Chuck Berry was a great guitar player. I’m sure you heard that once or twice.
Thing is, Chuck was a better songwriter. Both his guitar and his words became staples of rock ‘n roll. The reason John Lennon said you could call rock ‘n roll “Chuck Berry” is because so much of what the world loved about it came from him. From the time signature to the solos, Chuck stumbled upon a marriage of styles that would combine what people liked about R&B and country while extracting what they didn’t. His music, for its time, was as perfect as anything anyone could ask for.

There are a zillion songs I could have pulled for this. I went with “Johnny B. Goode” because it’s the best known, but it’s also a clear reflection of all the things Chuck figured out before the rest of the world.
The story was that Chuck and his band started playing country music for white audiences because they couldn’t get enough of it. Blues was his thing, but the idea of those black guys singing that hillbilly music just set them off. Plus, yanno, the music was pretty damn incredible.
What’s funny to me about Chuck Berry singing country music is how damn proper he was. Every word was clearly enunciated. The grammar, considering he was singing, was pretty correct. You could hear every single word. Every syllable was perfectly placed.
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And with those perfect, pristine pronunciations came perfect songs. They told stories. Their settings were clear. The characters were fleshed out. They were catchy. And man, they moved. And when he went from the verse to the bridge and back, he never had to throttle down.
It was all the energy of music from the boondocks with the requisite polish for mainstream success. In an era of segregation, he sound could cross over and cross right back without changing.
That’s not the sort of thing one can do just by being a bad ass guitarist. That’s the power of songwriting, the skill that takes hits and makes them classics. It is Berry’s greatest contribution to the game, and the one that will endure long after rock is actually dead. Everyone with a band, ultimately, is trying to make a point, and I’m not sure anyone ever did so better than Chuck Berry.

I think we can all agree Jimi Hendrix was a weirdo. That’s not an insult, but love songs written by weirdos tend to be a bit of a mixed bag. Especially the sorta weirdo who would try to break you for your girl dead in front of you. Jimi was that sort of weirdo (read a story once of him trying to pull Marianne Faithful dead in Mick Jagger’s face and saying “I don’t care about Mick”).
And weirdos do stuff like explain love through the colors of the rainbow, and they don’t bother to make sense until the end of the second verse. And, when the weirdo’s as good as Jimi, they somehow find a way to make it work.

There’s no real science to “Bold as Love.” It rambles around that loose, chromatic theme. It “ends” twice, with a 360-degree rising crescendo of drums in between. It’s the good and the bad. Purple anger and green envy are casually mentioned before the “live-giving” blue waters. And all, as titled, are bold. So are the good things. So is his red confidence and yellow fear. It’s classic Hendrix, fully immersed in whatever he felt or played at the time, even if this one song meant being immersed in them all at one time.
Sure, the whole greatest-guitarist-ever thing is why we’ll always remember Jimi, but that emotion is why we think of him as such. You can go find guys who can do all kinds of twisted shit with they fingers, and you can find folks who can play every note Jimi played and then some. But no one, ever, has been able to tap into the feeling of a song with his guitar like Hendrix. Where so many see the best guitar player as the one who can most blow your mind, Jimi remains the greatest at moving the soul.
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It’s that quality that grounds his often abstract lyrics. Behind “Bold as Love” are notes that dance behind the verses, his characteristic style of breaking down chords into their component parts so nothing gets lost. The solos aren’t fast or necessarily impressive. They’re just perfect, picking up from his confession of love and exploding in something between an expression and a release.
And if you didn’t understand him the first time, he cranked it up again.
The name of the game in music will always be emotion. Great singers make you feel them. Great instrumentalists move you as they make you move. Jimi, awkward though he could be while singing, was great at both. Because no matter what weird shit he was on, you had to feel it. There was no other choice because he had no other choice. He was too confident in his difference, too comfortable in his insecurities, to do anything else. The acknowledgment of fear didn’t require that he bow to it. Love was bold, so he had to be, also.
And he always was. His one guitar did the work of two men. On “Bold as Love,” he did enough feeling for two, also. Except it was always just him. Just his willingness to ride out the dissonant voices inside all of us. But he wasn’t torn between them. He wasn’t even stuck in the middle. He brought it all with him, and whatever else he couldn’t carry was in his guitar case.
He was the best because he was everything, and he said it all, regardless of how it sounded when it came out. He had his guitar to say the rest.
And we heard him, loud and clear.

The amazing thing about Bob Marley was how he always seemed to be right. Granted, he wasn’t spitting complex theses that invited much argument. His thoughts were typically basic, inarguable truisms.
It got no truer than “Them Belly Full (But We Hungry).”
Them belly full
but we hungry
A hungry mob
is an angry mob

I mean, do we need to say anything else? It was Bob at his most foreboding and obvious, but somehow as profound as anything he ever said. It managed to put the racism and oppression of Jamaica — and anywhere else, really — in stark terms that exposed those on the side of wrong as not just devilish, but also dumb.
With the backdrop of the Caribbean’s absurd levels of income inequality, this was a calm and measured warning. Keep messing with us, and we’ll burn this thing down. That’s not exactly what he said. No, that was “Burnin’ and Lootin’,” but that was certainly his point on “Them Belly Full.” If those with don’t learn to share, those without are gonna come take it. It may not happen today, or maybe not tomorrow, but it’s coming. There would be no other reasonable outcome from this situation. This is how people respond when they’ve been kicked. At some point, the kicking will stop. Can’t dance the pain away but for so long. When the “cost of living get so high,” dying can seem like a risk worth taking.
We all know this to be true. Yet and still, people keep kicking. Why? Because they feel like it. That can be the only reason when the act itself is so doomed. The fight itself won’t last long, but it’ll cost more than it would to share.
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Yet so many are full while others are hungry.
While the image of Marley is always couched in revolution, “Them Belly Full” almost speaks to the opposite. It acknowledges a resignation to withstanding poverty, and it’s built around the simple coping mechanisms of the downtrodden. There is nothing about actually fighting. But it’s damn sure around the corner.
That was the genius of Marley. He wasn’t soft, but he couldn’t have gotten away with anything as explicitly combative as, say, The Clash’s “The Guns of Brixton.” He had to convey his message similarly to how civil rights workers did in the American South. The message had to be pure. It had to be based in a universally recognized philosophy (even if the spiritual basis, Rastafarianism, wasn’t embraced the same way). He couldn’t just challenge. He had to dare those on the side of wrong to challenge themselves.
Sometimes those appeals would be emotional. On “Them Belly Full,” it was pragmatic. The emotion was unnecessary. The coldness of the verses spoke to the fire beneath them. The dancing on the hook almost seemed like The Wailers were stepping outside before they really got pissed.
But the point was made. And, as always, Bob was right. We’ve seen it all over the world. At some point, someone will realize cats like Marley weren’t playing. They were doing the very real job of reminding power that the world they ignore is closer than they think.
And it get too close for comfort unless something changed. Sadly, four decades after Bob said this, people still haven’t gotten the message.