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 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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Chapter 24 - Bo Diddley and a Beat from West Africa

Photo Credit: Reba O'Neil

In 1980 I joined Peace Corps and began three years in the tiny West African nation of Togo. I didn’t think much about Chuck Berry during that time. I didn’t have room for him. Arriving in Africa was like being reborn in a world I hardly understood but loved to experience. On my first morning in the capital city, Lomé, I took a short walk from the hotel to the big market—le Grand Marché—about a half mile away. The roads and sidewalks near the hotel were quiet and sunny and nearly empty, but the closer I got to the market the more people there were. A block or so from the market building the roads seemed impassable. Thousands of people were squeezing through streets lined with vendors. Little girls carried trays with one or two boxes of matches on top. A man with a sing song voice and an umbrella hat sold “Essiiii glaceeeeeeee!” (ice water). Tougher customers yelled “Ago!” as they pushed through from behind. The only way to get to the market was to become part of it. I slid into the crowd. All around me were vegetables and fruits; essentials like lipstick, nail polish, cigarettes, balm; sandals and “jimakpla” (a pejorative name for rubber flip flops, which nearly everyone wore); cassette tapes with music from around Africa and the world (I never heard mention of Chuck Berry in Africa, but an American country singer named Gentleman Jim Reeves was surprisingly well known); bicycle parts, towels, canned mackerel, dried fish, smoked fish, clothing, chickens, beads, tomato paste, shoes, drums. Young women peeled oranges with razor blades then cut a hole in the top so that you could squeeze the juice into your mouth. Others sold fritters or French fried yam slices with hot salsa, or peanuts, or bread with butter. As the newest potential source of income they all summoned me. “Yovo!” It was a word I would hear every time I went outside for the next three years. “White guy!” “Foreigner!” “Foolish and sweaty looking person!” Kids sang it and danced. Old women snickered it. Sliding through the ever tightening crowd I found all of it nearly overwhelming and completely wonderful.

And then the market itself—a huge, three story concrete building that looked something like an American parking structure. First a gauntlet of red meat and machetes (softened by tables covered in tomatoes, onion, garlic, peppers, tiny eggplants, assorted greens, lettuce, potatoes, cucumbers, oranges, limes, grapefruit, mangos, papaya and pineapple). Then, climb the stairs and you are in a cathedral of cloth from Jakarta, Dakar, Ghana and Holland. Fat women nicknamed “Mama Benz” lay on concrete tables in front of shelved bolts of wax prints and kenté. And a floor above that, everything else: bicycle chains, beads, hammers, saws, radios, batteries, you name it, the best hardware and variety store I have ever seen. I spent a few hours pushing my way through and found myself physically and mentally overpowered. I went back to the hotel and tried to nap, but when I closed my eyes I heard and saw everything that I’d just experienced.

And that’s more or less how it was for the next three years. It was usually quieter, but for three years everything was new, and every time I thought it wasn’t, every time I thought I’d figured it out, I’d be slapped with a new revelation that I understood nothing at all.

Photo O'Neil/Young

I didn’t expect it. When I had first been assigned to Togo I did some research and was a bit disappointed to learn that Togo wasn’t famous for art—at least not the sort of art that finds its way into museums. But it turned out that art was everywhere, as much a part of daily life as food and water. It was there in the way people dressed, the way they walked, the way they did their hair. There was art in the way they displayed pyramids of fruit and vegetables to sell and in the way market women stacked cans of sardines and mackerel, nail polish, soap and cigarettes. There was art in the way villages rose from the red earth like something alive. There was art in the carved walking stick of an old man and the homemade toys that children made—tiny bicycles built from bailing wire and cars carved from soft bits of raffia. There was art and magic in the broken, flat stone that sat beneath an old tree at the center of my village, drenched with dried blood and history and stuck with feathers, and there was art and danger in the “gri-gri” or ju ju, (Muddy called it “mojo”), fashioned out of roots, beads, and feathers and wired to a stick at the edge of a corn field. There were beautiful kenté cloths woven from colorful silk and cotton; fantastic embroideries around collars and cuffs; wonderful fabrics. There were paintings, too. Hair braiders advertised different hair styles with hand-painted signboards. Wall paintings on bars and restaurants showed suave men in bell bottoms and afros sipping beer with beautiful, long-necked women. Togo wasn’t known for art, but art was everywhere.

The Black Star Band from Ghana arrives in Kougnohou to the delight
of a hundred kids.  Photo credit Rooney O'Neil.

