by Jochen Markhorst
XIV A cool breeze from a camel’s ass
Put your head out the window, let the good times roll
There’s a party going on behind the grassy knoll
Stack up the bricks and pour the cement
Don’t say Dallas don’t love you, Mr. President
Put your foot in the tank and step on the gas
Try to make it to the triple underpass
Black face singer – white face clown
Better not show your faces after the sun goes down
“Chuck’s music’s always got that hidden thing about it where, you know, the cause is always hidden but the effect is known,” says DJ Dylan in 2006, having just played Chuck Berry’s “No Money Down” (Theme Time Radio Hour, episode “Cars”). It’s a very Dylanesque, layered tribute, which the DJ somewhat undermines by concluding with: “Chuck Berry. Always one jump ahead” (a kind exaggeration; after 1958, Chuck marked time and kept repeating the same trick for forty years, right up until his death in 2007). Which in no way detracts from his greatness, of course. Neither from Chuck Berry’s, nor from “No Money Down”.
“No Money Down” is one of the Very Greatest, a monument on a par with “Johnny B. Goode” and “School Days”, or “Roll Over Beethoven”, or “Maybellene”, or “Sweet Little Sixteen”… his body of work is one endless Monument Valley anyway, but Chuck himself also places “No Money Down” on a pedestal. If your jukebox only had room for three or four Chuck Berry songs, interviewer Robert Hilburn asks him in 1987, which ones would you choose?
“For rhythm and lyrics, it would be ‘Back to Memphis.’ I think it is a heck of a story … a fellow went up north to make it and (finds) there is no place like home. It is the grown boy talking to his mother rather than little ‘Johnny B. Goode.’ For heart-throbbing, tear-dropping, it is ‘Memphis, Tenn.,’ which is the tenderest. For novelty, it is ‘No Money Down.’ For teachings, it is ‘Downbound Train,’ because it is spiritual and it shows if you really need to do well, you will do well.”
(Los Angeles Times, 4 October 1987)
Dylan plays the song twice (in 1981, letting his childhood friend Larry Kegan sing whilst he himself plays the saxophone), both times as the finale. The Father of Rock and Roll is a recurring feature on Dylan’s setlists; “Around And Around”, “Bye Bye Johnny”, “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Johnny B. Goode”, “Little Queenie” (which he has already performed 26 times, more often than, for example, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” or “When The Ship Comes In”), “Nadine”… and then there are the many, often effusive tributes in word and writing.
The best-known and most enduring is probably Dylan’s congratulatory message from 2012: “To Chuck, the Shakespeare of rock and roll, congratulations on your PEN award, that’s what too much monkey business will get ya,” which, apart from the grand honorary title the Shakespeare of rock and roll, also references Chuck’s “Too Much Monkey Business”, which at the time served as the template for Dylan’s earth-shattering “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. And Dylan is, obviously, not the only one to recognise Chuck’s status. Lennon suggests replacing the term “rock and roll” with “Chuck Berry”, Keith Richards calls him “the granddaddy of us all” and rock & roll in its pure essence (and steals every riff from him), “It’s not really possible to sum up what he meant to all of us young lads growing up in Liverpool,” says Sir Paul, calling him a “Magician”, and Springsteen adds: “The greatest pure rock & roll writer who ever lived.” Apparently all members of the Pantheon agree: Chuck is the greatest of them all.
Seen in that light, Chuck comes off rather short-changed in Dylan’s mosaic of the twentieth century, in the carousel where everyone and everything whizzes by, in “Murder Most Foul” and on Rough And Rowdy Ways in general. His name isn’t mentioned at all, nor is any song title… it’s limited to this single reference:
New Jersey Turnpike in the wee wee hours
I was rollin’ slowly ’cause of drizzlin’ showers
Here come a flat-top, he was movin’ up with me
Then come wavin’ by me in a little’ old souped-up jitney
I put my foot on my tank and I began to roll
Moanin’ siren, ’twas the state patrol
So I let out my wings and then I blew my horn
Bye bye New Jersey, I’ve become airborne
… put my foot on my tank, which Dylan borrows in this second verse to colour the panic immediately following the shot: Put your foot in the tank and step on the gas / Try to make it to the triple underpass.
Dylan doesn’t go for one of the usual suspects. The line comes from “You Can’t Catch Me” from 1955. Recorded during the same session in December 1955 that produced “Maybellene” and “Wee Wee Hours” (both songs are referenced in “You Can’t Catch Me”, incidentally), but the single fails to make an impact. The song only gained its place in music history in 1969, when Lennon opened Abbey Road with the rip-off “Come Together” and the carbon copy line Here come old flat-top, he come groovin’ up slowly. Leading to a legal row when music publisher and rights holder Morris Levy took the matter to court on grounds of copyright infringement. Lennon eventually settled with the agreement that he would record three songs from the catalogue of Levy’s publishing company for 1975’s Rock ‘n’ Roll (he did indeed record “You Can’t Catch Me”, “Angel Baby” and “Ya Ya”).
Chuck himself does have, quite apart from that coincidental significance in music history, fond feelings for the song, and devotes almost an entire page to it in his highly readable 1987 autobiography:
“You Can’t Catch Me was embodied from an experience I had when returning from New York City along the New Jersey Turnpike. The New Jersey Turnpike itself is long enough, but the song was well on its way in theory as I rolled off the west end of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was at night and Toddy and I in our Buick had been overtaken by some dudes with crew cuts (flat tops) who pulled up alongside and passed us, waving. Their car was not as late a model as mine, but must have definitely been in better shape or souped up.”
The subsequent race provides the rest of the text and the images, and with them an insight into Chuck’s creative process – just like he attributes “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” to a chance street scene whilst on tour: “A Caucasian officer was picking up a fairly handsome male loiterer near the auditorium when some woman came up shouting for the policeman to let him go.” Or, as with “No Money Down”: “It originated from the salesman’s pitch I usually heard when buying my first few cars. They would inevitably lure you in with signs like the song’s title.” Like Dylan says of his own creative process: “images which are just in there and have got to come out.” The most beautiful image by far, however, is the one Chuck incorporates for cool breeze in the chorus of “You Can’t Catch Me”:
“The balance of the lyrics were improvised excepting the tail end of the chorus, cool breeze. In a novel I read some time ago, there was an explanation of how a saying got started. A native on a safari in the deserts of Africa was standing in the blistering heat, behind one of the camels, and suddenly the camel broke wind. The native only remarked that at least it was cool, and the phrase was carried throughout the trip: A cool breeze from a camel’s ass.”
… which would have rhymed perfectly with Try to make it to the triple underpass – but that was probably considered a bit too much. Pity, though.
To be continued. Next up Murder Most Foul part 15: “My two favourite singers are Frank Sinatra and Al Jolson”
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon in both paperback and on Kindle: 
- *Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue*
- Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
- Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
- Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
- Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
- Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
- Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
- John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
- Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s looking for the fuse
- Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
- Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s second Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rise of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s late-career classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other kind of music
- Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British masterpiece
- I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
- Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways – Side B
- Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
- Bob Dylan’s 1971
- Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door
- It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry b/w Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Bob Dylan’s melancholic blues
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side A
- Bob Dylan takes Highway 61 – Seven mercurial songs
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side C
