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Why Chuck Berry Is Even Greater Than You Think
Revelatory encounters with a rock & roll pioneer
Peter Guralnick looks back on meetings with Chuck Berry stretching back nearly 40 years,
and explains why his genius is deeper than it seems.
Rolling Stone ~ October 18, 2016 ~ By Peter GuralnickThe first time I met Chuck Berry he was playing a club called Where It's At, which, in contradiction of its name, occupied the second floor of a drab business building in Kenmore Square and was operated by longtime Boston DJ Dave Maynard and his manager, Ruth Clenott. It was 1967, and I was in my senior year of college, working at the Paperback Booksmith, as I had for the last four years, both in and out of school. I was making $65 a week. The reason I know this is because Chuck Berry signed my paycheck.Well, it wasn't my paycheck exactly, it was my paycheck stub, and the reason he signed it was because I didn't have anything else to present to him for an autograph. He had just given an exhilarating performance with a pick-up band of Berklee College students (unlike Bo Diddley, say, whom I had recently seen at the same club, Chuck Berry never carried his own band, and the result was inconsistent, to say the least). But tonight for whatever reason Chuck's creative impulse had been stimulated, and rather than performing tired rehashes of his familiar hits with a rhythm section that didn't have a clue, he followed what I'm sure was the unintended lead of the band, jazz players all, freely improvising on the hits, while throwing in unexpected bonuses like "Rockin' at the Philharmonic" and Lionel Hampton's "Flying Home," along with a few T-Bone Walker and Louis Jordan tunes for good measure. He was clearly in good spirits, but it still took a while for me to work up the nerve to approach him as he stood to one side of the foot-high stage, packing up his guitar and getting ready to leave.
He regarded me with a quizzical look, casting an even more quizzical look at the book I was attempting to give him "book" might actually be a little bit of a stretch for the pamphlet-sized booklet I was finally able to hand him, with its smudged white cover and stapled-together pages. What's this? his noncommittal expression seemed to say, in a manner that betrayed neither receptiveness nor hostility. More to the point, that blank stare seemed to suggest, who the fuck are you? I have no idea what I said. I'm sure I wished that the book could simply declare itself. The stark black lettering on the cover announced "Almost Grown, and Other Stories, by Peter Guralnick," and it had originally been published three years earlier, when I was 20. I must have mumbled something about how the book had been inspired in part by his music, that the title obviously came from his song, that I hoped he would like it. (Help me, I'm trying to paint a sympathetic picture here.) He flipped through the pages and placed the book carefully in his guitar case. "Cool," he said, or the equivalent, and flashed me what I took to be an encouraging, if inescapably sardonic, smile. And then he was gone, off to the airport, off to another gig, or maybe just home to St. Louis. I still like to think that he read the stories on the plane on his way to his next destination.
It would be another 44 years before I actually met him.
But, first, perhaps I should say well, you tell me, do I really have to say? that there is no end to my admiration for Chuck Berry's work, even if his commitment to performance has at times proved wanting. As much as Percy Mayfield remains the Poet Laureate of the Blues, Chuck Berry will always be the Poet Laureate of what? Of Our Time. Has there ever been a more perfect pop song than "Nadine," a catchier encapsulation of story line and wit in four verses and a chorus, in which the protagonist (like all of Chuck's characters, a not-too-distant stand-in for its author but never precisely himself) is introduced "pushing through the crowd trying to get to where she's at/I was campaign shouting like a Southern diplomat." I mean, come on and the song only gets better from there. When he was recognized in 2012 by PEN New England (a division of the international writers' organization) for its first "Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence" award, his co-honoree, Leonard Cohen, graciously declared that "all of us are footnotes to the words of Chuck Berry," while Bob Dylan called him "the Shakespeare of rock & roll."
Which is all very generically well. But perhaps the most persuasive tribute I ever encountered was delivered by the highly cerebral New Orleans singer, songwriter, arranger and pianist extraordinaire, Allen Toussaint. I was trying to get at some of the reasons for the dramatic expansion of his own songwriting aspirations (musically, poetically, politically) in the Seventies, when he graduated from brilliant pop cameos like "Ride Your Pony" and "Mother in Law" to more ambitious, post-Beatles, post-Miles, postCivil Rights Era work. Was it the influence of Bob Dylan, say, that allowed him to contemplate a wider range of subjects, a greater length of songs? Oh, not at all, Allen replied in his cool, elegant manner; he wished he could agree with me, but his single greatest influence in terms of lyrics and storytelling from first to last was Chuck Berry. And with that he started quoting Chuck Berry lyrics, just as you or I might, just as Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis do on the fabled "Million Dollar Quartet" session. "What a wonderful little story that is," he said of "You Never Can Tell," Chuck's fairy-tale picture of young love in Creole-speaking Louisiana, "how he lived that life with that couple, you know. Oh, the man's a mountain," said Allen unhesitatingly, and then went on to quote some more.
