Chapter 4 - Why He Matters, Part One: Chuck Berry as Songwriter

One night I challenge my wife Rebecca to name someone with more cultural impact than Chuck Berry. 

“Shakespeare,” she says.

She gets me, first time.

“Okay, but he’s the only one!” I stammer, less confident.

I am quick to acknowledge other musical geniuses—greater ones: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk.

There are many better singers. There are better guitar players (though not many who could be called more important or more influential). I’m not sure there are better entertainers—just different ones. Few songwriters can match him.

But Chuck Berry’s importance goes beyond the music, or the songs, or the poetry, or the performance. He is one of the big daddies of modern history. In the pantheon of important and great Americans I think he matches all but two. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln are alone at the top. But when you accept that an artist can be as important as a military leader, or a politician, or an industrialist, or an inventor—and I certainly do—then he is up there with the most important. Compare Chuck Berry to the self important— to murderers for hire like Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney. See who actually matters. Some men are distinguished only by the slaughter and heartache they cause, or what they stole. Chuck Berry changed a culture.

He didn’t do it alone, and though his art and his career moves were carefully calculated, he didn’t exactly do it on purpose; but he was part of a movement that delivered us from days of old to a new and different and in many ways a better place. And there is something unique about his individual role. He wasn’t just a singer, or a star, or a guitarist, or performer, or poet, or songwriter, or businessman, or felon, or genius, or icon—he was all of that. It is no accident that he was born and stayed at the very heart of the country and continent, on a river that has symbolized the soul of that country from the time of Twain until the time of Dylan. Nor is it mere coincidence or happenstance that in his fourth recording session he told Tchaikovsky the news and then, in the 60 years that followed, lived up to the boast.

He might deny his importance. He once told a reporter “I ain’t no big shit.” But he is a big shit— a popular artist who achieved uncommon results in the vernacular. Our Dante. Our Shakespeare. A man who does everything Mark Twain did, but backwards, with a guitar. And like both Twain and Shakespeare, he did it as much to earn a living as to make art.

It starts, of course, with the songs— dozens and dozens and dozens of them. Hundreds, actually. Written, Chuck Berry will tell you, for commercial purposes. “I was writing commercially then,” he says of “Johnny B. Goode.” In the film Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll he says “Half the young people go to school so I wrote about school… Half the young people have cars and I wrote about cars. And mostly all the people, if they are not now, they’ll soon be in love—and those that have loved and are out of love remember love, so write about love. So I wrote about all three.”

The vast majority of Chuck Berry songs are “good” songs. (There are definitely some clunkers.) But then there are the great ones— the two minute ditties with the fast folk poetry and searing 10 second guitar breaks, the songs recorded at Chess Records between 1955 and 1964, with Johnnie Johnson, Otis Spann, or Lafayette Leake on piano, Willie Dixon on bass, and Ebby Hardy, Fred Below, or Odie Payne on drums—those songs—“Johnny B. Goode,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “School Day,” “Memphis,” “Nadine,” “No Money Down,” “Maybellene,” and more— those songs come as close to perfection as we human beings get. They have it all: energy, poetry, youth, sass, nostalgia, family, fantasy, comedy, rhythm, rhyme and blues.

The poet Cornelius Eady, who wrote a poem entitled Chuck Berry about Chuck Berry, wrote in an e-mail that “John Lennon once called CB one of America's great poets, and I have heard (and read) little to dis sway me of that notion."

Consider “Johnny B. Goode,” recorded by hundreds of different groups and individuals, played by hundreds of thousands of small time singers, guitarists, and bands, in millions of performances, a song that was sent out to the galaxy on both Voyager spacecraft to represent humanity’s better angels to other worlds. “This is a present from a small, distant world,” wrote President Jimmy Carter to whatever distant life form first spins “Johnny B. Goode” on that ultimate, intergalactic gold record, “a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” (The joke, on Saturday Night Live, is that the first radio message received from aliens in outer space says “Send more Chuck Berry!”) It’s a song so overplayed and omnipresent that it should be cliché, but Chuck’s original version, recorded in 1958, never grows old. And no wonder— it has everything: ringing guitar, pounding bass, Lafayette Leake’s rippling piano, great drums, inventiveness, a perfect title (the economy of turning “be” into an initial), a timeless story, and vivid imagery: the log cabin “made of earth and wood,” the gunny sack, the tree, the railroad track, the great name envisioned in lights. (He wrote it after seeing his own name on the marquee of a theater in New Orleans.) It is pure and perfect poetry, the best all around rock and roll song ever recorded, and probably the greatest American song of all time—that famous “Great American Novel” crystallized in two minutes and 42 seconds of perfect sound.

But wait—there’s more! The ode to broken homes called “Memphis, Tennessee!” “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” rock and roll’s first manifestation of black pride. There’s the angst and excitement of young love in “Carol” and “Little Queenie.” There’s the sexual frustration of “No Particular Place to Go,” and the sexual riot of his live version of “Reelin’ and Rockin’.” There’s the youthful frustration of “Almost Grown,” the youthful fantasy of “You Never Can Tell,” the youthful energy of “School Day.” There’s the geography and history of “Promised Land,” the insane, unstoppable energy of “Let it Rock!” the crushed spirit of “Oh, Louisiana,” the hard blues of “Have Mercy Judge,” and the charming innocence of “Sweet Little Sixteen.”

New York Times writer Verlyn Klinkenborg called “Memphis” a “short story,” and found herself haunted by “the metrical precision of the lyrics, its emotional realism and, of course, the revelation in the penultimate line. You know the one: that this is a father’s mournful love song to his daughter, Marie, who is only 6 years old.”

“What I really find myself listening to,” wrote Klinkenborg, “is Chuck Berry the sociologist of incredible economy. It’s the open-ended plea to that disembodied personage, ‘Long-distance information.’ It’s the household where uncles write messages on the wall. It’s the geographical precision of Marie’s home, ‘high up on a ridge, just a half a mile from the Mississippi bridge.’ Undercutting it all is the very hopelessness of the singer’s plea.”

“Too Much Monkey Business,” almost a protest song, is the certain inspiration for Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and a probable inspiration for the Stones’ “Satisfaction.” In his autobiography Berry said he wrote it to describe “the kinds of hassles a person encounters in every day life” and says he “would have needed over a hundred verses to portray the major areas that bug people the most.”

It begins with Chuck’s lead guitar ringing exactly like a bell.

Deedlee-dee, deedlee dee,

deedlee-dee, deedlee-dee,

deedlee dee, deedlee-dee,

deedlee-dee-dee.

Then Willie Dixon’s jazzy acoustic bass, answered by Chuck‘s chords and Johnnie Johnson’s rippling piano. The song doesn’t have the boogie-woogie rhythm guitar work that Chuck Berry became so famous for (almost none of the early songs have it); the roots here are jazzier, with strummed chords. The sound is incredibly light and clear, like a flat rock skipping over wind dimpled water on a bright day. It swings. But when the band jolts to a stop to make room for the lyrics, it’s pure rock and roll.

