Chapter 14 - Back Home

The Tower Theater in Downtown Sacramento

Although Rasco Tempo held scattered treasures it couldn’t satisfy me for long, so in late spring or summer I found myself visiting the outlying sections of Tower Records on Watt Avenue. Tower was one of those rare points of pride in Sacramento. I’m not sure what the others were— Shakey’s Pizza? Tomato juice? Tower began at a downtown Sacramento drugstore, spread to the major capitals, then disappeared instantly and forever like some ancient civilization. So much for Sacramento’s contribution to arts and culture.

I got my first job in Seattle at Tower through a Sacramento connection. We set up the store. It was hard work, carrying boxes of records one direction and books the other. We worked 12 hour days, which meant lots of overtime. A man from corporate supervised. One day he watched me carry boxes of vinyl record albums that would break my back today. He offered help. “Could you use some amphetamines, Peter?”

But this is still 1971, and I’m at the second Tower, on Watt, exploring sections I haven’t visited before. There’s a section called “Oldies,” and a few feet away, a section for “Blues.” This is where I’ll stay. This is where I’ll find my first T-Bone Walker record, and my first Robert Johnson record. Both are marketed almost directly to me. The cover of the Robert Johnson record is a comfortable cartoon of Johnson recording in a hotel room. It is warm and welcoming. Who knew that the early bluesmen were surrounded by doilies? (They probably were!) The notes on the T-Bone Walker record say “Surprisingly often these old timers sound pretty good in the quaint authenticity of their period styles.” Jesus! But at 15 I miss the condescension. To me everything about the record is strange and wonderful, from the cover shot with the brown suit, thin socks and strange Gibson guitar, to the music itself, where I hear roots of my new master.

But today we’re talking about my second Chuck Berry record, an album called “Back Home.” I find it in the oldies bin. It isn’t an oldie. It was released five or six months prior, in November 1970, a few weeks after I first saw the man climb down from those perilous risers on the Mike Douglas show, and a few weeks before I saw him again on Dick Cavett.

The cover of “Back Home” has a high contrast black and white portrait of my new hero printed in sepia tones. Remember, they are marketing to me, and old is new. Butch Cassidy. Granny glasses. Chuck is seated in front of a crinkly backdrop holding his Gibson. He looks serious, like the hostage I met at Tahoe. The famous, large hands (“like baseball mitts,” said his friend and original piano player, Johnnie Johnson) caress the shoulder and neck of the guitar. A similar shot from the same session will be used on the back of his next album, “San Francisco Dues,” which I will find at the same branch of Tower a few months later.

On the back there are more photographs, not so somber. He’s clowning, doing posed versions of his “scoot” and duck walk. He’s mugging, flipping a peace sign, hugging his Gibson like a girl some he’s met backstage and will take home. These are charming portraits that will absorb my attention for hours. I will stare and ponder. Decades later, reading a biography of Howlin’ Wolf, mesmerized by the stunning cover shot- Wolf, with eyes half shut, drawing hard on a cigarette- I will see that it was taken by the same photographer, Peter Amft, who took these pictures of Chuck Berry.

I listen, I stare. I read. The liner notes on “Back Home” by writer Michael Lydon keep me absorbed almost as long as Amft’s photographs. Lydon is both a fan and a scholar. He wrote a Ramparts magazine article about meeting Chuck Berry at Berry Park that will be instrumental in causing me to stall my car there a few years hence. His notes dance at the edge of my 15 year old understanding. He compares Chuck Berry to Charles Chaplin and B. B. King, and drops important sounding names I only vaguely know, like Norman Mailer, Kerouac and Lenny Bruce. He takes my new hero seriously. He calls him a “comic genius,” makes reference to Huckleberry Finn, the Supreme Court, and the Montgomery bus boycott. He says “To dance to, sing along with, or just dig Chuck Berry body and soul, was not only to celebrate him and oneself, but to celebrate the celebration. That doubling of involvement created an intensity like that of full participation in ritual.” Chuck Berry knows this. Twenty-five years later he will tell Rolling Stone “I’m not an oldies act. The music I play is a ritual— something that matters to people in a special way.” At 14 or 15 I have begun to participate, learning the songs, joining in the call and response- Go, Johnny Go! Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll! Deliver me from the days of old! Sweet Little Sixteen! Got the grown up blues!

By the time I buy “Back Home” I know Chuck Berry’s classic 1950s sound— ringing guitar, pounding drums, piano and acoustic bass, all with plenty of rhythm, reverb and energy. Here is something similar but distinctly different. The album begins with a twist on the familiar “Chuck Berry” intro—the guitar lick that begins songs like “Johnny B. Goode” and “Roll Over Beethoven.” It takes me years to decipher the difference. One day I pick up my guitar and figure it out. Instead of playing it the normal way, fretting the two thinnest strings at the same fret then dropping an octave, he goes up the frets and then drops to his normal position. The result is familiar in structure but altogether different in feel— which is a good description of the entire album.

“Back Home” doesn’t always have all the energy of Chuck Berry’s best early stuff, but there are some great songs and a new refinement. In the 1950s he was a brash innovator. There’s nothing innovative on “Back Home,” but 15 years on the road have made Chuck a virtuoso. In the liner notes Lydon writes that Berry’s guitar has “the bitingly fine quality of etched steel”—a perfect description of the Berry’s guitar on this record.

I listen with interest. I’m happy that the man I’d seen battling through that sad set in an empty hall is making new songs. Even though I recognize the contours, I can feel the passage of time in these songs. The sound had been modernized. The bass is electric. There’s not a teenage song on the album. It is a serious adult record. A couple of songs are forgettable, but a few stand with the best he ever recorded.

