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

Chapter 26 - Down Beneath the Counter

(This is part of a book length piece on Chuck Berry.  You can find the prologue and early chapters to the right.  The later chapters are down below this one.)  

If Chuck Berry is your imaginary friend you might experience a certain degree of chagrined embarrassment.  Before I left for Africa, he went to prison for tax fraud.  I cringed a little.  A few years after I got back the tabloids published discretely masked Polaroids of him standing naked with various young women.  I cringed again.  I saw a couple of them.  They were not sexy.  They looked like American Gothic, without the pitchfork or the overalls, Chuck and his girls standing straight and staring at the camera.

In his book he says he makes a big mistake every 15 years.  He calls them his “naughty naughties.”  Add the occasional grumpiness, some personality quirks, a few urban legends and internet rumors, and you find yourself with a hero who makes you blush.  No one remembers John Lennon’s foibles but they know about Chuck Berry’s, both real and imaginary.  One night a charming and refined 70 year old woman had dinner at our house.  At some point I was forced to admit that “I am a big Chuck Berry fan.”  The woman lit up.  “I love Chuck Berry!” she said.  Then she leaned closer and whispered.  “I hear that he likes to watch women shit.”

Chuck Berry (and Jim Marsala!) perform at Lompoc Prison

I don’t know or care about that or his fetishes, real, imagined, or mythical.  I didn’t care about the taxes.  If they tried and convicted all of America’s tax cheats our prisons would burst with corporate giants.  I was vaguely pleased to know he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes because it meant he was doing well.  As for the bizarre documentation of his life on the road, it made strange sense to me.  In the late 1950s he had been arrested twice, put on trial three times, convicted, and had served more than a year in prison for violating the Mann Act by consorting with young women.  I figured the Polaroids were just photographic evidence these women (1) looked old enough, and (2) were consenting participants.  

The Mann Act was originally called The White Slave Trade Act.  It made it a crime to transport women across state lines "for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose."  Convictions under the Mann Act are historically rare and were often politically or racially motivated.  The African American boxer Jack Johnson was convicted under the Act for travelling with a white prostitute.  Charles Chaplin, labeled a Bolshevik by J. Edgar Hoover, was arrested under the Act for having an affair with a young actress from another state.  And then there is Chuck Berry.  It’s clear that various powers in Missouri were irritated by the success of a young black man and wanted to teach him manners.  One of his arrests was for crossing from Kansas to Missouri with a white girl in his car.  At trial, the girl testified that she loved him, and Chuck was acquitted.  He wasn’t so lucky the next time.  He brought a girl from El Paso, Texas to work in his club.  The consensus was that she looked like an adult and claimed to be one.  Chuck said he wanted to help her out and learn Spanish for his songs.  Whatever.  He gave her a job as a hat check girl.  Later he tried to put her on a bus home to El Paso, but she jumped off and was arrested for working as a prostitute elsewhere.  Down went Chuck Berry.  The judge at his first trial was so openly racist that the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reluctantly tossed the conviction, but they got him the second time and he went to prison for more than a year.

It wasn’t the first time he was incarcerated.  In his book he writes about a youthful crime spree.  Berry and his friends used a broken gun to rob stores in Kansas City, and then, when their car died, took someone else’s.  Being young and dumb they let their victim escape near a pay phone.  They were arrested a couple miles down the road. 

The teenaged Berry went to jail, became a trustee, did some painting work, formed a musical quartet, and tried amateur boxing.  When he went to prison in 1961 he studied business, typing, business law and enough general subjects to complete his high school degree.  He must have practiced, too.  He wrote a couple of great songs and came out bigger than ever.  When he went to prison in the late 1970s for tax evasion he used the time to finish his Autobiography, thus bringing to pass what had been written:

Blond haired, good lookin’

Tryin’ to get me hooked

Wants me to marry, get a home,

Settle down, write a book.

(The first sentence of his Autobiography acknowledges his gratitude to Francine Gillium, the blond haired, good looking secretary who was, at times, mistaken for his wife, and encouraged Berry’s efforts with the book.)

Although Berry has never relished talking about his criminal convictions, he wrote extensively and honestly about them in his Autobiography.  The author Bruce Pegg documented the trials in his book Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry.  Between the two books, you get a sense of what happened.  It’s clear that he “deserved” jail twice, for robbery and tax evasion, (whether he deserved the long sentence he got as a youthful first offender is a different story), and didn’t deserve to be prosecuted or convicted under The Mann Act.  

The crimes don’t particularly bother me.  He was a kid when he committed the only truly serious one.  He paid his taxes.  He did his time.  

More problematic, for me, is the story about his restaurant in Wentzville—the probable source of my elderly friend’s remark that he likes to watch women on the toilet.  I don’t know if it’s true or not true, but it’s disturbing.

It starts as a wonderful thing.  

Way back in 1944, on the way to his teenage crime spree in Kansas, Chuck and friends stop at the Southern Aire Restaurant in Wentzville.  They aren’t allowed inside.  They eat from paper plates at the back door.   Then, decades later, he buys the place.  I see him on the Johnny Carson show inviting the world to his restaurant.  He seems happy.  He promises to be there most nights.  I want to go.

