Chuck Berry RIP

OBITUARY

Chuck Berry

Founding father of rock’n’roll who lit the flame of teenage rebellion in 1950s America and was himself never far from trouble

Berry in 1971, the year before his visited the UK on a concert tour and caused outrage with his single My Ding-a-Ling

One of the greatest testaments to Chuck Berry’s status as the progenitor of rock’n’roll occurred in the 1985 film Back to the Future, in which Marty McFly, played by Michael J Fox, travels back in time and performs a futuristic vision of popular music at a 1955 high-school hop.

Robert Zemeckis realised that if they wanted to represent convincingly the moment in which rock’n’roll guitar-playing was born, one song fitted the bill above all others — Berry’s signature tune Johnny B Goode, performed by Fox complete with the guitarist’s trademark “duck walk”.

John Lennon made a similar point more succinctly. “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry.” Keith Richards concurred: “I’ve stolen every lick he ever played.”

On songs such as Roll Over Beethoven, Sweet Little Sixteen, No Particular Place To Go and, above all, Johnny B Goode, Berry created a set of riffs that remain the core building blocks of rock guitar-playing. He combined them with smart, sassy, sly and playful lyrics that painted incisive vignettes of teenage life. The result was a series of perfect three-minute pop masterpieces built around themes of fast cars, erotic discovery and escape from parental authority, which not only captured the mood of 1950s American youth but defined the spirit of teenage rebellion the world over for generations to come.

If Elvis Presley was early rock’n’roll’s pre-eminent singer, Berry was its premier songwriter, acknowledged as such by pop music’s two most celebrated poets. Leonard Cohen declared that “all of us are footnotes to the words of Chuck Berry”, while Bob Dylan dubbed him “the Shakespeare of rock’n’roll”.

As he boasted in the title of one of his hits, Berry was also a “brown-eyed handsome man” with a devilish twinkle in his eye that women across the racial divide found irresistible. It was an appeal that, in his younger days, often led him into trouble.

As musical tastes changed the hits dried up. The pop world of the 1960s was the province of youth and Berry was approaching 40 by the time the Beatles and the Rolling Stones emerged. Both groups paid homage to him and covered his songs, yet they were also his nemesis by unintentionally making Berry sound “old hat”.

With the exception of the playground innuendo of My Ding-a-Ling, which unexpectedly returned him to No 1 in Britain and America in 1972, there would be no more chart entries. By 1979 he had stopped bothering to make new records and made his money from touring, demanding that promoters paid him in suitcases full of cash before he took the stage — a practice that subsequently led to a prison sentence for tax evasion.

With his wife Themetta in 2000

If he spent his later career resting on his laurels, he could afford to do so. While other more ephemeral hit-makers of the 1950s were forgotten and faded into obscurity, Berry’s influence was profound, permanent and ineradicable.

It would be an exaggeration to say that without him there would have been no Beatles or Rolling Stones, and no Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin, but they would at the very least have sounded considerably less potent.

Yet he remained an enigma. He was described as “the least biddable man in showbusiness” and his life was conflict-strewn. “Every 15 years it seems I make a big mistake,” he noted in a candid autobiography. Most of them were big enough to involve custodial sentences.

His first taste of prison life came when he was still in his teens after he went on a crime spree in Kansas City with two friends, robbing stores at gunpoint and hijacking a car. At the height of his success in 1960 he was sentenced to five years after having sexual intercourse with a 14-year-old waitress, Janice Escalante, and illegally transporting her across state lines to work at his nightclub in St Louis, Missouri.

He appealed successfully on the grounds that the trial judge had made racist comments that had prejudiced the jury against him. The cultural historian Martha Bayles later wrote that Berry’s “brown-eyed handsome man” image, which attracted so many white female fans, had caused outrage in the segregated South, provoking a “lynch-mob atmosphere surrounding his arrest”.

A retrial resulted in a shorter prison sentence and he served two years, re-emerging in late 1963, just as Beatlemania was about to go into overdrive. It was a critical break in the momentum of his career.

A third prison sentence for tax evasion followed in 1979. Somewhat more embarrassing was the suspended sentence he received in 1990 after police found incriminating videotapes at his home, taken with a camera he had installed in the ladies’ toilet at a restaurant he owned in Missouri. A class action settlement with 59 women cost him an estimated $1.2 million, with additional legal fees.

Despite the times when romantically he preferred the road less travelled, he was married to Themetta (known as “Toddy”), for almost 70 years. They had four children: Darlin Ingrid Berry-Clay, Melody Exes Berry-Eskridge, Aloha Isa Lei Berry and Charles Berry, sometimes known as Chuck Jr.