“Tulane” is often called the last great Chuck Berry song. (Not true. It’s great. It’s not the last.) It’s the story of Johnny and Tulane, who run a novelty shop but keep the best stuff—the “cream of the crop”— under the counter. There’s an assumption by most writers that “cream of the crop” means drugs, but we’re talking Chuck Berry, so who’s to say what’s actually down there? When “one day lo and behold an officer comes,” Johnny and Tulane take off—or try to.

Johnny jumped the counter but he stumbled and fell

Tulane made it over, Johnny fell to the yell

Go head on, Tulane!

If this is Johnny B. Goode, Johnny’s gone bad. His name’s not in lights, it’s a number, on a mug shot. He spends the next several verses yelling fevered instructions to the real hero of the song, a girl named Tulane, who’s faster, stronger, and long gone.

Which is no surprise. The best Chuck Berry characters are his women, who are always a step ahead of the men. Maybellene disappears over the hill in another man’s Cadillac. Her long-limbed sister Nadine moves around like a wayward summer breeze, always just beyond reach. And Tulane, the youngest and fastest, jumps the counter and runs like East St. Louis native Jackie Joyner-Kersey.

Johnny, neither nimble nor quick, winds up in jail, singing “Have Mercy Judge,” a hard blues about hard prison and Berry’s best blues after “Wee Wee Hours.”

Chuck Berry once told a writer "Look, I ain't no big shit, all right? My music, it is very simple stuff. I wanted to play blues. But I wasn't blue enough. I wasn't like Muddy Waters, people who really had it hard. In our house, we had food on the table. So I concentrated on this fun and frolic."

But one place Berry lived hard is in the justice system. As a kid he high-jacked a car and was sent to reform school. As a rich, middle aged rock star he did what many rich people do- avoided taxes- and got what a lot of rich people deserve but don’t get: a sting in prison. But as a young, handsome, black rock and roll star, rivaling Elvis, he got what he no doubt didn’t deserve—a felony conviction on trumped up charges of transporting a minor across state borders for immoral purposes. The charges were essentially bogus, and the first judge was so insistently and clumsily racist that the original conviction was grudgingly overturned. But they tried him again in front of a better judge, convicted him, and put him away for 20 months at the height of his artistic and commercial success. All of which is simply to say that Chuck Berry was definitely “blue enough” to sing about the penitentiary. “I was thirty-five years old, really set back, out of contact, feeling more black but still intact, and determined to make the best of it,” he said in his Autobiography.

And he did. He made “Have Mercy Judge.”

Berry has too much to say on “Have Mercy Judge” to be restricted to the AAB pattern so common to the blues where the first line of each verse is repeated. Here every line advances the story. “Lord, have mercy, I’m in a world of trouble,” he begins. “I’m being held by the state patrol.” He is “charged with traffic of the forbidden” and has “almost finished doing my parole.”

Now, I'm on my way back downtown.

Somebody help me! Have mercy on my soul.

Chuck Berry is usually a cool singer— a Nat King Cole/Charles Brown wannabe. But he almost shouts these lines, and no wonder. He lived all of this. He had been held by the state patrol. He had been in a world of trouble. He’d been “charged with traffic of the forbidden”- twice.

I go to court tomorrow morning

And I got the same judge I had before

Lord, I know he won't have no mercy on me

'Cause he told me not to come back no more

He'll send me away to some stony mansion

In a lonely room and lock the door

The final lines of “Have Mercy Judge” go to the girl who jumped the counter. “Have mercy on my little Tulane,” he sings. “She's too alive to try to live alone.” And in some ways, except for songs to mother, or child, this seems like Chuck Berry’s only true love song.

“I know her needs,” he sings, “and although she loves me, she's gonna try to make it

While the poor boy's gone.”

Somebody tell her to live

And I'll understand it

And even love her more

When I come back home.

It’s a rare and unusual line in the blues- and fitting for the author of odes to Maybellene and Nadine, girls who aren’t waiting, anyway.

This pairing- “Tulane” and “Have Mercy Judge”- is the only example I can think of where a song and its sequel play in consecutive order on an original album. They are among Chuck Berry’s best songs and come fifteen years after “Maybellene” and “Wee Wee Hours” introduced him to the world.



Another great one, perfect for an album about returning home, is a reinterpretation of the Benny Goodman/Lionel Hampton/Charlie Christian classic, “Flying Home.” The song is a deep vein of Chuck Berry influences. Goodman's guitarist, Charlie Christian, was one of his heroes, and Berry cites Hampton’s saxophonist, Illinois Jacquet as another important influence.

Jazz is a series of stepping stones. You jump from one artist to the next as sidemen become headliners and hire sidemen of their own. Goodman had Christian and Hampton. Hampton, when he went on his own, hired Jacquet. All four are famous for versions of "Flying Home." And Chuck Berry should be famous for it, too. He recorded the song three times, trying to get it right, and this time he did, making it very much his own. It has the same “I Got Rhythm” chord changes as the original, and if you listen carefully, you’ll hear Chuck putting his usual twist on the tune, but those snippets of the original melody are overpowered by Robert Baldori’s wailing harmonica. Chuck and pianist Lafayette Leake (who played on “Johnny B. Goode” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”) have fun trading chords and riffs—but my favorite moment comes from Leake, whose crescendo of piano notes at the end of the bridge perfectly reflects the exhilaration of an overdue journey home.

My third Chuck Berry album, after “The Golden Decade” and “Back Home,” was “San Francisco Dues.” It’s an album I associate with my failed effort to grind a telescope mirror. I still have the chipped Pyrex mirror blank stored in a plaid lunch box, and I still have that original record, its cover frayed and worn, the vinyl scratched and dusted with finger prints (though not nearly as worn out as “Back Home,” which I bought twice, and wore out twice.) It’s been called Chuck Berry’s most “cohesive” album, but I don’t think so. (I give that nod to “Back Home.”) If it’s cohesive the glue is a hideous “wah-wah” on one of the guitars. (“Why-why” I would ask?) To me the record has a patched together feel. And no wonder. Most of the songs were recorded in 1971, just a few weeks before I’d first see him at the Memorial Auditorium, but two older songs were thrown in as filler. The older songs are okay- among the better songs on the album- but they are teenage songs that Chuck Berry wisely left behind when he recorded “Back Home.” Even as a kid I found it vaguely weird that a middle aged man was singing about “Lonely School Days.”

