into his group around 1951. Johnson, however, was bashful and introverted, and Berry’s over-the-top antics gradually made him the frontman. The guitarist was as ambitious as he was extroverted, and began crafting lyrics and jamming up riffs with Johnson. In 1955, Berry went to Chess records in Chicago, and was rewarded with a record contract. These were they days when the 45 was the central medium of music, and Berry fired off a string of hit singles over the next half-decade.

Johnson, meanwhile, stuck with Berry as a backing musician, but received no credit for any of these songs. (Berry’s first hit, ‘Maybelline,’ actually lists disk jockey Alan Freed as a co-writer, a condition imposed by the payola-soaked radio celebrity in return for playing the tune). Johnson eventually left Berry’s side, though he kept playing in and around the St. Louis area. But whereas Berry managed to rake in a pretty good living (Springsteen believed he was getting as much as $10 000 a set as far back as the mid-’70s), Johnson lived a much more mundane life.

By the time Richards (the hero of this story in some ways) pulled Johnson back into the scene in 1986, the piano player was making a living driving a bus for elderly people. In the making of “Hail Hail Rock ‘n’ Roll,” he seemed as self-effacing as you could get, a kind of big shinking violet. But he was clearly the steadiest member of the band. There is one scene where Richards and Berry are hectoring each other during practice over how a particular tune should be done. They launch into the song and both sound ragged as hell, all preen and no polish. All the muscle came from Johnson. Apparently driving the elderly around on a bus is a better recipe for rock ‘n’ roll longetivity than drugs and debauchery.

A few others noticed this as well, and after the St. Louis reunion Johnson went on to enjoy some limelight of his own. He’s recorded a handful of albums, and has played with the likes of Richards, Clapton and Paul Shaefer. He has also been inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and, most recently, has gotten round to suing Chuck Berry for royalties owed on all those old classics.

This is where the story got a little sour for me. Not that I mind Johnson trying to force Berry to give him a bit of the credit. It just seems that a nice story, heading for a bit of a fairytale ending, comes crashing gloomily back to Earth. In any case, they were a good pair. One guy supplied the groove and the progressions, the other layered it with signature riffs and licks (still widely copied) and almost era-defining lyrics. Johnson’s steady, rockin’ delivery may have been a great foundation, but without Berry’s on-stage antics and, more crucially, his off-stage hustling, there would be nothing for either of them to fight about today.

There’s a bit more to this; a bit of a sub-plot.

I was intrigued to find that one of the songs Johnson claims to have laid down the music for is ‘Sweet Little Sixteen.’ I noted this because I came across another reference to this tune recently. Chuck Berry received all the credit for composing the Beach Boys’ 1963 classic ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.,’ essentially because the song was considered to be a rip-off of ‘Sweet Little Sixteen.’ The progression is the same, and the stop-start verse that expodes into a rocking chorus was used to full effect by Beach Boy writer Brian Wilson (in a further goofy twist, Wilson took no credit for writing his own lyrics on that song). Of course, if Johnson gets the credit he's seeking, he will by extension presumably be able to lay some claim to the music for ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’

When I was 12 or so some kid brought a record to school that had ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ on it. He was an erstwhile friend of mine, and he was curiously into old vintage rock, Elvis and such. I had nothing against any of it, but none of it (or any other music, for that matter) really got me wanting to play music until I heard that song. I immediately went out and bought the ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ album. The Beach Boys had not yet fully defined themselves at the time of its making, and much of the record was instrumental, in the veign of the Surfari’s or Dick Dale. One of the instrumentals was a tune called ‘Stoked.’ I always liked that title. Whenever I think of it I’m reminded of being 12 years old, and just getting into something new and exciting.

And I like the idea that some quiet, solid guy is behind ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ I owe you one Johnny, and I like the fact that it’s you that I owe.