Introduction to
CHUCK BERRY, WON'T YOU PLEASE COME HOME

For those too square to have any roots in American music, Chuck Berry was one of the germinal influences who, between 1955 and 1960, set the tone and meter for the rhythm & blues idiom. It is fairly safe to say that no one playing today—and that includes The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and whoever comes next this week—got to his sound without going by way of Chuck Berry. Blues were (and still are, but most importantly were) Chuck Berry's ultimate bag, and putting him alongside B. B. King, Otis Redding, Big Miller, Muddy Waters and Lightnin' Hopkins should draw nothing but nods of approval from students of the Greats. But it was with his upbeat compositions that he made his biggest splash. "Maybellene," "Johnny B. Goode," "Memphis," "Roll Over Beethoven," "Reelin' and Rockin'" and "Sweet Little Sixteen" created a Berry sound that between '55 and '58 made him the single biggest name in R&B. Even today Berry is fine to hear. Not just my opinion: when the Stones go on tour and take along music for their own pleasure, everything Chuck Berry ever recorded goes with them.

Once having been with Chuck Berry, it is impossible to give any credence to Bobby Sherman. Red beans and rice is a diet in no way enhanced by bubble gum.

But I digress.

The Chuck Berry of the story that follows is in no way related to the Chuck Berry of the amplified guitar. But the latter inspired the former in a deranged way that could only have been chronicled by a madman. Segue to Ken McCullough, on a rising note of hysteria.

McCullough I found at the University of Colorado in 1969. Poet, roust-about, esthete, musicologist, writer, madman. He came into my class and I made the error of quoting Herman Melville: "No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it."

Madman went back to his cubby and set out to prove me wrong. Well, Chuck Berry ain't a flea, but close enough. Herman may have been wrong.

McCullough, madman, strikes me as a likely bet for stardom. If he ever gets his head straight. He has a sense for fiction that is platinum-bound by the rigors of poetry; good poetry, muscular poetry. He turns the phrases just so, and his mind wanders down the metaphorical byways with considerable style and grace. The way McCullough treats prose reminds me of a meaningful quotation from an otherwise undistinguished and fearsomely ponderous essay by Graham Greene on the work of Fielding and Sterne: " . . .prose used in fiction as Webster and other Jacobean playwrights used it, as a medium of equal dignity and intensity to poetry, indeed as poetry with the rhythm of ordinary speech."

As this will he McCullough's first wide-circulation publication, I suspect it would be presumptuous of me to gambol on through fields of verbiage, proclaiming his wondrousness. Rather would I back off and let you hear McCullough in his own voice, first as autobiographer, then as writer of cunning fixated fictions. I will merely add that if you savor this first taste of his work, that you somehow scrounge a copy of the Winter 1971 issue of The Iowa Review, wherein a delight titled "His Loneliness, the Winner" lies waiting for your attention. But till you can, or until McCullough shucks off the lamebrain dreams of Hollywood playacting and gets down to what he does fantastically well—writing mad things with the pen of a poet—here is a complete bio and biblio, and a creature named Chuck Berry.

"Born Staten Island, N.Y., July 18, 1943 at 9:38 A.M., the first of five children to a marathon runner father from Derma, Mississippi, and a Canadian mother from a long line of centenarians. My father was in the USAF during my formative years so travelled frequently to many podunk sooty places—the best of which was Newfoundland where we spent six years—maggoty folk songs, drunks pissing on your tricycle, the Portuguese fleet, icebergs, horsedrawn funerals, school blazers and school ties and a free bottle of codliveroil from the govt. each month. From this island in the past we returned to the U.S. of A. where there was the television we had missed and Elvis was at his peak. I went off to prep school (St. Andrew's) to get an education. During the year previous I had passed through the puberty rite of being saved, as a Southern Baptist. St. Andrew's is an Episcopal school. After initial hysteria, I was able to fuse these two styles in my peabrain in the best of all possible ways (?). At St. Andrew's I was one of the 'peasants', and had to cop labels from my father's suits during vacations to sew into my Robt. Hall threads. About the only way I could make my dent in this Frank Merriwell-fairytale scene was via athletics since I am no scholar. I became captain of the football and baseball teams. The peak of my career in prep school (except for losing a no-hitter) came when I got a ruptured kidney in a football scrimmage after our second game during the year of my captaincy, and I wrote the team a Win One For The Gipper' letter from my infirmary bed. It worked and those sons-of-bitches went on to a fantastic season inspired by my absence. They lost the conference championship game, however, because the coach didn't put me in as a punter (doctor's orders). I was all set to run for the winning touchdown instead of punting. I was also active in plays—winning the Drama Award for my portrayal of the angriest man in Twelve Angry Men', and also active in pseudo-piety—punching out our best hitter for smoking during baseball season. I was also Warden of the Student Vestry. Don't get me wrong—I was very much a wiseass. Oh, I won the MVP Award in baseball, and the Eddie Stanky Shitty Award. My height went from 5'8" to 5'7¾" and I became asthmatic.

