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 8 - My Very Own (Imaginary) Berry Park

I’m fifteen or sixteen. I’ve got a spiral bound notebook and a ball point pen. I fill a page with a large square. At the bottom is a straight country road. I plant trees and shrubs along the road. Like Gretta Garbo in Grand Hotel I want to be alone. 

I draw a long, curving drive from the road to a small house. The house is surrounded by more trees. There is room inside for me and the mystery woman who will accompany me in life. I don’t draw it but there is a room with guitars, drums, a keyboard and a four track reel to reel tape recorder. I have vague plans for a one man band that will use cheap amps and instruments to produce low fidelity sound. Out back is a small wooden structure with a roof that rolls off onto raised wooden tracks. Inside that shed is a large telescope bolted to a concrete pier. I draw rows of garden crops. We are self sufficient. I put a gate on the access road. We are safe. But while the goal is a sort of protected solitude, I’m frightened enough of the country and the pickups that hurtle past on that dark road that I draw outlying cottages for close friends and family. I give each its own gravel road. The only rent is to protect me. 

Though I don’t yet know it, I have designed my very own Berry Park.

Early on I developed the ability to draw a line between myself and the unhappiness that surrounded me. I still have it, though with age and responsibility the line has deteriorated. I’m no longer able to insulate myself so thoroughly—especially when it’s something that involves my children or my granddaughter. But as a kid I learned to protect myself even if it meant losing myself in an estate imagined on 8 ½ by 11 inch lined paper. 

I recall at age 12 training some classmate to do my paper route. He was going to be my substitute. I’m not sure how or why he got the job—he wasn’t my friend. We didn’t hang out together. We hardly spoke. He was a chubby, pushy guy, with an awful mom, who wound up taking almost all my profits for one day of work each week. I remember his sour faced mother pushing him to my front door at the end of the month and forcing me to hand over just about every penny I’d collected. (My problem was that customers didn’t pay me. I paid my substitute and my distributor, delivered the papers, and at the end of the month the customers hid, sipping desperate gin behind shut doors.) Anyway, one morning at 5 am this unpleasant kid and I were on the front porch folding papers. It was still dark. We were going to strap canvas bags of newspapers to our bikes and ride around the neighborhood and deliver them as gifts to evil deadbeats. Suddenly the front door opened, and there was my dad, in sagging underpants and a t-shirt, swaying, bleary, still drunk enough from the night before to burp and slur his words. 

“Wha tchou doing?” 

I saw the kid look, bewildered, but with growing understanding, at my dad, drunk at 5 am. His eyes swelled with enlightenment. “O’Neil’s dad is a drunk!” I knew instantly that he’d share this vignette at school with whoever it was that he hung with. 

There weren’t many such instances. I made sure of it. Once I asked a friend named Kevin to spend the night. I’d never done such a thing. It was night and we were in my room when I began to hear howling and craziness migrate through the house. Kevin was Irish and probably had a life similar to mine. He became very excited. His eyes lit up. He became hyper. He wanted to see what was happening. I knew all too well what was happening: my kindly old dad was drunk and berserk. I could hear the house erupt in a battle to get him back into his room. Kevin became diabolical. “What’s going on?” he asked, again and again, with a manic grin. He was ready to pop like a party favor. My mom and sister came to my door and told Kevin and me to stay put. I remember my mom’s worried face. I suspect my own expression was the same. My father bellowed and howled. There was banging and thunder all over the big house. 

That was my last sleepover.

I didn’t bring people home unless they were very good friends— a pattern that stuck even after I’d grown. I’ve never had much use for acquaintances. I don’t ask coworkers to lunch. I rarely go drinking with the boys. I don’t even know the boys. I’m quite satisfied with family and a few close friends, even if the friends are far away.

Even my hobbies and interests are solitary.

I’m writing, for example. I like to read, write, and listen to music. I jog long distances, alone. I hit golf balls at the range, and might enjoy golf, but hate foursomes. I even make music alone, playing two or three guitar parts, and adding drums, bass, keyboards and a droning vocal. 

It was the same as a kid. One of my hobbies was stargazing. It still is. You can’t get more alone than to sit under the night sky with a companion that is a hundred million light years away. That is being alone. As a young teenager, I’d lay outside nights with a tiny telescope and a star map. The skies were still dark in those days, and my little scope, purchased for $10 at a big discount shop, could show me the rings of Saturn, the Orion Nebula, and the cratered surface of the moon. I even found Uranus once—a tiny, cold blur that I marked in my atlas of the stars. The Milky Way still glimmered faintly in our sky then, and the immensity of it all thrilled me. 

I inherited my interest in telescopes from my seventh grade friend Peter F., one of the rare kids I really allowed into my life. He knew my secrets and I knew his—(chiefly that we stole half a dozen packs of his dad’s Tareytons and smoked them in a “fort” that we dug behind his house.) We could laugh at our problems, even my dad and his drinking. We could make the skeleton in my closet dance a bit for our amusement. 

