Chapter 21 – Why He Matters, Part VIII: Backing Chuck Berry

Random black and whites of petrified kids behind the father of rock and roll are among my favorite things to gaze at. I once found the website of a surf bassist who claimed to have introduced Chuck Berry to the Dual Showman amplifier. I believe him. There is a photograph of Chuck Berry looking back in glee at the rush of guitar sound bursting from the giant black and fabric covered box. Equally wonderful are photographs of a performance in Mexico where the backup musicians appear to be 14 or 15 years old. Some part of me always wanted to be there.

When I went to tiny Peach Tree High School on the outskirts of Sacramento I used to fantasize about bringing Chuck Berry to perform there. I read somewhere that Berry’s minimum rate in those days was $2000. We had 60 students. I figured it was doable if we all brought our friends and families. I imagined an outdoor show in one of the big, drab fields of stickers, raccoon shit and oat grass that surrounded our school. Part of the fantasy was that our little band— the worst band I’ve seen or heard in public— would back the founding father of rock and roll. Luckily my delusions are always tempered by a vivid imagination for disaster.

Chuck Berry has been criticized for using local pickup bands throughout much of his long career, but consider for a moment how many thousands of young musicians were schooled in rhythm, blues and showmanship during their frightening but exhilarating hour with the father of rock ‘n’ roll. If you Google words like “backing Chuck Berry” you’ll find good stories. They’re always the same. This one (edited and disguised somewhat to protect the author and myself) has rough charm and humor.

Chuck didn’t rehearse or spring a set list on you. So I stood back and watched the roadies haul his psychedelic stained Fender Dual Showman on stage in front of ten thousand reefer-sucking teenagers.

Well, it wasn’t his amplifier. It would have been provided by the reefer sucking promoter, who was probably not much more than a teenager himself, but got the right model, anyway. Our correspondent continues.

Chuck shows up in a magnetic looking blue Nehru shirt. I’d owned a dozen custom-made Nehru’s cut nicely for me at a shop in lower Manhattan. Chuck’s must have come from a thrift store. He could have lit the heavens with that shirt.

It’s true that Chuck Berry has not wasted much of his considerable fortune on stage clothing. In this new millennium he alternates mostly between the pale blue sparkle shirt and the bright red sparkle shirt, with the same ancient black slacks. When I saw him in the 1970s the pants were either red or purple. “The red pants that many fans have seen me in were bought in 1972 at a jeans store on La Cienega in Los Angeles, for eight dollars,” he recounts in his Autobiography.

The internet musician tells about a struggle with another piano player who’s vying for the keyboard spot. Our narrator wins. Then comes his description of the show.

Chuck kicks off louder than a rampaging diesel.

This description is similar to how Florida singer-songwriter Ronny Elliott described his first time on stage with Chuck Berry. I discovered Elliott in an old photograph showing frightened, long-haired children with guitars standing near Chuck Berry. (They are children only from my current vantage. They were undoubtedly hardened professionals.) Describing his first show with Berry, Elliott wrote that Chuck “came out of the wings with his 345 blazing.” The image Elliott describes delights me. The “345” is Chuck’s favored guitar—a Gibson ES-345 semi hollow body. Elliott is a poet. I can see and hear the guitar and the entrance. But let us return to our anonymous internet scribe.

Berry’s amp was so distorted it was difficult to hear separate chords, but during the next fifty minutes we hit nirvana. Every song had a piano solo and an approving nod from above. I can’t express how elated I was. The crowd stomped, hooted, rocked and rolled. I left the stage feeling like I’d conquered the west.

That “approving nod” is important, and much better than the angry glare or the frank dismissal, which I have also seen. The piano player is feeling so good, in fact, that he thinks for a moment he has become more than just imaginary friends with the great Chuck Berry. When the show is over he tries to strike up conversation. Chuck Berry is counting money when our friend decides to interrupt him. If we are to believe the rumors, interrupting him during this act is like squeezing yourself between a mother grizzly and her cubs!