But something awful happens.    There’s a confusing string of allegations from a couple of disgruntled former employees.  They say he’s a drug dealer.  Cops descend on Berry Park and tear it apart looking for drugs but find little of consequence, and certainly no signs of drug dealing.  No charges are filed against Berry, but a lawsuit emerges charging that Berry hid cameras in the women’s room of the Southern Aire Restaurant.  The principal plaintiff is a woman who used to work there.  There are no criminal charges, and the lawsuit is eventually settled. 

I’ve read Bruce Pegg’s account with as much attention as I could manage.  The affair is so tawdry I find it difficult to read.  I’ve never figured out whether or not the allegations have a basis in truth.  I don’t want to know.  In my heart of hearts, I assume the worst.

I don’t care much about the private life of my imaginary friend.  But I remember an old interview where he used Berry Park as the setting for a parable.  If you are alone in the Park, he said, you can do what you want, but if there are others there, you have to respect them.  They key, he said, is not to infringe on others.

If those hidden cameras in fact existed, they were obviously an infringement.  So who knows?  Without evidence, I go ahead and assume the worst.  It’s the worst I know of him, and it’s basically just pathetic.  

Once, not long ago, I picked up a biography of Elvis Presley for $3.  As a Chuck Berry fan I always resented the man people called “The King,” but I’m trying to get past it.  I never read the book, but I skimmed bits here and there at bedtime.  And that’s how I see it: 

“Few of the girls knew about the two-way mirror he had installed in the swimming pool cabana that served as a ladies’ dressing room.”  

See, there is the problem.  No one knows about the two way mirrors at Elvis’s place—it’s a short paragraph in a 700 page book—but a similar story about Chuck is all over the internet and was the subject of a major lawsuit.

Do I care?  If it’s true, I do.  

It fits.  He likes video.  He likes technical stuff.  He likes documentation. 

He’s a carpenter, a painter, and does his own work.  It might be true, so let’s assume the worst.  

Does it affect me?  Yes, more than the criminal convictions.

 Does it affect how I feel about him?  I guess it does.  It makes me sorry and uncomfortable—assuming it’s true.

But for me, as stupid as it sounds, he’s family.  I accept him as he is, with any faults and failures.  What else can I do?  He’s a second dad to me.

Which raises an interesting issue: my real father never did anything bizarre or unseemly— he just had a common addiction, and fell apart way too soon.  

So I’ve got work to do.



(This is part of a book length piece on Chuck Berry.  You can find the beginning to the right, or scroll down to find the next chapter.)

25

Chapter 30 - Such a Sight to See (Chuck Berry at The Pageant in St. Louis, October, 2010)

Until my first Blueberry Hill show I’d been in a sort of remission.  After that show I was infested again, stage three.  But now it had little to do with the music.  Even though he’s got a better band now, Chuck Berry can’t top what I saw and heard in the early 1970s.  But as I sat at Blueberry Hill and waited for him to appear I realized that I was waiting for just that: an apparition.  I knew that my imaginary friend and idol would take human form, that he’d walk on stage with a scratched guitar and frayed pants and stand just a few feet away, as real as anything.  He might even gaze at me for a time, or speak to me, or acknowledge me.  And in fact, he did.  It was reassuring to remember that the person who loomed so large in my thoughts and imagination was also flesh and bone and wears ancient polyester.

There is something almost religious about it, and Chuck Berry knows it.  “I’m not an oldies act,” he said when he turned 75.  “The music I play, it is a ritual, something that matters to people in a special way.  I wouldn’t want to interfere with that.”

So in October 2010, I go to St. Louis again.  There will be two shows, one at The Pageant, and one at Blueberry Hill.  Rebecca, an actor, is in rehearsals and can’t join me.  My two younger kids wouldn’t be allowed into Blueberry Hill.  My elder daughter, Jade, is about to become a mom, so she’s not going anywhere for a while.  But my brother Paul and his wife Liz agree to meet me in St. Louis.  Paul spent time in Missouri as a kid.  Liz grew up bopping to Jimmy Reed.  I find it odd but wonderful that they are willing to join me on my eccentric pilgrimage.  I have plans to tour St. Louis looking for the landmarks of my hero’s past.  I want to see the houses and neighborhoods where he grew up, and the clubs where he played.  Paul and Liz are game, as long as they can get in a few games of golf between times. 

We arrive on separate flights.  I text Bob Lohr that we are in town and he invites us to a 3:00 pm sound check.  It’s already 2:00 when we speed off towards The Pageant in the rental car.

We’re staying at the Moonrise Hotel, next door to The Pageant, and a few blocks east of Blueberry Hill.  All three establishments are owned by Chuck Berry’s friend Joe Edwards.  We check in and head quickly to The Pageant, but it’s locked up tight, so we stroll up Delmar towards Blueberry Hill, thinking the sound check is not in the cards.  Then I check my phone and find four or five voice mails from Lohr beginning with a polite tone, then increasingly emphatic.  (The last is something like “get your asses down here, we need to start!”)  We hurry back and find Bob waiting on the east side of the building.  He hands us passes and we follow him through a side door and onto the stage.