The new songs on “San Francisco Dues” are a mixed bag. “Festival” is dippy—a long recitation of every band Chuck Berry could think of and make rhyme. (The Beatles are tossed in at the end like minor characters in the Gilligan’s Island theme song.) The title track has a nice bluesy feel, but the hip lingo of 1967 was already dated by 1971:

Went on a little trip last night

And the boys was playin' some of them old Fillmore Blues

And every head was right on in there diggin'

Beautiful vibrations, had some heavy grooves.

“Bound to Lose” is another semi-blues and rings truer.

Now I've lost the only one I really loved
And I'm bound to this pain in my heart.

Who knows what goes on in the heart of Chuck Berry? He gives us his songs and his stage presence, not a confession. But some of his truest songs— “Memphis” or “Have Mercy Judge”—reflect the fall from wild times to the sometimes painful consequences. There’s no better example than the bluesy “Oh Louisiana,” which I consider to Berry’s last truly great song. Louisiana is both a place and a person. He remembers “quaint porches and windows,” the local food and “bayous of green.” Like many so Chuck Berry songs, it is steeped in place.

Oh, Lou’s’ana, I'm flying on Delta 903

Right over St. Louis, high over Memphis, Tennessee

On southward to the sea

Where I long to be

But when Berry sings about Louisiana’s “beautiful delta,” it’s hard to imagine terrestrial geography, and his final cry, “Oh, take me back!” is sung with a raw emotion rarely heard from Chuck Berry. “Oh Louisiana,” probably played once or twice in the studio to fill an album and then forgotten, is a song that should be played, either by Berry himself, or by anyone smart enough to cover it.



Berry went on to create three more albums at Chess. They were like most Chuck Berry albums—a couple of great songs, some good ones, some filler. (He once called the filler “sausage.”) “The Chuck Berry London Sessions” had a brilliant version of “Mean Old World,” and an entertaining instrumental (the real “Concerto in B. Goode”) called “London Berry Blues.” The album “Bio” produced at least three good songs, including the title song and a loose-limbed shuffle called “Woodpecker.” (“Bio” is one of only two 1970s songs that he has kept playing. The other is the show-ending “House Lights.”) The final Chess album, simply titled “Chuck Berry,” was a disappointment—but more about that later.

Berry’s 1970s music seems to be getting more respect. A lot of the songs have received a democratic “thumbs up” on YouTube where people post them from time to time. The record company Hip-O-Select put out a collection of the 1970s material that contains everything recorded from 1969 through 1975. (You almost wish it wasn’t everything. Like most Chuck Berry collections, it’s good, bad, sometimes spectacular, and occasionally very, very ugly. The best “new” release on the set is a solo performance of Robert Nighthawk’s “Anna Lee” which Berry recorded as “Annie Lou.”)

I’ve often thought a carefully selected compilation of the best material from these final Chess records would make a good double album, and could change the stubborn perception that Chuck Berry never made a good record after his “golden decade.” But that idea has probably been rendered obsolete by I-tunes, and the new, fragmented way that music is marketed.

I’ve spent a lifetime imagining such things. As a kid in my room I foolishly imagined how I’d tinker with Chuck Berry’s career to make it more perfect, more interesting, more enduring. (Ha!) I planned tours with a regular band. I mentally storyboarded a concert film I hoped to direct. I lay in bed nights and produced “all star” albums with superstar lineups (that weren’t half as good as the personnel on the original Chess records!) And I never really outgrew these childish fantasies. As an older fellow I imagined encouraging Chuck Berry to sing or re-cut neglected songs like “Oh Louisiana.” In my mid-50s, when I first heard “Annie Lou,” I imagined the impact it might have had if it had been released in the 1970s—made part of the album “Bio,” perhaps— and how it might have lifted from Chuck Berry the burden of always playing his big hits and “oldies.”

What foolishness.

One day, not long ago, I read where someone asked Bob Dylan if he ever thought of collaborating with Chuck Berry. Dylan laughed. "Chuck Berry?" he says. "The thought is preposterous. Chuck doesn't need anybody to do anything with or for him.”

That’s it, exactly. Chuck Berry is, was, and ever shall be exactly what he is.

Hail! Hail! And Have Mercy.

(This is a chapter from a longer, book length piece about how Chuck Berry grabbed onto my imagination when I was 14 and never let go.  To find the very beginning, CLiCK HERE!  The whole thing is here on these pages.  Comments appreciated!) (Usually!)

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Chapter 15 - Hard Workin' at the Mill, Why He Matters Part V

Nowadays Chuck Berry plays with the words of “Johnny B. Goode,” singing “Maybe someday your name will be back in lights,” as if the marquee had gone dark. It never has, though. Because I first encountered him at a poorly promoted I used to think Berry’s situation could be found in the song “Sergeant Pepper,” going in and out of style, guaranteed to raise a smile. But I was wrong. Chuck Berry never went out of style. The music is too authentic and too good. The performances, though sometimes lambasted, were too strong. He’s got it in spades, but style has nothing to do with it.

The records didn’t always sell. Even during the so-called “golden decade” he had fewer giant hits than you might imagine. “School Days” peaked at Number 23 on the pop charts. “Roll Over Beethoven” got to 29. “Promised Land” was Number 41. “Little Queenie” was a lowly 80. (Of course, the pop charts, like the old so-called “Major Leagues,” were overrated. Berry’s songs did considerably better on the R & B charts, where he did have number one hits. Think Negro Leagues. Think Satchel Page, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron. Think Chuck, Muddy, Wolf, B.B., and Little Richard. It’s pretty clear, in baseball and in music, that there was more than one “major” league.)