Running to and fro

Hard working at the mill

Never fail in the mail here come a rotten bill

Chuck’s 29 when he sings that first verse, but his voice sounds older. Unlike “School Day” or “Oh Baby Doll,” this isn’t teenage stuff—it’s real world frustration, “16 Tons” with a backbeat. He doesn’t use the fine diction his mother insisted upon here—“business” is pronounced “bidness,” or just “bi’ness,” “here” is “hiya.”

Salesman talking to me

Tryin’ to run me up a creek

Says you can buy it go and try it

You can pay me next week—Ahh!

This is where Mick Jagger, an accomplished Berry scholar, first hears absence of Satisfaction:

Man comes on to tell me

How white my shirts can be,

But he can’t be a man cause he doesn’t smoke

The same cigarettes as me.

I can’t get no

And it’s a radical song. In 1956 Chuck Berry sings:

Blond hair, good lookin’

Trying to get me hooked

Wants me to marry, settle down,

Get home, write a book. Hmmf!

In 1956 it’s against the law in many states, and frowned on in all of the others, for Chuck Berry to marry a blonde—especially, it seems, in 1958 Missouri, where what passed for the law routinely stopped, prosecuted, and once imprisoned the man for dalliances with any female not black. How dare he sing these words? Of course, maybe it’s not Chuck— but we know it is: it’s Chuck rounding third and heading for a once forbidden place he admits had always tantalized him; and somehow, in a way, predicting his own future, since in just two months (according to his Autobiography) he’d meet the good looking blonde who would share much of his life and ultimately help him write his book. (Maybe the book is off by a few months. Maybe he’d already met her.)

That same day he recorded “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” whose first hero is “arrested on charges of unemployment.” Another radical song! It ends with another hero smacking the game winning home run. It so happens I was born a month after that song was recorded. My wife, Rebecca, once bought me an old LIFE magazine from the week that I was born. It’s a pretty scary document. There’s an ad for Heinz that tells how to make “Baked Fish in Ketchup Sauce.” There’s a Cadillac ad that would have got Chuck’s attention. In another a bunch of women hold up enormous panties that would make Bridget Jones’ boyfriend laugh. A dozen or so ads for Bourbon explain my father’s taste in tragedy. But the only brown eyed man in the whole magazine is Willie Mays, who, an ad for Wheaties explains, hit 51 homers the year prior. That makes me happy. I’ve always compared Willie and Chuck. Willie was described as a five tool player, who could hit, hit with power, field, throw and run. Chuck can write, write with poetry, sing, perform, and play. As a kid I saw Willie Mays in San Francisco, and I always figured it was Willie who was rounding third and heading for home in Chuck’s song of black pride.

If you want to appreciate Chuck Berry the singer, try to spit out the first line of “No Money Down”— “Well Mister I want a yellow convertible”— in the space allotted. (Pronounce it “convoitable.”) The syllables just keep coming, like circus clowns from a broken down old ragged Ford. Cars are, of course, everywhere in Chuck Berry songs, from the sleek “Flight DeVille” to the beaters in “Dear Dad,” “Come On,” and “Move It.” In “You Can’t Catch Me” Flat Top “comes movin’ up with me, then goes waving goodbye, in a little old souped-up jitney.” Pierre and the Mademoiselle also owned “a souped-up jitney, ‘twas a cherry red ’53.” Nadine and Maybellene are last seen in Cadillacs— a coffee colored one for coffee colored Nadine. Girls disappearing in Cadillacs are a big reason why the hero of “No Money Down” has to get out of his “broken down old ragged Ford” and into a “yellow convertible four door De Ville,” but it’s twice the Caddy.

I want air conditioning

I want automatic heat

I want a full Murphy bed

In my back seat

I want short wave radio

I want TV and a phone

You know I got to talk to my baby

When I’m riding alone…

“Let it Rock” is a grown up work song. I’m pretty sure it’s one of Chuck Berry’s own favorites. I don’t recall a show where he didn’t sing it, and with plenty of room for guitar, it always gets him going.

In The Heat Of The Day Down In Mobile, Alabama

Working on the railroad with the steel driving hammer

Got to make some money to buy some brand new shoes

Tryin' to find somebody to take away these blues

She don't love me, hear ‘em singing in the sun

Payday's coming and my work is all done

This isn’t “Johnny B. Goode.” No one’s going to make a motion picture. It’s a song about energy, motion and an unstoppable force.

Everybody's scrambling, running around

Picking up their money, tearing the teepee down

Foreman wants to panic, 'bout to go insane

Trying to get the workers out the way of the train

Engineer blows the whistle loud and long

Can't stop the train, gotta let it roll on

Another wild one is “Promised Land”—the same sort of motion, but this time across the country by bus, train and plane to California. The song starts with an abbreviated Carl Hogan guitar intro and then rolls unstoppably, like the train in “Let it Rock,” the only pause being a T-bone steak “a la carty” high over Albuquerque. It’s never seemed like a coincidence that “Promised Land,” written a matter of months after the terrorist bombing of a church killed three little girls, talks about “trouble that turned into a struggle in downtown Birmingham.” Nor is it coincidence that the “Po’ boy” wants to get “across Mississippi clean.” Chuck Berry was nearly lynched in Mississippi by drunken frat boys who feigned outrage when he returned the kiss of a white girl who jumped on stage. Guess who got arrested.

In 2011, I would learn more about history and more about the lyrics of Promised Land. I was watching a television show celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Riders—a racially mixed group of young people who attempted to integrate commercial busses in 1961. A group of them are attacked in the Rock Hill bus station. The police who are supposed to protect the riders vanish.

No wonder the Po’ Boy’s Greyhound chooses to “bypass Rock Hill.”

And no wonder these songs grow larger and more powerful with time. It is like Chuck Berry dipped deeply into the Missouri or the Mississippi Rivers and pulled up what makes us who and what we are.

The untroubled vocals and sprightly guitar disguise something weightier and more important. This isn’t a silly trip on busses, trains and planes. This is the same Promised Land that Martin Luther King saw, but viewed through Chuck Berry’s unique perspective. Think how a ballet dancer’s art makes his partner look weightless. That’s what Chuck Berry does with his humor and his guitar. Don’t be fooled.

Rebecca was right, Shakespeare has more significance. But not many others.

(This is part of a book length piece.  It continues below.)

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Chapter 5 - The Golden Decade

The day after that first Chuck Berry show I hop on my bike and ride half a mile to a drab discount store called Rasco Tempo, where I buy my first Chuck Berry record.