The interior of The Pageant is stunning— a simple but beautiful space with a dance floor in front of the stage, raised seating at tables all around that, and a U shaped balcony.  Every seat appears to be a good one, and there’s a dance floor in the front.  That’s where I intend to be.

As we stand there, I begin to realize that my blog, which at times I feel silly about, is bringing me closer and closer to where I wanted to be as a child.  A few months before Lohr was in my living room.  Now I’ve got a backstage pass.  It’s possible that later in the evening I’ll be able to meet Chuck Berry again.  This time I’ve learned from Rafferty.  I’ve got a gift for him, a copy of the drawing I made when I was 17, the one of him as a child from the cover of “Bio.”  It’s framed.  I don’t want an autograph—I want to give something back.

I feel pretty lucky.  

I wave at CBII.  I’ve never met him in person, but we’ve communicated a bit.  He’s busy but waves back.  Chuck’s long time bass player and de facto musical director, Jim Marsala, comes and welcomes us.  I’m surprised to learn that he remembers an e-mail I sent him.  I introduce myself to Keith Robinson, telling him that he’s the best drummer I’ve seen play with Chuck Berry.  

Most of the sound check is done individually, but before they finish they invite Thomas Einarson, a musician visiting from Sweden, to fill the spot Chuck Berry's guitar will take later in the show.  Eainarson is a commited Chuck Berry fan.  His band, "Bad Sign," has opened for Chuck Berry at Blueberry Hill.  He is also one of the rare individuals to be trusted with Chuck Berry's guitar.  I'm hoping he'll pull it out, but instead he uses a Fender to play some very authentic licks.  It's a nice moment.

Lohr tells us that the “all access” passes will get us into the hall as soon as the bar opens at 5.  We get back early and enter through the stage door.  It’s a curious feeling when the guards wave us through.

The Pageant is empty.  We find places at a bar about 30 feet from center stage with a direct sight line over the dance floor.   A waiter or bouncer approaches.  He seems annoyed.  

“I don’t know how you got in, but we’re not open,” he says, with authority.  

We flash our “all access” badges.  “I’m sorry,” he says, and leaves us in our majesty.  

And then, finally, it starts.  I’m not at the bar anymore—I’m up front, as close as I can manage to get to the center microphone.  The man next to me has brought his son from Georgia for the show.  To my left, at a table near the dance floor, is a large contingent of Berrys.  (I see Chuck Berry’s wife, whom I recognize from her brief, stunned appearance in the film “Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll.”)  I like that the hometown audience is more racially mixed than the other Chuck Berry shows I’ve seen over the last 40 years.  

Two girls too cute to be a minute over 17 are craning their necks, searching the wings for Chuck’s grandson.  I suspect they are cousins or school chums.  A lot of young hipsters are there, and a lot of old folk.  A mother pushes two other high school girls—sweet little sixteens— into a position next to me.  

Joe Edwards and a co-owner of The Pageant come out to make the introduction.  There’s a giant birthday cake, but it’s for the theater, not Chuck.  (The Pageant is ten years old this evening; Chuck will be 84 the next day.)  The band stands ready.  And then here comes Chuck Berry, black slacks, a glittering red shirt, an admiral’s cap and that scratched up, taped up old guitar.  He grabs Edward’s hand and pulls him close.  Edwards walks off, grinning, and a Chuck Berry show begins.

How often has this happened?  There’s no authoritative or complete listing of the shows he has performed in his 60 years as a professional.  Author Morten Reff lists as many of the international shows as he could find and it is a bigger number than I care to count—well over 500.  But I can make some reasonable (and I think reasonably conservative) estimates.  Let’s assume that from 1955 until 1961 he did an average of 200 shows a year.  That makes 1200.  Let’s say that from 1963 until 1971 he worked a little harder—say 225 a year.  That’s another 1800.  Then comes his “Ding a Ling” and even more work—let’s say 750 shows over three years.  We’re up to 3750.  Then let it cruise at 125 shows a year for the next 10 years.  That’s probably conservative, but it’s now 1986, and we’re at 5250 shows.  But he’s only 60 and still going strong.  Let’s assume 100 shows a year until he turns 70, 75 a year until 75, 50 a year till he turns 80, and then slow him down to something like 25 shows a year when he enters his 80s.  By my reasonably well educated (and carefully manipulated) fantasy count we’re at 7000 shows and counting.

It’s guesswork on my part, but you get the idea.  The man worked.  This isn’t someone who plays golf 300 days a year and then regroups for a tour every ten years to refill the coffers.  If there’s nothing else you take from this reading, take this: the man worked, and still does.

So here I am, at show 7001, and I know, from the first notes, that it will be special. Tonight, on the eve of his 84^th birthday, Chuck Berry is young again.  His eyes shine.  His look is devilish.  His guitar intros are perfect.  He is hitting all the riffs, hitting them on all cylinders, and he knows it.  He looks almost surprised, and absolutely delighted.