But where most songs that peak at number 80 are quickly forgotten, Chuck Berry’s aged well. They got bigger and better with time. They entered the charts as minor to moderate hits and became major cultural landmarks.

He had three clear bursts of record sales— 1955-1960, 1964-1965, and 1972— and it probably would have been an uninterrupted selling spree from 1955 to 1965 if he hadn’t been stopped by an outlaw legal establishment. The Missouri State Highway Patrol and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals tried to put a world of hurt on him. They locked him up at the height of his success. But they couldn’t actually stop him. He came out of prison with “Nadine,” “No Particular Place to Go,” and “Promised Land.” And he must have been practicing in that stony mansion, because almost as soon as he got out he recorded one of his best ever live shows. (The 10 song set—with backup by a group of Motown studio musicians— is a good reason to buy the boxed set “Chuck Berry: You Never Can Tell: His Complete Chess Recordings 1960-1966.”)

In between record sales he was out doing concerts, keeping his name in lights. That 60 year record of professional performances, from 1952 until present, is one of his most outstanding legacies. The man worked, and still does. He has gone out night after night, just him and his guitar, to clubs, stadiums, bars, barns, fairs, fraternities, colleges, casinos, theaters, gyms, television studios, movie studios, festivals—wherever they booked him. He demanded cash, an amplifier, and a band, and he supplied the rest—in big towns, small towns, in auditoriums all over the world. (He showed the same work ethic in prison, where he studied typing and business law, and wrote a book.)

He does a great job describing the earliest years in his Autobiography—first the bars and clubs of St. Louis, then a few solo shows, then the bus tours, and finally, the lonely and sometimes dangerous one-nighters as a solo act.

In 1964, a year after getting released from prison, he made two tours of Europe, focusing on England, where his influence was huge. Groups like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and many others recorded his songs and talked up his music. They took a lot, to be sure. They built careers off his music. But they also gave back. Their recordings earned him royalties and helped grow his reputation.

But mostly it was his own work, day after day, year after year.

In October 1964 he was part of The T.A.M.I. Show, a live concert that included Marvin Gaye, James Brown and the Rolling Stones. It came out on film in 1965. (Berry’s performances in The T.A.M.I. Show are short and sweet—but the cameras cut him off at the waist to focus on the go-go dancers behind him.)

In 1965 he showed up on teen shows Shindig and Hullabaloo, (Stevo probably saw him), and seemed to spend a lot of time on the European continent. This resulted in a couple of extended television appearances, including an extraordinary show at the Salle des Fetes in Paris that includes some of the wildest Chuck Berry performances ever recorded.

In 1966 he left Chess Records and signed a five album deal with Mercury. He didn’t produce any hits during the next three years, but he recorded at least one good album, “Live at the Fillmore” and a nearly good one called “Chuck Berry in Memphis,” which he cut at Willie Mitchell’s Royal Studios. The Mercury contract was a good deal for Berry—something like $30,000 per record— but even though he recorded some good songs (“Back to Memphis” is a Chuck Berry classic) the Mercury records didn’t have the sound that came from the Chess studios and for the most part just don’t match the quality of the records Berry cut at Chess. (Part of the deal was to reproduce his biggest hits for Mercury. He did a competent job, but the recordings have little of the spirit or fire of the originals.)

Ketchup, mustard, relish, onions...

In 1967, things took a new turn. Berry was courted by San Francisco’s Bill Graham and became a staple headliner at Winterland and the Fillmore. The pay was bad—at least initially— but the venue introduced Berry to an important audience—boomers born a bit too late for the original hits, but who probably heard “Nadine” and “No Particular Place to Go” as teeny boppers. This is a big wave that runs from my brother Stevo, who introduced me to Chuck Berry, all the way to me. And Berry worked it, dazzling the crowds, demanding better pay from Graham, (but always staying at the same cheap, transients’ hotel), doing it his way, frustrating reporters but delighting surprised fans. Before long he was big again, playing landmark events like the Rock and Roll Revivals in New York and Toronto. He returned more to the blues, played long, drawn out numbers, and his guitar playing, though perhaps less fiery than in 1955, became more refined.

And he kept making records—some of the first I was able to buy, including 1970s “Back Home” and “San Francisco Dues,” recorded in 1971 with Robert Baldori’s Michigan rock band, The Woolies.

He had no publicist or management to speak of, but the crowds were big. Baldori describes what it was like flying under the radar with Berry in the early 1970s, drawing huge crowds without the monkey business of a manager or publicist.

Baldori and Berry in Ann Arbor, Michigan circa 1982

“We were on the road night after night with Charles playing to sold out houses, and there was hardly a mention of it in the media. Charles didn't have a manager or a marketing department, so the fan base was really a testament to the power of his show and his material. But the power was definitely there, and the shows were electrifying.”

Although I didn’t ever see him with The Woolies, I can attest to it, having seen Berry perform to ecstatic crowds throughout 1971 and 1972.

But then two things happened. First, Berry was invited by John Lennon to appear on the Mike Douglas show. It happened in mid-February 1972, about a year after I first saw him at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium. By then I was a “long time” fan of exactly 12 months. I’d seen him live three times, had shaken his hand, had three or four of his albums, and I was thrilled to see a Beatle fawning over my idol.