"This is the beginning of a new paragraph. Went to the University of Delaware, that bastion of softsqueeze lobotomy, where I addled my brain through more football and baseball (I once hit Floyd Little head-on in a scrimmage against Bordentown Friends as a Freshman), and acted in many of the dramatic productions—my favorite role being Dylan Thomas, eating up the vicarious notoriety and expecting a similar end. Oh, in the summers of all these years (except one when I worked as the social director of a resort hotel in Lake George, N.Y.—a glorious erotic fantasy from which I've never recovered) I worked construction and played semi-pro ball. The scouts always told me I was too short despite feats like striking out 17 batters in the first game of a twinbill and collecting five hits in the second game. At Delaware I compounded my nonessential dilemma by majoring in pre-Med, and by doing innocent cartoons for the school paper for which I got called into the Dean of Students office every week. But with the pre-Med, for a person who is so scared of numbers that a license number freaks him out, I had my difficulties. I say without reservation that I sincerely regret and am heartily sorry for every hour I spent in stinking Chemistry labs with all those pimpled slide-rule weirdos. All that formaldehyde and butyric acid did serve to aggravate my asthma, giving me an eventual 1-Y.

"During my last two years as an undergraduate I was an alcoholic, I think, killing a fifth of County Fair Bourbon a day. My twenty-first birthday, which I know about only second-hand because I was blacked out throughout the escapade, has become a legend with the Jet Set around D.C., a place through which I cut a swath like the time Sherman played Georgia. Speaking of the Jet Set, my prep school background did give me an opportunity of being 'in' with these people while still being 'out' in reality—like being a Roman citizen and a Christian, too. I wasted at the cotillion while inbred DuPont seedlings talked of F. Scott and the good life. I became inward, melancholic, misanthropic.

"After being suspended for a semester for swiping a library book (some shit by Kierkegaard I never read), and working a strange holy gig as a social worker during the interim, I came back and finished a B.A. because what else was there to do? During my last semester I tried my hands and feet at poetry and won the Academy of American Poets Award, my creditors making short work of the prize money. Knowing I would last about a week at Med School I said well what now. Iowa they said. So in Iowa I lived in a $4/month sackcloth-panelled cave on a cliff overlooking the Iowa River with no plumbing no running water (except me off the back porch) and a Warm Morning No. 530 for heat. After two years of peace, more-or-less, in the woods, my melancholia tempered by bucolia. I got an M.F.A. in Poetry, equipping me to do exactly nothing. Worked construction for awhile as I am wont to do, and was ready to sail for the Far East (the Lord Jim trip) after getting my Z Card for the Merchant Marine, when I met Lady Kathryn, the Poet. She said stay so I did. That was two years ago. Under the Harrow. I have been a vegetable since then but am rapidly rehabilitating. Am presently sojourning in Bozeman, Montana with Lady K. and son Galway Django Ari Kamal Krishna—where I am poet-in-residence at Montana State University, hating (nearly) every minute of it, longing for the good life of wild irresponsibility. Re: the future—took a stab at filmmaking, but after two brilliant though abortive attempts I gave up the ghost, realizing that my ambition was not to make but to be in movies—as the star of Spaghetti Westerns. The character will be a hybrid of Paladin, Peter Sellers and Lon, Jr. all rolled into the form of a quart-size Haystacks Calhoun. If I can't do this, I'll have to write, I guess. But shit, Alan Ladd was short.

