The paradox of rock’s founding father
How Berry inspired a generation of stars then faded into their shadow
To hear Chuck Berry had died was a reminder that he once lived, making music that everyone in the world heard, shaping the very sound of the times we live through. But Berry was no longer very present in pop culture. He was a vanished man, a ghostly relic of former times. You didn’t see his lean, wolfishly grinning face on the front of retro music magazines and vintage T-shirts like so many of the rock stars who followed him, perpetually preserved at their youthful peak.
Somehow, rock’s founding father avoided being transformed into an everlasting icon of rock’s self-mythologising glory. Maybe the passage of so many decades made him too distant a figure, like an old movie star who has lingered so long in retirement all their classic films have been remade with new actors and CGI technology. Berry stopped having hits by the mid-Sixties (apart from one last novelty smash with My Ding-A-Ling in 1972). He was effectively a nostalgia figure by the Seventies and stopped making new records altogether in 1979 (although there will be a timely final album later this year). He didn’t go out in a blaze of glory, he just slowly faded into the background, gradually winding down live appearances until he could only be found playing once a month in a restaurant called Blueberry Hill in St Louis, Missouri, where Berry was born and apparently lived out peaceful semi-retirement.
At the grand old age of 90, he outlived not just most of his contemporaries in the original rock ’n’ roll explosion but many of the first wave who followed. It was that second rock generation who really gleaned the benefits of Berry’s pioneering song and guitar craft. Elvis Presley unleashed global pop mania that Berry was too slick, urban, adult and – let’s be honest – black to ever benefit from himself. The Beatles, The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones crammed their early sets with Berry’s songs, mimicking his punchy, talky guitar technique, learning at the hands of a master before taking it to the next level. The Stones’ first 1963 single was a version of Berry’s Come On. The Beach Boys’ 1963 breakthrough Surfin’ USA was a blatant rewrite of Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen (Berry sued and ended up with a co-writing credit).
And The Beatles recorded definitive versions of Roll Over Beethoven and Rock and Roll Music, then concocted Come Together out of Berry’s You Can’t Catch Me (where “old flat top” is a car rather than John Lennon’s alter ego). Berry, who had a notoriously difficult streak threatened to sue (again) before Lennon placated his hero by recording a version of Berry’s original.
Berry may have been curmudgeonly at times about musicians paying homage to his oeuvre (he ordered Keith Richards off the stage at the Hollywood Palladium in 1972 because he didn’t like his playing) but these now are the ways Berry lives on in pop culture, second and third hand, yet still lingering if you know where to look.
After I heard of his death, I went for a run with Berry on my headphones and marvelled again at his extraordinary canon of song, hit after hit after hit that is buried in the very DNA of rock ’n’ roll.
What I should have done, of course, was get in my car and take my baby for a spin, with no particular place to go. Automobiles were central to Berry’s work, as they would be to one of his greatest admirers, Bruce Springsteen. For a man who grew up hard and poor, and worked on the production lines of motor factories, cars represented gleaming high-tech status symbols, embodiments of the American dream.
It was Berry who first held up the prospect of the Promised Land that so many American rockers still set off in pursuit of. He was rock’s first genuine auteur, an audacious, guitar-playing, band-leading singer-songwriter completely in command of every aspect of his music. He realised that rock could be driven by words as much as music a decade before Bob Dylan. Berry’s songs exalted teenage ritual ( School Days, Little Queenie), bemoaned the travails of the working life ( Too Much Monkey Business) and gave rock a clutch of its greatest escapist anthems.
If you want to listen out for Berry now, you can trace a line from Too Much Monkey Business through Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues all the way to modern hip hop. Or you might follow the rock ’n’ roll highway through Berry’s Promised Land via Springsteen’s Thunder Road to Ed Sheeran’s Castle On The Hill. Any guitarist imitating Keith Richards’s repertoire of licks is paying homage to Berry. Any songwriter conjuring John Lennon’s lyrical cadences and sharp wit is drawing on Berry.
That is, perhaps, a paradoxical reason Berry himself seemed to have been forgotten. He has become canon, like folk music, as if his songs have existed for ever and belong to everyone. I guess they do now.
