Chapter 27 - One Last Song?

It’s May 2001—thirty years and three months since I first saw my hero under the bright lights of a stage, and more than 12 years since I saw him perform for “the last time.” My life has changed considerably. The marriage to Ama has ended. I’m a recently divorced single dad and lawyer, raising my two girls and trying cases— too pooped to pop, too old to stroll, a life of botherations and monkey business. Rebecca is still two years away. I’m at the end of a fragile, fraying piece of rope, doing the best I can. And then one morning I open the newspaper and see in a small “what’s happening” piece that Chuck Berry will fill in for an ailing Jerry Lee Lewis at the Experience Music Project in Seattle. It’s a last minute change. He’s playing that night!


A tiny spark ignites. The show is at an all-ages venue. I get tickets for myself and my two little girls, Jade and Gemma. The girls live with me. Jade is ten. She wears her hair in a shaggy afro and dresses like a boy. Gemma is seven, more girly, but with a man-sized rasp to her voice. I decide that, just once, they should see the man their father talks about so often.

The Experience Music Project, more often called the EMP, is a rock and roll museum built by billionaire Paul Allen. The building was designed by architect Frank Ghery. It’s not his best work, in part because of its location in the colorful civic jumble we call Seattle Center. The building is all curves and colors, inspired by the painted bodies of solid body electric guitars. It would have looked better set in the middle of Seattle’s staid downtown, but gets lost in the relative chaos of Seattle Center—or at least it was back when it was surrounded by roller coasters and Ferris wheels. Beyond that there may be something fundamentally wrong about putting rock and roll (or any form of music) into a museum. Rock and roll belongs in garages, clubs and gilt civic centers. But on this day I learn that the EMP is more than a museum—that it has a “club,” a great little hall called the Sky Church where real music comes alive.

We get there early and as we approach the EMP, my girls’ hands in mine, a black Lincoln Town Car exits the EMP’s underground garage and stops right in front of us. I know about the Town Car stipulation and become immediately alert. The driver’s got a captain’s hat, and he’s leaning forward, avoiding eye contact, trying to figure out which way to go. Adrenaline explodes inside me.

“That’s Chuck Berry!” I tell my kids.

The girls (properly indoctrinated) shriek, and we lurch towards the car, but no chance— Chuck is determined to get somewhere. Anyway, what the heck would I say?

He’s with another man. I wonder who it is. I’m guessing it’s some old friend or relative helping him do what he used to do alone—pack a toothbrush and a guitar and head out to one of the hundreds of one-nighters he’s done over the past half century.

The car scoots away. We watch. I’m half way thinking how I can follow it, but he’s gone. I imagine that somewhere in Seattle, some restaurant or hotel lobby is about to be visited by the great Chuck Berry. I try to imagine being in that place when the two walk in.

There is a scene in the movie “Chuck Berry- Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll” where Berry walks through an airport in his red sports coat and bolo tie, carrying his guitar, talking about how each one lasts six months (“Deductible, you know? Tools!”) Heads turn. There are little waves and moments of recognition. On board the plane the flight attendants ask for and receive a tight lipped kiss.

It’s fascinating to me: a landmark of history and culture who walks among us, doing ordinary (and sometimes pretty extraordinary) things.

Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry described once meeting Chuck Berry in an airport. “I was walking through the airport, and someone said, ‘It's Chuck Berry over there.’ Well, I had to go over and shake his hand. But he was tongue-tied. Then he was gone.” (If you get too close you know I’m gone like a cool breeze!)

But we can’t follow the Town Car today. I’ve got two little girls. We have tickets. The show starts in an hour. We want good spots. We get inside and set anchor near the stage. My younger daughter is only tall enough to see people’s butts, so she spends most of her time in my arms.

The guy behind me is an expert. “He’s paid in cash before the show,” he tells his friends.

I can’t even listen. I figure I am the biggest fan there. I have studied Chuck Berry for 30 years. I know more than all of them put together.

When it’s finally time for the show, Chuck comes out in a captain’s cap, a glittering shirt and a grumpy mood. Call it foul. The first thing he does when he gets on stage is pull all the plugs from somewhere around his feet. I don’t know why. A cool 22 year old is sent out to get the wires right while Chuck taps a very large foot.