The same was true for music. Togo didn’t produce many recording stars when I lived there, but every shop and bar had a loudspeaker blaring High Life from Ghana, Reggae from Jamaica and Ivory Coast, or “Zairoise” from the former Zaire. I heard faint similarities between the lilting African guitar styles and Chuck Berry’s music, and also in the way that African pop singers incorporated the names of different cities and countries in their songs— a clever marketing ploy that may have first been used by the author of “Sweet Little Sixteen” whose fans were “rockin’ in Boston, and Pittsburgh, PA.” (Deep in the heart of Africa chears would erupt when dancers in my village heard the Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou sing the name of the Togolese capital, Lomé.) Those connections to American rhythm and blues were probably coincidental, but when I walked past rows of Muslim money changers near the Grand Marché in Lomé I heard music from the edges of the Sahara that sounded like the hard blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker, and I don’t think that was a coincidence. I was hearing the roots of the blues. Nor was it a coincidence that men in both Togo and Detroit pour a part of their drink onto the ground in honor of those who’ve “gone before.”



Dance was everywhere, too. Mothers rocked their babies to complex polyrhythms. Kids played dancing games to old chants. In the 1980s, all night dances with barnstorming bands from Ghana were regular events at the local “club” in my village. Dance was so omnipresent in Togo that sometimes even I got on the dance floor to express my stiff and awkward physicality. My favorite night spot in the capital was a dance bar called The African Queen. I described it for a local Seattle music magazine.

(Here's 12 seconds of children fresh from the internet.)

The African Queen is a typical Togolese dance bar—battered white tables and chairs, red and black fluorescent lights, funky wall paintings, all year Christmas decorations, and a sandy concrete floor that goes “swish-swish” when 200 feet start moving in unison. No live bands play there, but the music—a cosmopolitan mix of Soukous, High Life, Makossa, Reggae, Juju, Salsa and Funk—is fine. On one wall there’s a painting of Sonny Okossuns, the Nigerian singer who’s appeared in the Northwest a couple of times. On another there’s a painting of the good life—a man and woman surrounded by scattered empties, with a full case of Togo’s delicious Biere Benin by their side.

Probably Sokode

The African Queen puts on no airs. An unkind observer might call it a dive. The signs out front are old and fading. The “urinoire”—a stinking, shower like cubicle that becomes less revolting after a few beers—is marked by a painting of a man pissing towards its door. There’s invariably one downhearted soul, head on the table, surrounded by empties. Although a tad of bleached white looks fine under the black lights, there’s no dress code. There are seldom any Togo-Yuppies or fancy folks. The African Queen is just a place to dance.

You can bend at the waist, like the taxi driver from the North, or you can do it Southern Togo style and bend at the knees, arms akimbo, and jerk your shoulders to the beat. A man from Ivory Coast, in Lomé on a construction job, dances bow-legged. His Togolese friend does just the opposite, keeping his feet together and moving with tiny, Latin-flavored steps. Another man, after a few too many, invents a style all his own, mixing muscleman poses with karate moves he learned at the Cinéma le Togo down the street. A German expatriate bobs up and down and back and forth in artless ecstasy. Injustice of the third world, he’s with the most beautiful woman in the place. 

Fat women dance with their butts, scarcely moving their feet except to execute spins that are both elegant and seemingly impossible, given the mass. Young girls in hot pants, jump suits and skits, strut, bob, jump, kick and spin more often. Afro-Wave kids, hip and misunderstood, push both feet forward at once and dance Makossa in a jerky style of their own. Boys in second hand sport coats dance disco. Men in traditional garb dance a complex Latin style. The elderly, rare at the African Queen, dance with a spare elegance that marks their wisdom. Little kids, on the other hand, just stand by the door and dance dance dance until some adult runs up to shoo them away. Even out on the street the passerby and the women selling cigarettes nod their heads or add a step or two to their walk.

When my sister Ann visited Togo we once found ourselves avoid a March heat wave by getting a drink at a tiny buvette in some northern village. A small boy approached wearing nothing but a smile and a white bandage around his penis. When a song came on the bar’s little record player he began to slowly gyrate his pelvis and slide across the floor, smiling coolly. Michael Jackson would have been impressed (alas, perhaps in more ways than one!)

An elegant dancer at the opposite end of life was the local Chef de Canton, the paramount chief of the dominant ethnic group in my village. He was in his mid 70s, overweight by Togolese standards, and hobbled by an ugly growth on his foot. But once, when a “fahn-far” band came to town and played High Life music on battered horns, (my guess is that “fahn-far,” which I write phonetically, meant “fanfare,” which The Encyclopedia Britannica defines as “a brief musical formula played on trumpets, horns, or similar “natural” instruments, sometimes accompanied by percussion, for signal purposes in battles, hunts, and court ceremonies”) I watched him step and glide elegantly, hardly moving, yet moving perfectly, the visual, rhythmic definition of “cool” in a golden crown and kenté cloth.

