Chapter 23 - I Say but yet I Wonder

(This is part of a book length piece on Chuck Berry and his influence on MY life.  You can find the first chapters to right, or the later chapters below.)

I’ve always know there was a time when I lost interest in Chuck Berry.  I’m sure it has something to do with Stevo’s death.  But from this distance it’s equally obvious that there was a time Chuck Berry lost interest in himself, and that had to be part of it, too.  

I understood that things were fading when I finally listened to the 1975 album, “Chuck Berry,” his last with Chess Records.   I was living in Italy and bought my copy while visiting my friend Greg in Paris.    He lived in a cold water garret painted garish green and dirtied by years of soot on the top floor of a building on Avenue Victor Hugo that, on lower floors, housed rich women in furs.  One night, after all the regular shops were closed, we were hunting for a bottle of wine.  We drank the cheapest, rankest stuff, (we used our math skills to calculate alcohol content per franc), but the only store open late in Greg’s quartier was a flashy place called “Le Drugstore” where cheap stuff would not be found.  It was supposedly modeled on the American notion of a drugstore, but not Rasco Tempo or any American drugstore I had ever seen.  Le Drugstore was very 1970s and very Champs Elysee, with chrome and glass, perfume, and large, unfrosted light bulbs.  But Le Drugstore had a record rack, and I did then what I always do: I searched the rack for Chuck Berry.  And there it was: a new album, black, with pale green neon lights on the front cover spelling his name.  

It should have been an omen to me.  The six layers of neon lights on the front cover didn’t seem to be lit.  They faded into the distance as coolly as an icy Frigidaire, without color, fire or excitement.  I would blame the art director, Neil Terk, but he was responsible for my favorite Chuck Berry album cover—the glorious Golden Decade, Volume 3, where Chuck appears as a grease-stained sheet metal cutout of a service station attendant, bolted to a rack of oil, and pointing to a can.  That was in the 1973 heyday, when his ding-a-ling was charting and Chuck Berry records were selling briskly.  By 1975 the records were moving more slowly, and Chess, was a hot potato in the hands of the uncaring GRT Corporation.  Maybe GRT refused to pop for an electrician.  

I bought it even though I had no record player.  My only musical device in Europe was a $12 cassette deck 700 miles away in Italy.  But I didn’t leave new Chuck Berry records in the store, so I bought it and, months later, when I finally got back in the U.S.A., I put the album on my record player, listened, and thought: 

(half-hearted raspberry sound.)  

It just didn’t do it for me.  

I’ve still got it, 37 years later, the cover bent and scuffed, its vinyl grooves worn smooth despite my disappointment. I listened more than I remember.

But I still don’t like it.  

I remember in the store wondering where the Chuck Berry songs were.  I like to hear Berry interpret other people’s work.  His covers of “Time Was,” “Mean Old World,” “Love in ¾ Time,” “House of Blue Lights,” “Cottage for Sale” and “I’m Through With Love” are some of my favorite things.  But the best Chuck Berry songs are Chuck Berry songs, and on the album called “Chuck Berry” there aren’t many Chuck Berry songs.  Even one of the “Chuck Berry” songs isn’t a “Chuck Berry” song!  “Don’t You Lie to Me” is credited to Berry, but Tampa Red recorded it 35 years earlier.

Worse, there is something flat about the sound.  It’s not “tinny” like the Mercury LPs, but it’s clinical, with something dead in the mix.  “Sound” is a huge part of what makes Chuck Berry Chuck Berry, and what made Chess Chess.  Chuck Berry is about being there, live.  The sound on his best records is rich, deep and alive, full of echo and reverb and bass, with drums that pound and a guitar that has an electric spark to it.  The distortion is real—from an amp turned up a little too loud, and atop it all a piano rippling over the highest keys.  Here the distortion on the extra guitar sounds phony.  The drums are drab.  The bass is boring.  Despite this (or perhaps because of this) the album features some of Chuck Berry’s wildest singing ever.  Berry’s usual vocals are cool and crisp.  Here he channels Little Richard.  There’s a hint of desperation when he exhorts a well known keyboard player to “sing” over and over, but the piano, refusing to be hurried, just keeps clip-clopping along like a Clydesdale.  On my old vinyl copy even Chuck Berry’s usually full throated guitar sounds chintzy and weak.  

So in the late 1970s I drifted away.

At record stores I turned to serious jazz—Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk, Ben Webster, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, most of it older than Chuck’s music.  I still loved the blues.  I saw B. B. King a couple of times.  Chicago slide guitar great J.B. Hutto was in Seattle for a time.  Clifton Chenier came to town.  I saw Bobby Bland and Bo Diddley do casino shows at a Lake Tahoe lounge.  