He would not take to the stage before being paid suitcases full of cash

Ingrid and Charles performed in his band at the monthly concerts he gave at the Blueberry Hill club in St Louis. The basement dancehall where he played was named the Duck Room, after his famous stage walk, which he first performed in 1959 because his suit was creased yet threw his audience into instant rapture.

He lived for more than half a century on an estate outside St Louis that he named Berry Park and which he designed as a private version of the whites-only country clubs from which he was excluded when he was growing up in the days of segregation. In later years he spent his time there quietly, playing chess and croquet and mowing his many acres on a tractor, sculpting crop circles into the greensward.

Significant birthdays were celebrated in jubilee style as if they were rock’n’roll’s equivalent of state occasions. On Berry’s 60th birthday, Keith Richards and Eric Clapton visited him and played a celebratory concert in St Louis. Characteristically, he got into an ugly row with Richards, who later confessed that meeting his ultimate musical hero had been a “big disappointment”.

On his 90th birthday he announced that he was recording his first new album since 1979. Simply titled Chuck, the record is due for release in June. It features his son, Charles Jr, on guitar and his daughter Ingrid on harmonica.

Early in his career he complained bitterly that he had been misrepresented by the press and he spent most of his life shunning mainstream media. He was famous enough without it, he argued, and in later years those requesting interviews were peremptorily told to read his autobiography.

Published in 1987, it was written without the help of a “ghost” after he had learnt to type during one of his prison sentences. A curious yet compelling book that mixed prurient confessions and elegant accounts of his early years, he conveyed the sexual anecdotes with a poetical degree of circumlocution. A woman engaged in oral sex was described as “paying personal homage to his magnitude”.

He was born Charles Edward Anderson Berry in 1926 in St Louis. His father, Henry, was a carpenter and Baptist church deacon and his mother, Martha, was a school principal. One of six children, Chuck learnt to play the family piano, sang in the church choir and was a well-regarded pupil at Sumner High School, but went off the rails in his teens and ended up in a youth reformatory for armed robbery.

While in detention he formed a vocal quartet. Released on his 21st birthday, he worked on a car assembly line and trained as a hairdresser and beautician. By 1950 he was doing well enough to buy a house in St Louis, which is now a listed historic monument.

Nights were spent playing in local bars and clubs under the name “Chuck Berryn”, a thin disguise to protect his God-fearing parents from the shame that their son was playing “the devil’s music”. Modelling himself on influences that ranged from Nat King Cole to Muddy Waters and even mixing in country styles, local audiences came to dub him the “black hillbilly”.

His breakthrough came in 1955 when he travelled to Chicago and met Waters, who introduced him to Chess Records. His first recording for the label, Maybellene, topped the R&B charts and made No 5 in the pop listings. This success also gave Berry his first taste of the crooked machinations of the record industry. It was the days of “payola” and when he received his first royalty statement he discovered that he was sharing the payment with two others, including the disc jockey Alan Freed, who were credited as co-authors, despite having had nothing to do with writing the song.

Berry was incensed and, having been stung once, he took great pains never to be cheated again, gaining a reputation for excessive meanness. On tour in Britain, not even Don Arden could intimidate Berry. In fact he told the bruising promoter that he was upping his fee just before going on stage.

In concert he became infamous for checking his watch in mid-song: he was not going to perform for a minute longer than the time for which he had been contracted.

Maybellene was followed by Roll Over Beethoven, an anthem of rebellion that was inspired by childhood memories of his sister playing Für Elise on the family piano, and by Johnny B Goode, which went on to become one of the most covered songs.

By the end of the decade he had reeled off a dozen more hits, including School Day, and Sweet Little Sixteen, which tapped into the teenage weltanschauung, articulating adolescent passions in worldly, streetwise poetry, acutely aware of the need to reach white as well as black listeners.

Then came the enforced hiatus of jail, where he took courses in business law and accountancy, and wrote songs such as No Particular Place To Go, You Never Can Tell and The Promised Land, which provided him with a stream of hits when he was released.

When these dried up he took to touring prolifically, maximising his income by not employing a permanent backing band, but using a cheap pick-up group at each venue. Unsurprisingly, this led to an alarming lack of quality control. Sometimes the pick-up musicians were outstanding and a young Bruce Springsteen and Steve Miller were among those who backed him on one-night stands. When the musicianship was of a lesser standard, the results were often dire, not helped by his refusal to rehearse.

He was asked in 2002 why he had written hardly any new songs since his initial glorious hits in the Fifties. “I felt it might be ill-mannered to try and top myself,” he answered. As excuses went, it was not a bad one — and as long as he played Johnny B Goode every night, 
nobody really cared.

Chuck Berry, rock’n’roll musician, was born on October 18, 1926. He died on March 18, 2017, aged 90