Chuck Berry, page 43
To be “more than just bodies,” as Iyer puts it, “is to reinsert and reassert this aural component of Black life in the United States which existed under dire, horrific, violent circumstances.” To bring the past into the current moment, and to bring it to life through improvisation. That becomes part of what is asserted when Andrew Hill at the piano, or Chuck Berry at the guitar, puts his body on the line. “What is the sound of someone asserting their personhood in the context of their personhood being legally denied or revoked?”
Always present, Iyer says, is “an insurgent quality and a resistance—it becomes more than just ‘bodies are present and I hear them moving’; these are defiant human beings.” Flesh becomes more than flesh. History is shared in a flash.
Iyer, like others, hears in Berry’s guitar playing the tradition of boogie-woogie piano. Johnnie Johnson and the players he learned from used their left hands, the lower notes, to convey locomotion, a groove that carried the essence of walking, dancing. The right hand in boogie-woogie raised the human voice, the melodic frequencies that were the provenance of breath. There was the whole body in motion coming through Chuck’s hands.
A boogie-woogie pianist could groove with their left and speak with their right. And he points out that Berry did the same things through the guitar. “With those big [alternating] open fifths to the sixth bass lines that would evoke a certain quality of movement—with his hands he would conjure the feet. But he could also riff and play lines that evoked the voice—a cry, a wail. I think his ability to move between those two poles set his field in a certain way. ‘This is all of me; this is how I move.’”
Music brought the parts of the body together, and brought bodies together in flux: this is how everybody moves. The way Iyer talks about it, to play music for people in a room—to be in communion with your band and audience—is to “create a bond among us; it reminds us we’re not alone.” Surely there are endorphins involved. “All I can say is I do know I’m doing it—there’s a ritual power that we are able to do this together and gather and behave in a very different way, a way we wouldn’t if we were just walking down the street, say. We are engaged in a unified experience built around shared synchronous movement. In pulse. It’s extraordinary when you think about it—that we can do it.”
Extraordinary to think of the voodoo that happened when folks heard an electric guitar with their feet for the first time, flooding their spines, connecting them to every other spine in the barn. Extraordinary, as well, to think about a human strong enough to invoke that state again and again, hundreds of times a year. It was a form of play from the start, your hands opening up spaces that radiated a shocking form of love, of wildness, lawlessness within community. It was better than work, harder than work. Not work.
All around there were geniuses, goofuses, and hacks building their own maquette of the new thing. Lots of people came up with a blueprint: Little Richard, Elvis, Ike Turner, Henry Glover, Devora and Jack Brown. There were countless ways to invent something, and in the 1950s countless people were trying.
“I’ve been told that I’m very unique. And I just think it’s because I’ve been around so long,” Chuck said to Hackford. “I didn’t start anything. There’s nothing new under the sun. I participated in it strongly perhaps at a particular time, when it was vulnerable to being impregnated, and I may shine out through those perforations. But other than that, it’s just a washboard of time passing.” It was one of the more amazing things he said.
There is the washboard flow of time, and there is a second for history to spark. Two lines intersecting. A teepee on a railroad track.
Berry’s blueprint was the sturdiest and most transferable of all. He arrived with a new instrument and became an early master of it, just as it was taking over the new sound. He created a role that held the wishes of his audience and his own wishes together tightly: the rock star. Dragging country music into the boogie-woogie woods, Berry bridged races and regions. He spoke with fine diction to white teenagers. He had the world on his mind.
The blueprint led to rock & roll. It was Black, and then mostly Black, and then almost entirely white by the late 1960s, and by then the thing was just called rock.
It’s the summer of 1970. Jimi Hendrix is playing a sense-impairing version of “Johnny B. Goode” on his Cry of Love tour. He’s heading to Baltimore for a date at the Civic Center when, on June 12, the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team was playing the San Diego Padres. Pitcher Dock Ellis misread the calendar and dropped acid on what he thought was a day off, then realized he had to throw in several hours. It’s a famous moment in baseball history: the day Ellis pitched a rare no-hitter while he was, as he put it, “high as a Georgia pine.”9
Ellis vividly described it later. He had a vision while on the pitching mound, hallucinating that Jimi Hendrix came to the plate against him, waving his guitar as if it were a bat. Calling the strikes was the home plate umpire, none other than President Richard M. Nixon. That was the praxis of rock in 1970: Jimi Hendrix was batting cleanup, but Richard Nixon called the shots. The fix was in.