And then, a few months later, “The London Chuck Berry Sessions”—a mammoth hit that told everyone who was my age exactly who Chuck Berry was. It was a good album, not great, a thudding, British, hard rock version of Chuck Berry, but it gave a glimpse into the power and humor of his live act and the hastily recorded studio side had at least two wonderful performances. “London Berry Blues” is a dictionary of Chuck Berry guitar riffs, with a beginning, a middle, a quiet spot, and a rousing finale—an instrumental with a story line on a record where most of the lyrics lack Chuck Berry’s usual literary touch. (One song’s chorus is an endless repetition of the words “I love you.”) The other notable song—the best on the album—is a powerful rendition of Little Walter’s “Mean Old World” mixed with lyrics from “Last Night.” It is one of Chuck Berry’s most powerful blues performances on record, and the studio musicians rise to the occasion. The other half of the record, recorded live at an arts festival in Lancaster, England, is a pox on his fans because of “Ding-a-Ling,” but a pox with genuine humor that allowed Chuck Berry to earn money long overdue on accounts receivable for less commercially successful masterpieces such as “Promised Land,” “Let it Rock,” “Tulane,” “Oh, Louisiana,” and “Have Mercy Judge.”

Chess cashed in on his superstar status by releasing a slew of old material in two more volumes of “Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade.” Volume Two was sort of the Rolling Stones’ collection, with “Carol,” “Little Queenie,” “I’m talking ‘Bout You” and “Come On.” It was a rougher edged Chuck Berry than I’d gotten to know on the original Golden Decade set—songs with more reverb, and a bit less polish. And there were songs that should have been put on Volume One. “You Never Can Tell” and “No Money Down” were as intricate and poetic as anything on the first volume and could easily have replaced lesser numbers like “Too Pooped to Pop” and “Anthony Boy.” “Promised Land,” with its hints of the civil rights struggle, was as important as anything he ever did, and I’ve often thought “Let it Rock” might be Chuck Berry’s favorite Chuck Berry song— the song that so often gets him going these days, even in his old age.

Volume Three of the Golden Decade gets raunchier still. Some of my favorite songs are ones Chuck Berry didn’t write but might have. “Time Was” has the nostalgia enough to be a Chuck Berry song.

Time was

When we had fun on the schoolyard swing

When we exchanged graduation rings

One lovely yesterday

Chuck Berry also didn’t write “House of Blue Lights,” a boogie-woogie about dancing, food and fun times recorded the same day as “Time Was” and “Carol,” but he made it his own, and then made his own version, “Carol.” Compare the opening lines of “House of Blue Lights” to those of “Carol.”

Come on down and we’ll cut a rug

Dig that jive as it should be dug

A real home coming for all you cats

You keep a walkin’ till you see that welcome mat

Fall in there, lose your lead

At the House, the House of Blue lights

It could be the same place—the biggest difference being the sheer number of syllables that Chuck Berry can squeeze into every stanza.

Climb into my machine so we can cruise on out

I know a swingin’ little joint where we can jump and shout

It's not too far back off the highway, not so long a ride

You park your car out in the open, you can walk inside

A little cutie takes your hat and you can thank her, ma'am

Every time you make the scene you find the joint is jammed

For a while then—three or four years, from 1972 through 1975— he was a huge star again, and everywhere: on shows like “The Midnight Special” and “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.” He even did “Soul Train.” He was featured in the film “Let the Good Times Roll,” along with Little Richard, Fats Domino and Bo Diddley.

In 1973, Chuck put out another good album on Chess called “Bio” which included the only post-1960s song he still plays on a regular basis—the autobiographical blues shuffle that gave the album its name.

For me it was a time of affirmation. The subject of my odd obsession had caught the world’s imagination yet again. And Chuck Berry kept playing, show after show, in halls, auditoriums and festivals, bigger than ever, working it day after day, night after night.

One day while blogging it occurred to me how important this was. He wasn’t a pampered rocker who did a tour every few years. The man did what his fans have to do. He worked, day after day, night after night, year after year, and still does at age 84 and counting. It’s something he hasn’t been given enough credit for. I’ve read now and then that he “mailed in” a performance—but he keeps walking to that post office, buying stamps, licking them, and sending it to us.

If he never went out of style, if the name remained in lights, if he remained significant, if there’s now a bronze statue in his home town, there’s no mystery to it.

He earned it. The man worked, and still does.


(This is part of a book length, personal tale of how my life was rolled over by Chuck Berry.  Feel free to leave comments or your own Chuck Berry story.  You can read the other chapters, starting with the Prologue, to the right in a section called "Pages" or by clicking HERE.)

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Chapter 18 - Across Mississippi Clean (Why He Matters, Part VII)

It’s no accident or coincidence that Chuck Berry rose to fame during the civil rights movement.  He probably couldn’t have achieved all that he did at an earlier time.  

But it’s also true that Chuck Berry did his part to deliver us from the old, evil days, even if he did it primarily out of self interest.

The early rock and roll shows were transformative events.  In 1969 at Berkeley Berry was asked if his early audiences were predominantly white.  “On one side of the hall…” he answered.  In his Autobiography he described a show in Jacksonville, Florida.  “[F]our of the maintenance guys came out and roped off the armory with white window cord.  They looped and tied it to each seat down the center aisle, making it an off-limits zone that neither coloreds nor whites could tread.”  But at Berkeley he went on to describe the Fats Domino tour a couple of years later.  “It was breaking then.  We’d go in and see the salt and pepper all mixed together, and we’d say, ‘Well, look what’s happening.’  Every once in a while, we’d go into a place where it would break—- it was broken, I should say.  It was a thrill.”

Life on the road was difficult for the artists.  Listen to Bo Diddley:  “When I was goin’ through the South, I used to cook all the time. The reason for that was: here am I, gotta go in some white dude’s back door, an’ I’ve got ten—maybe fifteen thousand dollars in my pocket! I’m gonna get a 95 cent hamburger ‘cause I can’t go in the front door. So I said: “To hell with your back door!  I’ll go buy me some chicken an’ put it in the trunk, get some utensils, put it all on the bus, an’ I’ll do my own cookin’!” 