It’s a small miracle that Rasco Tempo has any Chuck Berry at all. He is not exactly top of the pops. He has just played to a crowd of hundreds in a downtown hall that seats thousands. And Rasco Tempo isn’t downtown. It’s in Citrus Heights, a small, bleak patch of suburban Texas transplanted to the outskirts of suburban Sacramento. (We live across the invisible line in Orangevale, a patch of Oklahoma.)

Rasco Tempo (“a Division of Gamble-Skogmo, Inc.”) is where I pass bored hours looking at models and hardware, but I shall learn over the coming year that Rasco Tempo’s record bins, though small, hide interesting treasures. I will buy a great Jimmy Reed record there soon, and one day I will find, for .66 cents, “Best of the Biggest,” with two songs each by Howlin’ Wolf, Ray Charles, Elmore James, B. B. King and Bobby Blue Bland.

But this day I find a double album called “Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade.” The outer packaging is a bit ugly. There is a gold record on the front, surrounded by black, with black lettering that looks like the rub-on decals from the hobby shop. I hold it and know that I am embarking on a new sort of musical journey— one that clearly doesn’t benefit from the slick and expensive marketing that the Beatles and Rolling Stones enjoy. The gold isn’t rich looking—it’s drab, faded, and nearly colorless, like Rasco Tempo itself.

The back cover has a nicer esthetic— pure white, with gold lettering that lists the 24 songs. It looks a little like The Beatles white album, though its original release actually predated the Beatles record.

When I get it home and tear off the plastic wrapper I find four black and white photographs inside that capture my attention for several years. Three are from recording sessions. In the biggest Chuck Berry is at the mike, singing, and strumming the guitar with just his thumb. The strings are vibrating. He’s in a white shirt and thin black tie. He looks his true age at the time—probably mid-to late 30s. There’s an authenticity to this and the next two shots that mesmerizes me. He’s a working musician, with no frills. (We are in that age after Woodstock where almost every rock and roll and soul star wears clothing with fringe, brocade, leather, and glitter.) In the next shot the tie is off and the guitar is a fatter one. He’s sitting down. He looks ageless. Actually, he looks about 50, although I’m sure he’s in his 30s. He’s looking at music on a stand and gesturing, as if there’s a discussion about how the song should be played. In the next he’s young and lean and sucking hard on cigarette. There is bare insulation in rafters up above.

On the front cover are the misleading words “The ORIGINAL Two Albums.”

Not quite. “Golden Decade” included 24 songs released between 1955 and 1964. The songs originally had been scattered over six or seven albums and a bunch of singles. But they were originals, and thank goodness for that. And thank goodness for small lies. Without those words I might have bought one of the records then available on Mercury Records. If I had bought Chuck Berry’s greatest hits as re-recorded years after the fact for Mercury, my life would have unfolded differently. I would have listened, yawned, and lived to tell the story: “Yeah— I saw Chuck Berry once.”

I might have been normal.

But I got the real thing—the originals recorded for the Chess Record Company in Chicago between 1955 and 1965.

Chess Records was one of the great, small record companies that helped change world music in the late 1940s and the early1950s. It was run by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess. The company became famous by producing a string of hits for bluesmen like Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson II and Howlin’ Wolf. A big single might sell 10,000 copies. But then Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry showed up. The Chess brothers recognized they had something new, and suddenly a company the company was pressing and selling hundreds of thousands of copies and producing top hits on the pop charts. The beautiful thing is that it was the same music, played by many of the same studio musicians, just tweaked a bit for a younger, and often whiter, generation of fans.

And at 14 I’m even younger! I come to this music 16 years late. “Maybellene” and “Wee Wee Hours” were recorded before I was even born.

I’m up in the tower room of our old house—a room with windows on four sides but nearly empty except for a bed, my drum set, and an old stereo. It’s where Stevo sleeps if he’s visiting. I put down the needle and feel mounting excitement as song after song blasts from the speakers, each wittier, wilder, raggedier, and better than the last: “Maybellene,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Nadine,” “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Thirty Days,” “Memphis,” “Almost Grown,” “School Days,” “Reelin’ and Rockin’,” “Bye Bye Johnny,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Rock and Roll Music.”

When I’m not dancing my head is between the speakers. The sound is full of rough edges and reverberation—the raw, energetic sound of creation. I used to describe it as sounding like it was recorded in a garbage can. It was a bad analogy, but not too bad. I’ve learned since that some of the vocals were recorded in the bathrooms at Chess to capture the prehistoric reverb of a ceramic tile bounce. Once electronic reverb was available Chess records were flooded with it. But this didn’t result in a spacey sound. The bass is deep. The piano is sharp. The drums are slamming. And there is an electric bite to Chuck and Muddy’s guitars that I’ve seldom heard elsewhere.

In other words—Chess records sound like live performance.

It helps that they were, essentially, live. Mistakes hardly mattered compared to the energy—and that energy could only result from a single, charged performance with all instruments blasting. (A little overdubbing of lead guitar doesn’t neutralize the vibrancy of the original jam.)

The sound may have been Leonard Chess’s peculiar genius. He knew what he wanted, and got it, even if he had to kick out the drummer and slam the bass drum himself. It also had a lot to do with Malcom Chisolm, a Chess recording engineer who sat almost anonymously at the center of cultural history and who worked on Chuck Berry’s records as late as the “Back Home” album in 1969, and maybe longer.

Berry’s short guitar solos take flight and tell stories as interesting as the lyrics—musical stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The guitar can ring like a bell, or cut like sharp teeth, or burn like fire depending on the urgency of the moment and the setting on the amp. The drums echo. There are maracas on “Maybellene,” horns on “Nadine,” background voices on “Almost Grown,” and behind all of it, a rippling, roaming piano that never stops.

As I listen I begin to see my first images and make my first feeble connections—the mother waving, doors flying back, police with billy clubs, Nadine’s long leg and nice behind. And I see context. The Beatles, though disbanded, are still a very big deal. I hadn’t known until the night before that two of “their” songs—“Rock and Roll Music” and “Roll Over Beethoven”— are Chuck Berry songs. But there’s more. As I listen I figure out that the song “Back in the U.S.A.” was the inspiration for “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” and when I hear “Ol’ Flattop” come “movin’ up quickly” in the song “You Can’t Catch Me”—a line recycled in The Beatles “Come Together”—I just about flip.


(Read the earlier chapters in "Pages," to the right, or follow the link to Chapter One.)

