Chuck Berry in the dark

Sometime in the 1990s I was listening to a bootleg CD of the Beatles’ late-1966 recording sessions for “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Buried deep in one take, I heard what sounded like a random Chuck Berry lick played by George Harrison, a lone formalist stay against the chaos that John Lennon was brewing in his deeply inward, trippy evocation of childhood. I smiled at this, as the band probably did, too. 1966 must’ve felt eons away from 1963, when the Beatles would bust out Berry’s “Roll Over Bee...