The view from stage must be fine.  The Pageant is full.  The people are happy.  He starts with "Roll Over Beethoven," hitting every note of the introduction, showing us his “blue suede shoes” twice, moving back and forth across the stage and nailing every guitar part.  He chugs straight into the chords of "School Day" and we all “hail! hail!” the music he invented.  He plays "Memphis," singing about a lost daughter, with Ingrid on stage to back him.  When he starts "Carol" he must not like the first few notes, so he stops and starts again and gets it right— and then starts doing what Mr. Richards thought impossible exactly 24 birthdays earlier, playing both lead and rhythm.  For a time “Carol” becomes “Queenie," and he’s “still thinking” (“I do that sometimes!”) but then Carol’s back, and he’s frantic, thumping on the strings of his guitar like the head of a drum.  The night’s emotion works on him.  There’s a moment he sings "oh" to Carol so long and plaintively you think he might cry remembering when that girl was hard to get even for him!  Then he gives his 84 year old body a break and gives us all an education in the blues with “Wee Wee Hours.”  Ingrid bends at the waist and blows her harmonica.  Bob Lohr does the riff that Chuck tried and failed to teach a piano player in Seattle and trills and flourishes that hearken directly back to Johnnie Johnson.  If Chuck Berry had written and recorded just this one song he would have a place the blues encyclopedia.  But he wrote dozens, and after opening the floor for requests he responds with "Nadine," chugging away at its familiar bass riff as the girl slips into her macchiato Cadillac.  During "Rock and Roll Music," he gives a lyrical twist to the lines about modern jazz.  His singing is youthful tonight.  He’s not just shouting the lyrics rhythmically, an interesting style he’s adopted in recent years.  He’s singing, bending notes the way he bends the notes on his guitar, savoring rhymes he invented so many years ago he sometimes forgets them, grinning devilishly at the double entendres.  He ends “Rock and Roll Music” with a powerful cha cha cha of strummed chords, then starts a blistering rendition of "Let it Rock."  He takes another breather by trying  a verse of a stage rarity, “La Juanda,” but lets go of it quickly to finish with "Reelin' and Rockin'," which doesn’t last till the break of dawn, but goes on a long, long time and includes the closest thing to an encore that I've seen Chuck Berry do.  He gets most of the way off stage, then returns to sit on the drum riser and play a while longer.  Then a bit of "House Lights," and he’s done.

I don’t take notes but there are moments I can remember without them.  He does his famous scoot twice, then starts a third time to coax his grandson into trying it.  Charles III, is playing the third guitar.  Daughter Ingrid, in tight, black leather, is singing harmonies and wailing on harmonica.  Adopted “son” Marsala seems pleased, grinning cheerfully throughout the night.  Chuck’s extended family is hooting and hollering from the dance floor.  It’s an all ages show, and the Berry family contingent includes little kids.  His “rock and roll children” are there, too, some nearly 70, some still sweet, little and sixteen.  The night belongs, in many ways, to Lohr, who plays at least a half dozen extended solos on his digital keyboard.  There’s a special moment at the end when CBII and CBIII move to the front of the stage and play together, heads bent in concentration.  There’s another special moment when Ingrid finishes a solo then walks towards her dad on stage.  I see him lock eyes with her and mouth the words “I love you.”  

And that’s how I feel, too, not just about Ingrid, but about her dad, about his music, about his band, about the night we’ve just experienced, the whole spectacle and ritual and this amazing rebirth and rejuvenation of my old hero.  I’ve experienced it again— an apparition, like the Virgin of Guadalupe or the Lady of Lourdes—our Father of Rock and Roll, young again, at age 84. 

(This is Chapter 30 of a book length publication about how Chuck Berry turned my life upside down.  The next chapter is HERE.  To start reading from the beginning, look for the Prologue and Chapter One HERE.)

33/43      5/13/13/8/08/a

Chapter 31 - Meeting Chuck Berry

(Chapter 31 of a book length piece on Chuck Berry.)

And then, somehow, I find myself being led by Jimmy Marsala into a room with lemon yellow walls and a cream colored couch or love seat. If I’m not mistaken, an open guitar case is near the wall to my right. But I might be mistaken, because my attention—by which I mean my faltering brain stem and sputtering central nervous system—is focused on that couch, where I see, so real, my “imaginary” friend and lifelong hero, my surrogate dad, the father of rock and roll and of us all. He appears lost in some happy thought, exhausted but smiling, leaning back, one arm on the back of the couch, the other at his side. Marsala tells him “Chuck, this fellow wants to give you something!” and suddenly 84 year old Chuck Berry is bounding out of his comfortable chair. “I’ve got to shake his hand!” he says. I would be terrified, but I’m functioning at a level too primitive for fear. “That was a great show. You were spectacular,” I tell him, as he grabs my hand and pulls me close.

We are standing at a proximity that would normally make me uncomfortable. This is not the giant of my imagination. He is about my height, but much thinner—the former heavyweight, though still tough, has become a feather in his old age. His nose has done what elderly noses do. His face and chin and waist line are remarkably thin. His eyes sparkle. As we talk I am mesmerized by curly white hairs poking from behind the admiral’s cap. I remember when he was much younger than I am, and his hair was slick and dark.