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Chapter 7 – Why He Matters, Part II: Chuck Berry as Guitarist

The guitar matters all by itself. Some people think it’s easy. Those are the ones who can’t do it. An interviewer for Guitar Player magazine pointed out that most people who try to play “Chuck Berry” guitar don’t get it right. “Have you noticed that people who approximate your sound often play a watered-down version—more pentatonic or bluesy, less moving around the fingerboard, less major scale?” Chuck is too polite or diplomatic to respond directly, but the question is right on. Although his music is based mostly on the blues, it departs frequently from the so-called “blues scale,” both on the guitar itself, and in the melodies. A good example is the song “School Day” (or its melodic twin, “No Particular Place to Go.”) Most of it is a pure blues shuffle with riffs older than Robert Johnson, but during the guitar solo on “School Day” there’s something more, major scale riffs Chuck Berry must have copped from his teenage years listening to big band swing, but done in Chuck Berry’s unique “double-stop” style, where he plays two strings at a time. He talks in his Autobiography about the day he became “fluent enough picking the guitar to fill in full choruses without repeating licks.” The guitar tells its own stories. According to Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, “he would build his solos so there was a nice little statement taking the song to a new place, so you're ready for the next verse.”

The best Chuck Berry guitar measures include remarkable rhythmic back flips, with chords and double-stops that jab, punch, and counter. (The next to last bars of the “School Day” solo are a good example.) As a rank and sporadic amateur on guitar I can follow and imitate to a point and then just have to laugh and enjoy.

The best guitarists admit it isn’t easy. “He is rhythm supreme,” says Keith Richards. “He plays that lovely double-string stuff, which I got down a long time ago, but I'm still getting the hang of.” (A funny, well known scene from the movie Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll shows Chuck giving Keith a painful tutorial in one double string slur.) “A lot of people have done Chuck Berry songs,” says Aerosmith’s Perry, “but to get that feel is really hard. It's the rock and roll thing—the push-pull and the rhythm of it." The early records emphasize that tension between the skipping shuffle drum patterns and Chuck’s sometimes straight ahead rock and roll rhythm work. “His guitar leads drove the rhythm, as opposed to laying over the top,” said Perry.

The sound is unique and instantly recognizable. Like other great musicians he took bits and pieces from his predecessors and created something new and fresh that changed music as we know it. “We're all part of this family that goes back thousands of years,” said Keith Richards. “Chuck got it from T-Bone Walker, and I got it from Chuck, Muddy Waters, Elmore James and B. B. King.”

Berry is up front about his own influences. “There is nothing new under the sun,” he says frequently. He is quick to cite influences that include T-Bone Walker, Charlie Christian, Lonnie Johnson, Carl Hogan, Elmore James, and even his old St. Louis friend, Ira Harris, the man who first taught him to play. “He was into jazz, and the way he could manipulate the sound, I knew I had to do that. He played a bit like Christian, and a lot of what he showed me is a part of what I do.”

I remember the first time I heard T-Bone Walker on record and recognized the familiar slur that Chuck Berry uses so often, most famously during the intro to “Johnny B. Goode.” And I remember the first time I ever heard the guitar introduction to Louis Jordan’s “Ain’t that Just Like a Woman,” a jazzy, single string version of the familiar intro to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” and about half the songs Chuck Berry plays live. Jordan’s guitarist, Carl Hogan, must have invented the phrase, and Berry made it his own, adding the double string approach and topping it off with the T-Bone Walker slur. (And then we all copped it from Chuck, and say we’re playing “Chuck Berry” when we do a simplified version!) Old blues records continue to surprise me. Recently I heard what I’ve always considered a uniquely “Chuck Berry” lick coming off a guitar played by Louis or David Myers about a minute and 20 seconds into the Little Walter instrumental “Sad Hours,” which was on the R&B charts back in 1952, when the journeyman Chuck Berry was developing his professional chops at the Cosmopolitan Club in East St. Louis. I had a similar experience listening to Benny Goodman play his clarinet on “Flyin’ Home”—because suddenly there it was, a “Chuck Berry” lick, twenty years early, on woodwinds!

But wherever it came from, it’s a sound that just about everyone who followed considered indispensible. “He’s really laid the law down for playing that kind of music,” said Clapton. He was a favorite of Jimi Hendrix, of Keith Richards, of Perry. Clapton copied him in his early years. The Beach Boys, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones built their early careers off his songs and his style.

B. B. King and Jimi Hendrix are the only two guitarists who have had such a direct impact on rock guitar players. King’s style (like Berry’s, rooted partly in T-Bone Walker, but with bent single string runs and tremolo) is probably just as influential as Berry’s. Both men rose from similar influences at the same moment in time. Every modern rock and roll guitarist owes a great deal to one or both. (Add their student, Jimi, to the list and it’s done.) True—since they all learned from T-Bone Walker you could argue that his influence is larger, and since Robert Johnson informed just about everyone, you could say the same of him. But for the rock side of rock and roll, Clapton had it right: Chuck Berry laid down the law.

Not only that, but he did it with so much cool, energy and style that guitar moved front and center. At the start, maybe piano was king. But when Chuck Berry put the guitar out front, played it like crazy, danced with it, gave it a hero named “Johnny,” and made everybody want one, he changed the face of popular music for generations.

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Chapter 10 - Family

The melancholy of Chuck Berry is hard wired—as much a part of his personality as the humor. He’s often at his best when he is most nostalgic, as in “Wee Wee Hours,” “Memphis,” or “Oh Louisiana.” Sometimes it’s a sweet melancholy— “Time Was,” or “Oh Baby Doll.” It’s rarely the hard blues of Muddy Waters. His deepest feeling is the dull ache of faded memory, of loss, of aloneness. “In a wee little room, I sit alone and think of you,” he sighs in “Wee Wee Hours.” Or watch him sing “Cottage for Sale” or “I’m through with Love” in the film Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll. He is on the floor, leaning back, eyes half closed, strumming slow, simple chords, and yet it’s the emotional highpoint of a film about a “rock and roller.” This is Chuck Berry’s real blues, the blues he feels at his core. It is why, despite his own protests, or Stevo’s musings, he really is a bluesman, and a great one.

Imagine the hours, days, and weeks he has spent alone, in hotels, on planes, backstage, in wee little rooms or big ones; the separation from his family and home; the forced isolation caused by a society that jailed him unjustly at the peak of his career; the self-inflicted injuries caused by his own bad choices. When I have seen him onstage with his daughter Ingrid, or son Charles, or his grandson, or backstage with his wife, it is obvious how much family means to him— but how much time with them did he lose or throw away?

Then again, is there a single Chuck Berry song that takes ownership of any part of that loss? It is always the other party’s fault. “Her mom did not agree, and tore apart our happy home.” “You ain’t done nothing, darlin’, but ruin a happy home.” “She put me in shame and in sorrow.” Is there an apology anywhere?

Maybe one. “I stayed away from you too long,” he sings in “Oh, Louisiana.” If there is a single regret that rises from his astounding career, I’m betting it’s that.

Family has always been a part of it.

He wrote “Roll Over Beethoven” in part because of the struggle for time at the family piano bench. His older sister Lucy played classical and got first dibs. Chuck wanted time at the keyboard to learn boogie-woogie. It was a musical family. Another sister, Martha, sang on some of his early 1960s recordings.