Peter was a natural engineer. We built mock spacecraft together. He taught me about Estes model rockets. He showed me catalogs from a company called Edmunds Scientific, filled with telescopes, telescope kits, and parts. Edmunds sold a three inch reflector for about $30, and a six inch mirror kit for about $13. I chose the latter and spent several months gamely trying to grind a telescope mirror using instructions from The Standard Handbook for Telescope Making, by Howard Neale, and Star Gazing with Telescope and Camera, by George T. Keene. The unfinished mirror is still in my closet. But in middle age I found the $30 reflector in mint condition at a flea market for $15, and just recently I purchased and built an Estes model rocket with my six year old, Rafferty. Thank you, Peter. 

I played drums. After I’d learned some basics on Stevo’s set, my former brother in law, Rich, gave me a set of sparkling red Kents. Later I bought a set of used Ludwigs painted black. I wasn’t Stevo, but I could keep a few beats and do some simple fills. Although I participated in a band, of sorts, most of my drumming was done solo, to records.

I stopped playing when I went away to college but I kept the Ludwigs and resurrected them recently. The drums are now “vintage” and somewhat valuable.

My mom loaned me her old Argus 35 millimeter camera and I roamed our property shooting pictures. I still have the negatives. When she saw I was using her camera she bought me a darkroom kit that I set up in my closet. I made prints of our goat, our house, and bits and pieces of my room. A sign that said “Income Tax.” Hand puppets that my sister Ann had made. A pair of overalls blowing in the wind. A tiny bottle of some product called “Death to Moles.” For a time I bought photography magazines and studied not only the artistically nude women and the Ansel Adams photographs, but also the black and white ads in the back crammed with deals for cameras from Germany and Japan sold in shops on 42nd Street in New York City. I sent for a $33 German Exa IIA single reflex that I could focus and adjust. (I still have a postcard from 42nd Street informing me that my camera had been shipped.) My pictures improved just slightly. Eventually the camera broke and the enlarger was retired, but I still have both, and the pictures, too. I hang on to important things.

I hung out in the non-fiction part of the library and scoured shelves for anything that interested me. I liked science and practical things. For a few days or weeks I read all about pigeons and dreamed of building a coop. I read books on astronomy. I’d become interested in some weird topic like horse-shoeing, or rabbits, or gold-panning, and try to learn how to do it. (I suspect you can’t actually learn horse-shoeing from a book.) I read Helen and Scott Nearing’s “Living the Good Life” about a New England couple who built their own home, and “Living on the Earth,” by Alicia Bay Laurel, about imaginary hippy skills—how to live in flimsy shelter without clothing. It seemed appealing, in part because there were pen drawings of pretty naked women, arms outstretched beneath the sun. I wanted to live among them. I see now that much of the knowledge I sought focused on self-sufficiency and freedom. I loved “Summerhill,” a book about a free school in Leeds, England, where the children had an equal vote. I wanted to go there, but instead I got Peach Tree, a school just as good, maybe better, run by an African American woman who wanted a decent school for her own children during turbulent times. It was no “free school.” Mrs. Brunberg was strict but loving. She let you argue. She didn’t let you win, but she allowed you to. Our teachers were young and smart. The kids were a collection of delinquents and misfits who quickly became family. We did cool things. In one class we built a big raft of plywood, two by fours and styrofoam and floated it overnight down the Sacramento river. We made movies. We protested at Dow Chemical. We saw Ralph Nader when he was still a hero. 

Our art teacher once assigned us the project of writing our “philosophy of life.” I wrote about what I called “Some necessities”: 

“a Steinway piano, or any spinet or grand piano; a record player of extremely high quality; three or more acres of land; a four track tape recorder; my drums, my Silvertone to be; my Teisco to be; my gorilla; a typewriter; interesting books with pictures; an eight inch telescope; a small basketball court; four cars of varying prices ($62-$22,000); and of course, the girl or woman of my dreams (depending on how long it takes to get my wishes).”

It’s funny how close it is to what I now have. I have my drums. I have several guitars. (They are not Silvertones or Teiscos, but they are equally unique.) I own a four track recorder but don’t use it. Technology has changed. I use a computer. But I have a good telescope, plenty of books, a $20,000 car (they ain’t what they used to be), and the woman of my dreams. All that’s missing is the acreage, which I still covet. 

The desire for rural privacy stems from the place we lived when I was a teenager. When my father’s drinking got too crazy my mother, my sister Ann and I moved to the outskirts of Sacramento, a part of town that almost qualified as country. There were trucks and cowboy hats and threats of violence. Low rolling hills climbed past Folsom Prison towards the Gold Country. There were a couple of small sad shopping centers and drive-ins between empty lots of wild oat grass and powdery brown dirt. People there talked like “Okies,” and after a while, so did I. 

