Chuck Berry, rock’s fabled ‘architect’ never got his due
People wonder why Chuck Berry — the architect of rock ’n’ roll, a titanic figure in the music pantheon — isn’t getting the recognition Prince and David Bowie did when they shuffled off their mortal coils a year ago.
Why aren’t magazines devoting front covers and lavish centre spreads to the black singer-songwriter who crossed the colour line with songs that spoke to a mythical teenage nirvana and laid the groundwork for generations to come?
The man was a prophet, a giant, a legend.
Why isn’t social media convulsing with orgiastic overkill as people grieve for their own lost youth?
There are many reasons, but the main one has to do with the fact Berry was 90 years old, musically neglected for the last half of his life, a distant relic from a prehistoric era.
Hell, he was an oldies act when I first heard him on the “American Graffiti” soundtrack in 1973, four years after he played the Toronto Rock ’n’ Roll Revival festival, which took place a mere decade after his biggest chart hits.
From hero to zero in the blink of an eye.
And don’t talk to me about 1972’s “My Ding-A-Ling,” his final hit and sole chart-topper, an embarrassing novelty record about a male appendage Chuck didn’t even write. It was over, man. But Berry was like many firsts — the first iMac, the first automobile, the first airplane: impressive in his day, groundbreaking, but ultimately frozen in time, surpassed by those who channelled his brilliance into an arresting new paradigm. Poor Chuck. He never knew what hit him.
Emerging from a prison sentence in 1963 for transporting a minor over state lines for “immoral purposes,” he found his career in dry dock as British Invasion bands filtered his innovations through a louder, brasher, whiter rock sensibility.
It would be secondgeneration acts like The Beatles and Rolling Stones that would sell out stadiums and rake in millions while Berry — hiring makeshift backup bands in every city he played — eked out a living at county fairs and nightclubs.
But let’s be clear: in the age of Elvis, this lanky, 30-year-old ex-con married father wasn’t about to become a pin-up idol or conduit for teenage sexual awakening.
Berry was a black man playing to a white audience in an era where racism was part of the air you breathed.
It was inevitable he would be taken advantage of, his career stymied, his legacy obscured.
After a half century of near obscurity, how many people under 50 even know who he is?
“He was a rebel, a guy who was incredibly complex, unbelievably thorny, and through his own headstrong nature and his own appetites, was truly punished for his rebellion,” Taylor Hackford, who directed the 1987 Berry doc “Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll” told the Los Angeles Times.
“He had the audacity to be a black man who wanted to get out there and perform for white kids and seduce white women, and he did, and he was punished for it. If rock ’n’ roll wants to lay claim to the music of rebellion, he led the charge.” But don’t feel too bad. The middle class son of a contractor and public school principal was, in many ways, his own worst enemy.
Prickly, demanding, opportunistic, he had a bona fide rock ’n’ roll attitude before anyone knew how to gauge such things, served three jail terms (armed robbery and tax evasion were the others) and alienated his most ardent supporters with a combative attitude and hair-trigger temper.
The Soup Nazi of Rock ’n’ Roll.
I remember Kenny Hollis, late MC at Lulu’s Roadhouse — Berry’s favoured Kitchener venue in the ’80s — describing the sloppy performances that resulted from his reliance on unrehearsed local backing bands: “He was the worst musician I ever heard. But people loved him. The worse he played, the more they loved him.”
And then there were his notorious stand-offs with Keith Richards — who worshipped the ground Berry walked on — that resulted in the Rolling Stone guitarist being turfed offstage on one occasion, punched in the face on another. Never mind this. Berry was one of the greats, an artist who — like Ray Kroc, who turned McDonald’s from a onehorse eatery into a fast food empire — read the cultural tea leaves and spearheaded a revolution. The Founder. “Looking hard for a drive-in, searching for a corner café,” he crooned on “Back in the U.S.A.,” one of his many hits that celebrate the mythical American dream.
“Where hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day/Yeah, and a jukebox jumping with records like in the U.S.A.”
At a time when Pat Boone was turning rollicking Fats Domino records into pristine, choir boy church ballads, it was a cultural call to arms, a vision of America that fused blues, country and a giddy postwar optimism into something compelling, electric, undeniable.
“M-O-N-E-Y,” he once told an interviewer, explaining his hard-boiled philosophy. “What sells. What’s on the market. I tried to sing as though they would be interested.”
“I wrote about cars because half the people had cars, or wanted them,” he elaborated in a 2002 interview with London’s Independent newspaper.
“I wrote about love, because everyone wants that. I wrote songs white people could buy, because that’s nine pennies out of every dime. That was my goal: to look at my bank book and see a million dollars there.”
Yeah, I know. Elvis had more charisma. Little Richard was more frenetic. Jerry Lee Lewis melted down in more spectacular fashion.
But Berry, with his penchant for tapping into the cultural subconscious, was built to last.
Without his swagger, duck walk and jangly guitar riffs, there would be no Beatles, no Rolling Stones, no “Surfin’ U.S.A.” (a rip of Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen”), no punk rock, no, well, nothing.
“If Beethoven hadn’t rolled over,” Leonard Cohen once said, riffing on a Berry hit, “there’d be no room for any of us.”
In the end, it’s one of those complicated legacies that encompassed:
a cultural heavyweight and flawed human being;
a musical innovator overtaken by his own disciples;
a bitter, cranky, tireless guy who personified the American Dream, yet somehow ended up in the ditch.
When Michael J. Fox — having travelled back to 1955 in “Back To The Future” — launches into the monster riff on Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” three years before it was written, the pre-rock squares in the audience gasp in horror, then doff their inhibitions and dance the night away.
“Chuck?” a member of his backup band shouts into the phone to an unseen, pre-fame Berry. “You know that new sound you’re looking for? Listen to THIS!”
So Marty McFly was the guy who inspired Berry to blend country, blues and mayhem into a potent rock ’n’ roll smackdown?
Even in a fictional world, the fearless rock pioneer couldn’t get a break.