Berry did the same thing.  According to Marshall Chess he “carried a little electric plate in his suitcase. He’d buy like canned beans and he’d cook it.”  It was old news.  In his Autobiography he talks about a restaurant in Wentzville he visited when he was 17.  “The colored lady cook came to the little window built in the back kitchen wall that solely catered to black patrons, and she asked what we wanted. She overfilled the paper plates of our order, which was the one good result that can be remembered about a Jim Crow café policy: getting more on our paper plates than we would have been served on china out front.”

40 years later he bought the restaurant. 

Chuck Berry was not an activist, but he kept active, kept pushing, kept pushing the envelope.  It took courage and effort, night after night sleeping God knows where, in cars, in boarding houses, in cheap hotels, on planes, heating beans on a hotplate far from kids and family, driving all day, playing at night, sometimes running from enraged crazies.  

And that may be his biggest contribution.  

Like his colleagues he did it for himself and his family, risked life, limb and dignity to make a little money by delivering astounding art to screaming teenagers.  But in the process, he helped to deliver all of us irrevocably from times we needed desperately to leave behind.  

(This is part of a book length piece on Chuck Berry.  It starts HERE or you can continue reading HERE).  

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Chapter 21 – Why He Matters, Part VIII: Backing Chuck Berry

Random black and whites of petrified kids behind the father of rock and roll are among my favorite things to gaze at. I once found the website of a surf bassist who claimed to have introduced Chuck Berry to the Dual Showman amplifier. I believe him. There is a photograph of Chuck Berry looking back in glee at the rush of guitar sound bursting from the giant black and fabric covered box. Equally wonderful are photographs of a performance in Mexico where the backup musicians appear to be 14 or 15 years old. Some part of me always wanted to be there.

When I went to tiny Peach Tree High School on the outskirts of Sacramento I used to fantasize about bringing Chuck Berry to perform there. I read somewhere that Berry’s minimum rate in those days was $2000. We had 60 students. I figured it was doable if we all brought our friends and families. I imagined an outdoor show in one of the big, drab fields of stickers, raccoon shit and oat grass that surrounded our school. Part of the fantasy was that our little band— the worst band I’ve seen or heard in public— would back the founding father of rock and roll. Luckily my delusions are always tempered by a vivid imagination for disaster.

Chuck Berry has been criticized for using local pickup bands throughout much of his long career, but consider for a moment how many thousands of young musicians were schooled in rhythm, blues and showmanship during their frightening but exhilarating hour with the father of rock ‘n’ roll. If you Google words like “backing Chuck Berry” you’ll find good stories. They’re always the same. This one (edited and disguised somewhat to protect the author and myself) has rough charm and humor.

Chuck didn’t rehearse or spring a set list on you. So I stood back and watched the roadies haul his psychedelic stained Fender Dual Showman on stage in front of ten thousand reefer-sucking teenagers.

Well, it wasn’t his amplifier. It would have been provided by the reefer sucking promoter, who was probably not much more than a teenager himself, but got the right model, anyway. Our correspondent continues.

Chuck shows up in a magnetic looking blue Nehru shirt. I’d owned a dozen custom-made Nehru’s cut nicely for me at a shop in lower Manhattan. Chuck’s must have come from a thrift store. He could have lit the heavens with that shirt.

It’s true that Chuck Berry has not wasted much of his considerable fortune on stage clothing. In this new millennium he alternates mostly between the pale blue sparkle shirt and the bright red sparkle shirt, with the same ancient black slacks. When I saw him in the 1970s the pants were either red or purple. “The red pants that many fans have seen me in were bought in 1972 at a jeans store on La Cienega in Los Angeles, for eight dollars,” he recounts in his Autobiography.

The internet musician tells about a struggle with another piano player who’s vying for the keyboard spot. Our narrator wins. Then comes his description of the show.

Chuck kicks off louder than a rampaging diesel.

This description is similar to how Florida singer-songwriter Ronny Elliott described his first time on stage with Chuck Berry. I discovered Elliott in an old photograph showing frightened, long-haired children with guitars standing near Chuck Berry. (They are children only from my current vantage. They were undoubtedly hardened professionals.) Describing his first show with Berry, Elliott wrote that Chuck “came out of the wings with his 345 blazing.” The image Elliott describes delights me. The “345” is Chuck’s favored guitar—a Gibson ES-345 semi hollow body. Elliott is a poet. I can see and hear the guitar and the entrance. But let us return to our anonymous internet scribe.

Berry’s amp was so distorted it was difficult to hear separate chords, but during the next fifty minutes we hit nirvana. Every song had a piano solo and an approving nod from above. I can’t express how elated I was. The crowd stomped, hooted, rocked and rolled. I left the stage feeling like I’d conquered the west.

That “approving nod” is important, and much better than the angry glare or the frank dismissal, which I have also seen. The piano player is feeling so good, in fact, that he thinks for a moment he has become more than just imaginary friends with the great Chuck Berry. When the show is over he tries to strike up conversation. Chuck Berry is counting money when our friend decides to interrupt him. If we are to believe the rumors, interrupting him during this act is like squeezing yourself between a mother grizzly and her cubs!

Without looking at us Chuck lays out four hundred dollar bills, then scoops up the rest and pockets it. Like a fool, I think the time is ripe to get acquainted and say,

“So, I guess you’re taking the band out for steaks?”

He is rewarded not with steak, but with a glare that could sear one. He is not the first or last to report such a look. Ronny Elliott describes something similar:
“We were scheduled to do a sound check at 3:00,” says Elliott. “The show was at 8:00. Chuck strolled out onto the stage at Curtis Hixon Hall in Tampa around 7:30. I didn’t write this down so the accuracy of the quote might be a little shaky after forty years but this is close: ‘I’m Chuck Berry. I’ll tell you what song we’re playing and I’ll tell you the key. If I go like this, (raises his guitar up in a swooping motion), you stop. Don’t anybody play too loud. It’s my show. If you do, I’ll stop. I’ll embarrass you.’”