I saw Chuck in performance many times over the years, everywhere from Carnegie Hall to a decommissioned state armory. I wrote to him at one point at the invitation of Bob Baldori, who started playing with Chuck in 1966 and has been close to him ever since. Chuck had begun work on his autobiography at that point, and Bob thought, a little fancifully perhaps, he might welcome some help. "Dear Mr. Berry," I wrote in effect, "You won't remember me, but ...," then cited Bob as a reference and suggested that while I didn't know that I had anything to offer as a writer, maybe he could use me as someone to bounce ideas off, if he were so inclined. I never heard back from him, which was just as well, because when the book came out two years later, in 1987, it was a masterpiece. "It is at once witty, elegant, and revealing," I wrote of it for Vibe, "and (or perhaps but) ultimately elusive. Every word was written by its author in a web of elegant, intricate connections that are both coded and transparent. Very much like the songs." And it was all Chuck with a little help from his editor, Michael Pietsch, who traveled to Chuck's amusement park / residence, Berry Park, outside of St. Louis, to retrieve it.
It was not until New Orleans, in 2011, though, that I got beyond that first, monosyllabic exchange. We were both there to fulfill a date that was initially referred to without irony as "The Summit Meeting of Rock," because it was to include filmed interviews with Chuck, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Fats Domino, both as a group and, in the case of the first three, singly as well. It was part of a Rolling Stonesponsored oral history project for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that had only recently begun, and I was the designated interviewer. Do I have to stipulate that it was one of the most challenging things I've ever done, and also, unquestionably, one of the most fun? You try facing down Jerry Lee Lewis, Richard or Chuck, each with his own keenly intelligent, widely divergent and informed point of view, and try to get a go-ahead smile out of them on their own uncompromising terrain. I think I'd be safe in saying that, overall, unaffected warmth and affection prevailed, stimulated as much as anything by everyone's genuine love for Fats, but at the same time it was not an entirely smooth and mellow meeting. Religion, politics, personality all of the usual sources of conflict were present in good measure. Little Richard at one point wanted to thank God for bringing them all to New Orleans, but Jerry Lee, an intensely religious man himself, demurred at what I think he took to be a too-casual appropriation of faith. "I don't know about you," he muttered, "but I came here on a plane. And I think you came by bus!" Someone suggested that Louis Jordan was one of the key figures in the development of rock & roll, and someone else objected that "Ain't Nobody Here but Us Chickens" was not in their view anything like rock & roll. It was incredible! The interview with Jerry Lee was probably the most wide-ranging; Little Richard, for all of his avid study of history and precise recollection of it, was not about to abandon his theological texts; but it was Chuck who proved the most surprising, as, robbed of the constraint of memory, he abandoned, if only for a moment or two, his lifelong habit of emotional indirection and spoke unguardedly of his family, his mother and father, the expectations they had had of him and the inspiration with which they provided him, growing up.
He was as slim and elegant as ever, wearing the jaunty captain's hat that has become almost ubiquitous since the departure of most of his beautifully coiffed hair some years ago. Communication was sometimes a challenge, because not surprisingly he had left his hearing aids at home, despite the repeated reminders of his family and his friend Joe Edwards, proprietor of Blueberry Hill, the St. Louis club where he played off and on for almost 20 years before "taking a break" from performing two years ago. He spoke of poetry and politics (just to clarify, nearly everything is "politics" to Chuck, from the endemic chicanery of the music business to the endemic racism he has encountered over the years), and he insisted for the most part, just as he always has in his art, on speaking metaphorically, if unmistakably.