Our house was magic—a yellow Victorian on two and a half acres divided into small pastures. There was a lot to explore and photograph. We had a dark tool shed, painted brick red, and a small red barn where we kept two goats. Everything was old and a bit funky and exactly what I wanted after five years in a posh, suburban home where the vacuum system was built into the walls and floor, a sprinkler system was built into the lawn and terror seemed to bleed from the woodwork. I needed old paint and country. A Singer automobile rusted on blocks on the western side of the property, and to the east there was a forest of bamboo. Huge trees hung over us, including a cork oak, a magnolia, and lots of elms and maples. There were olive trees, too— enough that a neighbor gave us a gallon jar of them in exchange for the rest of the harvest; and grapes that crept up the side of the house from an old fashioned arbor. (Once my mother and I used them to make wine, but my brother drank it and replaced it with colored water.) The yard was lush and grassy, with beds of violets around the edges. Out front, a long gravel driveway led to the main road and the back end of a great Mexican restaurant. Our white goat would sometimes wander back from the restaurant with an orange face after getting into the garbage cans. 

So there I was open, curious, living a little out of the mainstream, increasingly fatherless, insulating myself more and more from what ailed me, and I found this wandering rocker with slicked back hair and a red guitar, a man who could do incredible splits and dance moves and who made me laugh. 

Some part of his appeal was probably genetic or accidental—a predilection for certain sounds, rhythms and rhyme. Maybe, deep in my bones, I needed the vibration of an old Gibson guitar cranked hard through the tubes and speakers of a huge Fender amplifier, or songs about “Milo Venus” and “Nadine.” But that can’t be all of it. 

Maybe it was just timing— that simple twist of fate leading me to the exactly right thing on the right day. There’s a moment in life when we are ready to be swept away by whatever we really see or hear, and it behooves us that day to find something real. I got lucky. 

Maybe it was the recognition of some real aspects of his personality. It didn’t escape me that he was described, in his private life, as something of a “loner” who shut out people and amused and insulated himself with a large piece of property. It didn’t escape me that he was self sufficient and managed his own businesses. Nor did it escape me that he was fit and sober, unlikely to die at an early age.

And maybe there was some real connection that runs deeper than my small mind can imagine. 

In 1973, I learn from an old snapshot on the inside cover of a record called “Bio” that Chuck Berry used a darkroom as a kid. In the picture he is standing, leaning against a counter where we see trays of developer and stopper. He’s probably 12. His head is bowed as he studies something in his hands. A portrait of Abraham Lincoln, out of focus, gazes upon him. Because I have a darkroom of my own I can practically smell the chemicals. I know the magic of watching an image that I created appear in the dark bath of developing solution.

Then, when I am much older, I see another photograph of the pre-teen Chuck, this time using a telescope. It thrills me beyond imagination. It’s my hobby! The snapshot is probably taken the same year as the darkroom picture, but this time Chuck is full of energy and dressed to the hilt in coat, tie, and two-toned leather shoes. He’s got a cap on—either a beanie, or a baseball cap, backwards. The telescope’s spindly wooden tripod is on gravel, and behind Chuck are four or five parallel lines or lanes. At first I think he is at a running track. It takes a while for me to decipher that he is on a rooftop, and that the lines are created by sheets of tar paper tacked to a sloping roof. 

The photograph is taken in broad daylight, and I first assume he’s just posing with a new toy. But I notice the shadows are all behind little Chuck. This means he’s pointing his telescope at the sun. I realize that front lens of his telescope—which I had thought was some tiny, prehistoric lens— is covered by a solar filter to protect his eyes from the blinding rays of magnified sunlight! Chuck Berry is using his telescope to observe the Sun— an act that probably puts him in the top five percent of telescope owners. I wonder if, perhaps, he is observing an eclipse. I e-mail Peter K., the Chuck Berry fan in Sweden who sent me the picture and who, I have learned, is good at internet sleuthing. Peter K. shares my obsession with Chuck Berry and also my interest in astronomy. I offer my theory. Within minutes Peter K. sends me details of two solar eclipses that passed through St. Louis when Chuck was a youngster—one when he was 12. 

So I am reasonably confident that Chuck Berry once shared my geeky interest in stargazing, and did it at a level that raised him above the typical department store telescope owner. 

In that moment I feel an almost magical connection.

Maybe if 12 year old me had met 12 year old Charles on that rooftop, in a world untouched by reality, or by Jim Crow, my imaginary friend could have been my real friend!

Ah but that’s imagination again.


(This is part of a book length piece about my lifelong fascination with Chuck Berry.  You can find every chapter on this blog!  Read it!  Only free book this side of your local library.  Almost.)

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