Day: June 7, 2017

Chuck Berry did things his own way, right up to his final album, a 10-song set nearly four decades in the making.

The St. Louis native widely hailed as the father of rock ‘n’ roll announced plans for the album “CHUCK” in October on his 90th birthday. The music took on added poignancy when Berry died in March. The album will be released Friday.

It’s a fitting finale from the guitar master who melded blues, R&B and Country music into a sound that took over the 1950s, forever changing the cultural landscape. Some of the new songs, like “Wonderful Woman” and “Big Boys,” feature the same driving rhythm of his earliest hits like “Maybellene” and “Roll Over Beethoven.” In fact, one of the new songs, “Lady B. Goode,” offers the perspective of the woman left behind by his legendary “Johnny B. Goode.”

But Berry’s son, Charles Berry Jr., said his father did not set out to make a legacy album.

“I think this was just his next body of work, and it just took a lot longer than the other albums to get released,” Charles Berry Jr., 55, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

That’s an understatement. Jim Marsala, who played bass guitar in Berry’s band for 41 years, said Berry began working on new material soon after the release of his previous album, “Rock It,” in 1979.

Always marching to his own beat, Berry was in no particular hurry. For 10 years, he recorded songs, or riffs for songs, or whatever came to mind. All of the tracks were destroyed in a 1989 fire at a studio near his home in Wentzville, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb.

At that point, “he has nothing,” Charles Berry Jr. said. “So, he builds another studio and goes back to work, re-creating and creating new music.”

In the meantime, Berry continued to perform, including monthly shows for nearly two decades at Blueberry Hill, a venue in another St. Louis suburb, University City, until age 88. Marsala directed the band, Charles Berry Jr. played guitar, and the always unpredictable frontman commanded the stage, taking his bandmates on a nightly trip they could never anticipate.

“The show was completely ad-libbed,” Marsala said. “You never knew what was coming next. We usually started out with ‘Roll Over Beethoven,’ ‘School Days,’ and then ‘Sweet Little Sixteen,’ and then from there it was whatever he felt like playing.”

Marsala made sure he stood to Berry’s left, better to see where Berry’s hands were on the neck of his guitar “so I knew what key he was in. So when he would do his four-bar intro I had hand signals. I would flash to the keyboard player so he would know what key we were in. And we’d come in on the fifth bar. It worked great.”

Charles Berry Jr. smiled as he recalled those shows.

“He’d be up onstage and just start doing stuff,” he said. “And it’d be, ‘OK, let’s just follow him wherever he’s going.”’

“CHUCK” was a family affair. Charles Berry Jr. plays guitar, as does his own son, Charles Edward Berry III, who turns 23 this week. Ingrid Berry-Clay, one of Chuck’s three daughters, sings and plays harmonica.

She sings along with her dad on “Darlin’,” a Country-tinged ballad that resonates as a final message to his children.

“Darlin’, your father’s growing older each year,” Berry sings. “Strands of gray are showing bolder/Come here and lay your head upon my shoulder/My dear, the time is passing fast away.”

Typical of Berry, the lyrics of “CHUCK” are at times poetic, at other times playful. “Big Boys” harkens to his earlier odes to teenage cravings. “The girls wanna stay and the boys wanna play/So let’s rock ‘n’ roll `til the break of day,” he sings.

But in the closing song, “Eyes of Man,” Berry warns philosophically of worshipping false idols.

“So be the temples men have cherished/Crumble in ruins to rot and rust/Low lies each pillar and arch to perish/Doomed to decay and rot to dust.”

Berry’s impact on music was evident, said Joe Edwards, the owner of Blueberry Hill and a close friend of Berry’s.

“But the fact that he changed culture around the world by bringing black kids and white kids together through music was an even greater accomplishment, perhaps,” Edwards said. “It was just unbelievable the influence he had.”
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A rusted fragment of the battleship USS Arizona sunk at Pearl Harbor, a woman’s munitions plant uniform and ration books all tell the complex story of life on the homefront in a new exhibit at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.

“Salute to the Home Front,” which opens Saturday, explores the bitter fight about entering the war, racial and gender prejudice, and the development of the atomic bomb.

Museum President and CEO Nick Mueller said most of the museum’s 6-acre campus shows how the war was won on the battlefield but the new permanent exhibit explains “why it was fought and how it was won on the homefront.”

The 10,000-square-foot exhibit begins with the years after World War I. The peace treaty that ended the war in 1918 was “punitive and did not really solve the social and cultural ills” that led to the war, according Owen Glendening, the museum’s associate vice president for education and access.

“With democracy and capitalism under question, the rise of authoritarian regimes really shook the world,” he said.

