Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade Vol. 1 was a revelation for me. I bought it in 1971 but it had a lifelong influence. Not only were the music and production thrilling, the lyrics lit up my imagination and shaped my idea of how a song should be written. I never dreamed of ever being able to come up with that kind of material but at least it pointed a path.
Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade Vol. 1
There are a handful of artists that have affected me in this way. Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Billie Holiday, and the Boswell Sisters are among them. When first exposed to performers of this stature it’s as if you’ve suddenly been dropped into an undiscovered land. They can make listening to anyone else seem pointless and it takes a while to step back and look at them objectively. Other than Chuck Berry and possibly Hank Williams, all of these performers pre-date the Rock era. Although I was a fan of the music from the 1960s – and although ’60s music led me to the performers I mentioned – my songs would never have amounted to much had I not gotten away from its influence. Older music seemed to have more substance and felt grounded in a way that made much of what I heard by the contemporary performers of my day sound second-rate.
After finishing Grandview (see chapter 5), I continued to write. It had become habitual and I did it without any particular objective in mind. Songwriting was, and still is, a mystery to me. I could never predict why or when a good song might appear but when it did, it felt like a friend had stopped by to drop off an unexpected gift. The majority of my best songs came without struggle. In fact, struggling usually meant that the end product would not be very good. This too was something I picked up from writers like Chuck Berry and Hank Williams. Most of their songs were written using three chords, occasionally four. While my material may have had a few more chords, it was still based on their approach. That being; simple, uncluttered and immediate.
I wrote some good music during this period, a lot of which ended up on two cassette tapes: Carefree Life and Mandatory Minimum. They were both released in 1996. Unlike Grandview, the cassettes took one session each to finish. Not only were they done in one session but I asked the engineers – Dan Murphy on the former and Jeff Monroe on the latter – to keep recording without taking a break between my performance of the songs. I would finish a tune, strum a bit and start into the next number. The process stopped only if I fouled up or if my voice started to crack. In this sense, these really were “live” studio recordings.
Along with my originals, the cassettes included a handful of tunes by other writers. I had been rummaging through volumes of old time American music for years and every so often I found material that I felt worked with my songs. Generally, these numbers were public domain recordings done by long-forgotten performers. I discovered much of this work in the LP collection of the public library. There was one series in particular – the Library of Congress’s Folk Music in America series – that I cannibalized to make mixtapes containing my favorite selections.
Delving into the past had become something of a fad by this time. Several local acts adopted the look of old-time musicians. Beat-up fedoras, suspenders, work shirts and pants were fashionable; a sign of artistic credibility. The change in apparel was also accompanied by the shift to a more acoustic string band sound. All of this was intended to give their music authenticity. I thought it had the opposite effect because, despite the musicianship, the outfits always came off as a contrivance. To this day, bands adopt an old-time image and use it with varying degrees of success. This is also true of acts that go for a Rockabilly look or a traditional Country & Western look or even a Swing Era look. People tend to be more accepting and comfortable with what they know and perhaps these performers benefit from tapping into an audience that has been pre-sold on a particular style of music.
I never contemplated any of this for myself. There wasn’t much consideration given to actually making money or gaining any kind of following with my music. Being the perpetual child, I just kept writing and recording songs without a single thought about marketing or image. It was so easy to walk into a studio with a collection of material and walk out with a finished record. When things did eventually change, it wasn’t because of anything I did. Usually, I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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© 2013 by Maurice Mattei
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