“That’s pressure,” says the guy behind me. I have to agree this time. The kid manages, though, and the fanatic mumbles knowingly. “It’s all in the contract,” he says. “It’s got to be exactly the way he wants it.”

The second thing Chuck does is kick a dumbstruck guitarist from stage before the band plays a single note. And now Chuck Berry is sounding like the guy behind me.

“It’s in the contract!” he says, coolly. “Drums, bass and piano—that’s it.”

I feel terrible for the guitarist. He didn’t write the contract—he’s just a victim of it. The band is a decent fit—a bunch of old rockers who’ve played together for decades— but Chuck’s evidently in no mood.

Chuck reduces the bass player to three notes and a set rhythm: “ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump” and it stays that way for the rest of the night; he plays a good chunk of the show without accompaniment—silly songs like “South of the Border” and “My Ding a Ling,” and when he gets to “Wee Wee Hours,” the grown up flip side to “Maybellene,” he instructs the pianist on just how to play it, or tries to, anyway, sliding up from E to G, and then from A to C. The piano player could get the same effect with his middle finger, but he doesn’t seem to get it. Chuck shrugs.

This isn’t the Chuck Berry I remember from the 1970s, but that’s okay—it’s an interesting Chuck Berry, and I’m enjoying every minute of it. And he’s playing his first song—the one he originally brought to Chess Records, the one that came in second to “Maybellene.”

In the wee, wee hours
That’s when I think of you.

It’s a suitably sad and nostalgic song. I mouth the words as he sings.

In a wee little room

I sit alone and think of you

Chuck Berry looks down at me with tired eyes, watches me for a while, and says:

“You’re remembering somebody, aren’t you?”

Actually, no. Mainly I’m trying to absorb the music lesson and the moment. But I’m pleased he’s singled me out—that he’s noticed me in a crowd and has spoken to me. He can’t know the connection that I’ve felt since that day in Sacramento, 30 years before, the bizarrely powerful force that once took me half way up his driveway half a continent away.

When Chuck plays “My Ding-a-Ling” I’ve got seven year old Gemma in my arms a few feet from his knees. The song was his biggest hit—a funny but silly ditty full of sexual innuendo. I pretty much hate it these days. Gemma, just three or four feet from Chuck Berry, has never heard the song, but listens a while, then blurts in her uniquely gravelly voice: “He’s singing about his penis!”

Even this doesn’t get a smile out of Chuck Berry on this crabby evening.

I’ve heard he can be ill humored. I never saw it during a show until now. Carl Perkins, who toured England with Berry in 1964, said that Chuck was changed by his early 1960 prison sentence on trumped up charges of violating the Mann Act.

My brother-in-law, a smart man knowledgeable about music once told me: “He doesn’t give a shit. He doesn’t even tune his guitar!”

It’s a sentiment I’ve heard often. Keith Richards says something like it in “Chuck Berry- Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

And maybe they’re right—maybe he doesn’t care.

But he keeps doing it—playing for people, playing songs they need to hear, working them into at least a small frenzy before he lets go and heads back to the car.

At the EMP he doesn’t seem to care much about anything except the contract— until, like magic, he perks up, the songs take life and flight, and the notes start flowing. He’s like a surfer who has suddenly caught the big wave. The guitar strings snap, the old licks come alive, he’s grinning, he’s crackling, he laughs and makes faces. The crowd goes crazy, jumping and screaming for this 74 year old in a captain’s hat, inventor of rock guitar and rock poetry, grumpy genius, occasional felon, and father of us all. It don’t take— or last— but a few minutes, but it’s good. And then, before we know it, it’s the closer “House Lights,” the guitar notes as full throated as a railroad air horn or a Ford V-8, ringing familiarly as he backs off stage, still playing, driving us wild with an energy and sound that hasn’t faded at all in 40 years, doing it better at 74 than all the younger folk on stage, and ready to disappear into the night with his guitar, his towel, and the black Town Car, back to the airport or some airport hotel, and ultimately, back to his home, gone.

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