Without looking at us Chuck lays out four hundred dollar bills, then scoops up the rest and pockets it. Like a fool, I think the time is ripe to get acquainted and say,

“So, I guess you’re taking the band out for steaks?”

He is rewarded not with steak, but with a glare that could sear one. He is not the first or last to report such a look. Ronny Elliott describes something similar:
“We were scheduled to do a sound check at 3:00,” says Elliott. “The show was at 8:00. Chuck strolled out onto the stage at Curtis Hixon Hall in Tampa around 7:30. I didn’t write this down so the accuracy of the quote might be a little shaky after forty years but this is close: ‘I’m Chuck Berry. I’ll tell you what song we’re playing and I’ll tell you the key. If I go like this, (raises his guitar up in a swooping motion), you stop. Don’t anybody play too loud. It’s my show. If you do, I’ll stop. I’ll embarrass you.’”

The instructions, short and not too sweet, confused the scared young rockers.

“First time he raised his guitar to start a duckwalk, we stopped,” says Elliott. “Dirtiest look I’ve ever been given. We didn’t fall for that one again.” But Chuck must have liked what he heard. Elliot and his band went on to back Chuck Berry in a dozen or so shows.

“The last time that I took one was in Miami, at the Jailai Fronton, on a bill with the James Gang. I attempted to pass on it but the promoter offered too much money to ignore. We played a set that lasted two and a half hours. Chuck was on his knees, reciting poetry, working the young crowd like a horny, broke preacher. I was amazed. I have never enjoyed playing more.”

“The next week he was on the Mike Douglas Show with John and Yoko co-hosting. He boasted that he had just played the longest set in his life the week before, two and one half hours.”

“I’m still proud.” says Elliot.

Berry has admitted that using local bands limited what he could do, since he had to shy away from lesser known songs with unique chord progressions. But I sometimes think that in his best days a good pickup band worked in Berry’s favor, turning old songs into fresh new challenges and feeding his apparent need to live dangerously and improvise. An example is the brilliant live show recorded in Michigan just days after Berry got out of prison in 1963. The “pickup” band was pretty special—a bunch of Motown session musicians—and` they nailed it. Chuck Berry’s music has its roots in jazz and boogie-woogie. It’s got to swing— needs that backbeat you’re not supposed to lose, and the Motown players had it.

But the band doesn’t have to be great. One of Berry’s finest live recordings was done for BBC television in 1972. The band was competent and professional and kept the beat, and Chuck used that platform to put on a virtuoso performance. Around the same time he recorded a more raggedy live show in Coventry, England. The set began raggedly, anyway. Recently released recordings show that at the start Chuck and the band barely kept up with each other. But by the time Chuck got to “Reelin’ and Rockin’” they really were rocking; the band got it together, learned the cues, and helped Chuck put together a smash single.

But even if they don’t have to be great they have to be competent. At a 1969 live show, filmed in Toronto by D.A. Pennebaker, at least one member of the band appears so rhythmically challenged (perhaps just so overcome by nerves or substance) it becomes an obstruction. Chuck battles like a fish upstream against a mechanical and at times variable beat. It’s awful—mostly because this is one of so few live concert performances professionally recorded on film or video. Chuck’s own performance is admirable under the circumstances, but the circumstances are sometimes so jarring it’s painful. (Editor's note: I softened my feelings about that show when I learned, a few months ago, that one of the musicians was 18 years old at the time!  I found a website where he remembered the hour very humbly and happily.)

I never saw him perform with a band that out of it, but in two Seattle shows there seemed to be a subtle disconnect between Berry and the group that backed him. In theory it was a decent fit—a long time, local bar band that played old time rock and roll. But at the two shows I saw, a decade apart, there seemed to be something dead about the performance. There was little joy or magic. My inclination was to blame Chuck Berry and the cruelty of time, but I’ve come to believe it was the band. They were okay, but they didn’t bring that intangible, skipping bounce or swing. It was bar band Chuck Berry. Berry spent a minute or two trying to teach the piano player a riff. It was a master class in blues with Chuck Berry patiently demonstrating, but the guy smiled and kept doing what he was doing. Berry finally shrugged and accomplished what he wanted with his guitar.