The idea was clear by the time of Ellis’s no-hitter: you could change the world through the power of rock. But to do it, you had to live in the world of rock. (Elvis famously visited Nixon in 1970.)
A letter from an Ohio radio station employee to Billboard, 1980: “I’ve found that banning black product on our station is in no way a racial thing. In fact, my white co-workers personally like a lot of black product we don’t play. But we all know our job—rock ’n’ roll. We are committed to that sound.” His letter was a defense of the then-popular album-oriented rock format. “A lot of young blacks and whites don’t realize the great contribution of blacks to the current rock ’n’ roll sound. I played an old Chuck Berry tune to a 14-year-old black. He cringed and said, ‘We used to sound like that?’”10
It was never as simple as “they stole Black music.” The Beatles, the Stones, to employ the two most massive examples, used Berry as source material they ultimately extended into different, new directions, folding his influence into a world of their own. And rock was now a product of that world.
Back to the Future, the 1985 film, imagines teenager Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) traveling back in time to join a band, Marvin Berry and the Starlighters, as they play a high school dance in 1955. McFly teaches them “Johnny B. Goode.” You see bandleader Marvin hold a telephone toward the music after placing a call to his cousin: “Chuck! Chuck,” he shouts. “You know that new sound you’re looking for? Well, listen to this!”
McFly plays Berry’s guitar part, then does the duckwalk, offers a little Hendrix, some Eddie Van Halen squall on his back, and then kicks over a monitor. The history of rock guitar, brought by a white man from the future. That was the joke.11
In 2021, a panel of conservative thinkers from the Daily Wire website finally proclaimed that rock & roll was officially dead. “There was rock ’n’ roll, then there was Barack Obama, now there is no rock ’n’ roll,” the host of Daily Wire Backstage explained. “Rock ’n’ roll was about white male angst, white male teenage angst. Barack Obama came along and said, ‘Young white men aren’t allowed to have angst. They’re not allowed to basically express their dissatisfaction because they’re so toxic.’”12
Chuck Berry had the best blueprint available. And over many years he would use it to wage war on rock & roll. Stage by stage, he would make them pay. Taking his history and America’s out on those around him, while finding a way to give the crowd something worth remembering. Remembering him.
In his final years he traveled with the Blueberry Hill Band. Seventeen shows in Europe over eighteen days in 2007, from Moscow to the Canary Islands. It was below zero in Russia, and two weeks later over eighty degrees, a grind that would wear on anybody, let alone someone eighty-one years old. That year they toured Europe three times.
On New Year’s Day in 2011, he came to Chicago’s Congress Theater. He had played two shows the night before in New York and was fatigued from the start. About an hour in, Berry realized how out of tune he was and approached the keyboardist to give him a note. But then he started arguing and tried to tune himself, until he laid his head down on the keyboard. “I’m struggling,” he said, as staff led him off.
Fifteen minutes later he wandered back, his Gibson around his neck, until a stagehand came out, took the guitar away—took Chuck Berry’s guitar!—and walked him from the stage. He came out one more time, played “Around and Around” three times, and asked the band what he had just played. Apologizing to the crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been trying to dig myself out of this hole that I’m in. If I’m living next New Year’s, I’m gonna walk on this stage and do a whole new show. I want to apologize.” Then, according to Rolling Stone, he wandered away, playing his guitar as he exited. Offstage, a crew of emergency medical technicians delivered a hasty examination.13
The band of St. Louis veterans knew how to roll with things. Bassist Jimmy Marsala joked, “I told him once, ‘That’s the first time I played a blues song in five different keys.’ But he’d keep changing, and we’d keep going with the flow.” Still, the audience could tell. “He knew he was going out upstairs. It was sad to watch,” said Bob Lohr. “He would get to the place where he couldn’t remember anything.” At Blueberry Hill everybody would cut him slack. The fans could see his face, and he could see theirs. But when they played big stages overseas, audiences expected the 1950s Chuck, and they let him know when they felt disappointed.
