Chuck Berry at Ninety: Full Speed Ahead

A few years ago, sometime during the Bloomberg administration, a New Year’s Eve party in Manhattan was failing to achieve liftoff. Then somebody put on Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene.” Suddenly, the party was urgently alive, in need of immediate dancing to address the excitement: that raw, fuzzy opening riff, shockingly playful; that delirious, furious, propulsive energy, with whamming drums, blistering guitar, staccato lyrical hilarity, and a piano snaking around in the distance. “Maybellene” sounds like one of the roaring, heavy American cars that Berry loves to sing about—a powerful machine, with a girl in it, fuelled up and gunning to get somewhere. “Maybellene! Why can’t you be true?” Berry sang. I found myself doing a crazed sort of Charleston with the hostess, in the kitchen.