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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Chapter 10 - Family

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

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

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

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

Family has always been a part of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strains of gray are showing bolder each year.

Lay your head upon my shoulder, my dear:

Time is fading fast away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love him.

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

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

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

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

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


She bore glad tidings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re my idol!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then came the killer line:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[J.B.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rest of this is taken straight from the newspaper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J.B. says he was “ticked off.”

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


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

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