He is wearing his glittery red shirt and frayed black trousers. I get the feeling someone has altered them for a thinning frame. He smiles and keeps my hand for a time while I utter inanities. I have practiced them. They are things I need to say, however silly. I speak on autopilot, using brain stem. I hope that some of what comes out of my mouth makes sense, but I’m not sure it matters. I am the millionth fan who has spoken this way, and he has heard it all before.

I tell him, stupidly, that I last shook his hand at age 15. I tell him that I first saw him when I was 14, and that (I am at times a man of understatement) “It changed my life.”

“I’ve been coming back to see you ever since.”

That’s when he tells me something. He is listening. For just a moment we have an actual conversation! He tells me that when he was 14, he’d done some sort of work directly beneath the spot where we were standing. I remember him saying “When I was fourteen…” and I remember him finishing by pointing at our feet. “Below this very spot where we are standing!” he says, with satisfaction. And I know we talk about what it was that he did— it is some childhood job. But his words have been excised by my adrenaline. I have no memory of what he said that he did. In fact, the memory is gone by the time I leave the room.

This, for me, is a tragedy that mars an otherwise remarkable evening. It is proof that my cognitive faculties were reduced to something like the awareness of a dying turtle. Because even ten minutes later when I try to recount it to Paul and Liz, I don’t—can’t— remember what he said.

By the time I meet him I have spent more than a year and half painstakingly resurrecting and reassembling lost memories. Those memories were stored carelessly by a child, tossed here and there the way I now handle keys, tax records, checkbooks, mobile phones and credit cards. (As a youth I only had keys and memories to lose.) The memories I retain survived out of sheer cussedness, the way that rugged little firs survive stark conditions at the timber line. They survived despite repeated rinsings of red wine, despite the course of years, despite work, and stress, and change, and millions of newer, sometimes more profound memories: the births of my children, the death of my mother, Stevo’s and daddy’s funerals. I took those small, tough fragments and nurtured them. I rebuilt my past. It took work and time.

And yet here I am with my hero, who is spoon-feeding me a moment that should be mine forever, and ten minutes later it is gone.

The memories I kept of that room and that conversation are not fuzzy. They are crystal clear, but shot with holes, like a brick of Swiss cheese. Most of what is lost doesn’t matter. It’s me, jabbering. I know what I said. What I want back is him, speaking, telling me something that mattered to him, and therefore matters to me, that as a child he had done some menial but memorable task below the very spot we were standing. It is his own rugged little fir on the mountain, something that I imagine he had been pondering, through that wistful smile, when I entered the room, thinking, perhaps, how far he had travelled to get back to that same spot, an old man, a legend, who had once again managed to ignite fire in the hearts of 2000 strangers. For just that one, brief moment, my imaginary friend was telling me something real, about the boy with the telescope; about the boy standing, head bent, in the darkroom below that blurred picture of Lincoln; the boy I had drawn so painstakingly in pencil when I was 17; the boy who, absent reality, might have been my real boyhood friend. The man who had spoken to me before only in dreams spoke to me in real life, sharing one precious memory (and to a nostalgic man few things are more precious). But as soon as he said it, as soon as I heard it, it was gone, evaporated like the words and visions of a dream when we are woken against our desire.

I carry on, more or less on auto-pilot. I tell him that he played brilliantly. I try to joke about him seeming much younger than 84: “Are you turning forty-four on Monday?” It doesn’t work. I swear he says something like “Oh yes, I’ll be seventy-seven!” but that is probably hallucination on my part. Anyway, I’m not sure he can hear everything I am saying. After an hour in front of the Dual Showman, his ears are probably ringing like Johnny’s guitar.

I tell him that I have something for him.

“I drew this when I was 17,” I tell him. It’s my pencil sketch of him as a child—a little Chuck Berry, in a dark suit, his lips twisted a bit. The face reminds me of my friend Dando, a boy in West Africa who’d been like a little brother to me. It is a good drawing, a surprise to me even now, a little wider than his actual face, but I’d gotten the expression, the quick wit, the wisdom of a boy who was going to be somebody (a bit like a middle-aged baby Jesus in a renaissance painting.) My mom saved it in a rusty metal box along with artwork from kindergarten and other childhood artifacts. It is so old that the golden brown residue of the Scotch tape I had used to fasten it to my wall bleeds through the thin, lined paper making an amber mustache.

He takes it in his hands and examines it. “You drew this?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m not an artist, and don’t often draw, but I drew this when I was a kid because you were so important to me. It’s so old that you can see where the scotch tape is coming through the paper.”

I assumed at the time he recognized the picture. I had copied a photograph on the cover of his 1973 album, “Bio.” He’s 13 or 14, so the picture I copied was probably taken close to the time that he did whatever job he told me about.

But who knows if he recognized it? Days later, after a second birthday show at Blueberry Hill, I presented him another copy, this time asking him to autograph it for me. He looked, and smiled, and signed. His son Charles was standing behind him. Charles must have recognized the drawing from his father’s Facebook page, where I posted it briefly next to the original photograph, or from my blog, where I wrote about it. “Hey, Peter” he said, “It’s your picture!”

As I walked away I heard Chuck say “It looks like me!”

Charles laughed. “It is you, dad!”

