- *The “Where Have You Been?” series handles individual songs and diagrams their history, from their inspiration, to the writing, to their eventual contexts and implications it’s had in our culture, with an emphasis on the geography of all these things, or the “where,” in other words.
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Chuck Berry had plenty of time to sit around thinking of songs in 1963. You see, he was serving a year and a half in prison for statutory rape, and what probably could have amounted to sex trafficking, in the form of employing the young, 14-year-old girl at his club. One auspicious result of this ruminative process is the jaunty gem of “You Never Can Tell,” which according to Wikipedia was written by Berry while he was in the “joint.”
Besides its altogether benign and light emotional tinge, another puzzling thing about “You Never Can Tell,” which yes is that song that Mia and Vincent dance to in Jackrabbit Slim’s in that Pulp Fiction scene, is how sophisticated, and even erudite, it is in subject matter and lyrical template. That is, you usually think of songs written in prison as really microcosmic, maybe dealing with things like missing a lover and crawling across the floor (I was just thinking of that “Prison Cell Blues” song by Blind Lemon Jefferson that Steve Earle covers), or at least desperate, as which “Touch of Grey,” even in all its pristine optimism, tends to strike. The only thing that seems telling, or explainable, about the whole set of lyrics, is the “teenage wedding” reference, in light of how Berry had gotten caught with a young girl. It’s almost as if he’d been rationalizing while locked up on society’s ardent insistence that romantic links solely involve people of the same age group.
Berry was born in St. Louis and died in Missouri too. Strangely, though, he seems to have made relatively scant lyrical references to his home state, at least in the way of overt specifics. Again, it might have to do with wanting to write music that everyone anywhere can sink into and make fantastical, in their own way. Anyway, “You Never Can Tell” would surface on St. Louis to Liverpool, an apparent reference to the hometown of the Beatles, and that fine, translucent guitar sound can of course be chalked up to what was by this time a significant studio budget for his seventh studio album, following umpteen mega-hits like “Johnny B. Goode”; “Rock and Roll Music”; “Roll over Beethoven”: “Reelin’ and Rockin’,” etc., etc. The interface here is one of a full band in which many members took a hand in bolstering the score, such as J.C. Davis with the tenor saxophone tapestries and Johnnie Johnson with the lithe, rhythmically sound piano runs that would invigorate the tune distinctly. In Berry’s voice, too, seems like a newfound maturity: I actually didn’t even recognize it as him in Pulp Fiction despite that I’d obviously heard “No Particular Place to Go” and “Rock and Roll Music,” among others. All in all, the lyrics seem to play out like a fantasy on Berry’s part: a veritable orgy of modern developments, material possession and surplus but most of all, probably, freedom. And just to give an indication of how far this mix reached on an influential level, I got to the point halfway through my last listen where I couldn’t hear those relentless saxophone runs and not think of Morphine, to whom this one little jazzy Chuck Berry one-off could have more or less given birth, at least on the superficial level of instrumentation and general stylistic m.o. “You Never Can Tell” is important for where it took us but also where it’s been, which in this case was a place nobody wants to go but which also seems to have given rise to some singular, unforeseen and maybe even unprecedented muse, within the burgeoning orchard of rock and roll.