Or think of the families in his songs: Johnny’s mother, spending everything she could earn or borrow on Johnny’s future, then waiting anxiously by the kitchen door for his return; Little Marie’s father living, presumably, at his uncle’s place, missing his daughter and family; Sweet Little Sixteen’s pushover mommy and dad; Henry Ford’s junior, who asks his dad for a competitor’s car.

When I first saw Chuck Berry, he made a point of including everyone in the crowd as family, walking back and forth across the stage, eyes wide, head twisting this way and that, feigning surprise as we chanted “Go! Johnny, Go!”

“Sing it, children!” he’d say, marveling like a proud dad. “Just look at you! All my children! All my beautiful rock and roll children!”

Nowadays he usually shows up on stage with his son Charles and his daughter Ingrid at his side, and sometimes even grandson Charles III, who plays guitar. Out front some of his “rock and roll children” hobble in on walkers, because hey— Sweet Little Sixteen is sweet little old 70 something these days! But remarkably, there are usually lots of young people in the crowd, too, because Sweet Little Sixteen will always be 16, and Little Queenie will never be more than an interesting year older.

An early instrumental was called “Ingo,” presumably after his daughter Darlin’ Ingrid Berry Clay. It bops and bounces along like a happy little girl.  Ingrid is a regular part of her father’s shows in St. Louis, blowing harp and singing blues and harmony. She started early. When she was still a little girl she walked onto the stage at the Apollo Theater in Baltimore, Maryland (not to be confused with the better known Apollo in Harlem). “Mother was holding me pretty tight so Alan Freed intervened and said ‘Oh, let her go,’ you know. I was shaking and shimmering, trying to get away from Mamma, and I broke loose and ran on out there and first thing that struck me were the lights, the people in the audience, the musicians,” Ingrid told an interviewer for a St. Louis oral history project. “The first thing I did was just stand there for about a few seconds and then I had this little guitar that Dad bought—a little toy guitar and I just strummed it and went across. And that was the first time too, that I ever did the "duck walk," which Dad has in his show.”

She didn’t stop at the Apollo. Ingrid helped with vocals on some of his Mercury recordings, and then on the 1975 album “Chuck Berry,” where she harmonized on a couple of numbers including Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me To Do.”

There’s evidently an unreleased song about Ingrid—one I haven’t heard. The New Yorker reported in 2006 that Berry had written a song called “Darlin’.”

Darlin', your father's growing older, I fear;

Strains of gray are showing bolder each year.

Lay your head upon my shoulder, my dear:

Time is fading fast away.

It’s part of a mountain of unreleased material that Berry has recorded since 1980, some of it probably bad, some reputedly wonderful.

Though Ingrid has been a regular part of her father’s shows and tours since the mid-1970s, I didn’t see her live until 2010. She is over 60 now and has matured into a powerful harmonica player and blues singer but obviously remains her father’s little girl. I have a snapshot, taken in early 2012, where she stands beaming, hands clasped in delight or prayer, while her 85 year old father bunny hops across stage with his guitar.

In the same shot is Charles, Jr., the very accessible moderator on Chuck Berry’s website and social networking pages, where he calls himself CBII. (He has also used the clever screen name “Son of Rock and Roll,” a bit of wordplay worthy of the lineage). In the photo Charles’ smile is proud and amused. He shares the enthusiasm of fans, and offers amazing tidbits of history. My favorites have been his descriptions of the wine red Gibson that Chuck Berry has played for the last 35 years or so. The guitar is scratched, busted, with missing knobs and other parts tossed as useless. A funky steel bracket is screwed to the front, evidently to accommodate a thumb when the guitar is played on a shoulder or behind the back. A strip of yellow tape has cut across the butt of the guitar for several years now, holding the strap in position. It reminds me, in many respects, of Big Joe William’s nine string guitar, with all of its added hardware. Despite this cosmetic charm, Charles, Jr., who appears to love cars and guitars as much as his father, says it’s a powerhouse, and one of the best his father has played. At a 2012 show at a casino in Alton, Illinois, Chuck told the audience “I love this guitar. It’s scratched and raggedy, but it’s really good!” He’s not the only one who loves it. A picture that Swedish fan Peter K. took of that guitar backstage draws more people to my blog than almost any other single thing. In Peter’s photograph the guitar sits casually next to snacks and drinks. Another Swedish fan, Thomas, calls Chuck’s old guitar “the Holy Grail.” Thomas has actually held it and played it—an honor. There’s a video on YouTube of Charles, Jr. playing the guitar during a sound check in France. With the old Gibson in hand, the genetic link between father and son becomes audible as Charles plays chords that would make me jerk with recognition from halfway down the street. That guitar is family, too.

Charles seems determined to protect his father on stage, and to protect his father’s legacy off stage. I occasionally see him pop up on the internet to comment on his dad or his dad’s equipment. Usually he’s fan-friendly and polite, but I saw him sharply rebuke some anonymous commenter who called Chuck Berry a “jerk-off” on a list serve. Poor fool didn’t see it coming— didn’t know the “son of rock and roll” would read his rude post about the father of same.

There are less public children. One daughter seemed to give her name to Chuck Berry’s music publishing company. Another—a health care administrator— showed up in the news talking about Obamacare. All of the kids seem intent on protecting their dad. A Berry family friend once told me that “gate-keeping” within the family is formidable. When Charles, Jr. was remembering bits and pieces of his past on Facebook, one sister appeared with the gentlest comment—Charles’ nickname, followed by three dots. I can’t know it, but I got the impression she was reminding him that discretion is a Berry family value.

Family is everywhere in his songs, but also, touchingly, in the movie Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, when Chuck and his sister sit with their father and tell stories. There’s one about “Daddy” losing his eyesight as a child but regaining it when “they pierced his ears.” Charles and Ingrid sound just as adoring in a BBC interview when they talk about how Chuck still mows his own lawn, and occasionally makes “crop circles.” “I think they’re beautiful!” says Ingrid.

When I see Chuck Berry now, 15 years older than my dad ever got, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, I realize that it was not such a bad choice for a desperate 14 year old to make, searching for someone to symbolically take the place of a dad who was slipping away. And as I’ve grown older the bond I felt as a kid grew even stronger. Here was a “dad” I could watch grow old. When he first started showing his age, at about 55 or 60, I didn’t like it. I wanted the young guy back. But now that he’s elderly and I am showing my own age it gives me great comfort to have him around. I go to see him now and then. I sit or stand up close. I bring small gifts in case there is a “meet and greet” after the show.

I love him.

As for my real father— I keep him as near as I can, and hope that maybe someday I’ll be truly lucky, go backstage, and meet him again, for the first time.

(For the rest of this story, from the beginning, see the "pages" section to the right.  Or keep reading below!)

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Chapter 11 - How a Small Town Promoter Held the Great Chuck Berry Hostage!

(40 years after meeting Chuck Berry between sets at Lake Tahoe I learn why he was sitting there!)

