A Word In Edgewise: Rock and Roll Will Fly Forever

Do you ever wonder if Johnny ever did “B. Goode”? I’d turn Chuck Berry’s 1958 tune up full blast on my ’54 Merc convertible’s radio, tooling around town with that and the other rock ‘n’ roll greats blasting through those halcyon pre-Beatles days, along with Berry’s “Maybelline,” “Nadine,” “Route 66” and “Roll Over Beethoven.”

Back then, gasoline was 29 cents a gallon, traffic was light, the nights still dark enough for my father and me to stand out in the yard, wondering at the vast Milky Way that arched across the sky, already faint or invisible to brightly lit city-dwellers.

There were typical niggling teen problems: graduating high school, getting accepted at a decent college, young romance … well, let’s just say I had plenty of time to read. But tooling about in that white convertible on its red and black leather seats blew worry away — for a while.

In 1958, when Berry, lead vocalist and guitarist, accompanied by Lafayette Leake on piano, Willie Dixon on bass and drummer Fred Below, recorded the iconic tune, I was 17, and Berry a (then) grandfatherly 37. Partly autobiographical, he later explained he’d replaced Johnny’s original “colored boy” with “country boy,” to “ensure eligibility for radio play.” Was that so far a leap to the future? Or our present?

Nineteen years later, the “country boy” learned NASA’s 1977 launchings of Voyager 1 and 2 each contained a Voyager Golden Record with his “Johnny B. Goode,” the only rock ‘n’ roll entrant selected by committee head Carl Sagan. (Ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax protested that rock ‘n’ roll was too “adolescent” for inclusion, but Sagan declared that the current planet held many adolescents.) So “Johnny B. Goode” entered the welkin to ring the “rhythm, fire and soul of Earth.”

By the time of Charles Anderson Edward Berry’s death in March 2017, Voyager 1, having passed the heliopause on August 25, 2012, had sailed through interstellar space to achieve some 12.8 billion miles (20 billion kilometers). On or about November 13 of this current year (DV), it will have reached 16.1 billion miles (25.9 billion kilometers), at which point it will require 24 hours for light or radio signals to reach Earth. One Light-Day.

It’s cold in outer space at 38,000 mph (61,000 kph); Voyager’s hull is near absolute zero at -455 F (-270 C), though of course there’s no wind to resist, no untoward drafts to buffet. Inside, where the Golden Record goes a-calling, seeking an audience, the temp’s just warm enough to keep the instruments at their chores. No music yet, classical, ethnic or rock ‘n’ roll, has been tapped. Are they audible to celestial beings in the void? Can the spirits of their creators hear their progeny or that of the others? What would Ludwig or Pyotr Ilyich make of Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Tell Tchaikovsky the News”? Tap their feet? Side with Alan Lomax? As mysterious as the Voyager’s fantastic speed — no, I err. It seems we do know space engineers achieved that through gravity assist maneuvers off Jupiter. Hormuz would be a walk in the park for this craft.

Berry drew from his background to write the four iconic stanzas and four refrains, the latter uncannily suitable to their current task:

Go, go
Go Johnny go, go
Go Johnny go, go
Go Johnny go, go
Go Johnny go, go
Johnny B. Goode

And if, perchance, the hull is breached, Voyager’s Golden Record deciphered, operated and understood; should those beings be motivated and able to search us out, what will they find? Moist eyes and welcoming arms? Loaded arms raised with NIMBY curses and threats? Puzzlement at ruined dwellings of charred, broken stones and empty, untrafficked roadways? None of us will ever know.

Should there be no knock at the hatch, Voyager and its passengers will slide through the stars forever. Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, folk singers, balladeers and Berry names borne into infinity.

His mother told him someday you will be a man
And you will be the leader of a big old band
Many people coming from miles around
To hear you play your music when the sun go down
Maybe someday your name will be in lights,
Saying “Johnny B. Goode” tonight.

Lights? An endless cornucopia of lights, forever.

Mother knew best.