National Post (National Edition)
‘Another name for rock ’n’ roll’
‘If you tried to give rockand-roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry,’” John Lennon once quipped, but Berry was an unlikely idol for the burgeoning teen subculture that he sang about at the dawn of the rock era.
He was 30, married and the father of two when he made his first recording, Maybellene, in 1955. The song — a story of a man in a Ford V8 chasing his unfaithful girlfriend in a Cadillac Coupe de Ville — charted No. 1 on Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues chart and No. 5 on the pop music charts.
It was soon followed by Rock and Roll Music and Sweet Little Sixteen, whose astute reference to the teen-oriented TV show American Bandstand helped him connect to adolescent record-buyers.
With his lithe, athletic body, high cheekbones and perfectly pomaded hair, Berry personified the dangerous appeal of rock. He’d grin salaciously and telegraph the lyrics with a wide-eyed, almost childlike exuberance and then shoot across the stage, unleashing a staccato burst of bright, blaring guitar notes.
Berry, the perpetual wild man of rock music who helped define its rebellious spirit in the 1950s, died March 18 at his home in St. Charles County, Mo. He was 90.
Berry was born on Oct. 18, 1926, in St. Louis. His father was a carpenter and handyman. The family — which included six children — lived in the Ville, a middle-class African-American neighbourhood.
Although his parents and three of his sisters sang in a Baptist choir, Berry’s own youthful tastes gravitated to more secular pop music.
He was 14 when he began playing guitar and performing at parties, but that was interrupted by a three-year stint in reform school for his role in a bungled armed robbery. After his release, he worked for his father and on an automobile assembly line while studying for a career in hairdressing.
On weekends, he sang at the Cosmopolitan Club in East St. Louis, Ill. At the urging of Muddy Waters, Berry took his demo tapes to Chess Records, the Chicago label that specialized in blues and urban rhythm-and-blues.
Berry was credited with penning more than 100 songs, the best known of which used carefully crafted rhymes and offered tightly written vignettes about American life.
Perhaps the most performed of his songs — indeed, one of the most performed of all rock songs — was Johnny B. Goode (1957). Its storyline embodied Berry’s experience as an African-American born into segregation who lived to see “his name in lights.”
In 1948, Berry married Themetta Suggs, known as Toddy. They had four children.
But his career was nearly derailed in 1959, when he was arrested on a federal charge of taking a 14-year-old girl across state lines for immoral purposes. He claimed that he didn’t know the girl’s age and had hired her to work as a hat-check girl in his nightclub. Berry served 18 months of a three-year sentence and paid a $10,000 fine.
His legal troubles continued in 1979, when he served four months in Lompoc Federal Prison in California for tax evasion. And in 1989, Hosana Huck, a cook in Berry’s St. Louis restaurant, the Southern Air, sued him, claiming that he secretly videotaped her and other women in the establishment’s restroom. Huck’s suit was followed by a class-action suit by other unnamed women. Berry denied any wrongdoing but settled out of court in 1995 for $1.5 million.
“While no individual can be said to have invented rock and roll, Chuck Berry comes the closest of any single figure to being the one who put all the essential pieces together,” reads Berry’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.
At the time, Berry said he was wary of accepting a crown — bestowed by critics or peers — as a “king” of rock music.
“What the heck is a king?” he told The Washington Post. “I’m a cog in the wheel. My portion might have been greater than some other guy’s, but some other guy’s, I’m sure, was greater than mine in some avenues.”
In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine named him No. 6 on its list of the greatest guitarists of all time. Berry so embodied the American rock tradition that his recording of Johnny B. Goode was included on a disc launched into space on the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1977.
Berry remained an indefatigable and acclaimed performer, playing concerts all over the world well into his 80s.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
WHAT THE HECK IS A KING? I’M A COG IN THE WHEEL.