But I’m still backstage in the yellow room. “I have a website about you,” I tell him. “A lot your friends have written about you there. They say some wonderful things about you because they love you so much, and I wanted you to have a chance to read what they have said.” I give him the interviews topped by pictures of his friends Judy and Karen, and musicians Bob Lohr, Bob Baldori, and Daryl Davis.

Again, I can’t tell if he cares or can even hear my mumblings, but he nods solemnly and studies each document, giving me the time he must know that I need. I don’t see it, but a line is forming across the room.

I pull out a photograph that Doug took. It’s a great one, Chuck singing, arms spread wide. This is a year and a half before Doug and I will stand backstage with Chuck Berry. I’ve never met him, but we know each other anyway.

“This was taken by a guy in Iowa. He comes to see you often. I think it’s a great picture. He sent it to me, and I thought you should have it.” Again, he pays close attention and makes appropriate noises. At some point his wife comes in and sits down quietly behind me. When I finish he turns and leans down, and gives everything to her. She studies it with some interest.

“Take all of this to the house,” he says gently.

Before I leave I tell him something like:

“I want to thank you for all that you’ve done for me and for all of us. I really think you are one of the great Americans.” It must be longer than this, because twice my voice gets wavy with emotion— but not too much.

I know that at some point I reach out and touch his shoulder, and before I leave he shakes my hand again and bumps my forearm with his. He is incredibly warm, alive, gracious, and attentive.

And although my memory of that moment is damaged, that is what I will always remember—the generosity of an icon, an historic figure, one of the great artists of our time or any time; a man who told Tchaikovsky the news at his third or fourth recording session and lived up to the boast; who invented rock and roll as we know it; who taught the Beatles and the Stones and Dylan; who wrote the poetry of “Bye Bye Johnny,” “Nadine,” and “Memphis;” a man who is probably the most influential musician America ever produced, and one of its most influential guitarists; a man who toured the country, heating his own food to avoid the back door of a restaurant, and who helped break down Jim Crow by feeding his family and playing music to kids; a man old enough to be this old man’s father, who’d just played an exhausting knockout show: that man stood and greeted the latest in a long line of perfect strangers, and listened as if he mattered.

That’s what I remember, and that’s what I’ll never forget.

(This is Chapter 31 of a book length piece on how Chuck Berry changed my life and our culture.  The prologue and Chapter 1 are right HERE.  The next chapter is right below.)

11-12-12 10:58 148/175

Chapter 32 - Growing Older

You could almost see it coming. First, two shows in New York City on New Year’s Eve, and then another in Chicago on New Year’s Day. And he didn’t take his band, or even Jimmy Marsala. He travelled alone. Later I’d learn that he had a cold in New York, and saw a report that he’d been pushing a wheelbarrow at Berry Park all day before heading to the first show.


So in Chicago Chuck Berry collapsed on his piano.

The videos were hard to watch. In one he struggled to tune his guitar for a couple of minutes before being escorted off stage. But he kept coming back. He finally apologized to the crowd, told them he’d been checked out by medics, and then did his scoot without a guitar before leaving the stage for good.

Since we are talking about an imaginary friend, I can envision an imaginary and cinematic end. Imagine, perhaps, that he collapses one night many years hence, surrounded by women, surrounded by family, during the frantic final minutes of a particularly good show in St. Louis— one of the big ones at The Pageant with his extended family in attendance. He is taken off stage like Charlie Chaplin at the end of the film Limelight (Chaplin left stuck in a bass drum; Chuck can walk off with help from his son and the band). He has time for comfortable and sweet goodbyes. A long life well lived ends where we saw him live it so vividly—on stage, with family, without an encore.

Right. And we must immediately balance that romantic vision with the image of him arguing with Keith Richards in “Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll!”

“I ain’t dying!” he says. And he may be on to something.

It has been interesting watching Chuck Berry grow old. He has done it exceptionally well.

When I first saw him he was young, energetic, strong as a person could be, capable of astounding feats—but at 45, he was already considered one of the “old men” of rock and roll (which, of course, he was.)

When he turned 60 nothing had changed. He no longer had the smooth facial skin of a younger person, but he looked fitter than Keith Richards. Most 30 or 40 year old men would happily take the sculpted upper body he showed off on the cover of his autobiography. I saw live him when he was 62 or 63. He was the same old Chuck Berry. He could still do splits, the duck walk, and the “scoot.”

When I saw him in 2003 it was different. He covered his thinning hair with a cap. It was the first time I saw him act grumpily. He looked older. His face was a bit careworn. He could still play the guitar with panache, but I don’t recall that he did his famous “scoot.”

Then January 2009 at Blueberry Hill. He came out tall, happy, in great voice. (When I saw him in the 1970s his voice was ragged from constant touring. At age 82 he sounded younger, like a 30 year old.) But he looked considerably more frail. He was still tall and lean, but there was a slight hunch to his shoulders. When women jumped on stage his son Charles looked concerned and cautious. Chuck himself ignored the temptations of a 22 year old who was doing her best to interest him. He forgot lyrics now and then. He played interesting rhythm guitar, but he couldn’t pick a lead worth a damn. He seemed to watch his stiff fingers as if in disbelief. He didn’t even try to do the “scoot” that night— but it was a great show, full of energy, humor, and delight.

