Chuck Berry

Today is the anniversary of a memorable day in the history both of pop culture and of law enforcement.

It was thirty years ago, on July 10, 1979, that legendary guitarist Chuck Berry was sentenced to four months in prison for tax evasion.

Berry was travelling the oldies circuit at the time, and it was customary for promoters on that circuit to pay the performers in cash, a custom that for obvious reasons irked the IRS. He may have been simply a collateral victim of their crackdown on that practice.

Not long before that, though, in the middle of the 1970s, astronomer Carl Sagan had composed an anthology of the planet's music to be set into space with the Voyager I and II probes. If some outer space DJ ever figures out how to play it, this collection of our planet's greatest hits will provide the aliens with bits of the western orchestral canon -- Bach, Mozart, Beethoven,and Stravinsky are all there. So are Peruvian pipes and Navajo chants, and a Pygmy girls' initiation song from Zaire.

Jazz is represented by Louis Armstrong and his "Melancholy Blues."

Rock and Roll is represented by ... Chuck Berry, "Johnny B. Goode."

This situation gave rise to a great Saturday Night Live skit. A panel of psychics were announcing the following week's headlines, concluding with the coming Time magazine cover. That cover was going to herald the first human contact with extraterrestrials. And those first words to us were going to be: "Send More Chuck Berry."

We haven't actually received that message.

Yet.