By Steve Jones, USA Today
Every time you see a rocker strutting the stage, slinging their guitar around and cutting loose with killer riffs, Chuck Berry’s musical DNA is at work.
Berry, who died Saturday at 90 according to the St. Charles County Missouri police department, created the rock star blueprint more than 50 years ago and generations later, there’s still nobody who can touch the original. It’s no wonder that when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland inducted its inaugural members in 1986, the Brown Eyed Handsome Man was at the head of the class.
From the time Berry first hit the scene with Maybellene in 1955, he defined the sound, the swagger, the style of a rock and roll star. He was the show. And to this day, guitarists pay homage banging out his wicked licks and imitating his signature duck walk.
Famous fans tweet love for late Chuck Berry
He blew the fuse in many a jukebox with songs like School Day that spoke directly to the teens that embraced him: “Soon as three o’clock rolls around/you finally lay your burden down/Close up your books, get out of your seat/Down the halls and into the street.” They may not have wanted to learn the Golden Rule from mean-looking teachers, but “tight dresses and lipstick,” and Cadillacs “doin’ about ninety-five” sure struck their fancy.
Berry was so energetic, charismatic and unique that he rendered moot the prevailing racial barriers of the 1950s that kept most African American musicians out of the mainstream. He had a knack for gauging what his audience liked and then giving it to them. His witty, libidinous lyrics spoke of girls, motorin’, and footloose fun. “If you get too close, you know I’m gone like a cool breeze,” he crooned on You Can’t Catch Me. Who can’t empathize with him on No Particular Place to Go, when his plans for a little moonlight romance are thwarted by a balky seat belt or his lament about life’s pressures on Too Much Monkey Business.
His virile concoction of country hillbilly guitar licks and spirited R&B was the high-test that fueled the rock and roll engine. Even being locked up in 1962-1963 couldn’t keep his fire from spreading on both sides of the Atlantic. The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys and others gained traction during that time by covering Berry songs. Even Elvis dipped into his catalog. More than 75 different artists have done Berry songs. Johnny B. Goode alone has seen at least two dozen versions.
Berry and his music were built to last. Scandals couldn’t keep him down. Neither could passing fads or changing tastes. His salacious euphemisms and rebellious spirit still resonate.
Charles Edward Anderson Berry was born in St. Louis in 1926. He started taking guitar lessons after he wowed his peers at a high school talent show singing Jay McShann’s big band song Confessin’ the Blues. It was an audacious choice given the setting, but it would foreshadow choices he’d make as his career blossomed. By 1952, he was playing in a band that played everything from blues to country. He soon joined Sir John’s Trio, which was led by pianist Johnnie Johnson, who’d become a longtime collaborator. He eventually became the band’s leader.
In 1955, he went to Chicago where he befriended bluesman Muddy Waters. Waters introduced him to Leonard Chess of Chess Records. His homemade demo included some blues songs, but it was the countrified, up-tempo R&B number Ida May, which would later become Maybellene, that sealed the deal. When the song came out that summer, it hit No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 5 on the pop charts.
Over the next five years, Berry toured extensively and was a hit machine rattling off winners like Wee Wee Hours, Thirty Days (To Come Back Home), Roll Over Beethoven, Rock and Roll Music, Sweet Little Sixteen, and of course, Johnny B. Goode. Bolstering his crossover appeal was influential New York DJ Alan Freed, who booked Berry for his rock and roll stage extravaganzas and appearances in Freed-produced movies Rock, Rock, Rock, Mr. Rock and Roll, and Go Johnny Go.
But Berry’s ambitions went beyond just being a star. He invested heavily in real estate in the St. Louis area and in 1958, he opened the racially-integrated Club Bandstand in what was then a segregated area of the city. A year later, he hired a young woman that he’d met on tour in El Paso, Texas, to work at the club's hat check. She was fired after two weeks, but after working as a prostitute at a local hotel for several nights, she called her hometown police in Yuma, Ariz., to help get her home.
Berry wound up being charged with violating the Mann Act - transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. He was found guilty, but the verdict was overturned because the judge made racist remarks. He was convicted again in 1961 and sentenced to three years in prison and a $10,000 fine. He served two years.