A year and half later at The Pageant he seemed 20 years younger, grinning slyly, hitting nearly all of the riffs perfectly, singing beautifully. He did the “scoot” several times. It was a beautiful evening.

A few days later he put on another good show, but messed up one song completely because he couldn’t tune his guitar. In fact, he did just the opposite—he twisted and cranked it mercilessly till the notes that exited the pickup bore no relation to what his fingers were doing.

The show had started well— and the crowd never uttered a whisper of complaint. They danced, sang “Go Johnny, Go!" and shouted “Happy Birthday!” and “We love you Chuck!”

He started with “Carol,” “School Day,” and “Sweet Little Sixteen.”

When he asked for requests a guy in full Chicago Cubs regalia yelled “Ding-a-Ling.” He obliged.

But then chaos. After “Ding-a-Ling,” Chuck begins to tune his guitar. I see momentary cringes from both Jimmy Marsala and CBII (whose look seems to say “You’re digging your own grave, pop!”) (Marsala’s expression, though lightning fast, has the character of that oft-repeated movie scene where a person runs towards the camera in slow motion yelling “Nooooooo!”)

But it’s too late. Chuck twists the tuning knobs on his guitar, just a bit. When he looks for approval from his band members and gets a slightly annoyed look instead he stamps his foot and uses a line similar to one heard in Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll during the famous amplifier scene. “This is how I wish it.” The comment elicits a shrug. I remember Keith Richards in that same film saying “Even when it’s goin’ great he won’ leave it at that (indecipherable drunken slur) the potential to screw it up!” And when I see him tuning his guitar despite all the advice not to, despite the shrugs, (“This is how I wish it!”) I think of the Edgar Alan Poe story “The Imp of the Perverse,” where the hero confesses to a murder he has gotten away with. He describes other sorts of insane actions we take on a daily basis—walking towards a precipice, or procrastinating despite our own best interests. “Examine these and similar actions as we will, we shall find them resulting solely from the spirit of the Perverse. We perpetrate them merely because we feel that we should not.” That’s what I initially think is happening—that my hero likes to tempt fate, push limits, and defy authority, even when it’s against his best interest. It is a standard, worn out interpretation of Chuck Berry.

The first song out is a rocker, and actually, it works. Even though the guitar is partly out of tune, Chuck bends the strings until they sound pretty good. The rhythm carries the song, and disaster is temporarily averted.

But eventually things fall apart, the circle will not hold, and mere anarchy is loosed up the Duck Room— for a few moments, anyway. From off stage we hear Ingrid Berry singing the opening lines of the blues “Rock Me Baby.” There are a few moments of confusion about the key. Then, as the song begins, Chuck attacks the tuning knobs on his guitar a second time— not just tweaking them, cranking them this way and that, like a fishing reel. The result is three minutes of musical chaos, with the band playing one number and Chuck Berry making disjointed but very loud noise in the background.

I’m thinking at the time that it’s passive aggression without passivity. (A passive person might stop playing, but Chuck settles morosely at the back of the stage, leaning his forearm on the bass amp and making loud, incoherent sounds on his guitar, with a look that says—unconvincingly—“this is how we wish it.”)

I follow his fingers as best I can. It looks like he’s playing the proper positions. My guess is that he’s doing a sort of arpeggio that he likes to play during a slow blues while others solo, the one I’d watched him do at The Pageant, admiring the way his long fingers stretched easily across expanses that would make my own tendons shout in agony. He seems to be making the same moves—but the sounds that escape from his giant amplifier are awful—like an animal dying. I’m amazed that Ingrid and the band manage to keep going. She and Charles huddle at one point, eyeing each other with determination.

But all’s well that ends well. When the song finally ends Chuck surrenders his guitar to Jimmy Marsala, apologizes to the crowd (“When it rains it pours,” he says) and accepts a cream colored Stratocaster from his son. There’s a scare when he almost “tunes” that one, but he absorbs a meaningful head tilt from Charles, smiles acceptingly, and launches into another good rocker.

When my sister Rooney heard this story she immediately linked it to hearing loss. She had been reading Oliver Sacks’ book Musicophelia. Sacks describes an elderly composer who loses his sense of pitch because of hearing loss. He thinks his piano is out of tune, especially in the higher registers. In order to continue working the composer has to have his piano deliberately unturned until it sounds right to him.

That might be what Chuck is trying to do. For 60 years he has worked on bandstands in front of loud guitar amps, drum sets, and monitors. He unquestionably suffers from hearing loss. Maybe it has affected his pitch. According to Sacks’ book, the effect can be intermittent, and fades during periods of concentrated musical activity. Maybe Chuck’s properly tuned guitar sometimes sounds wrong to Chuck. Maybe the crazy tuning he sometimes does on stage is simply to make it sound right to himself. But as part of an ensemble he can’t do what the lone composer did. He needs to make it sound right on stage, when the guitar itself might not sound right to him. If Rooney’s theory is right—if he’s suffering from loss of pitch because of hearing loss— it’s a predicament.

He’s getting older, on stage.

