Rock’s so good to me. Rock is my child and my grandfather.—Chuck Berry

If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry.’—John Lennon

He has not performed live at Blueberry Hill, his St. Louis, Missouri, nightclub, since the summer of 2014, according to his website, but if that means Chuck Berry has retired, he hasn’t let anyone know about it. That summer, he was honored with the Polar Music Prize.

Chuck Berry is 90 today. Perhaps it is to his liking that there are no celebrations scheduled in his honor today, no live performances, no career-spanning television network extravaganza. Because without the man himself cutting a duck walk across the stage while unleashing one of his immortal guitar riffs, what would we have? What we have is the music:
Read More

He had pouchy eyes, smoked a cigarette, and sat at the kitchen table in an undershirt, black tuxedo pants, and bare feet. His fingers danced nervously on the valves of his brilliant gold-plated horn.
 
On weekend nights, Chernecke played in the Blue Moon, which was under the el, three blocks from his house. Now on a rough, fuzzy Saturday morning after a bust-out night at the Blue Moon, he had me, this Catholic school kid who instinctively blew his notes louder when an el train passed. The only thing you’re learning is to compete with an el, he said. But he had such deplorable personal habits that he needed the three dollars for a lesson desperately.—from a new story by Jimmy Breslin, “Trumpet Lessons, Life Lessons“

I first encountered Jimmy Breslin, who turns 86 today, in the pages of the New York Daily News in the 1970s, when I first fell in love with newspapers. (Like all things related to love, my immediate affection for newspapers was inexplicable and still fills me with joy.)

My father used to buy the News on Sundays for reasons I never learned but I think had to do with making sure there was more than one colorful comics section available in the house to amuse my sister and me. I loved the comics sections, but I also read every columnist.
Read More

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
 
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
 
Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.—a section of Oscar Wilde’s poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

Oscar Wilde was born on this date in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland.
Read More