"Rebellious Applause": A Defense of Chuck Berry’s 'My Ding-a-Ling'
It’s a masterpiece. A childish, simple, and disgusting song that requires perverse participation.
When Chuck Berry died on March 2, 2017, it was decided: Call it a “novelty song.”
In a New York Times obit; in a nice The New Republic appreciation; and in a Reuters’ “Factbox” (which lies and says he wrote it, oops)—in each, “My Ding-a-Ling” is a “novelty,” and this is meant to jump the reader quickly to an idea: The song sucks.
It is not, we are to believe, who Berry really is. Instead, “My-Ding-a-Ling” is literally novel: His only number 1 hit, and released far after his prime, in 1972. The song is part of a shaky, and ill-defined tradition: the novelty song. Think “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! That Cigarette” by Tex Williams for a listenable example or the “Monster Mash” for a horrific one.1 These songs are jokes. Berry, a pillar of American music, was not. “My Ding-a-Ling” is something the burdened critic must mention—how could you not write about his only chart-topper?—but only to cast aside, and to say: No there was an authentic Chuck Berry. He meant something. This four-minute sing-song bullshit can’t be how we remember a god.
In Harper’s, Ian Penman recently wrote a masterful review of a new biography of Berry, which does much the same.
Penman is a British writer who came up in NME, when that was a fashionable thing to imagine—writing obtuse, slanted (maybe pretentious) reviews on the artists that young rockists hoped to anoint.2 His new essay on Berry is, as usual, incredible3—although it is a bit tidier of a document than some of his sojourns.4 Penman wonderfully evokes how the American love of the car combined and infused itself in Berry’s music. He deeply understands the promise of pleasure and temporal specificity (a 1950s culture finding consumerism) that makes Berry great. And so I want to quote it at length, because I am going to say Penman’s a piece of shit in a second, and you should know I am just nitpicking.
Here he is on Berry’s choice to drive “a fourteen-year-old waitress across state lines for the purpose of having sex with her” after cops stopped him the previous year for doing basically the same thing with a seventeen-year-old and left Berry off with just a warning:
Why didn’t he heed that warning? Was it a deliberate choice, a pointed provocation, a perverse compulsion, the assertion of a kind of doomed but sturdy personal ethic? There were times when Berry seemed almost to be daring authority to notice him. There is a definite sense of testing limits, courting retribution, pushing convention. It’s as if there are two Chuck Berrys: the jovial, jaunty character in his songs . . . and the real Charles Berry, jagged storm clouds massing above his head. The former sees an endless highway while the latter is prepared to haggle over a handful of change. One sees the possibility of a life outside conventions; the other spies a trap, and walks on in. The traps most often seemed to involve sex…
Penman goes on to say these are “both the feathers and the talons of Berry.” His lude acts—a camera placed in a women’s bathroom, the sex tapes, the clip of peeing on someone—contrast the shiny possibility of the American dream he oozed: “The toilet stall and the open horizon.” For Penman, Berry “is both the impish spirit of rock and roll and its undisclosed agon.”
I agree. And yet I struggle to see that as a divide, or as “two Chuck Berrys.” After this treatise on Berry and the creolization of the American dream—its disgust, its filth, and the horrific childishness of mass sexuality—there is a natural example that comes to mind. Penman mentions it in the next paragraph: “My Ding-a-Ling.”
And yet for him, like so many other critics, the song is simply something to give a half-assed evisceration. He writes that the advent of rock-n-roll involved a lot of copying;5 as an example, he notes “the execrable (but insanely popular) late hit ‘My Ding-A-Ling’ was a virtual xerox of a roiling 1952 R & B side by the marvelous Dave Bartholomew.” The only other mention of “My Ding-a-Ling” is near the end, in the final paragraph. Penman lists the track along with Berry’s greatest sins: “Nothing that Berry did and was mocked and punished for down the years—the underage girls, the tax fraud, ‘My Ding-A-Ling,’ the lawsuit, his own sex tapes—has ultimately interfered with his place in history.”
Sorry but fuck off. The quality of the song might be up for debate—even the idea it is a blotch on his legacy—but the Xerox claim isn’t: Berry’s version of the tune is nothing like Bartholomew’s. At least, not the one that became famous.
**
In 1972, Berry played a show at the Lancaster Arts Festival in England. A stage over was Pink Floyd. Picture him: ten years past his prime; the man of the tight rock tune beside a band exploding it into stars and geometry. For the last song of the night, Berry tells the crowd there is one more, but as they boo, he explains, don’t worry: “We’ve got to do our alma mater.” An audience member that night would later write in the Guardian that the crowd “couldn’t quite believe it” once they realized what was happening. Chuck Berry began closing his set with “My Ding-a-Ling.”
Robert Christgau has written that Berry’s songs are driven by an “active relationship” with his audiences that “shift every time a song enters a new context.” And so now, go listen to Bartholomew’s version. And then listen to the unedited version of Berry’s performance of it that night.
Here is Christgau’s “new context”; here is Berry at work:
Well in that case it gives us one more to do. [BOO!]
We’ve got to do our alma mater. We must do our alma mater. And our alma mater—oh yeah!—is a fourth grade diddy, and it’s very cute. I learned it in the fifth. I was a little behind.
But it’s a beautiful song of togetherness. And when I say togetherness, believe me: I do mean togetherness. If it wasn’t for togetherness, I wouldn’t be here tonight—really. Oh yeah!
And if it wasn’t for togetherness, none of the rest of you would be here tonight. Oh yeah!Well, this also happens to be a sexy song. And there’s nothing wrong sex. Not a thing wrong with sex! NOTHING WRONG WITH SEX! NOTHING WRONG WITH SEX!
Sex is a beautiful thing. It’s honorable and it’s lovable.
