Chapter 29 -

(Wherein various people trace their lineage to the Father of Rock and Roll.  And Vice Versa.)

Outside the temperature was below zero with a stinging wind, but I felt energized and elated.  There was a bit of craziness in the air after the show.  Some people I didn’t know offered me a ride—I don’t know why—then changed their minds.  I called my sister Ann and told her where I was and what I’d just seen.  It was late, and too cold to walk, so I went back inside and asked the bartender to call a cab.  

I could feel, already, that something had reignited.  I was in love with Chuck Berry again.  I was 52, but felt like I was 15 or 16, and just as inarticulate.  “You’re still my hero.”  I’d met him again, presumably for the last time, and that was all I could say.  But I forgave myself.  I was happy.

The hotel had a Tudor theme, with oak paneling and armor.  The “tavern” was still open.  There were armchairs and a fireplace.  I got a glass of wine.

One of the things I treasured about the evening was the simple fact that Chuck Berry was still there, on stage at 82, with his guitar playing loud.

About a year earlier my mother had died.  She was 92— 10 or 11 years older than Chuck Berry.  My mother had been an athlete, but in her late 80s her bones dried up and sometimes broke, her body gave out, and she spent her last couple of years sitting or lying near a window.  She was a private person and hated having to rely on nurses and aides at her assisted living facility, but she had to and did it with patience and kindness.  Once I asked her if life was still worth living.  She told me that it was.  We noticed that her focus became smaller but more intense.  She was delighted by whatever small things happened to be available.  In her high rise apartment she watched evening traffic back up on an arc of freeway a mile or so away.  She liked the contrast between the white headlights and the red taillights.  When they moved her to a bleak hospital room she watched filthy pigeons that gathered outside her window.  Happily they found her a temporary place more like an apartment.  It was not in a high rise.  She was on the ground floor.  But it allowed a glimpse of the garden, trees and clouds.  She became interested in a family that lived across the street.  She watched television, too: a goofy long haired violinist from Ireland, baseball, golf.  A harpist came to the room to play for her.  She loved that, too.  When they moved her one last time it probably killed her.  She was hurt and never quite recovered.  But she watched the leaves outside her window while we spoke with visitors from hospice.  I was on a business trip when she began to fail.  The staff at her home reached me at the Detroit airport.  She lived until I got home.  I found her hardly breathing, surrounded by family.

Her death was different than my dad’s.    There was nothing incomplete in our relationship.  She lived until I was middle-aged, with kids of my own.  She met and loved my new wife.  She was fast friends with my youngest, Rafferty.  My girls sat with her at her deathbed.  Even at the very end she’d listen if I had problems at home or with one of the kids.  She didn’t say much, but it helped.  She’d lived through worse.  She’d lost Stevo.  But she’d lived, right to the end.  

So it was powerful and comforting, after her loss, to find my childhood hero on stage at age 82, rocking a small house with the songs that he created.  It was powerful and comforting to find I still had an old person in my life.

I went home and wrote a recap of the trip and the show for Berry’s website.  Chuck’s son Charles, and keyboardist Bob Lohr both responded.  Charles had even seen Rafferty’s drawing.  “I was wondering who drew that picture,” he wrote.  I was happy to know it wasn’t left on the floor next to the folding chair—that it made it far enough to be wondered about.  Rafferty taught me something.  He and his sisters often do.

For a time I was a regular contributor to the Chuck Berry website, but one day I was surprised to find myself locked out.  I couldn’t log on, couldn’t post, and everything I had posted earlier was gone.  Because I’m prone to internal dialogue and paranoia, I first took it personally.  I fantasized that whatever power ran the site had banished me for some misstep.  I imagined Chuck Berry himself steaming over something I had written.  “What does he mean my fingers don’t work like they used to?  His presence is obnoxious to me!”

Delusion is a difficult thing.  There was much gnashing of teeth.

(Years later, a family member told me about her struggles with a computer.  She didn’t ask for help because she feared she would be mocked.  “Most of the unpleasant encounters I have,” she told me in an e-mail, “take place entirely in my head.”)

   

I was so chagrined about my imagined excommunication I figured out how to contact Charles.  “I hope that I didn’t do or say anything to insult your father,” I told him.  He told me that all new members of the “message board” had been accidentally knocked off.  It was an effort to lock out spammers.  It took a while to fix.  But one day my old posts were back. 

By then I’d started something new.