‘Elvis unleashed global pop mania that Berry was too slick, urban, adult – and black – to benefit from’ ‘He was an audacious, band-leading singer songwriter in command of every aspect of his music’
CHUCK BERRY, who has died aged 90, was a pivotal figure in the development of rock ’n’ roll, responsible for classics such as Johnny B Goode, Roll Over Beethoven and Maybellene; drawing on the roots of traditional blues, he brought the new genre into the mainstream, exuding a raw energy that influenced countless emerging bands, among them the Beach Boys, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
Berry was the rock ’n’ roll poet of the adolescent American dream, depicting a promised land of bigfinned Cadillacs, soda fountains and blaring jukeboxes; a land in which, as his song Back in the USA puts it, “hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day”. As John Lennon was to say: “If you tried to give rock ’n’ roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry’.”
A consummate entertainer, Berry’s act was remarkable for what was known as his “duck walk”. As he delivered his distinctive guitar riffs, he would slink across the stage on one leg. The effect was more graceful than it sounds.
He claimed that he first performed this trick in New York in 1956, the aim being to conceal the wrinkles in his Rayon suit. “It got an ovation,” he later recalled, “so I did it again and again.” He continued to perform regularly into advanced old age, likening himself to an “automobile that had a lot of miles but a good grease job”.
Berry once observed: “I wasn’t like Muddy Waters – people who really had it hard. In our house we had food on the table. So I concentrated on fun and frolic. I wrote about cars ... I wrote about love, because everyone wants that. I wrote songs white people could buy, because that’s nine pennies out of every dime.”
Someone said of Berry that “his true god [was] the dollar sign”, and he was famously parsimonious. When touring abroad he would decline to go to the expense of bringing with him his own musicians, preferring the cheaper option of hiring a band on the spot. He insisted on being paid in advance, and would often still be haggling over his appearance fee while in the wings waiting to go on stage as the fans bayed for him to start his set.
On one occasion, in Britain, Berry upped his fee by £5 moments before he was due to appear. Peter Grant (later the renowned manager of Led Zeppelin but then a tour manager working with Don Arden) did not have the money on him, and was forced to leave the theatre and break into a cigarette machine to get the cash.
The son of a carpenter, Charles Edward Anderson Berry was born on October 18 (or January 15 – sources differ) 1926 in St Louis, Missouri. Chuck and his two brothers and three sisters were brought up in circumstances that were relatively comfortable: Goode Avenue (later immortalised in Johnny B Goode), where the family lived, was considered “the best of the three coloured sections of St Louis”.
Not that this background prevented Chuck getting into trouble. “I was the first in my family to try smoking, to play hookey from school, the first to venture away from home, and the first to go to jail,” he said. “On the other hand, I was the first child in the family to own a Cadillac, the first to have a formal wedding, the first to fly to Europe, the first to earn a half-million dollars – and the last one to admit I was wrong.”
As a teenager Berry and two of his friends were sentenced to 10 years apiece after being convicted of armed robbery. At Algoa Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men, Chuck learnt that he had no talent for boxing, and in the event was released after three years.
“You might wonder,” he later said, “if you are a female, what I wanted to do first after leaving Algoa. If you are male, you likely know.” His first, fumbling attempt had been in the family’s garage after a dance. On that occasion his parents had burst in “looking like Joseph and Mother Mary. My father spoke: ‘You’ll never turn this garage into a bordello’ ” – and gave his son a whipping.
As a boy Chuck had sung with the Antioch Baptist Church Choir in St Louis, and at Sumner High School, which he left aged 15, had taught himself to play a six-string Spanish guitar. Nat King Cole was among his inspirations, but his greatest influence was the rhythm and blues musician Louis Jordan, known as the “King of the Jukebox”.
Not long after leaving the reformatory, in October 1948 Berry married Themetta “Toddy” Suggs, and to support her and their two children he worked in a factory and as a hairdresser (perhaps explaining his subsequent fondness for pomade). At the same time he freelanced as a guitarist with orchestras before, in 1952, forming a trio with the pianist Johnnie Johnson and the drummer Ebby Harding, doing gigs in St Louis.