My father is a baptist minister. He taught us—He told us: Son, there’s nothing wrong with sex, it’s just the way that you handle it, you see.
Oh yeeAAhhh!
So now the reason why it’s a sexy song is because the girls have one part, and the boys have the other. Very simple.
From there, Berry teaches them, in a call-and-response fashion, to sing the song with him. The crowd member who wrote about being in the audience says they all “wanted to humour him” by singing along. Perhaps that is why they are timid at first. More likely, they were stunned, and soon entranced. Because, by the end of his cajoling, they are with Berry in full. The boys loud; the girls softer but with a piercing high. It is unearthly and incredible: Berry’s rendition transforms the childish song into actual sex.
The song is a push and pull—in and out—played as call and response, with Berry as guide and voyeur. He asks the women to sing “my” and the men to sing “ding-a-ling.” They are separate, but “together.” Then, Berry goes beyond this old, traditional ballad of the birds and the bees. He jokes in an ad-lib that anyone is free to have sex with someone of the same gender; he mentions it is okay that a man is singing the woman’s part. As Shana Redmond has written, the basicness of the structure, and simplicity of the notes, stand in contrast to the “progressive sexual politics of the song.”
I could transcribe the entire monologue that goes over ten minutes—with all the little moments and subversions—but just listen. Because if you do, you will see there is a flip side to this, too: His seduction—and his power—over us. The way he controls the crowd. The poking, and the prodding. “Oh yeah!” he yells. Here is not libidinal energy written down but instead shown. Again: sex. The other kind, done in a cute voice. And how old was that girl in the car with Berry again? And how old was that other girl in the car? And what did those sex tapes show? “Ain’t nothing wrong with that,” Berry repeats amid his sexual innuendos. “Ain’t nothing wrong with sex.” And maybe he’d like to believe that. “Oh yeah!” he yells. But it isn’t quite true.
In that contradiction—that freedom of sex, the power of it, the strangeness and lust, the terror—is Berry. The full one that Penman seems confused to have never found in the music. How to explain this artist who learned from the Black vernacular poet Paul Laurence Dunbar? How to explain his perversion—at once cute and obscene and performative and real? How to see “the country cousin” and the “city slicker” in “one and the same body”? How to, as Penman drives back to the old debate, see the art of Berry and the evil he did?
“You get the impression,” Penman writes, “that music was never really the place [Berry] lost, found, or explained himself and his deepest desires.” Maybe. But if any song comes close, it is the one that Penman lists—alongside sex and tax crimes—as among Berry’s greatest error: “My Ding-a-Ling.”
To be fair: It was a truncated version of that performance of “My Ding-a-Ling” that became a hit. The original song is over 11 minutes; the number 1 single is a bit over four. Much of the monologue is cut.
Still, even in miniature, the song has an acute power. Mary Whitehouse, a conservative activist, tried to ban it from the airwaves; when she wrote to the BBC she noted a teacher found boys with their “trousers undone” playing along. What other song could do that?
It seems Berry knew the pull of “My Ding-a-Ling,” even if he was the only one. In 2010, he told Rolling Stone: “I can look around and be singing ‘My Ding-A-Ling’ and stop and sing ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ because some people will be sitting out there looking like they’re from church. There’s certain songs and thoughts, for that matter, that almost make tears come to their eyes.”
“My Ding-a-Ling” is not a mistake. It’s the transgression at the center of Berry’s catalog. It is the threat he offers. In 1968, when Greil Marcus asked Berry about his early musical memories, and how that set his career, he recalls singing “Confessin’ the Blues” in glee club. That was when Berry realized his ability to “challenge the public.” The song received a “terrific ovation,” he told Marcus.
“It was like singing ‘My Ding-A-Ling’ or something,” he remembered, “it this was sort of rebellious applause.”
—JR
Let’s move on but I think a tension with “novelty song” as a tradition is the fact that so much country music (and blues, too) is centered around a joke-like structure, especially in the chorus; or, at the very least, indulges in corny wordplay. Think about “Next Girl” by Carly Pearce or “White Lightning” by George Jones or “I Like Beer” by Tom T. Hall or half of Johnny Paycheck’s catalog. The songs choose wit—not intelligence or even humor—as fundamental. When Paycheck sings that the “only hell” his mama “ever raised” is “him,” do you think that’s a joke? A novelty song chorus? Or is it a good double-entendre? I guess it depends on how you see cliches. In the recent Martin Amis obits you can read the stuck-up British fuck (good writer, whatever) splaying out his hatred of common phrases. But country music is about the opposite: it loves to twist what we’ve heard before by repeating it, but just slightly altered. The idea is to go deeper into the cliche, instead of running from it. This is why David Berman loved Paycheck so much, and you can hear it in a song like “Tennessee,” which could be a novelty tune from a certain angle: “Marry me and leave Kentucky / Come to Tennessee / 'Cause you're the only ten I see / You’re the only ten I see.” That’s a dumb joke until it hits you in the gut.
I found him from this one on Elvis Costello’s “Trust.” I barely understood a word of it but took deep pleasure in knowing someone could write about Costello using phrases he might sing: “The posh and their prudently acute camp followers would-be cameleons and critics are searching for the ultimate.”
Why is he incredible? Why does this post have footnotes? So I can link this odd piece on Kate Bush where Penman rants a bit about the band Coil (whatever) to end up describing her songs perfectly: “If anything sounds like music made in the first disarming glow of Ecstasy, an MDMA honeymoon album, it’s Hounds of Love, from 1985. (That’s MDMA as gateway to a sincere spill-your-secrets relationship rap, rather than a gurning, Duracell bunny rave.)”
It’s probably worth mentioning my old editor Tommy loves Chuck Berry. I bet I am stealing from him without realizing it, too.