He spoke, too, of the sources of inspiration that he always points to for much of the flair, if not the full scope, of his creativity. (There is, Chuck will never fail to tell you, nothing new under the sun.) He cited Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker and Louis Jordan (not to mention Louis Jordan's great guitarist Carl Hogan: Check out "Ain't That Just Like a Woman" if you want to hear one of the fundamental sources for Chuck Berry's guitar style) and Nat "King" Cole, too, for his diction. But as to his idea of reaching everyone, not just the "neighborhood" (the ur-definition, of course, of rock & roll), well, that was something he derived from the concept of get-ahead capitalism that he got from helping out his father in the grocery business as a young boy. "By then," he said, describing himself at ages 10 and 11, "I had a bit of politics in my head. My dad had a business of his own, selling groceries, and he worked for himself, so I came to handling money at that age. He carried vegetables in a basket and would go by someone's door and knock on it. 'Would you like ...?' You know, the material looked so good. [But] I sold a lot [of it] because of the ingenuity that I [showed] trying to sell."
That was the very idea that he applied to the music, when, after driving up to Chicago to introduce himself to Leonard Chess on Muddy Waters' recommendation, he introduced himself to the world at the age of 28 by employing that same sense of ingenuity, that same sense of "politics." Meaning, he said, "M-O-N-E-Y. What sells. What's on the market. Now I knew the market. There had to be a market in order for you to be successful in a business. The market had to need your business, or the product of it. So I tried to sing as though they would be interested, and that would become a market." And then, he said, you multiplied that market, and you added another market to it, and it was as if you were still traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood, and pretty soon you had a constituency that included nearly everybody. That was the constituency that Chuck Berry was aiming for as an artist. And that was the constituency that he ultimately reached.
We started out our interview talking about poetry, and we came back to poetry in the end. Remember, this is a man whose older brother was named for Paul Laurence Dunbar, the great African-American poet, whose "We Wear the Mask" should be required reading in all the schools. It had always tickled me the way that Chuck would end so many of his concerts with a poem. It was a poem I had never heard in any other context, though it reminded me of "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, in which a traveler from "some antique land" stumbles upon the tomb of one of its ancient kings. "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair," proclaim the words engraved on the faded stone at the base of the ruined monument, while "the lone and level sands stretch far away ... boundless and bare."
The poem that Chuck recited, while nowhere near as bleak (it takes a more positive, transcendental spin), was certainly in the same philosophical ballpark. It was called "Even This Shall Pass Away," and, as I discovered from asking him about it, it was not an original poem by Chuck Berry at all; it was in fact a poem that he had first heard his father recite ("That's my dad," Chuck said. "I get a little choked up when I think of him"), when he was no more than six or seven years old. The poet, I would later learn after a little research (very little it's all over the Internet!), was Theodore Tilton, an American poet, newspaper editor, and Abolitionist, and the poem was first published in his collection The Sexton's Tale in 1867. With very little prompting, Chuck recited the poem, and as he did, he got more and more choked up. "My dad," he said, "was the cause of me being in show business. He was not only in poetry but in acting a bit. He was Mordecai in the play A Dream of Queen Esther. [This was a church production by a prolific white playwright and meteorologist, Walter Ben Hare.] He was very low in speech and music, and he came out onstage, he came out to tell the king, 'Sire, sire, someone is approaching our castle.' And I knew his voice. I'm five years old right now. I knew his voice and I hollered out in the theater, 'Daddy!' I don't remember it, but they tell me I did. His position in the choir was bass. Mother's was soprano and lead. That's all there was in our house, poetry and choir rehearsal and duets and so forth; I listened to Dad and Mother discuss things about poetry and delivery and voice and diction I don't think anyone could know how much it really means." Who were some of his favorite poets as a kid? I ask. Edgar Allen Poe, he said after some consideration ("I can't think of them [all], my memory's really bad"), and Paul Laurence Dunbar was his mother's. On second thought, he offered, Dunbar was his favorite, too.
But getting back to that recitation he couldn't do it as well as his father, Chuck said after completing several verses of "Even This Shall Pass Away," "my dad's voice rang. But here's something for you." And with that he launched into the fifth verse (out of seven), searching for the words, searching for the memories, concluding triumphantly, "'Pain is hard to bear,' he cried. 'But with patience day by day/Even this shall pass away.' Oh, I'm breaking up again." And with that he concluded, to the applause of everyone in the room, the film director, the sound and camera man, his son, Charles Jr., a woman who carried a card "Sherry with Berry," and assorted other bystanders no more than 25 or 30 in all. He was in tears. He was in triumph.