As for Chuck Berry, I saw him now and then on late night talk shows where he usually performed uninspired renditions, but that’s about it.  But what interests me now is how deep the obsession remained.  He bored me.  He seemed to bore himself.  But when I saved up some money and took off across the country in my Fiat, the road led indirectly but inevitably to Chuck Berry’s home in Wentzville.  

It was a strange, solitary, no frills road trip.  I survived on cheap breakfasts, canned beans, and hamburgers.  In 1978 McDonalds were just opening along the interstate, killing off the little roadside cafes I used to like.  I didn’t care.  I’d get a Big Mac for a dollar, gas up for another five, and drive.  I spent most nights reclined in the driver’s seat or shivering in a little tent.  Some days I spent 23 hours in the front seat of the Fiat.  

In Sheridan, Wyoming it was snowing when I sought out a cheap motel.  I found one for $12.  I offered $8.  The clerk told me, with menace and a smile, that I’d have to stay at a “cowboy motel.”  I had immediate, disturbing visions of physical and sexual assault, but pushed on, driving icy roads to the next town where I found a crumbier hotel for the same $12.  My hero (known to sleep in his car, eat canned beans, and stay at a dive hotels) found me in that night in Buffalo, Wyoming.  According to my journal “I sat fearfully on the bed and watched Chuck Berry and the Sonics on a broken TV set suspended from the ceiling.”  By then the Seattle SuperSonics, on a championship run, were more interesting to me than another tired performance of “Johnny B. Goode” or “Memphis.” But I watched. 

  

And I plugged on, bound for the Promised Land and for disappointment.  My broken down old ragged Fiat—reasonably new, but nonetheless a Fiat— gave me trouble in five different states.  It died the first time in Waukegan, Illinois, north of Chicago.  I got it towed and took an evening train into the city.  The American Youth Hostel directory listed a YMCA on the near south side where rooms were $4.32.  I stood at the front desk for half an hour.  It was a brief but useful exercise in prejudice.  A desk clerk approached now and again to ask what I wanted.  “A room,” I answered, and he’d turn away.  I wasn’t going anywhere.   Finally, a kinder fellow gave me a key. 

For the first time on my trip I was in Chuck Berry country.  I know now that my YMCA was half a mile from the South Michigan Avenue studio where my hero cut many of his records, but I didn’t know then and I didn’t go, nor did I visit any of the blues clubs that were still there, still real.  

I travelled as far north as Montreal, and then back south, through New England, and met my mom and sister in New York City.  We had lunch atop the twin towers and saw “Chorus Line” and “For Colored Girls” (written by Chuck Berry’s one-time next door neighbor, Ntozake Shange, born on his birthday seven years before “Maybellene.”)

Then I started motoring west.  I drove straight through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and into Missouri.  It was unseasonably hot and the marathon drive wasn’t good for my car.  After stalling and losing brakes in St. Louis, I continued west and pulled off the freeway in Wentzville.  

Wentzville is a tiny place on Highway 61, due north of the Clarksdale, Mississippi crossroads where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul in exchange for virtuosity on the guitar.  I first read about Wentzville and Berry Park years prior in Ramparts magazine.  The piece was by writer/musician Michael Lydon, who’d gone there for an interview.  Lydon found the great Chuck Berry hoeing weeds.  Instead of giving an interview, Berry escorted Lydon back to his car, returned the entrance fee, and uttered words that have stuck in my mind ever since I first read them 40 years ago:

“Standing in the sun ain’t my shot, so.”

It is a cold line for a hot day— one I’ve mouthed silently a thousand times since.  Like me, Lydon had travelled thousands of miles hoping for a moment with Berry.  He’d been spurned twice in San Francisco.  This meeting had been arranged, but so what?  

If you get too close you know I’m gone! 

Though no breeze that day, just heat.  

“Standin’ in the sun ain’t my shot, so.”  

And then he left.  

Lydon went on to write a respectful piece that I consider the single best essay ever written about my hero, later republished in Lydon’s book Rock Folk.  But if Lydon got the cold shoulder, what would happen to me—a scruffy kid in a broken down old ragged car?  

I found the Park, the little Fiat died, the lady came out, I uttered foolish words.  And then I pushed my overheated little car back out the driveway to let it cool in the heat of a dying day.

That was it for Chuck Berry for a while.  

Then, sometime in 1979, I went into Peaches records on 45^th Street and saw the album “Rockit.”  I bought it.  I played it.  And I did something you could only do at Peaches.

I returned it.

Maybe I was still feeling the effects of vapor lock and rejection at Wentzville.  On reflection, 30 years later, I admit that “Rockit” is a good enough record.  I could have enjoyed it.  I sort of like it now.

But in 1979, I didn’t care, and I wouldn’t really care again for a long time. 

   

(This is part of a book length piece, all of which you can find in this blog, free!)

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