"Have published poems in thirty-five-or so magazines and anthologies of varying repute, and my first collection of poetry titled The Easy Wreckage came out in April of '71. Illustrated a book of Gary Snyder's poetry, Three Worlds, Three Realms, Six Roads (Griffin Press, Marlboro, Vt.), and am now working on drawings for a concoction of W. S. Merwin. Have just gotten my head above the uterine waters of speculative fiction, but, being a Cancer, have always been fatally attracted to said.

"My lucky number is 38, I am left-handed, and my favorite color is green. I have a distinguished scar on my forehead where I was bricked by vigilantes."

Publications

(Poetry)

"Garden Song," The Defender (Iowa City), vol. 15, no. 2, p. 12, 10/4/68

"My Father: A Preface," The Defender, vol. 15, no. 10, p. 19, 12/16/68

"The Way It Was At Queen Jane Of Iowa's Wedding As Sung To The Tune Rendel Moulbauer's Codliverolive Phantalia," Ghost Dance (E. Lansing), vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 6–7, Winter 1968

"Boot Camp Nocturne, Nineteen Sixty-Eight," TriQuarterly (Evanston), no. 15, pp. 175–176, Spring 1969

"Naughty Petey," Saltlick (Quincy, Ill.), vol. 1, no. 2, p. 7,6/69

"Georgian Reception," Suction (Hayward, Calif.), vol. 1, no. 2, 10/69

"Langdon's Lament," "Custody," Doones (Bowling Green), vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 30–31, 10/69

"there are two of us where there is only one," New Voices in the Wind (anthology), ed. Jeanne Hollyfield, Young Publications, Appalachia, Va., p. 255, 11/69

"March Letter to Chuna," Doones, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 24–25, 1/70

"Opening Day," Trace (Hollywood), no. 71, p. 296, Spring 1970

"My Brother's Garden," "A Winter Espousal," Red Clay Reader (Charlotte, N.C.), no. 7, p. 83, Spring 1970

"Confession in October," Jeopardy (Bellingham), vol. 6, p. 103, 4/70

"Derailment," South Florida Poetry Journal (Tampa), nos. 4/5, pp. 197–198, Spring 1970

"Sabbatical Syllabus," "In Orion's Chamber," "The Installment Plan," "In the Year of Steel Vegetation," Wisconsin Review (Oshkosh), vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 24–25, Fall 1970

"Estranged From," "Anti-Elegy for Father and Son," "Over Small Beers," Quetzal (Abilene, Texas), vol. 1, no. 2, Spring 1970

"1968," Gum (Iowa City), vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 25–6, 3/70

"Blues Project," (broadside), Seamark Press, Iowa City, 4/70

"Falling Into Place," "Matins: :Iowa River," "For Baum, The Departed/In Red Moustache and Fedora," The Back Door (Poquoson, Va.), vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 19–23, 7/70

"Last Will and Testament," I LOVE YOU ALL DAY/IT IS THAT SIMPLE—Modern Poems on Love and Marriage (anthology), eds. Philip Dacey and Gerald Knoll, Abbey Press, St. Meinrad, Ind., p. III, 9/70

"A Sketch in Bird's Wing," Dance of the Muses (anthology), ed. Jeanne Hollyfield, Young Publications, Appalachia, Va., 11/70

"On a Scaffold North Bank/Stinking Water, Nebraska 1872," Hearse (Eureka, Calif.), no. 13, 12/70

"Old Skin Cantata," "The Installment Plan," (reprint), "In the Year of Steel Vegetation," (reprint), Bones (N.Y.C.), Spring 1971

"Boot Camp Nocturne," (reprint), "Falling Into Place," (reprint), Apropos (Bozeman), 11/70

"Amish Summer," december (Western Springs, III), Spring 1971

The Easy Wreckage (collection), illustrated by Donna Violetti, Seamark Press, Iowa City, 1/71

(Short Stories)

"Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home," Again, Dangerous Visions (anthology), Doubleday, ed. Harlan Ellison, 1972

"His Loneliness, The Winner," The Iowa Review, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1971

"The Legend of Wick Higgins," Larger Than Life (anthology), Scribner's, ed. Richard Gehman, Summer 1972

(Illustrations)

Three Worlds, Three Realms, Six Roads, a sequence of poems by Gary Snyder, Griffin Press, Marlboro, Vt, Spring 1968