The songwriter Leonard Cohen said everyone follows: “All of us are footnotes”
It might be a reductive claim, but music and its makers fall into tiers.
Even though art is always subjective with different people worshipping at different altars, there undeniably exists a cast of names who are broadly, widely and almost universally untouchable. Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix are all in there, as well as Leonard Cohen, but in his eyes, no one’s position in that lofty God tier is as solid and unshakable as one man’s, and he defies genre.
Even the biggest names in heavy metal would surely also appreciate the mass impact a folk act like Bob Dylan has had on songwriting. Even if their music couldn’t sound more different, or exist on more opposite ends of the spectrum, there are simply certain acts who have earned respect beyond all that, putting aside silly categorisations and boxes now that their reputation is too looming.
Martha Wainwright once put it perfectly when she said, “all roads led to Bob Dylan”, as if in Dylan’s case, he is a destination all songwriters at least have to pass through. If you want to get good, you have to at least stop off there, acknowledge and learn from him, even if you then keep things moving off into a far-off land of pop music or punk.
When it comes to Cohen’s hero, the story is much the same. He often feels referenceless as his music doesn’t wear its muses on its sleeve in a musical sense. Spiritually, they’re right there as he sings of gods, candle magic, tarot cards, pointing out all manner of religious or literary influences, but sonically, it’s not as if his music was ever super referential in that way. However, when it comes to the best of the best, that doesn’t matter, as the respect is still there, and in his eyes, respect for Chuck Berry seemed built into every artist.
“All of us are footnotes to the words of Chuck Berry,” Cohen once said, adding in 2010, “If Beethoven hadn’t rolled over, there’d be no room for any of us”. To him, Berry is the man who made it all happen, who truly launched rock and roll, kicked the whole thing off, and then made space for the rest of the 1960s and ‘70s generation to come flocking in.
You don’t just have to take Cohen’s word for it. The list of icons who admired Berry as their ultimate inspiration is long: The Rolling Stones worshipped him as a mutual love for him first bonded Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and then stuck around as the band’s ultimate influence.
It was the same for The Beatles, who even loved him so much that it got them in trouble when Berry accused them of copying him. “If you had to give rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry,” John Lennon once said, with McCartney agreeing, writing in the tribute to him, “To us, he was a magician making music that was exotic, yet normal, at the same time. We learnt so many things from him, which led us into a dream world of rock and roll music.”
Others on the roster of admirers include Led Zeppelin, the destination Bob Dylan himself, AC/DC, and even Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys, so if Berry influenced them, and they influence acts today, surely that means he remains the ultimate inspiration touchstone in rock and roll.