But the most powerful dancing I saw in Togo happened at funerals, elaborate affairs that involved several consecutive nights of eating, drinking, and visiting, finally culminating in a long night of drumming, singing and dancing. It took me a couple of years to work up the courage to attend one of these funerals. I’d listen nights to the far off chanting and drumming and wonder what was going on—another of so many mysteries that I met with every day in Africa. But eventually I went. It was the funeral of a neighborhood big shot. The homemade palm wine and sodabi (a local white lightning) were strong and good. I drank enough that, to the delight of the crowd, I followed willingly when someone grabbed my hand and pulled me into the center of a large circle. When I bent down and tried to snap my backbone in the local style you could have heard the cheer five miles away.

Kids dancing Azohoun at a school comedy show.

The locals from my village had a dance called “azohoun” in which men and women bent at the waist, arms akimbo, and stamped their feet rhythmically while jerking their elbows and shoulders backward. The women bent in what looked almost like a curtsy. Men crouched and snapped their backs powerfully from a concave arch to a convex one. Usually groups of two or three people would walk towards the center of the circle, link up visually, and then burst simultaneously into a dance that would last about ten seconds. At the end of their dance they would jerk into a pose as if to say “Top that!” If they were especially good, people would let them know by cheering or pressing money to their brow. What distinguished it, for me, from similar dances of neighboring people was the sheer force and power of it. I remember standing 10 or 15 feet from an old woman and feeling the ground shake while she danced.

There could be hundreds of people at a funeral. Six or eight might be serious musicians who played drums, rattles and bells. Everyone else was given sticks of pampranku, a light wood from the raffia plant, to tap out a beat. The musicians beat rhythms I loved to hear but could barely comprehend. The entire assembly chanted choruses. The final element was a lead singer, who usually played an iron bell called the gong-gong. The gong-gong played a variety of different rhythms, but there was one that I knew from back home— the shave and a haircut beat we call “hambone.” It’s a beat that can be found in music from Latin America to New Orleans, and that was made famous by Chuck Berry’s Chess Records label mate, Bo Diddley.

Once my neighbors had a funeral for an elderly family member. It was before I started attending, so I stayed home and eventually fell asleep despite the loud drumming and singing. But of course it kept going all night, till the break of dawn and a little beyond. That night I dreamed that Bo Diddley had shown up in our village like one of the barnstorming Ghanaian dance bands that occasionally appeared in town and that he was performing at my next door neighbors’ house. I woke up a little disappointed. I could have used the homespun comfort of Bo Diddley about then.

Years later I saw a documentary about how African traditions had survived in the United States. A kid played a homemade instrument similar to what I had seen kids in Togo make from a wooden bow, a can or gourd, and a piece of string. The announcer was one of those serious public television types. He said, without wonder, irony or, any mention of the Chess/Checker Records star and co-founder of rock and roll: “The children call their instrument a ‘diddley bow.’”

Much of what makes us great came from Africa.

And as I say, though I didn’t think about him much while I was there, it’s not too far-fetched to say that Chuck Berry played a role in getting me to Africa. His music brought me to the blues, and jazz, and gospel, and they, in turn, lured me to West Africa, where they have their roots. I wanted to know the place where so much of what I love in America came from.

And if Chuck Berry helped get me to Africa it’s also not wrong to say that he led me to my daughters Jade and Gemma, whose mother I met there, and decades later to Jade’s little daughter Tulane. (In a different sense he even led me to my little Rafferty, since it was the early gift of a signed photo of Chuck Berry from Rafferty’s mother that may have sealed that deal for me.)

Funerals in Togo are held outside. Rain can spoil them. One cloudy day, just prior to a funeral for an important man, I sat at a bar and listened as local priests fired a magical cannon in a ceremony to ward off rain. Huge thunderheads were approaching the village. I sipped my beer and joked. But as soon as the cannon rang out, the clouds began to break apart and disintegrate before my eyes. Within minutes the afternoon turned to brilliant, muggy sunshine, and there was no rain that night to spoil the funeral.

Reflecting on some inexplicable event like that my Togolese friends would often sigh: “L’Afrique et ses mystères!” Thinking back on my on my own life, and how it changed forever at a poorly attended rock and roll show in a third rate town, I know that a least a little bit of magic survives back home.






(Although it strays into Bo Diddley and friends here this is part of a "book" about the weird affect Chuck Berry had on my life from the age 14 until now. You can find the next chapter below, or read from the beginning in the "Pages" section to the right.  Hey, it's free, and what can I say?  Best stuff written about CB that I know of except his own book.)

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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.)

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