“It was just terrible. He just couldn’t do it anymore and he wanted to keep doing it,” Lohr said.
Berry, pretty skinny at this point, was hunched over in his chair backstage. At such a moment, anybody might have their doubts about what was possible. “But they say adrenaline was the big wonder drug,” said Lohr, “and it really is. Then he would take the stage and he was twice as big somehow.” Nobody could tell Chuck Berry what to do, and nobody could tell him to stop.
The Blueberry Hill Band played in South America in 2013. Lohr said it was on the national news there. “My god. It was ‘Fraud’—a big, big scandal, everybody saying, ‘Oh, how are they letting a legend like this ruin his reputation?’ And they were right. We shouldn’t have.”
Berry would buttonhole Lohr ostensibly for help with his iPhone, which was the way he asked for company, for somebody to talk to. They met in a hotel lobby in Brazil, Berry looking down a long hallway, turning around, and saying, “You know, I feel it coming closer every day.”
He knows he’s going mentally, Lohr realized. They had a tour of Europe coming later that year.
“Sit down,” Berry said to the pianist. “‘Bobby, what am I gonna do? I can’t even remember ‘Johnny B. Goode’ anymore.”
When that happens, Lohr suggested, he should just keep playing guitar for another song or two.
But that was poignant: “I can’t even remember ‘Johnny B. Goode’ anymore.”
I felt so sorry for him, and felt like saying to Chuck, “You should just hang it up.” But who the hell was I to tell Chuck to stop?14
There came a day, though, when somebody had to tell him—it was time to stop driving. Joe Edwards, who drove around town a lot with Berry, brought it up several times. If they were going to a charity event in the afternoon, Chuck would drive there, but as the sun went down Edwards would suggest, “Hey, Chuck, why don’t you let me?”
“I wasn’t gonna say, ‘I’m not gonna get in the car with you.’ And nine out of ten times he would just flip me the keys.”15
The idea had been to celebrate his ninetieth birthday playing at Blueberry Hill. But the shows early in 2014 were not good, and Edwards worried about Chuck driving back to Wentzville in the dead of winter. Finally, “I said, ‘Chuck, why don’t we pause here in the wintertime and see how it looks in the spring. Keep it going then.’ He could see he was getting on in time. But he never would have been the one to stop. He told me he wanted to play once a month, and he would have honored his word at ninety,” Edwards said.
“He said, ‘Are you sure—I’m not busting any trust we have, am I?’ I said, ‘No, I’m just thinking of it for the sake of driving.’ And then pretty soon it became clear to both of us that that was the last one.”
By 2015, an attorney was shopping around a new album to labels. News of the record was tightly controlled; the pitch was, if you could get a new album by an artist who was unable to do interviews or shows but had two and a half million fans on his Facebook page, would you be interested?
Chuck had been working on new music since the late 1970s. A double album was coming, he said then, with Johnnie Johnson playing on it. But in 1989 a fire in the Berry Park studio destroyed everything, thirty to forty twenty-four-track recordings, the lyric sheets, everything down to the foundation. Berry lost scrapbooks, photos, and memorabilia along with years of work.
“All things change; nothing remains the same,” he told an Associated Press reporter. “There’s no way to put a value on it.”
“Deep down he felt it really intensely. But outwardly there was nothing he could do about it,” said Edwards. “He was one of those rare people that went on with their lives. ‘This is the new ground zero, and what do I do? I start working on it again.’ That’s what he did.”
He rerecorded the music, but time was bending weird. Berry kept revisiting the songs, transferring them to new technology (he was learning Pro Tools). There was an album finished, he declared, in 2000. Then, when journalist Mark Jacobson visited him a year later he seemed to be putting demos together. Many of the songs Berry was testing out back then appeared on his final album, released in 2017.