The problem for Chuck Berry as he reaches his 90th birthday is the same one we all face: mortality. His work, of course, is his immortality, though as Woody Allen has often said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying" and Chuck might very well agree. He is, like many of us, his own best advocate and his own worst enemy, but the particular problem for Chuck is that, for all of the accolades that have come his way (listen to Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis celebrate his genius on the Million Dollar Quartet session, just for a start), to this day he has not been unambiguously embraced in the full artistic terms he deserves. There are undoubtedly a multiplicity of reasons for this (race would certainly have to be factored in), but the principal reason that Chuck has not been lifted up on a wave of critical and biographical hosannas is Chuck himself. His unwillingness to ingratiate himself. His unreadable apartness. The deep-seated sense of anger and suspicion that can unexpectedly flare up and turn into overt hostility, with or without provocation (check out the 60th birthday, star-studded performance documentary, Hail! Hail! Rock N' Roll, which is both brilliant for its uplifting artistry and maddening for its self-inflicted failures). Most of all, I would guess, it comes down to his determined, uncompromisingly defiant refusal to conform to anyone else's expectations but his own.
He is not like any other popular performer that I can think of (oh, Merle Haggard might be a distant cousin, even a second or third cousin once removed, but no closer). For all of the canny "political" (read "artistic" here) inclusiveness that established both his career and his legacy, he has from the beginning chosen to set himself apart. Or been set apart. By a juvenile conviction for armed robbery before he ever thought of entering show business (remember: this was an upwardly mobile, middle-class kid, by his own description). Later by two mid-career prison terms, one coming at the height of his success in 1960 (a contested Mann Act violation, which could certainly be seen as a form of "political" [read "racial" here] reprisal). Not to mention some of his well-documented sexual proclivities and peccadillos (and I don't mean to minimize them here), what his biographer, Bruce Pegg, writes, represent the actions of "a man whose detachment from society made him feel immune to its mores and taboos." (For details see Pegg's Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry.) Sometimes that sense of detachment has served him well (by allowing him to speak in another person's voice for example, in his songwriting), sometimes it has not but it has always been a non-negotiable part of his personality. And it has at times alienated his own audience at the very times that, were he but able to admit it, he might have needed them most.
Which has tended to make his transition to lovable icon, to venerable (and much-venerated) elder statesman, a little daunting at times. In the past few years he has enjoyed a round of gracious honors: a larger-than-life duckwalking statue in St Louis; that PEN New England "Literary Excellence in Song Lyrics" award, held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, where Chuck was delighted to snap pictures, and have his picture taken with images of JFK; his celebration in a week-long series of events as an American Music Master at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; the $100,000 international Polar Music Prize, which has often been referred to as "the Nobel Prize for Music." At each of the first three (he was not able to attend the Polar Prize ceremony in Sweden in 2014), he acquitted himself with more than a hint of sentiment and a large dose of his own brand of idiosyncratic charm. "I'm wondering about my future," he told Rolling Stone reporter Patrick Doyle. When pressed to be a little more explicit, "I'll give you a little piece of poetry," he said. "Give you a song?/I can't do that/My singing days have passed/My voice is gone, my throat is worn/And my lungs are going fast." Or as he put it 10 years earlier, in 2002, "In a way, I feel it might be ill-mannered to try and top myself. The music I play is a ritual. Something that matters to people in a special way. I wouldn't want to interfere with that."
Chuck Berry's 10 Greatest Rock & Roll Moments The philosopher Theodore Anthony Nugent once observed, "If you don't know every Chuck Berry lick, you can't play rock guitar." The Nuge was somewhat overstating matters, but it is no hyperbole to say that any rock & roller who doesn't get what Chuck Berry has done doesn't get much of anything. And guitar licks are just the start of the man's genius.
St. Louis Riverfront Times ~ October 12, 2016
Photograph by Irving Williamson, 1965.
Chuck Berry performing during "Chuck Berry's Bandstand."Chuck Berry will turn 90 on October 18. He's still with us, living right here in St. Louis. He may never take the stage of the Blueberry Hill Duck Room again; he doesn't have to. Put on any of his greatest songs "Nadine," "Johnny B. Goode," "Around and Around," "School Day" close your eyes, turn it up, and it's all there. The strut, the joust, the goof, the groove, the cool, the absolute joy of what it's like to be in the rock & roll moment. In a great Chuck Berry song, life really does come alive.
A top ten list of Chuck's most rock & roll moments isn't enough, but neither is 10,000. So happy birthday, Chuck. We couldn't have rocked without you.
