Chuck Berry didn’t need a No.1 pop hit.
By 1972, when he finally reached that pinnacle, he was already a legend. His early singles like “Maybellene,” “Too Much Monkey Business,” and “Johnny B. Goode” had stormed the R&B charts and came tantalizingly close to hitting the top of what was previously called the “Top Sellers In Stores” chart. He had been covered by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Wanda Jackson, and Jimi Hendrix. As Bob Dylan put it in an email he wrote when Berry was handed one of the first PEN New England’s Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence Awards in 2012, “If Beethoven hadn’t rolled over, there’d be no room for any of us.”
Berry knew how highly he was esteemed. So much so that, starting around the mid-to-late ’60s, he would go on tour all alone, playing with whatever pickup bands were available at the time and trusting that they knew his music well enough to follow his lead.
That was the case when Berry, in early 1972, played at the Lanchester Arts Festival about 90 miles outside of London. Joining him onstage were a quartet of seasoned players including future Average White Band guitarist Onnie Owen McIntyre and pianist Dave Kaffinetti, aka Viv Savage of Spinal Tap — who had come of musical age listening to Berry’s hits. As heard on the three live recordings plucked from that performance included on The London Chuck Berry Sessions, the 1972 album that yielded Berry’s sole No. 1 pop hit, they settle into the grooves of “Reelin’ And Rockin’” and “Johnny B. Goode” with a studied ease.
Strangely, it was the other live cut from that album that took Berry to the top of the pops in both the U.S. and U.K. For as powerful an impact as Berry had, and continues to have, on the world of music, his biggest commercial hit was, of all songs, “My Ding-a-Ling.”
If you know the song, you likely have the nursery rhyme-like chorus of “My Ding-a-Ling” jingling through your mental jukebox right now or are chuckling quietly about the novelty song’s puerile lyrics. If you’re unfamiliar, it hopefully won’t take you long to catch on that, while Berry starts off singing about the “silver bells hangin’ on a string” bequeathed to him by his grandmother, the “ding-a-ling” quickly devolves into pure innuendo. “I remember the girl next door / We used to play house on the kitchen floor,” Berry sings, “She’d be the queen, I’d be the king / Together we’d play with my ding-a-ling-a-ling.”
While “My Ding-a-Ling” will never be what Berry is most remembered for and only came up in passing in the memorials and obituaries written about him when he died in March 2017, the song’s success is such a strange footnote to his illustrious career. So much so that, after I decided to write this piece, I reached out to my colleague Stephen Thomas Erlewine, senior pop editor for AllMusic and noted Chuck Berry obsessive, to get his thoughts on the matter.
“I’d never claim it’s among Berry’s very best records… but I do think its success was earned,” Erlewine said, via email. “That it became a smash is somewhat bizarre to me because it’s such a spare recording and it doesn’t sound like anything else on radio in 1972. That just makes its success more impressive: the old huckster figured out a way to sidestep the rock revival fad and contemporary music and land his only number one. Even if you don’t like the single, it’s hard not to admire that trick.”
So, how did “My Ding-a-Ling” manage to hit the pop pinnacle that “Sweet Little Sixteen” and “School Days” couldn’t? The “rock revival fad” that Erlewine refers to surely played a part. There was a renewed interest in the early days of rock, fueled by the arrival of oldies radio in 1971 and the success of the Broadway musical Grease the next year. Berry happily took advantage of the rising tide, leading to his notorious appearance with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on The Mike Douglas Show in early ’72 and the Lanchester Arts Festival gig where he was booked along with Pink Floyd (who performed all of Dark Side of the Moon), Slade, and Billy Preston.
Helping the cause of “My Ding-a-Ling” was that the song appeared during a particularly fallow time in radio pop. While great strides were being made in worlds of soul, glam, and heavy rock in 1972 — the year of “School’s Out,” “Let’s Stay Together,” and “Supernaut” — it seemed that a healthy number of record buyers were seeking out musical comfort food in a post-Pentagon Papers, post-U.K. Immigration Act world. 1972 was also the year that cutesy fare like Donny Osmond’s “Puppy Love,” Hot Butter’s “Popcorn,” and The New Seekers’ “I’d Like to Teach The World To Sing” cracked the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic. “My Ding-a-Ling” was a comfortable fit for radio playlists of the time.
None of that is to say that everyone adored the tune. With lyrics as knowingly juvenile as “Every time the bell would ring / They’d catch me playin’ with my ding a ling,” complaints were sure to follow. In the U.S., some radio programmers refused to play the song, even as it climbed the charts in Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 program.
In England, the song raised the hackles of Mary Whitehouse, the conservative activist who waged a campaign against the country’s supposedly overly permissive broadcast standards. In early 1973, Whitehouse wrote a letter to Charles Curran, then-director general of the BBC, to complain about “My Ding-a-Ling” being presented on Top Of The Pops, the weekly TV show celebrating the hits of the day. According to her missive, parents and teachers alike were aghast at what the song was bringing out of the poor innocent youngsters. “One teacher told us of how she found a class of small boys with their trousers undone, singing the song and giving it the indecent interpretation which… is so obvious,” she wrote. “Parents too were very upset by the stories their children were bringing home about the actions which were accompanying the singing of this song amongst their friends.”
As unintentionally hilarious as the letter is, Whitehouse was probably telling the truth. Of course, young snickering schoolchildren were going to love the heck out of that song. And Berry knew that inside all of the adults that came to see him tear into his classic repertoire was a little bit of that immaturity. That’s why he was attracted to the song in the first place.
“My Ding-a-Ling” was originally written and recorded in 1952 by Dave Bartholomew, the New Orleans jump blues artist who co-wrote dozens of songs for Fats Domino, and it was even more direct in its earliest incarnation: “Have a li’l girl, her name is Sing / She like to play with my ding-a-ling / My ding-a-ling is the cutest thing / When Sing plays with my ding-a-ling.” By the time Berry got around to recording a version of it in 1968, he hedged his bets, re-writing the lyrics to be about “My Tambourine.”
When he brought it into his setlists in the early ’70s, Berry made no bones about what he was really singing about. That’s as clear as anything in the full 11-minute version of the song on The London Chuck Berry Sessions. He introduces the song to the rowdy British audience as a “4th grade ditty” and a “beautiful song about togetherness, and believe me, I do mean togetherness,” and walks them through helping him sing the chorus with plenty of bawdy asides and winking double entendres. “It’s all about Chuck Berry telling dirty jokes,” Erlewine writes. “It’s a stand-up gig as much as a performance, a dumb playground joke that works because the old pro knows how to land the laughs.”
Ultimately, that’s really why the song drew people in when Boston DJ Jim Connors put it in heavy rotation on WMEX in 1971 and it began its slow spread onto stations throughout the U.S. and beyond. It’s dumb and pointless and infantile, but it’s a heck of a lot of fun to sing along with. You can hear that every time the English concert crowd shouts out the chorus — the girls on the “my,” the guys on the “ding-a-ling.” No matter how many times they sing it, they sound like they’re having a blast.
For as much as Berry’s death in 2017 was lamented by top-tier musicians like Bruno Mars and Questlove, his true impact can be felt in the work of underground punk and garage rockers like Shannon and the Clams and Ty Segall. Those artists and their contemporaries continue to embody a lesson that Berry continues to impart: rock, at its core, and sometimes at its best, is a ribald, absurd, racy, and boisterous enterprise that should be undertaken with a sure hand and a light touch whether you’re singing about a little country boy with a guitar in a gunny sack or your ding-a-ling-a-ling.