Why no new music in so long? Jacobson asked. Berry replied,
For many years, there has been a great laziness in my soul. There were days I could write songs, but I could also take my four hundred dollars and play the slot machines at the casino. In a way I feel it might be ill-mannered to try and top myself. You see, I am not an oldies act. The music I play, it matters to people. People want to hear it a certain way. How they remember it. I honor that. I wouldn’t want to interfere with that. I don’t want to live in the past, but I am part of it for a lot of people. I have to respect that, especially now that it is so far into the future.16
Lazy was one thing Chuck was never. But, he told Jacobson, “I confess to schizophrenia,” meaning there was the public Chuck and the private Charles Berry. Maybe he was shrugging off the fact that there was now one more person: the Chuck audiences grew up with and carried with them. That guy was hard to compete with in the twenty-first century.
He was nervous and increasingly alone.
The final days were not for the meek. He was spending almost all his time at home in Wentzville, said Berry family attorney Martin Green. “Francine was there until the very end.”
By the time his final record was being shopped, it was unclear how involved the creator was. “He was a leader. He was like the chief,” recalled a family friend. In his prime, “he was in charge of everything, and was the one that created things.” The family friend, musician Steven Scorfina, recalls once seeing Berry recite the “even this shall pass” poem, the image of an old man ruminating with contentment on his life.
“It just brings me to tears because the end of his life was so drastically different,” said Scorfina. “I was never so disgusted in my life, to see what happened when Chuck died. Chuck had lost his mind; he’d be on the street throwing rocks at cars, and the police would come to make sure he got back in the house.”17
Chuck’s girlfriend called Themetta from Wentzville and said the family had better do something. He’d become “completely out of control,” said Scorfina.
“So they got doctors and got him declared incompetent. They fired all the lawyers and took over his business.”
“Big Boys,” his first single in forty years, was set to come out in late March 2017. Then, three days before its release, Berry died. He was ninety years old. The initial announcement, made by the St. Charles County Police Department on their Facebook page, said emergency workers had been called to his home at about twelve forty p.m. on March 18. He was unresponsive and failed to revive after lifesaving efforts.18
Paul Roper, the president of Dualtone Records, the label releasing Berry’s new music, contacted the family to discuss holding the single back. Perhaps it was too soon, in the wake of his death, to launch a full publicity campaign. The call came in the middle of a family meeting in St. Louis where they were discussing the same subject and asking themselves, “What would Dad do?”
Berry’s widow, Themetta, pointed out, “Well, he always stuck to the contract. If he had an agreement, that’s what he would do. One, because that was him and two because he didn’t want to give any money back.” So they called Roper, and one of the kids told him, “Paul, Mom says we are on schedule.”19
The last album, titled Chuck, came out in June 2017. It was a satisfying final framing of Berry’s sound. The guitar playing is sharp throughout, the vocals full-throated. There were no wild rhythms and no dangerous guitar solos; this was a sustaining Chuck Berry burger-fries-and-shake on a hot Ozark roadside.
The Blueberry Hill Band’s style is unambitious, elemental. Berry himself felt forcefully present and focused on making clear several key points. That “I need satisfaction, I didn’t get any yesterday”; that he still loved Themetta; that Johnny B. Goode had a son.
Chuck finishes with two unusual spoken-word poems evoking the dinner table recitations with Dad back in the 1930s and ’40s. “Dutchman” is about a tall, old man who pushes into a tavern and tells how he fell down on his luck. “Dutchman” might be modeled on Berry himself—he plays with the idea of his fame and wealth being behind him, as if now he was just a stranger unburdening himself to an indifferent crowd.
Chuck doesn’t make big points, and it doesn’t redirect the compass musically. It was a lively late portrait of the artist. But it does offer a faint apology to one woman, among Berry’s last words. He dedicates the album to Themetta. “Lady B. Goode” is a tribute to the woman who sacrificed and stood behind Johnny B. Goode. In “Dutchman” he says women were an addiction that all but brought him down.