The instructions, short and not too sweet, confused the scared young rockers.

“First time he raised his guitar to start a duckwalk, we stopped,” says Elliott. “Dirtiest look I’ve ever been given. We didn’t fall for that one again.” But Chuck must have liked what he heard. Elliot and his band went on to back Chuck Berry in a dozen or so shows.

“The last time that I took one was in Miami, at the Jailai Fronton, on a bill with the James Gang. I attempted to pass on it but the promoter offered too much money to ignore. We played a set that lasted two and a half hours. Chuck was on his knees, reciting poetry, working the young crowd like a horny, broke preacher. I was amazed. I have never enjoyed playing more.”

“The next week he was on the Mike Douglas Show with John and Yoko co-hosting. He boasted that he had just played the longest set in his life the week before, two and one half hours.”

“I’m still proud.” says Elliot.

Berry has admitted that using local bands limited what he could do, since he had to shy away from lesser known songs with unique chord progressions. But I sometimes think that in his best days a good pickup band worked in Berry’s favor, turning old songs into fresh new challenges and feeding his apparent need to live dangerously and improvise. An example is the brilliant live show recorded in Michigan just days after Berry got out of prison in 1963. The “pickup” band was pretty special—a bunch of Motown session musicians—and` they nailed it. Chuck Berry’s music has its roots in jazz and boogie-woogie. It’s got to swing— needs that backbeat you’re not supposed to lose, and the Motown players had it.

But the band doesn’t have to be great. One of Berry’s finest live recordings was done for BBC television in 1972. The band was competent and professional and kept the beat, and Chuck used that platform to put on a virtuoso performance. Around the same time he recorded a more raggedy live show in Coventry, England. The set began raggedly, anyway. Recently released recordings show that at the start Chuck and the band barely kept up with each other. But by the time Chuck got to “Reelin’ and Rockin’” they really were rocking; the band got it together, learned the cues, and helped Chuck put together a smash single.

But even if they don’t have to be great they have to be competent. At a 1969 live show, filmed in Toronto by D.A. Pennebaker, at least one member of the band appears so rhythmically challenged (perhaps just so overcome by nerves or substance) it becomes an obstruction. Chuck battles like a fish upstream against a mechanical and at times variable beat. It’s awful—mostly because this is one of so few live concert performances professionally recorded on film or video. Chuck’s own performance is admirable under the circumstances, but the circumstances are sometimes so jarring it’s painful. (Editor's note: I softened my feelings about that show when I learned, a few months ago, that one of the musicians was 18 years old at the time!  I found a website where he remembered the hour very humbly and happily.)

I never saw him perform with a band that out of it, but in two Seattle shows there seemed to be a subtle disconnect between Berry and the group that backed him. In theory it was a decent fit—a long time, local bar band that played old time rock and roll. But at the two shows I saw, a decade apart, there seemed to be something dead about the performance. There was little joy or magic. My inclination was to blame Chuck Berry and the cruelty of time, but I’ve come to believe it was the band. They were okay, but they didn’t bring that intangible, skipping bounce or swing. It was bar band Chuck Berry. Berry spent a minute or two trying to teach the piano player a riff. It was a master class in blues with Chuck Berry patiently demonstrating, but the guy smiled and kept doing what he was doing. Berry finally shrugged and accomplished what he wanted with his guitar.

Boogie-woogie pianist and blues harp player Robert Baldori, whose band The Woolies backed Chuck Berry many times in the 1970s and 1980s , explained the importance of the right backup. “Charles could stretch out with us because he didn't have to worry about us following anything he did, or losing track of the fundamentals - the groove and the dynamics,” says Baldori. “It was a completely different show than when he got stuck with local musicians. The range of material was exceptional, and he could always come back to the hits. Occasionally I would work a gig with him where it was just me and a couple of local musicians instead of my band. Those were usually a nightmare, even when the musicians were competent. A lot of the things we take for granted turn out to be too subtle for someone who learned it from the records. Like the exact timing of a blues shuffle. Or how the parts fit together. Or when not to play.”

Daryl Davis told me pretty much the same story. “What gives musicians like Jimmy Marsala, Bob Lohr, Bob Baldori and myself the advantage, is our understanding of Chuck’s need to not be restricted to playing something the same way he played it back in the 1950s.”

Davis, about my age, grew up abroad, child of a diplomat. He wasn’t always exposed to the latest thing in music and he fell for older stuff. Like me, he idolized Chuck Berry. He told his high school friends he was going to play music with him some day. They laughed, but for nearly 30 years now Davis has been Chuck Berry’s part time “musical director.”

Davis was born to the job and worked like a dog to make it happen. He studied music at Howard University with the express goal of learning to back Chuck Berry. Now he works with Berry at shows along the eastern seaboard, including prestigious dates at B. B. King’s Times Square night club. He’s become Chuck Berry’s friend and confidant.

I first learned about Daryl when Chuck’s son mentioned “the amazing Daryl Davis” online. When I saw videos of him on YouTube and read about his experiences with Chuck Berry I wrote and asked him to do an interview for the blog. He said he would. I sent him questions. His response, a few days later, filled 12 single-spaced pages with touching, personal stories about working with Chuck Berry.

Robert Baldori has worked with Berry even longer than Davis.

“I grew up on the streets of Dearborn in the 50s, and Chuck Berry was our hero. By the time I got to college I was playing in a backbeat R & B band that knew everything Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin Wolf ever recorded.” Baldori remembers “sneaking into bars to see Jimmy Reed, recording with Devora Brown and Nate Meyer at Fortune Records and in Chicago at Mother Blues and any other blues joint we could get into.” He got his first shot playing with Berry when his band The Woolies was invited to replace a hard rock outfit that didn’t understand Berry’s music. For the Woolies “It was a perfect fit, not just because we knew the material, but we also knew how to play it. The chemistry was there from the downbeat.”