It began simply.  During a trip to Mexico an American family showed us their family blog.  I was impressed.  I’d never really known what “blogging.”   The family showed me words and pictures online and said it was easy.  So one day I spent an hour setting up a site and posted the story of my first Chuck Berry concert.  

The more I typed, the more I had to say.  I found that to write about Chuck Berry I had to write about my own life and my family.  I’d never thought much about Stevo’s role in my life.  I saw for the first time how Stevo’s offhand remark had affected my life on a daily basis for nearly 40 years. 

For a time I was prolific.  I posted two or three times a day.  Blogging suited me.  There is nothing fastidious about it.  I had a lot to say, and I threw up everything I could find— old or new videos, reviews, photos.  And once or twice a week I added a short post or essay that talked about my personal history with Chuck Berry or his significance to me.  It was therapy. 

It was also an education.  I finally looked up the word “calaboose,” used in the song “No Particular Place to Go,” and learned that it’s a small, country jail, and that you can find one just north of St. Louis.  (It also rhymes beautifully with “still tryin’ to get her belt unloose.”)  

I’d get on a topic and flesh it out as best I could.  For a while I got interested in Chuck Berry’s sidemen—the incredible musicians from St. Louis and Chicago who helped him make records.  I’d known a couple names—Johnnie Johnson, of course, and Willie Dixon, Ebby Hardy and Fred Bellow.  But now I started looking deeper and to see what I could learn about musicians like drummer Odie Payne and pianists Lafayette Leake and Otis Span.  

One of my first “interviews” was of boogie-woogie piano virtuoso and lawyer “Boogie Bob” Baldori.  Baldori backed Berry in dozens and dozens of concerts and on the albums “Back Home” and “San Francisco Dues.”  The interview was done by e-mail but read like a thoughtful conversation, with insights about Chuck Berry as a person, a mentor, a showman, and a businessman.

Baldori’s interview was the first of a trio featuring Chuck Berry’s latter day pianists.  Chuck’s St. Louis collaborator, Bob Lohr, another piano playing lawyer, also agreed to an interview, providing equally articulate responses.  My readership bumped up a notch.  

Then one day my brother told me he was thinking about seeing Chuck Berry at B. B. King’s club in New York.  I posted a query on Berry’s website asking who’d be backing Chuck at the event.  CBII responded that it would be “the amazing Daryl Davis.”  I found a clip of Davis standing at an electric keyboard at what looked to be a private party.  Davis weaved history into his performance, telling the crowd how Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey each claimed to have authored a boogie-woogie that was really written by Pine Top Smith and later played by Pinetop Perkins.  (Smith began working on the piece at a house party in St. Louis.)  I contacted Davis and asked if he’d do an interview.  He agreed.  I sent him a half a page of questions.  A day or two later, I got answers that ran a dozen single spaced pages.  

The generosity of these musicians surprised and thrilled me.  Each of them took time to respond thoughtfully.  They seemed to want people to know more about the Chuck Berry they knew—that he isn’t the “truculent” or “difficult” man of so many media stories.  They described a mentor and friend, someone who’s witty, fair, and fun to work for.  “Chuck is the best cat I've ever played for by a long shot,” said Bob Lohr.  “He's always treated me with a ton of respect— essentially like one of his family.”  Lohr added that “Chuck is an extremely funny guy onstage.   He'll come over and start talking to me during the show— he'll get me laughing so hard I've almost fallen off the piano stool a couple of times.  Can't tell you what he said, though.”  Baldori said that “Deep down he's one of the nicest, most humble, gracious guys you will ever meet.”  

Daryl Davis often got past the public man to stories about small moments.  When I asked about an appearance at the Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival in 2010, Davis wrote about a detour through Washington, D.C.  “This guy had not been there in over 50 years but still knew the area and was telling me about what was on which corner and little tidbits of information. Sure enough, when we turned down the street, everything he had said was accurate.  He pointed out the rooming house where he would stay because in those days, Blacks couldn’t stay in the White hotels.  He had named a bar next door to the Howard where the entertainers would hang out.  Sure enough, there it was.  It had since changed names but it was still the same bar in the same building.”

I’d get a chance to meet Davis when he taught at the Centrum acoustic blues workshop in Port Townsend, Washington.  I went to one of the shows that end the workshop and saw Daryl do a powerful performance of boogie-woogie.  For a time he played nothing but his left hand, showing how the boogie part of boogie-woogie sounds when played by Ray Charles, or Little Richard, or Fats, or Jerry Lee Lewis.  That one hand pummeling the bass notes was enough to shake the room.