For me, and for all of his “rock and roll children,” it’s like watching a parent age, and can be bittersweet. On the one hand, I grant him and admire all that he has earned through his years on earth. He plays and performs with great grace and wisdom. On the other hand, it can sometimes hurt to see him mess up a lick or forget a famous line.

I no longer attend his shows for the music—though when he’s playing with his regular band, or with Daryl Davis, I think the music is authentic and powerful. But I’m prejudiced towards the days when I first saw him perform at South Lake Tahoe and Monterey— convinced that his best musical performances were 40 years ago, when his guitar skills were peaking and his body was still young enough to amaze us with its balletic contortions. In those days he had it all. I don’t expect to see or hear anything like it again.

And although I enjoy them, I don’t go to his concerts to hear the same old songs. The best thing I’ve heard him play in the last three shows was a song called “Love in ¾ Time.” He didn’t even write it, though it fit him to a T. (“I like enchiladas, and old El Dorados that shine!”)

I have no expectation that he’ll ever play the new songs that I’d love to hear, or the lesser known songs that he so rarely plays.

But I go whenever I can because I have to see him. He is important to me. And watching him grow old is important to me. Being with him is important.

I’ve seen various reviews and internet comments encouraging him to “hang it up.” Sometimes it’s just silly—crappy writers taking cheap shots, or unsuccessful club musicians complaining foolishly that Chuck Berry is stealing stage time from the up and comers. But sometimes it hurts. One of the earliest and most cutting (because it was most loving) came from critic and Chuck Berry fan Robert Christigau, who wrote way back in 1973 “Willie Mays was the greatest baseball player who ever lived, but he just can’t cut it anymore. He reminds me more of Chuck Berry every time out.” I know what he meant about Willie Mays. In October 1973 I watched in horror and pain as Mays flopped to his stomach chasing a fly ball in the World Series. Though I respect him, I don’t agree with Christigau, who was panning the pretty danged decent record “Bio.”

But unlike Willie, who had to stop, Chuck keeps going—like Pinetop Perkins, who boogie-woogied until he died at age 97, and like Chuck’s contemporary, B. B. King, who brings a chair to stage now, and often spends as much time telling stories as he does singing or playing guitar.

“We’re in uncharted territory,” Daryl Davis once told me. “We’ve never seen a rock and roller get so old. It’s going to happen to the others. Chuck is showing us how it’s done. He’s still a pioneer.”

When I got to spend a few minutes with him a couple of days before his 84th birthday I was struck most by the human scale of the man—the white hairs, curly now, that bunched out from beneath the back of his cap, the worn fabric of his pants, the thin lines of his face. A few days later I saw him stamp his foot in frustration, and when he cranked his guitar out of tune, I remember thinking that his kids, who obviously love him dearly, are living some difficult moments on stage with their aging father—moments that are usually far more private. (Then again, those same children live moments of great joy with him on stage, too—far more of those than the difficult ones.)

A couple of times I’ve heard of Chuck Berry telling someone “I hope you live 100 years, and that I live forever.”

And of course, in one sense, his eternal life is assured. Bob Dylan called him a survivor and “force of nature.” His music was sent into outer space as “a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings.” Chuck Berry’s legacy will live as long as human culture and technology survive.

But I guess, like the rest of us, he won’t live forever.

Since I began blogging I’ve received e-mails and messages from several fans who worry how they’ll cope when the day comes. (They may be underestimating his endurance, and over optimistic about their own. Who’s to say they’ll outlive him?) One wrote, “Something I think about a lot is: what's going to happen when the day comes when I have to hear that Chuck isn't around anymore? I dread that day. Sounds crazy but the only thing I dread more is the day when my mother leaves me. The world will shrink so much for me when that happens.”

I understand. I used to think about it, too.

I used to wonder what form the news would take, and how big a splash it would make. At first I imagined a small headline. By the late 1970s I knew that it would be a front page story, but I didn’t know how big it would be. With every decade the story has climbed higher and higher towards the masthead and the headline has gotten bigger. We don’t always acknowledge it, but he is a giant of our culture. I think everyone knows by now that he is far more important than the so-called “King,” Elvis. (It is a sore subject for Chuck Berry fans from the 1970s.) He’ll be on the cover of many magazines that he will never see.

His life has already been long and rich. He seems to have lived it full tilt, with little regard for the rules of society, but with a fairly high regard to his fans and his family and to what he perceives as truth. Yes, he can be a grouch, and yes he has been a criminal. He can fuck things up like few can do it. But he has also been an uncompromising and uncompromised person and artist. He has never watered down a thing. He’s been Chuck Berry all the way, and it has served him and his legacy well. He matters to us in a special way.

So when I see him struggling for a moment on stage, I don’t feel more than a minor sting of regret for the loss of his youth and virtuosity. Mostly what I feel is an extreme pride, and awe, that this man I first encountered when I was 14 is still going strong 40 years later at age 84, his guitar still ringing, his name still in lights, his grin as devilish as ever. And though I no longer fear the day that he’s gone, I’m thankful for every moment that he remains, and for every day that he’s been there, for me, for you, for all of us.

(This is part of a book length piece on my imaginary (well, sort of) life with Chuck Berry.  You can find the first Chapter over to the right, or CLICK HERE  to find the next one!)

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