Five months after my first Chuck Berry show a distant relation passed through Orangevale on her way from Lake Tahoe to her home in the Bay Area. It was my brother’s sister-in-law. I hardly knew her. She lived 90 miles away. It therefore says something about the state of my madness, five months after that first Chuck Berry show, that she said “You’re a Chuck Berry freak, right?”


She bore glad tidings.

“He’s going to be at Tahoe this weekend!”

Say but the word. A few days later I found myself at Lake Tahoe, where my family had owned a small cabin for decades, and where my brother Danny was living that summer to earn some cash at the casinos. My mother drove me. A girl from my school and her friend got there separately by Greyhound.

The show was at a small hall built from the shell of a former grocery store just across the highway from the lake. We didn’t know it but the grocery store setting was historically appropriate. Chuck Berry’s professional career first got serious in the early 1950s at an East St. Louis grocery store-turned-club called The Cosmopolitan.

Yep, Chuck Berry Played Here.  A Great Show.  A Long Show.

This time, unlike the February show in Sacramento, the joint was rocking and the place was packed—so much so that my friends and I didn’t get near the stage. My friend’s friend was vaguely neurotic and afraid of the jammed crowd, so we stayed in the back, fifty or sixty feet from stage, in a loosely populated area where men in motorcycle club jackets twirled their partners around us.

At the time I had no idea who was backing Chuck Berry. I remember being embarrassed when the drummer, a thin black man with an afro and goatee stepped onto the stage. Half the crowd cheered, evidently thinking it was Berry. (There weren’t many African Americans at Tahoe in those days.) Chuck Berry never wore an afro. He wore his hair processed and slicked back. Nor did he ever have a goatee—at least to my knowledge. He usually sported a razor thin mustache.

Even from the distance of 40 years I remember that the band was a good one, well suited to the music, and that the show didn’t have the mournful quality of the Sacramento show in February. Otherwise my memories are fragmentary. I don’t recall what he sang. I remember the fifties style dancing in my part of the hall, and that I tried to do it with Lara, and how she laughed once she realized, quickly, that I didn’t know the first thing about dancing. (“You know you can’t dance but you wish you could!”) I remember that Berry played two sets—the only time I’ve ever seen or heard of him doing so. And I vividly recall walking away across the parking lot with the music still booming— the only time I ever did or ever will leave a Chuck Berry show early. I think we left because of my friend’s friend, who was feeling claustrophobic—but that’s how long the show was: I was satisfied.

But what I remember most clearly from that night is the handshake.

During the break between sets I spot Chuck Berry sitting near the stage, looking somber, like the model
on the cover of his most recent album, “Back Home.” He’s smoking a cigarette and talking with a big, bearded guy. I assume they are old acquaintances, or that the big guy is making interesting conversation. I’m a shy, skinny kid, but I’m brave enough to push forward, hold out my hand, and blurt:

“You’re my idol!”

Even then I know it’s an idiotic thing to say, but I’m fifteen and it’s all I can manage.

Chuck is serious but gracious. He studies me, nods solemnly, and shakes my hand, probably pondering the market implications suggested by this skinny, long haired, fifteen year old. I’m the width of a pencil, with baggy jeans and wisps of fine hair on my upper lip. Aware that I have absolutely nothing to add to his life or store of knowledge, I leave him to his conversation and his cigarette.

Forty years later, having progressed but little, I will meet Chuck Berry and tell him, stupidly, about that handshake. I suppose it makes sense. I suppose, if Juan Diego met the Virgin Mary 40 years after the incident at Guadalupe, he’d mention their earlier encounter.

“You appeared before me once before, oh Blessed Mother, and we built a sanctuary for you on that spot!”

“Whatever,” she’d think. But she’d respond politely. Chuck did.

But here’s the real point of the story: forty years later I learned why Chuck Berry was sitting there, and who the big guy was.

By then I was blogging about Chuck Berry, and using the blog as an excuse to resurrect and reconstruct the dim, fading fragments that constitute my memory. This work was important to me. Some people remember everything, but I retain only broad strokes and a few specific details of what has happened in my life. I had a vague idea when these early shows occurred, and I remembered bits and pieces of each show— but I wanted more. I wanted more detail. I wanted corroboration. I wanted to verify my own memories, and to see how they fit into the chronology of my life.

Once, in the early days of the internet, long before I began blogging and at a time when I didn’t care much about Chuck Berry I actually saw someone advertising a poster for this Lake Tahoe show. He was asking $35. This was before PayPal. You had to send an e-mail, and follow it with cash or check in an envelope. I tried to buy the poster, but never heard back from the seller. Now I spent hours googling permutations of “Chuck Berry South Lake Tahoe,” trying to find that poster again, or any evidence of the show that might tell me what I’d seen, who’d backed him, when it was—anything. I did the same for shows in Sacramento and Monterey.

And one day, after months of repetitious googling, it paid off. I stumbled across a website where aging musicians and middle-aged former teenagers exchanged memories of teen dances at Lake Tahoe. (The internet is an odd but sometimes wonderful place.)

I posted an inquiry asking for anyone with a memory of the Chuck Berry show: “What was the name of the rock hall on Highway 50 at Bijou in a little grocery store building?” I asked. “I saw Chuck Berry there in about 1971— though I'd love to pin down the actual year. If anyone remembers that show, or who backed Chuck Berry, or when it was, I'd love to know.”

I got a couple of responses. Someone named Eddie told me he’d been to the show but got kicked out for being underage. (He must have been kicked out for another reason. It was an all ages show or I wouldn’t have been there.) And I learned the name of the place—either The Sanctuary, or The Fun House, depending on the year.

But then, a week or so later, I hit pay dirt, with a response from J.B.

J.B. is a name I knew. He was a local legend at South Lake Tahoe. I remembered him chiefly from signs posted outside the old American Legion Hall near our family’s cabin. J.B.’s band played teen dances there, and his name was always on the sign out front. When we were children my brother Danny thought J.B.’s name was funny, probably because it contained letters from the word “burp,” and if Danny thought it was funny, so did Ann and I. Now I learned that J.B. promoted the Chuck Berry show I’d seen at Lake Tahoe, and that his band backed Chuck Berry. “Peter,” he wrote, “I would have to dig up the exact year for you. I can tell you it was the last year that I operated the Fun House or the Sanctuary they were one in the same. My band backed Chuck Berry. More to that story.”

I was thrilled. I had found a witness to my history. Not just a witness—a perpetrator, the man who’d helped to create the object of my memory and obsession. He’d actually performed with Chuck Berry that evening.

But where I wanted to learn about the show and the music, J.B. appeared obsessed with the contract.

I had paid Mr. Berry half of his money when the contract was signed. The night he was to perform he asked for the balance (normal). After he got his money he refused to sign the contract and said he would be doing a short set. I reminded him what he had agreed to do in his contract and he said ‘What contract?’ I remember telling him there would be several hundred disappointed young people. He shrugged his shoulders.