I got to meet Bob Lohr, too.  I got an e-mail from Lohr telling me he was in town with his wife and suggesting we “kick it.”  I’d only “met” him through short e-mails and my interview.  I wasn’t sure how to entertain a blues musician.  He asked about bar-b-cue, so I told him about good place for ribs and fried chicken and we agreed to meet up later.  Bob wasn’t interested in bars, so we went to my house where my mother’s old Baldwin Baby Grand piano sat like a giant Bob Lohr magnet.  In the wee hours of the morning he began playing “Wee Wee Hours.”  “This is how Johnny Johnson would do it,” he said, then shifted gears.  “Otis Spann might play it like this!”  Rafferty and Rebecca were sleeping upstairs.  Ah well.  My daughter Gemma, who’d just learned her first blues on the piano, came down to investigate.  God knows what our neighbors thought, but they probably heard it.  The house was shaking.  Bob wasn’t playing the mushy, weak sort of “blues” I manage on the piano (I think of Chuck, describing the difference between “blues” and “Ba-lues”)—Bob was pounding the keys at 2:00 am, celebrating that piano’s centennial with the first real music it had felt in more than 40 years.  He kept apologizing that he wasn’t “used to” acoustics anymore.  He fooled me.  CBII says that the performances at Blueberry Hill are like having Chuck Berry play in your basement.  A key part of that show happened right in my living room.

As I drove back him across town to the house where he was staying we talked a bit about Chuck Berry.  He told me about a show where Chuck had introduced his son, Charles, and then his longtime bass player, Jim Marsala, who is white.  “He’s my other son.  Don’t know what happened!”  It was an old joke, told often.  But then Chuck looked at Bob.  “You’re my son, too, Robert.”

Lohr is a huge guy, too tall to fit in my car, a hardened, white-haired, no nonsense blues musician who grew up “dodging bullets” in East St. Louis and who has hung and played with more blues greats than most of us will see in our lifetimes.  But when he tells this story he is a kid, and solemn.

“You’re my son, too, Robert.”  

That would do it.  That’s what, in my heart, I wanted when I stalled my car on private property. 

I’ve seen it bring a man to tears.  

Three years and a month after my first visit to Blueberry Hill, when Chuck Berry was 85 years old, I had a chance to stand with him in a hallway and discuss a picture taken of him when he was a child.  I was totally absorbed in the drama of my own brief contact with the man.  When he and his party pushed through the door for the parking lot I turned to see a middle-aged factory worker from Iowa push a tear from his eye.  

“What a softy!” I said.

Doug and I had met for the first time two days prior at Blueberry Hill.  Although we hadn’t met in person before that, Doug and I knew each other from chuckberry.com and through e-mails.  Call us “pen pals.”  Doug was one of the first people to whom I sent the link to my blog, and he became one of its most loyal readers.  We arranged to meet up, and then to drive to Memphis together.  Although we’re as different as can be in many ways, and though I sometimes have trouble bringing new people into my life, I had no problem spending hours on the road with Doug, talking about families, jobs, and, of course, Chuck Berry.  After touring a couple of the Memphis studios, eating ribs on Beale Street, visiting the Lorraine Motel and catching a set at B. B. King’s, we drove back in time for a second Chuck Berry show at a casino just across the river from St. Louis in Illinois.  My wife Rebecca came for the casino show.  Bob Lohr had arranged backstage passes for the three of us, and thus my brief interaction with Chuck Berry in the hallway, which I wrote about on my blog.

A day or so later my wife and I were driving.  I think she wanted to point out a flaw in my reporting.

“Doug seemed really moved when Chuck Berry said that.”

“Said what?” I asked.

“When he called Doug his son,” she said.

It turns out that while I was lost in my own reverie, or perhaps talking to one of the other people in the room, Charles had introduced his father to Doug.  They talked, and then Chuck turned around, pointed to Doug, and said “This is my other son.  Don’t know what happened!”

I remember driving towards Wentzville with my silly childhood fantasy somehow still partially and irrationally intact—that deeply seated, poorly understood desire to enter the world of my hero, to see him in a more private moment, to be recognized as his child.  

Turns out it’s Doug.  And Bob.  And Jimmy Marsala.

And maybe, in some small way, that’s what we all are, whole generations of us, and Chuck Berry knows it.  “All my beautiful children,” he used to say.  

Just like my mom.  

(This is part of If You Get Too Close, a book length piece about how one life was affected by the Art and Rock and Roll of Chuck Berry.  To start at the very beginning, click HERE.)

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