Boogie-woogie pianist and blues harp player Robert Baldori, whose band The Woolies backed Chuck Berry many times in the 1970s and 1980s , explained the importance of the right backup. “Charles could stretch out with us because he didn't have to worry about us following anything he did, or losing track of the fundamentals - the groove and the dynamics,” says Baldori. “It was a completely different show than when he got stuck with local musicians. The range of material was exceptional, and he could always come back to the hits. Occasionally I would work a gig with him where it was just me and a couple of local musicians instead of my band. Those were usually a nightmare, even when the musicians were competent. A lot of the things we take for granted turn out to be too subtle for someone who learned it from the records. Like the exact timing of a blues shuffle. Or how the parts fit together. Or when not to play.”

Daryl Davis told me pretty much the same story. “What gives musicians like Jimmy Marsala, Bob Lohr, Bob Baldori and myself the advantage, is our understanding of Chuck’s need to not be restricted to playing something the same way he played it back in the 1950s.”

Davis, about my age, grew up abroad, child of a diplomat. He wasn’t always exposed to the latest thing in music and he fell for older stuff. Like me, he idolized Chuck Berry. He told his high school friends he was going to play music with him some day. They laughed, but for nearly 30 years now Davis has been Chuck Berry’s part time “musical director.”

Davis was born to the job and worked like a dog to make it happen. He studied music at Howard University with the express goal of learning to back Chuck Berry. Now he works with Berry at shows along the eastern seaboard, including prestigious dates at B. B. King’s Times Square night club. He’s become Chuck Berry’s friend and confidant.

I first learned about Daryl when Chuck’s son mentioned “the amazing Daryl Davis” online. When I saw videos of him on YouTube and read about his experiences with Chuck Berry I wrote and asked him to do an interview for the blog. He said he would. I sent him questions. His response, a few days later, filled 12 single-spaced pages with touching, personal stories about working with Chuck Berry.

Robert Baldori has worked with Berry even longer than Davis.

“I grew up on the streets of Dearborn in the 50s, and Chuck Berry was our hero. By the time I got to college I was playing in a backbeat R & B band that knew everything Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin Wolf ever recorded.” Baldori remembers “sneaking into bars to see Jimmy Reed, recording with Devora Brown and Nate Meyer at Fortune Records and in Chicago at Mother Blues and any other blues joint we could get into.” He got his first shot playing with Berry when his band The Woolies was invited to replace a hard rock outfit that didn’t understand Berry’s music. For the Woolies “It was a perfect fit, not just because we knew the material, but we also knew how to play it. The chemistry was there from the downbeat.”

Chuck’s regular St. Louis pianist, Robert Lohr, has a background similar to Baldori’s. (In addition to everything else, they are both lawyers. I’m thinking that if I can learn to play, I still have a shot!) Lohr is one of the “go to” blues musicians of St. Louis. He grew up listening to what he calls “the usual suspects: Muddy, Wolf, Sonny Boy, Little Walter, Billy Boy Arnold, the three Kings— BB, Albert and Freddie— the entire Chess roster including Chuck, plus Magic Sam, Otis Rush, plus all Motown piano players…” He goes on and on. (Lohr’s true musical hero seems to be “Lemmy,” leader of the British hard rock band Motorhead. “They don't make rock stars like Lemmy anymore,” says Lohr. “He's the real deal!” Lohr once gave Lemmy a box set of Chuck Berry songs signed by the master. “It was a scream. Chuck kept asking me ‘to Lenny? Lenny?’ I said, ‘No! Lemmy with an M!’ Lemmy was happy!!”)

I didn’t figure out how important the backup was until I finally saw Chuck Berry perform at Blueberry Hill with Lohr and a band custom made for Chuck’s music. The St. Louis band has a depth of talent and experience few “pickup” bands can match. “Keith Robinson, Jim Marsala, Ingrid Berry and I are old-school veterans from way back who know the Berry catalog inside out,” says Lohr. “And Butch (Chuck Jr.) has been in the band now for 8-9 years. He nails the rhythm guitar parts well and also kicks some nice lead solos when required.”



