By 1985, He Knew He Made A Mistake

So, if he only heard the end of the song, how did Chuck Berry copy Marty McFly’s lyrics so perfectly?

Jeremy will once again be crapping all over a beloved and iconic movie to celebrate your monday.  Enjoy, everybody!

So, let's leave aside all the usual time travel cliches about paradoxes and parallel time streams and all that stuff and just focus on one important detail that nobody seems to bring up. 

Everyone knows the scene from Back To The Future where Marty McFly ends up playing guitar for the band at the high school's dance.  If not, get out of whatever hole you've been living in for the past 29 years and Watch The Scene Here.  There are probably spoilers in that if you're not familiar, but you brought it on yourself.  The hand thing makes sense within the canon of the movie, so just go with it.  

So, the funny funny joke here is that Marty McFly accidentally went back to 1955 and invented rock music, specifically Chuck Berry's iconic "Johnny B Goode."  We'll ignore the fact that he's playing a guitar from 1962, or that the genre clearly already has legs by the fact that the band is entirely clear on how to play the blues riff in B while watching for the changes.  We'll ignore the fact that Marty is such a terrible musician that he seems to think that his nonsensical guitar solo not only fits within the realm of 1955 dancehall music, but in that song.  We're supposed to believe that he just got carried away in the spirit of the moment, so we can go with it.  

Lets focus on the bit where Marvin Berry calls his cousin Chuck to introduce him to this "new sound."  Again...the band already knew how to do it, so it can't be that new.  Also, by that point, the bulk of the song was over, and they were just onto the guitar solo part which everyone present agreed was pretty terrible.  This is what Chuck Berry heard over the phone...not the early makings of Rock and Roll.  He also clearly didn't hear ANY of the lyrics...so over the next three years before Johnny B Goode was officially recorded, Chuck Berry not only managed to copy a new song that he only heard one awful part of, but managed to guess all of lyrics with complete accuracy.  This seems to be like an unbelievable coincidence. 

I'm sorry to say this, Michael J. Fox and Robert Zemeckis, but I am forced to Call Bunk on Back To The Future.