"Nadine (Is It You?)" is a song written and recorded by Chuck Berry. It was released as a single in February 1964 and was the first music that Berry released after finishing a prison term in October 1963.
Composition
After his December 1959 arrest under the Mann Act, Berry eventually served a one-and-a-half-year prison term, from February 1962 to October 1963, for transporting a girl, age 14, across state lines. He had not released a single since "Come On" in October 1961.
"Nadine" was recorded at a November 1963 session at the Chess studio in Chicago, his first after his release from prison. Another song from that session, "You Never Can Tell," would also be released as a single.[2]
The composition resembles Berry's first hit, "Maybellene," similarly featuring lyrics about pursuing a girl, though in "Nadine" the pursuit is not by car but on foot and by taxi. As Berry told Melody Maker, "I took 'Maybellene' and from it got 'Nadine.'"[2]
As William Ruhlmann of Allmusic writes, the lyrics are distinguished by an "unusual use of similes," such as: She moves around like a wayward summer breeze; Moving through the traffic like a mounted cavalier; and I was campaign shouting like a Southern diplomat.[3]
Chart performance
The song was released in February 1964 as a single on Chess (catalogue #1883), backed with "O Rangutang".[4] It peaked at #23 on the Billboard Hot 100, #7 on the R&B chart, and #27 on the UK Singles Chart.
Reception
According to Allmusic, the song had a "profound influence" on the songwriting of Bob Dylan: "One need only listen to 'Nadine (Is It You?)', released in February 1964, and then to the 1965 Dylan album Bringing It All Back Home, with its surreal story-songs, to hear the similarities."[3]
Cash Box described it as "a hard-driving, rhythmic pop-blues tear-jerker essayed with authority and feeling."[5]
In the 1987 documentary film Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll (in which Berry performs "Nadine"), Bruce Springsteen praised the song's lyrics. Springsteen singled out the lines, I saw her from the corner when she turned and doubled back / Started walking toward a coffee-colored Cadillac. "I've never seen a coffee-colored Cadillac, but I know exactly what one looks like," Springsteen says in the film.[6]