Then came the killer line:

I asked our security to escort Mr. Berry to the stage and escort him back in 90 minutes, the time he agreed to do and that's exactly what happened.

He asked security to “escort” him back! This was fascinating stuff. But I was so excited to finally get information and hopeful to learn more about the music, I missed the full import of what J.B. was telling me. I replied, saying it was one of the longest, best Chuck Berry shows I’d seen. J.B. responded with more details about the contract.

I too was and still am a Chuck Berry fan. It is disappointing when you have to do business with someone you admire. At that time the band and I like a million other bands were doing Berry songs. I know about his royalties and he had every right to make all he could performing.

He has or had a strange sound and tech rider, in it he asked for a fender bassman for his guitar I made the stupid mistake of thinking surely that was a mistake and provided him with a fender twin.

That was unacceptable to him. While I was trying to work this out with him and get him on stage you might remember the hall was packed and there were another 700 or 800 hundred people outside (police estimate) trying to break the doors down.

I never called the police to either the Legion Hall or The Fun House, but that night I did.

After the night was over I sat down and decided that maybe after more than 10 years at the Legion and almost three at the Fun House maybe it was time to hang that part of my life up.

There is a lot more to this story but that was my last promotion at Lake Tahoe. I’m still a Berry fan and I don't blame him in any way.

[J.B.]

Fender is a guitar company. The Fender Bassman is an old powerhouse of an amplifier built for bass but often used by guitarists that Chuck Berry probably did favor at one time. The Twin Reverb is a smaller Fender Amp with a cleaner sound. Chuck Berry fans know all about the business of the amplifier. Chuck Berry has a sound. It’s the simple sound of a good guitar played loud through a good amplifier. So Chuck Berry’s contract always specifies exactly which amplifier the promoter is to provide. For several decades now it’s been the Fender Dual Showman.

In the book Brown Eyed Handsome Man author Bruce Pegg explains that Berry “developed a system of fines for unscrupulous promoters who failed to live up to their side of the contract.” Pegg quotes two regular Chuck Berry sidemen who describe how Chuck dealt with promoters who provided the wrong amp. The first, Robert Baldori, is a Michigan attorney and musician. He has performed with Berry countless times, including two albums and dozens of live shows. In Brown Eyed Handsome Man, Baldori describes a gig in Indianapolis:

“[O]ne of the amps isn’t there. Well, you can make do, but the promoter has breached the contract, and Chuck says, ‘You’ve breached the contract, I want another $2000, ‘cause I’m going to have to go up there.’ Well, the guy on the other end of the deal says, ‘You’re screwing with me here, you’re ripping me off;’ he goes and gets the cash, Chuck takes it and goes on. And the other guy walks away telling people, ‘Chuck Berry’s temperamental, hard to work with, and he fucked me on this deal,’ and Chuck just looks at him and says, ‘I’m not screwing with you.’ And he’s not!”

The amp is a pretty simple requirement. Berry expects it to be honored.

J.B. admitted in his internet post that he’d breached the contract—what he called the “strange tech rider.” And I liked that J.B. still respected Chuck Berry despite the dispute. I filed his name away, thinking that if I ever got to Las Vegas I’d look him up and see if he could find those files he talked about.

But I didn’t have to go to Vegas. A year or so after our internet conversation a story appeared in the online edition of the South Lake Tahoe paper celebrating the return of J.B. to one of the Lake Tahoe casinos, and a good chunk of the article was about the Chuck Berry show at the Funhouse. The article said the show occurred on July 4, 1971, and called it “the day the music died in South Lake Tahoe” because, it caused J.B. to stop producing shows and dances.

“I put 50 percent of the money up and he knew he was coming into a facility that would only hold less than 2,000 people,” J.B. is quoted as saying. “They put guys at the door with counters, so there was no way around that. Like a lot of things, he didn’t pay any attention to the contract. He signed it and took the money. Then when he shows up he comes back to the office with one other guy. He said to me as I was counting out the cash, ‘What about the percentage?’ ”

The rest of this is taken straight from the newspaper.

[J.B.] reminded him of the limited Fun House capacity and the contract he had signed.

“He didn’t like that,” [J.B.] said. “He wanted extra money. I said. ‘Look, I’ll pay you for this now.’ He took the money and when he went to sign the check to give me a receipt for it, he shoved it back to me and said, ‘I didn’t see no receipt,’ and he turns to his friend and says, ‘I have an idea this is going to be a real short night.’

“It hit me wrong,” [J.B.] said. “It ticked me off. I always look at it from the artist’s standpoint but that was just ridiculous to me.”

To make matters worse, the truculent Berry, who was to be backed by [J.B.]’s band, said he wouldn’t plug his guitar into the Fender twin amp he was provided.

[J.B.] had had enough. If the speaker was good enough for Jerry Garcia, he thought, it was good enough for Berry.

“I had security there that were football players,” [J.B.] said. “They were with the 49ers who were here for high-altitude training. I hired them for summer to keep peace in my hall. I said, ‘Walk Mr. Berry to the stage and don’t let him off until he’s done what he’s agreed to do.’ ”

So, forty years after the fact I learn why Chuck Berry was sitting by the side of the stage talking to the big guy. The big guy was a San Francisco 49er. One false move and the “Father of Rock and Roll” was going to be tackled.

To get some perspective, let’s imagine we want some work done on our kitchen. The contractor signs a bid but adds a “strange rider” that says it's my job to provide a functional table saw. When he arrives there's no table saw. The contractor gets grumpy and says "This might be a short day." So I call in my large buddies to keep the contractor there until the job is finished.

That is what might be called that false imprisonment—a crime and a tort. Generally speaking, you can't hold someone against their will. And Chuck Berry never breached the contract. He made a crack about a short show. It was the promoter who breached the contract by providing the wrong equipment.

My favorite bit of reporting is when the reporter calls Chuck Berry “truculent” and writes that if the speaker was good enough for Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead, it was good enough for Berry. What’s ignored is that the “truculent Mr. Berry” spent 20 years developing a guitar sound that Garcia, may he rest in peace, honored and sometimes imitated. Not many groups have covered more Chuck Berry songs than the Grateful Dead.

At any rate, the “truculent” one stayed and played two of the best I've seen him do, backed by J.B.'s very good band. It wasn't a short night.

J.B. says he was “ticked off.”

Ah well. Lucky for him, and lucky for me, the “truculent Mr. Berry” endured the humiliation of being held hostage by a local promoter, honored his part of a dishonored contract, and kept on rocking— for another 40 years and counting.


(For more of this story, go to the "Pages" section on the right, where an entire book is being published!  Or find the first chapter by clicking here!  Free!)

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Chapter 12 - Why He Matters, Part IV: Chuck Berry as Businessman

Which leads to the next topic— because beyond the art, the poetry, the songs, the performance and the pure presence, there are a couple of other things that make Chuck Berry’s long career so notable.


