Chuck Berry - "Thirty Days"

When Chuck Berry had a hit with “Thirty Days” in 1955, he probably never imagined that 20 years later, singing about high school heartache and hijinx would become passé, and disaffected youth in American industrial cities like Cleveland, would start writing songs inspired by the whir and whine and hum of the nearby factories. (I do realize that Run DMC also have a “30 Days,” a single their debut self-titled platter, but I would defy anyone to tell me that it’s one of their essential jams. I don’t think it’s blasphemy to say it was one of the only less-than-killer offerings from the primo phase of kings of Hollis, Queens.) As Chuck’s song hurtles along, the singer’s voice provides the main current running through it. This simple paradigm was all but dispensed with by bands like Pere Ubu, and admittedly, things did need some shaking up by the mid-‘70s. But “Thirty Days” is as fine an example as any of the man’s way with words. And it’s the sound of the words—the hoarse exuberance the vocals, the sheer fun of the way he enunciates “worldwide hoodoo” and the quintessentially Southern pronunciation of “agin’ ya”—that makes me smile so broadly. Somehow this simple tale of boy loses girl/boy wants girl back becomes panoramic in Chuck’s hands, with his references to the FBI, the United Nations and a gypsy woman. He takes a tale of woe and makes it sound joyous, which is not the same as taking a sad song and making it better.

Pere Ubu - "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo"

“Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” is the name of a book about the famed “Doolittle Raid” of 1942, in which a fleet of American planes hit targets in Tokyo, proving the city’s vulnerability and helping to turn the tide in the Pacific war. It is also a1944 film starring Van Johnson (who played the arch-villain “The Minstrel” on the ultra-campy “Batman” TV series) and Spencer Tracy, and oh yes, a song by those sons of America’s polluted heartland, Pere Ubu. The seminal outfit’s first single, from 1975, begins with a few shards of guitar, and you already know you’re in a strange land. After several bars, the one unifying melodic lick emerges, a guitar figure with a tone not far from Tony Iommi’s patented sludgy Gibson SG sound, and then David Thomas’s damaged tenor comes in with a sinister singsong melody, almost childlike, but with lyrics that speak of danger to come: “No place to run, 
no place to hide,
 no turning back on a suicide ride”

Around the midpoint the song devolves into a tangle of cacophony as the bombing raid commences—sonic chaos, pure freak-out stuff—and it goes on for some time until, out of the ashes and twisted metal, the smoke clears and that guitar lick crawls out and Thomas & company “take it home,” amid final images of “toy city streets crawling through my sights,
 sprouting clumps of mushrooms like a world surreal…” The song ends with Thomas repeatedly intoning the title phrase, amid sounds of static, metallic scrapes, and shrieking feedback. What would Johnny B. Goode say?

With musical apples and oranges of this kind, it would be pointless to argue which is “better.” One is spry and swinging, the other is damaged, corroded, and menacing. I can only say that I’ve always been one to opt for a cheap thrill over even the most audacious mind-fuck. Both kinds of songs have their hallowed places in my consciousness, but Chuck touches my heart while Ubu touches (prods at? assaults?) my mind. But in my desert island scenario, in which I am left with only my definitive 100 number songs to carry me through my prolonged Tom Hanks-ish isolation, Chuck Berry’s chonka-chonk guitar and joyful, articulate singing ultimately win out over the toxic skronk of Pere Ubu…but only by a scorched, chemically damaged hair.

Previously: No. 1, 2-4, 5-7, 7 (counterpoint), 8, 9, 10/11, 12/13. 13 (counterpoint), 14/15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26/27, 28 , 29