Photo by Doug Spaur

Daryl Davis also knows Berry’s catalog. Daryl was lurking on stage when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band backed Berry at the same show Springsteen describes in Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll. It was Davis’s first Chuck Berry show. He was 14 and already a big fan.

“Even though the show wasn’t to start until 8:00 p.m., I got a ride up there around noon. At that time of day, there was no backstage security, people were bringing in lights and speakers and setting the stage. So I walked on in like I belonged.”

Sneaking in—or, at least, sneaking a peak—is a proud tradition in the blues. Guitar legend Hubert Sumlin, now in his mid 70s, once fell through a window onto the stage where his future mentor Howlin’ Wolf was playing. “Let the boy stay,” said Wolf—and Sumlin pretty much did for the rest of Wolf’s life and career. Chuck Berry tells the story of watching through a window while Big Joe Turner sang at a Chicago club. B. B. King peeked through cracks and knotholes of an Indianola, Mississippi juke joint to catch a glimpse of Count Basie. I can only put myself in the company of these legends by remembering how a mean looking bouncer— a big thug of a man in a biker jacket—pitied my underage ass enough to let me stand by the open door during a Bo Diddley show.

A decade after sneaking onto the stage “as if he belonged,” Davis actually would belong, but in 1972 Davis was a stowaway. “I kept myself out of everyone’s way, but stayed near the band because that’s where I figured Chuck would go when he arrived and that way I could meet my idol.”

Davis remembers Springsteen’s band as “very friendly and excited about playing with Chuck Berry.” But he also remembered the growing tension as time dragged on without Berry’s arrival. “The promoter was trying to figure out what he would tell the crowd to keep them from causing pandemonium and how much money he would lose in refunds if Chuck didn’t show.” Jerry Lee Lewis was the co-star. “About 5 minutes before Jerry Lee finished his set, Chuck walked in the backstage door. He didn’t speak to anyone except to ask someone where the promoter was. I seem to recall that the person he asked was in fact the promoter. They walked off to the promoter’s office. I stayed on the floor on the side of the stage towards the back with the band. Chuck came out of the promoter’s office and went back outside. Within seconds he returned with his guitar. The rumor floating around backstage was that he went outside to his rental car to retrieve his guitar from the car only after the promoter paid him and he had not been paid he would have driven off.”

Springsteen, too, reported on a rumor. “I think the rumor was he would get eleven grand. At the end of the night he’d give a grand back if the band was okay and if the equipment worked.” These “rumors” about cash and contracts are regularly traded at Chuck Berry shows. Berry himself is pretty clear about it. When I saw him kick a guitarist off stage he said “It’s in the contract.” He might have done the same to Bruce Springsteen, but Bruce asked permission. “We were all really nervous,” said Springsteen. “There wasn’t supposed to be an extra guitar player, so I came up to him and I said, ‘Gee, is it okay if I play?’ And he said, “Yeah, yeah, you can play.”

Difficult man, right?

And really, would his career have been the same if he toured with a band of professionals? Would he have lasted? Would the legend have grown? Or would he have fallen into the routine monkey business of playing the same thing, every day? Isn’t risky and raggedy part of the charm? The lonely gunslinger image is what drew me to him in the first place. And think what whole generations of struggling young musicians would have lost—the opportunity to be terrified, have their hands cramp after 96 bars, and, sometimes, hit “nirvana.”

So for decades, he travelled alone, thrilled millions, and scared the bejezus out of young rock and rollers.

I asked Ronny Elliott if he had any advice for the garage band that got a chance to back up Chuck Berry at a one-nighter. I was looking for practical tips: be flexible, watch his leg, that sort of thing. But Elliot, a poet, got right to the heart of it.

“Get down on your knees and thank your God.”

(This is a book length tale of a life infected by Chuck Berry.  You can find Chapter One in the regular postings (here), or by going to the "Pages" section to the right.)

11/13/12/3:41 pm