“Young lady, what’s your name?” asks the dance competition MC at Jack Rabbit Slim’s diner. Uma Thurman, in black bob, white shirt and black trousers, leans into the mic: “Mrs Mia Wallace.”
“And how about your, uh, fella here?”
Again she leans in, and lowers her voice: “Vincent Vega.”
“All right, let’s see what you can do. Take it away!”
There are a few seconds of chatter from the audience while Vega, played by John Travolta, removes his shoes, and the couple step to the centre of the dancefloor. Then a guitar sounds, ringing and descending, joined by bass, drums and Chuck Berry’s voice — “It was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well” — and the pair begin to twist. If Pulp Fiction reminded cinemagoers that Travolta had made his name dancing in the movies, it also had the perfect song to remind them.
Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell” was released in August 1964, a witty and warm short story tracing the life of a couple from that teenage wedding, through living in an apartment where “the coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale”, on to their trip down to New Orleans — in “a souped-up jitney, ’twas a cherry red ’53” — to celebrate their anniversary. Nothing about Berry’s life at that time suggested he could be such a wry observer of teenage life. For one thing, he was 37 years old. For another, “You Never Can Tell” was his third single since being released from prison in October 1963, after serving 20 months for transporting a minor across a state line.
Berry’s guitar playing is often celebrated; his lyrical genius less so. He was, though, by a distance the best lyricist at work in the first wave of rock’n’roll: funny, sharp-eyed and, as on “Memphis, Tennessee”, occasionally even sincere. “You Never Can Tell” added wryness, brought by the distancing device of the watching old folks, the ones who say you never can tell. Add the joyous melody (which sounds as if it owes a debt to the country singer Mitchell Torok’s 1953 hit “Caribbean”), and you have something pretty much irresistible.
It’s also so definitively Berry that, while much covered, it’s been hard for other artists to impress too much of their personality on it. Emmylou Harris made it the lead single from her 1977 album Luxury Liner, naming the song “(You Never Can Tell) C’est La Vie”, playing it for the honky-tonks, but with a nod to New Orleans in the fiddle solo by Ricky Skaggs. It was a big hit on the country charts, but Harris later tired of playing the song: “I didn’t feel that I was bringing anything to it, I guess,” she said. John Prine’s version was not dissimilar; Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance slowed it down and loosened it up, making it sound like a late-night lock-in. Status Quo added it to the long list of rock’n’roll classics they had covered both wholly affectionately and completely pointlessly. Donny and Marie Osmond, for some reason, changed the opening line, from “teenage wedding” to “rock and roll wedding”, when they recorded it for the soundtrack of their 1978 comedy film Goin’ Coconuts. Even the great New Orleans soul singer Aaron Neville added little when he recorded it.
To make “You Never Can Tell” work for you, you have to find something of yourself in it. The folk duo Shovels & Rope completely recast it — and not as folk — on their Busted Jukebox Vol 2 collection in 2017. Suddenly it sounded far more like Plastic Bertrand’s “Ça plane pour moi” than an old rock’n’roll song. The best version of all, though, is one that brings out one single thing from the song — the same thing, perhaps, that Pulp Fiction emphasises: the complete joy of playing or dancing to rock’n’roll.
Bruce Springsteen’s version of “You Never Can Tell”, live in Leipzig on July 7 2013, has never been released as an audio recording, but the video of it — nearly nine minutes, including his introduction — has been viewed 38.6m times on his YouTube channel. And with good reason. The song is an audience request, and it begins with Springsteen trying to find a key in which to sing it. He starts too high and begins coming down. Then Springsteen starts teaching The E Street Band what he wants, in a stadium, in front of tens of thousands of people. Finally, after two minutes and 47 seconds, he counts in the song. Anyone who doesn’t find themselves beaming at the next six minutes surely has never loved rock’n’roll.
What are your memories of ‘You Never Can Tell’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Teeny Records; O.L.D Ltd; Rhino/Warner Records; Atlantic Records; UMC (Universal Music Catalogue); Edsel; Virgin EMI; New West Records
Picture credit: Terry Fincher/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images