Fortunately for him, the emerging white rock bands were keeping his music alive and he came back blazing with another run of hits including Nadine, Little Marie, Promised Land and No Particular Place to Go. He toured Britain and in 1964 appeared on the TAMI (Teen-Age Music International) Show with the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, James Brown and the Supremes. A film version of the concert was later released.
Over the next eight years, the stream of hits dried up, but he found a new audience on the blues and hippie festival circuit. In 1972, he scored his last hit - and only No. 1 pop tune - the racy novelty song, My Ding-a-Ling, which he’d recorded 14 years earlier as My Tambourine. Still, he never really wanted for festival work.
He played himself in 1978 Freed biopic American Hot Wax and in 1979, he played at the White House at President Jimmy Carter’s request. A month later, he was jailed for five months for income tax evasion. Also that year, he released Rock It, his last studio album.
The 1980s saw Berry much lauded for his body of work. When he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Keith Richards, declared, “It’s hard for me to induct Chuck Berry, because I lifted every lick he ever played.”
Berry inspired many such quotes during his career. Jerry Lee Lewis, his one-time rival who famously set fire to a piano on stage when Berry was set to close a show, said years later, “(My mama) said, ’You and Elvis are pretty good, but you’re no Chuck Berry.”
Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers declared that Berry is “a musical scientist who discovered a cure for the blues.”
John Lennon was even more to the point: “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ’Chuck Berry.’”
But it wasn’t all high praise for Berry especially in more recent years. Filmmaker Taylor Hackford’s 1986 concert/documentary Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll (Richards served as musical director) showed all the characteristics that made him “The Father of Rock and Roll,” but it also showed another side - a testy, unpredictable cheapskate.
The warts and all portrayal of a musician more interested in money than art, was in keeping with a reputation he developed in later years of saving a buck by using local musicians instead of paying a touring band. The result was hit-and-miss live performances.
He also faced more legal problems. In 1990, he settled a class action suit involving 59 women who complained that he’d installed a video camera in the women's bathroom at two of his restaurants in St. Louis. In 2000, Berry was sued by longtime pianist Johnnie Johnson, who sought royalties and credit he thought he was owed for songs they performed together. The suit was later dismissed, and Berry paid tribute to Johnson - the man who helped launch his career - when he died at age 80 in 2005. Johnson, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a sideman in 2001, was known as the king of the boogie-woogie piano.
Despite his ups-and-downs, Berry’s music never seems to go away. A four-disc, 103-song boxed set Johnny B. Goode: His Complete ’50s Chess Recordings was released in 2008 just ahead of his signature song’s 50th anniversary in 2009. Republican presidential candidate John McCain used the song in his 2008 primary campaign, until Berry made it clear that he favored Democrat Barack Obama.
Up until a few years ago, Berry played once a month at Blueberry Hill in St. Louis.
His first studio album in nearly 38 years, titled Chuck, is scheduled for release sometime this year, according to his web site, Chuckberry.com. The backing band includes two of his children, Charles Berry Jr. (guitar) and Ingrid Berry (harmonica).
Berry announced the new album on Oct. 18, his 90th birthday. He said the album is dedicated to Themetta Berry, his wife of 68 years.
"This record is dedicated to my beloved Toddy," Berry said in a media release. "My darlin' I'm growing old! I've worked on this record for a long time. Now I can hang up my shoes!"
Berry's son, Charles Berry Jr., described the new music as covering a wide spectrum from hard-driving "rockers to soulful, thoughtful time capsules of a life's work."
"What an honor to be part of this new music," Charles Berry Jr. said. "The St. Louis band, or as dad called us 'The Blueberry Hill Band,' fell right into the groove and followed his lead."
Berry has left a body of work that will have lasting appeal. He will be remembered as long as there are musicians smart enough to dig deep into the source of their inspiration. With his passing, Beethoven will now really have to roll over and tell Tchaikovsky the news - that they’ve got a new neighbor in music heaven.
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Source:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2017/03/18/rock-and-roll-pioneer-chuck-berry-dies-at-90/99360568/