10. Motorvating over the hill
"Maybellene" is often called the first true rock & roll song. If it is, it's that beat, that urgency, that instinctive rhythmic play of words everything in full gear rushing forward that sets it apart from other outstanding records from that great year of 1955. And in his first great rocker, Chuck tells a witty, cutting story. His raunchy, raging 25-second guitar solo, too, motorvates like a motherfucker.9. Playing punk rock reviewer
In 1980, Jet Lag, a fledgling music 'zine published by Steve Pick and John "The Mailman" Korst in St. Louis, asked Mr. Berry to listen to some punk rock records. His appraisals were solid gold. "What's this guy so angry about anyway?" he asked of the Sex Pistols. "Guitar work and progression is like mine. Good backbeat. Can't understand most of the vocals. If you're going to be mad, at least let the people know what you're mad about."8. Serving as interstellar space ambassador
In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 into the cosmos. The craft had no particular place to go, but it carried with it a gold record called "The Sounds of Earth." Along with Bach and Mozart, "Johnny B. Goode" was etched into the grooves. The selection was controversial some deemed the tune ephemeral kid stuff but if Saturday Night Live is to be believed, the first aliens to encounter it dropped the needle and declared: "Send more Chuck Berry."7. Writing one of the greatest rock memoirs in prison
By 1979, Chuck Berry had already done two prison stints. During his third four months for tax evasion in the Lompoc, California, pen he began writing his memoirs, determined to tell his story on his own in his own way. Often bitter, just as often bittersweet, richly detailed, funny, lyrical and profound, the autobiography is a declaration of artistic freedom.6. Walking the duck.
Chuck Berry preferred to call his signature stage move "the scoot" and even distinguished it from the one-legged hop-along that looks nothing like a mallard waddle. Whatever you call it, his animated style on stage, learned from bluesmen like T-Bone Walker, became as weirdly liberating as his music itself. Marty McFly did a game impersonation and Angus Young tried to make it his own, but no rock guitarist ever prowled a stage like Chuck in his prime.5. Playing a solo offstage at the Duck Room.
The date was December 11, 2013 and as always the venue was sold out. Fans had come from around the country and around the world to see Chuck Berry for the first time maybe, or maybe for the last. You really never could tell with Chuck. Sure he was lost most of the time, sure he had trouble finding and keeping the key. And then, toward the end of the show, he just wandered offstage, the band in full rock and rolling mode. Maybe he was standing somewhere in the corner or sitting in the green room, but wherever he was he was still fucking playing. The crazed tone of his guitar was still howling and kerranging, and he was nowhere to be seen. The moment was bizarre, brilliant and unforgettable.4. Cutting Keith Richards.
There's a moment early in Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, the 1987 documentary film based on Berry's 60th birthday concerts at the Fox Theater, when Chuck Berry and the band, including Keith Richards on guitar, work up "Carol," which the Stones recorded on their first album. Richards wants to lead the band and take the solo; Chuck is having none of it. They start and stop, start and stop, with Chuck glaring all the while. He wasn't just fucking with Keith. He was reminding everyone that you can't just dash off a Chuck Berry riff. You have to get it right; you have to play it like you mean it.3. Telling Tchaikovsky the news.
Chuck Berry didn't just invent the language of rock & roll. He created popular culture as we know it. His infinite reserve of images records, DJs, movies, cars, food, dancers, jukeboxes and guitars fused to relentless rhythms and elemental melodies, serving as affirmations of a youth culture thrilled to have their daily lives and loves sung and swung back at them. Chuck understood his audience, and his audience loved him for it.2. Integrating St. Louis and beyond.
In the mid-'50s, as Chuck Berry was making a name for himself on the circuit and pushing the limits and widening the appeal of rhythm and blues, he was also setting the stage for integration but not without pushback. At his Club Bandstand (located near the intersection of Delmar and Grand, with a name shrewdly copped from Dick Clark), he established his official fan club, held dances for black and white teens, and performed for fully integrated audiences. In 1958, authorities viewed such establishments as threats. Tired of the hassles, Berry closed the Bandstand after two years. But there was no shutting down the music that was desegregating radio stations across the land.1. Now. Somewhere. Anywhere. Forever.
Think about it. Right this minute, and the next minute, just down the road apiece or around and around the world, someone is blasting, humming, howling, studying or playing a Chuck Berry song. His songs started out as the expressions of a singular American vision, but they have become universal. If they are not timeless, nothing is. Any time a guitarist or a singer wants to be part of the tradition, they need only turn to "Rock & Roll Music" or "Come On." That's what the Beatles and the Stones did. And you can do it too. Not because the tunes are easy, but because the tunes belong to anyone who can feel them.
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