He fought for himself as an artist—and continues to do so. He makes sure he is paid in advance for his performances. He manages his own career. He insists that every promoter provide the bare bones necessary for him to put on a proper Chuck Berry show: i.e., a few professional musicians, the proper guitar amplifier, and cash. When they fail, he lets them know.

Various people have criticized Chuck Berry’s insistence on being compensated for work performed, including later generation rockers who take in unimaginable riches and have riders demanding assorted wines and chocolates, or tea served in china cups, and who undoubtedly leave most details to legions of attorneys, agents, handlers, publicists, and hangers on.

Eric Clapton said “I still love his music, but meeting him in some senses took the edge off it for me. I found out bit by bit that he was so concerned with money and himself, and he is such an ambitious man, that in a way it kind of spoiled the feeling for the music.”

This is ironic commentary from a man who, with The Yardbirds, The Bluesbreakers, Cream, Derek and the Dominoes, and as a solo act, has gathered more windfall from the inventions of African American and Jamaican musicians than whole armies of the original artists. As best I can tell, from what I admit is only idle knowledge of his music, Clapton himself invented nothing and has written just one truly good song. Instead, like a good second story man he lifted the good stuff, polished it beautifully, and then fenced what he took at great personal profit. Good for him—that’s music. Musically Chuck did much the same thing (though he added several dozen beautifully crafted songs to the mix). But where, then, does Clapton get off talking about ambition, money and self importance? He’s got all of that in spades.

Or listen to Keith Richards, who started his own career covering hits from Chess stars like Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. In my mind he deserves more artistic credit than Clapton—Richards helped write whole bunches of great songs. But discussing the 1986 film Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll he said: “Chuck said to the promoters that he wanted to bring his piano player, but only if they pay him. Chuck’s about bucks.” The Rolling Stones reportedly earned more than $400 million from its “Bigger Bang Tour,” and in 2001 the British paper The Guardian once reported that Richards was worth 130 million pounds. I guess with $200 million in your pocket, a busload of roadies, and a bunch of lawyers, managers, accountants and hangers on, you can be all about the art.

I got the Clapton and Richards quotes from John Collis’s Chuck Berry: The Biography. Collis himself chimes in: “Berry’s prudence with money, his fascination with its accumulation, is legendary. He loves it more than he loves rock ‘n’ roll. The deal is what matters to him, and he reads a contract with X-ray eyes.”

Collis’s quote is probably “on the money,” and less judgmental than the statements by the two well nourished rockers. Chuck Berry would never deny that he’s interested in the money. He remembers how much he was paid at his first gigs in the early 1950s. He remembers how much he was paid to paint the walls of the club, too. (“When the money got larger, I put the paint brush down, picked the pick up, and fiddled!”) He remembers the cost of old cars, tape recorders, guitars, even an $8 pair of pants. As an African American born in 1926, he is a child of both Jim Crow and the Great Depression. Yes, money means something to him.

And to his art! The pecuniary details are as important to his songs as the machines, the safety belts, or the young love. Johnny’s mother remembers where she got the bus money and the money for the guitar, which she bought at a pawn shop. The protagonist of “No Money Down” knows exactly how much he’s got left to spend to insure his “yellow convertible four door de Ville.” The “little money coming worked out well” for Pierre and the Mademoiselle.

There’s a scene in the film Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll where three legends gather around a piano at Berry Park. Bo Diddley starts talking about his early recording contracts. Little Richard admits he never read them. Bo says he did, and begins to say how much he earned per record. Half a cent says Chuck. The records sold for 59 cents. “There were 58 other pennies going somewhere,” says Chuck. “I majored in math. I was looking at the other 58 cents!”

At another point in the movie he talks about the payola scandal, and about finding two other names credited on his first hit record, “Maybellene.” “I knew Alan Freed. I heard him on the radio. He was the disk jockey in New York that played the records. Who was Russ Fratto? He owned a stenography store—a stationary store that supplied Leonard [Chess] with his stationary.”

“Maybellene” is now credited to just one man—Chuck Berry. Berry and his record company also fought to get royalties owed to him by the Beach Boys for using the melody of “Sweet Little Sixteen” to make “Surfing U.S.A.” Even John Lennon had to settle with Berry (he agreed to record more Chuck Berry songs) in return for using Berry’s line “here come old flattop” in The Beatle’s song “Come Together.” Call it hardnosed, or call it smart, or call it taking care of his family and his legacy— it was the right thing to do. How many blues and R & B stars died homeless, their efforts ripped off and returned home by foreign invaders? Not Berry. There’s a mansion on the edge of Berry Park that wasn’t there when my car stalled in 1978. (And that’s his other home. I’m pretty sure the big one is down the road a piece.)

His own musicians sure respect him. “The money's always right and on time,” says Bob Lohr, Chuck’s long time St. Louis piano player. “The touring conditions are the absolute best as well— five star hotels, sometimes first-class airfare, all expenses paid.” Fellow pianist Bob Baldori agrees. “I have never found Charles difficult to work with. He's always been 100% professional and easy going with me.”

If Chuck Berry reads a contract with “X-ray eyes” it’s because he’s a businessman who has been burned and would prefer to avoid it. “I have tried to curb the manners in which I have been ripped off so that it doesn’t happen again,” he told an interviewer from the BBC. “Which has given me a reputation of being—cynical, is it? It’s not that I’m distrustful—it’s just that if the same type of dog comes up and you think that he’ll bite you, well, move out!”

In his book he talks about his first and only manager. Chuck fired him when he learned he was stealing money. After that Berry managed his own career with the help of a few trusted agents and friends.

He wasn’t alone. The great Chess Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf also paid attention to money matters. Wolf paid his musicians’ taxes, social security and unemployment insurance—all unheard of in the blues world of the 1950s. When he fired a musician, or there wasn’t work, that musician could still get a check. When the musician retired, he’d get social security. Wolf also insisted on following the rules of the musicians’ union. Once, Elmore James put Wolf’s name on a poster without Wolf’s permission. Wolf fined James $25.

One of Wolf’s contemporaries talked about Wolf the same way some people talk about Chuck Berry. “He was mostly about money,” the musician said. “He conserved his money and he was always singing about money…. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him broke… He really was into that money thing and he had some money!”

Berry and Wolf, entertainers, sometimes clowns on stage, and undeniably great artists and musical innovators, were serious business people who insisted on being treated with respect, dignity and fairness in the financial rough and tumble of the music business. Musicians should thank them, not just for paving the way musically, but for helping turn the rough and tumble music business into a viable and dignified profession. It is a legacy almost as great as the music itself.

(Earlier chapters of this book length piece can be found in the "pages" to the left, and scattered throughout the blog.  I'll be publishing additional chapters once or twice a week throughout summer.  It starts HERE.  Or to read the next chapter, click HERE.)

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