Gas masks for children

Among the artifacts are British gas masks for children — one that might fit a 5-year-old and a much bigger one designed to hold an infant from head to waist. Gas had been a major weapon of World War I, and people feared that gas bombs might be dropped in civilian areas.

“Fortunately, it never happened, but the population was scared stiff,” Glendenning said.

Headlines and newsreels show the strident debate between U.S. isolationists and internationalists, which ended when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

Survivors’ accounts of that attack are among more than 50 videotaped oral histories interspersed throughout the exhibit.

“The signature of this museum is to engage people in personal stories. … We hear from survivors of Pearl Harbor, people on Main Street USA. … We hear first-hand stories about people who went into factories or into the service to fight,” Mueller said.

‘Victory Begins at Home’

The exhibit’s Main Street USA has a newsstand, a theater marquee and a store window filled with propagandistic wares such as Victory bobby pins and a charm bracelet of military service insignia.

Within the picket fence outside two rooms representing a 1940s-style home, one wall is covered with a photo of a victory garden. Nearby are a real hubcap and other metal items for a scrap drive.

Inside the kitchen, the shelves display pamphlets with titles such as “Victory Begins at Home!: Recipes to Match Your Sugar Ration” and “Health for Victory Club Meal-Planning Guide.” Pull open kitchen drawers and you see items including ration books, matchbooks and an icebag.

Map of the war

A living-room wall displays a framed map: “Esso War Map II: Invasion Edition.” It’s designed, an introductory statement says, so people can “follow the strategy of the Allies as it develops from day to day.” An open closet in the same room displays children’s military dolls, toy guns and dress-up uniforms.

Glendenning said the gallery on the rush to turn from a peacetime economy to a wartime one holds two of his favorite artifacts: a cutaway ship model from the Higgins boat-building plant in New Orleans, built as a reference to show workers how everything fit together, and the overalls and cap worn by a female munitions factory worker.

“It has such a ’40s sense of style,” he said. “I love the big red buttons at the hip.”

Toni Kiser, assistant director for collections management, said one of her favorite pieces is at the bottom right corner of the living room’s display cabinet: a statuette of Hitler bending over, with a pincushion as his rear end.

 
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With Wonder Woman blazing a trail at theaters across the United States, the female superhero is being hailed as a powerful new role model for girls and a break away from sexism in Hollywood.

The film, starring Israeli actress Gal Gadot, smashed box-office records on its opening weekend, raking in more than $103 million in the United States — a record for a movie directed by a woman, Patty Jenkins. The previous record holder was Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey.

Online debates ahead of the film’s release about the Amazonian superhero’s lack of armpit hair and the furor surrounding her selection last year as a U.N. honorary ambassador have only served to boost box-office takings.

But it is above all the depiction of the sword-wielding, lasso-tossing character as an empowered woman that accounts for the film’s triumph, said Melissa Silverstein, founder of the Women and Hollywood blog and co-founder of the women-focused Athena Film Festival.

‘Our stories matter’

“It’s almost an exclamation point on what women have been saying for a long time, in the industry, outside the industry — that our stories matter, we are the heroes of the stories, we can kick butt as well as anyone else and we’re equal,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.

Wonder Woman was first imagined in 1941 as an icon of female empowerment — even appearing on the inaugural cover of the flagship feminist publication Ms. magazine three decades later.

But her modern portrayal has been criticized for shifting to a sexualized buxom character, typically clad in a red-white-and-blue body suit.

The United Nations dumped Wonder Woman less than two months after naming her as an ambassador for women’s and girls’ empowerment amid criticism that her pin-up image sent the wrong message.

The film reverts to her original incarnation.

“Wonder Woman” is one of three comic-book superheroes from the 1930s and 1940s whose stories have been published almost without interruption — alongside Batman and Superman — according to Harvard history professor Jill Lepore.

Debut sparks celebrations

Yet, Jenkins’ film is the first theatrical release starring the Princess of the Amazons. Her debut on the silver screen has prompted a host of celebratory initiatives.

In New York, Wonder Woman enthusiasts have raised more than $8,000 in six days to send high school girls to a screening in Washington, D.C.

And female-only showings by the cinema chain Alamo Drafthouse have sold out from Austin, Texas, to New York, with promises of proceeds going to Planned Parenthood, a women’s health care provider.

Silverstein said the blockbuster should herald a new era in a Hollywood film industry skewed in favor of male characters and filmmakers.

Last year, females made up just 29 percent of protagonists among the 100 top-grossing U.S. films, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University in California.

Behind the scenes, women made up just 7 percent of directors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films in 2016, a study by the same center showed.

“The bigger picture is, for me, that women stories are as valid as male stories,” said Silverstein.
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