Chuck’s regular St. Louis pianist, Robert Lohr, has a background similar to Baldori’s. (In addition to everything else, they are both lawyers. I’m thinking that if I can learn to play, I still have a shot!) Lohr is one of the “go to” blues musicians of St. Louis. He grew up listening to what he calls “the usual suspects: Muddy, Wolf, Sonny Boy, Little Walter, Billy Boy Arnold, the three Kings— BB, Albert and Freddie— the entire Chess roster including Chuck, plus Magic Sam, Otis Rush, plus all Motown piano players…” He goes on and on. (Lohr’s true musical hero seems to be “Lemmy,” leader of the British hard rock band Motorhead. “They don't make rock stars like Lemmy anymore,” says Lohr. “He's the real deal!” Lohr once gave Lemmy a box set of Chuck Berry songs signed by the master. “It was a scream. Chuck kept asking me ‘to Lenny? Lenny?’ I said, ‘No! Lemmy with an M!’ Lemmy was happy!!”)

I didn’t figure out how important the backup was until I finally saw Chuck Berry perform at Blueberry Hill with Lohr and a band custom made for Chuck’s music. The St. Louis band has a depth of talent and experience few “pickup” bands can match. “Keith Robinson, Jim Marsala, Ingrid Berry and I are old-school veterans from way back who know the Berry catalog inside out,” says Lohr. “And Butch (Chuck Jr.) has been in the band now for 8-9 years. He nails the rhythm guitar parts well and also kicks some nice lead solos when required.”



Photo by Doug Spaur

Daryl Davis also knows Berry’s catalog. Daryl was lurking on stage when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band backed Berry at the same show Springsteen describes in Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll. It was Davis’s first Chuck Berry show. He was 14 and already a big fan.

“Even though the show wasn’t to start until 8:00 p.m., I got a ride up there around noon. At that time of day, there was no backstage security, people were bringing in lights and speakers and setting the stage. So I walked on in like I belonged.”

Sneaking in—or, at least, sneaking a peak—is a proud tradition in the blues. Guitar legend Hubert Sumlin, now in his mid 70s, once fell through a window onto the stage where his future mentor Howlin’ Wolf was playing. “Let the boy stay,” said Wolf—and Sumlin pretty much did for the rest of Wolf’s life and career. Chuck Berry tells the story of watching through a window while Big Joe Turner sang at a Chicago club. B. B. King peeked through cracks and knotholes of an Indianola, Mississippi juke joint to catch a glimpse of Count Basie. I can only put myself in the company of these legends by remembering how a mean looking bouncer— a big thug of a man in a biker jacket—pitied my underage ass enough to let me stand by the open door during a Bo Diddley show.

A decade after sneaking onto the stage “as if he belonged,” Davis actually would belong, but in 1972 Davis was a stowaway. “I kept myself out of everyone’s way, but stayed near the band because that’s where I figured Chuck would go when he arrived and that way I could meet my idol.”

Davis remembers Springsteen’s band as “very friendly and excited about playing with Chuck Berry.” But he also remembered the growing tension as time dragged on without Berry’s arrival. “The promoter was trying to figure out what he would tell the crowd to keep them from causing pandemonium and how much money he would lose in refunds if Chuck didn’t show.” Jerry Lee Lewis was the co-star. “About 5 minutes before Jerry Lee finished his set, Chuck walked in the backstage door. He didn’t speak to anyone except to ask someone where the promoter was. I seem to recall that the person he asked was in fact the promoter. They walked off to the promoter’s office. I stayed on the floor on the side of the stage towards the back with the band. Chuck came out of the promoter’s office and went back outside. Within seconds he returned with his guitar. The rumor floating around backstage was that he went outside to his rental car to retrieve his guitar from the car only after the promoter paid him and he had not been paid he would have driven off.”

Springsteen, too, reported on a rumor. “I think the rumor was he would get eleven grand. At the end of the night he’d give a grand back if the band was okay and if the equipment worked.” These “rumors” about cash and contracts are regularly traded at Chuck Berry shows. Berry himself is pretty clear about it. When I saw him kick a guitarist off stage he said “It’s in the contract.” He might have done the same to Bruce Springsteen, but Bruce asked permission. “We were all really nervous,” said Springsteen. “There wasn’t supposed to be an extra guitar player, so I came up to him and I said, ‘Gee, is it okay if I play?’ And he said, “Yeah, yeah, you can play.”

Difficult man, right?

And really, would his career have been the same if he toured with a band of professionals? Would he have lasted? Would the legend have grown? Or would he have fallen into the routine monkey business of playing the same thing, every day? Isn’t risky and raggedy part of the charm? The lonely gunslinger image is what drew me to him in the first place. And think what whole generations of struggling young musicians would have lost—the opportunity to be terrified, have their hands cramp after 96 bars, and, sometimes, hit “nirvana.”

So for decades, he travelled alone, thrilled millions, and scared the bejezus out of young rock and rollers.

I asked Ronny Elliott if he had any advice for the garage band that got a chance to back up Chuck Berry at a one-nighter. I was looking for practical tips: be flexible, watch his leg, that sort of thing. But Elliot, a poet, got right to the heart of it.

“Get down on your knees and thank your God.”

(This is a book length tale of a life infected by Chuck Berry.  You can find Chapter One in the regular postings (here), or by going to the "Pages" section to the right.)

11/13/12/3:41 pm

Chapter 26 - Down Beneath the Counter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blond haired, good lookin’

Tryin’ to get me hooked

Wants me to marry, get a home,

Settle down, write a book.

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

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

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

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

It starts as a wonderful thing.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do I care?  If it’s true, I do.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I’ve got work to do.



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

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