Chuck Berry turns 90, announces his first album in over 38 years

For 209 months straight, Chuck Berry kept a monthly appointment with 340 fans in the small Duck Room at Blueberry Hill in St. Louis.

As Blueberry Hill’s owner Joe Edwards tells it, “Chuck and I have been good friends since the early ’80s. One night in 1996 he was reminiscing about the smaller clubs he used to play when he was just starting out and how much he would love to play an intimate club again in contrast to large stadiums. There was a split-second pause. We looked at each other and said ‘Let’s do it.’”

And he did, for 209 shows until October 2014.

It might seem quiet for the first man ever inducted in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, a man the New York Times called “probably the most influential rock musician ever” and a man about whom John Lennon once said, “If you tried to give rock ‘n’ roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry.’”

But that’s how Berry’s always been for the past few decades — simple, intimate, personal.

So it’s wasn’t surprising five days ago that USA Today published a piece with the headline, “Chuck Berry is turning 90 without fanfare.” Of course he was. He doesn’t play his monthly gig anymore, and he hasn’t released an album in 38 years.

Though fans might have been waiting on new songs — in 2015, Edwards told St. Louis Public Radio that Berry was “working on some songs” — no one fully expected one.