This one is gonna get me in a lot of trouble.

Elvis was good, hell Elvis was great.  He made colored music acceptable (or at least accessible) to prejudiced white folks.  He was also a great performer and really probably a pretty good guy all in all.  He could identify a great song.  He was criminally manipulated by his so-called friends and screwed by the US government.  But my friend, I’m sorry to tell you, despite all of this, he is not the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.  No siree.  He is merely the White King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.  Not a bad thing to be really.  Right up there.

So who is the real King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, you ask?  Chuck Berry.  That’s it.  The real King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.  Why?  Because he invented it, plain and simple.  The riffs T-Bone Walker was fingering, Berry was bending; that and four major chords says it all.  Johnny B. Goode is as much an autobiography as any blues song ever written.  At the same time Berry was bending he was also freeing rock and roll from its blues roots, making it acceptable for a white boy to sing and play it.  No more blues minor chords.  We’re off to feelin’ good now.  Off to the Beach.  Surfin’ USA.

Berry is the oh so woefully underappreciated inventor of rock and roll.  No longer would it be called “race music.”  So why is this self evident fact largely unacknowledged.  Why is Elvis the marquee while good ol’ Chuck is almost a footnote?  Why don’t we say:  “Chuck:  The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll?”  Because America was (is?) a racist society that is sculpted by the Media.  Chuck was Black.  Chuck was a Man (not a cute teenager).  Chuck was not the sleek white American ideal of what a star should be.  And heaven forbid that 13-year old white girls should swoon over a black man.

So the next time you listen to Sweet Little Sixteen, Johnny B. Goode, Roll Over Beethoven, Rock and Roll Music, Maybelline, Run Rudolph Run, Little Queeny, Carol, or the Sex Pistols, or Johnny Thunders, or the New York Dolls, or The Ramones, or The Beach Boys, or the early Beatles, or the Rolling Stones remember who the real King of Rock ‘n’ Roll is.

He could play that guitar just like a ringin’ a bell.

It’s a well known fact that all music is better when played faster and louder, just like all music is better if it includes robot voices. From punk rock to opera to new age I listen to all my music at an ear shattering volume, always have. My kids tell me I’m going to lose my hearing to which I always reply: “What?” I figure at my age if I haven’t lost all my hearing by now it doesn’t really matter if I go partially deaf later. When I die I will either not care or get to listen to all the music I want to at an ear shattering volume.

My family hates my music. My wife used to share some of my interests but gradually has spurned almost everything I like. She moved on to the one music that almost nobody actually likes: Bluegrass. I hate banjos. I hate them in any kind of music not just Bluegrass but this probably is at least partially the reason I hate Bluegrass so much. For instance, I hate Bela Fleck. I wouldn’t care what he played, I’d hate it because it has banjos in it. I have extrapolated this to the generalization that nobody really likes Bluegrass music even though for some reason nobody will say so. I think it’s one of those things like asking a group of people where they want to go eat and nobody says anything even though they each have a place they really want to go. Somebody ends up picking somewhere that everyone else hates but nobody will say they don’t want to eat there because they think everyone else does. Does that make any sense? So people are afraid to say they hate Bluegrass because they don’t want to offend anyone even though they all really hate it.

I tried to give my children a good musical education with healthy doses of bands like The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Depeche Mode, The Toy Dolls as well as a side dose of classical music. It stuck for awhile. My oldest daughter still has tastes that are the closest to mine but I also find some of her music just noise and too avant-garde for my childish tastes. My middle daughter pretty much only listens to Asian pop music, K-Pop, J-Pop, etc. She’s in Japan now for study abroad so you can imagine she is in seventh heaven. My youngest daughter listens to Broadway musicals, Barbara Streisand, Judy Garland, you get the picture. I can stand these in small doses only. So you can see my comprehensive musical education had little to no effect on them, although my middle daughter once told me, “Nobody likes Bluegrass,” so some things were not completely ignored.

Faster and louder is the same way. Everyone really likes their music played faster and louder and with robot voices in it too, but are afraid to say it because they think everyone else will think they are stupid. If everybody would just ‘fess up, somebody take the first courageous step, then the music that gets played on the radio for instance would get a lot better when they started playing the music people really want to hear instead of say, singer-songwriter stuff.

So that’s why I’m here, to tell the truth in this blog. I have now taken that first courageous step. All you sheep can now feel safe jumping on my bandwagon and admitting what you really like.

I gotta go now and listen to some Teenage Bottlerocket.