A critical moment in Berry’s career came three years later when he met Muddy Waters, who introduced him to Leonard Chess, president of the eponymous record company. With Johnson, Berry performed for Chess two of his own songs, Maybellene and Wee Wee Hours, and the former became a big hit. Berry was already 29, relatively antique for a new star in the business.
His initial success provided an early lesson in the harsh realities of showbusiness. The copyright for Maybellene was not only in his name but also in that of the disc jockey Alan Freed; and while Freed’s name on the song guaranteed that it got airplay, it reduced Berry’s royalty payments. At the same time Berry discovered that his road manager, Teddy Reig, was pocketing money from his gigs. The experience made him determined to take charge of his own affairs.
Maybellene was the start of a highly successful partnership between Berry and the Chess label. In 1956 he released Roll Over Beethoven, an announcement that high culture had been superseded among the young by a new, unstoppable force. This was followed by BrownEyed Handsome Man and Too Much Monkey Business.
Berry continued to churn out the hits – School Daze, Oh Baby Doll, Rock ’n’ Roll Music – before, in 1958, recording what is probably his best-known song, Johnny B Goode, about a country boy who makes it as a rock star in the big city; also that year he released Sweet Little Sixteen.
During this period Berry was often on tour. By now a man of means, he moved his family into a large house in St Louis and opened his own club in the city, Chuck Berry’s Club Bandstand.
On December 1 1959, while playing a show at El Paso, Texas, Berry met Janice Escalanti, a young American Indian woman from Yuma, Arizona, whom he took back to St Louis, ostensibly to work as a hat-check girl at his club. Two weeks later he fired her. For several nights she solicited at a local hotel, then called the police in an attempt to find a way to get home.
This led to Berry being charged with violating the Mann Act – transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. A first trial, in which he was found guilty, was overturned after the judge was found to have uttered racist remarks; at a retrial in October 1961 he was given three years in jail and a $10,000 fine.
While serving his sentence Berry came under suspicion of planning an escape when he requested the use of an atlas. In fact, he wanted to check the route from Norfolk, Virginia, to Los Angeles, which was the basis of his song Promised Land.
He re-emerged in early 1964 to find that the landscape of rock music had changed. Berry threw himself into touring with makeshift bands, but the creative force appeared to have died; songs such as No Particular Place To Go, You Never Can Tell and Nadine sold well but lacked the conviction of his earlier work.
Then, in 1966, he abandoned the Chess label for Mercury and expended much of his energy developing Berry Park, a country club and amusement park at Wentzville, Missouri. By the end of the decade, however, he had returned to Chess, which released his albums Back Home Again (1970) and San Francisco Dues (1971).
In 1972, he released the somewhat unsubtle single My Ding-a-Ling, which sold more than a million copies. Berry’s only No 1 hit in Britain, it owed some of its success to the intervention of Mary Whitehouse, who was outraged by its priapic content. Much kerfuffle was expected when Berry and Whitehouse were invited by Eamonn Andrews to confront one another on television, but the protagonists were cordially polite.
Also in 1972, Berry released the hit single Reelin’ and Rockin’, and the following year he featured prominently in the film Let the Good Times Roll, a documentary celebration of vintage rock ’n’ roll.
In 1979, Berry was sentenced to four months in jail for tax evasion. While in prison he took a class in accountancy and polished up the autobiography with which he had been tinkering for some 20 years, although some felt that the time might have been better spent. A typical sentence runs: “I must admit I have never denied my eyes the beauty of femininity in the buff by turning my head there from.”
In 1985, Berry received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A year later – to celebrate his 60th birthday – Taylor Hackford filmed a documentary, Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll, featuring Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Etta James, Linda Ronstadt and other artists.
Berry’s encounters with the law were not over. In 1990, he was sued by several women who claimed that he had installed a video camera in the ladies’ lavatories at two restaurants he owned in St Louis. A settlement was eventually reached. Ten years later he was sued by his former pianist Johnnie Johnson, who claimed that he had co-written many of Berry’s songs; the case was later dismissed.
In his eighties he was still appearing once a month at a nightspot in St Louis. He also undertook a sevennation tour of Europe.
On his 90th birthday he announced that he would be releasing a new studio album, Chuck, his first for 38 years. He dedicated it to his wife, who survives him with their son and three daughters.
Chuck Berry, born October 18 1926, died March 18 2017