If Chuck Berry was the Father of rock 'n' roll, who was the Mother? If this is a (fair & balanced) question for the ages, so be it.
[x Esquire]
Chuck Berry Goddamn!
By Luke Dittrich
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The boy was maybe six, maybe seven when he found his father's perpetual-motion machine in the basement. It was in pieces, strange wooden blocks and wheels and chains, all heaped together in two bushel baskets. He fished the pieces out of the baskets one by one and started stacking them up high, like a skyscraper. Before he'd finished, he heard the front door open, heard the work boots on the cellar stairs, heard his father's silken bass, the pride of the Antioch Baptist Church choir.
"You know what that is?"
He didn't.
So his father explained it to him. He showed him how the pieces fit together to form a six-foot-tall tower. One wheel on the top, the other on the bottom, the chain wrapped around both of them. Some weights and counterweights. His father was good with his hands, made a living as a carpenter, but this machine didn't have anything to do with his work. He'd made it for himself, to see if he could, because people said you couldn't. Once the wheels started spinning, his father told him, they'd keep going for a long time. About six hours. But the friction would always win out in the end. The wheels would slow, and then they would stop.
Some years later, the boy tried to improve on his father's design. He set out to make his own perpetual-motion machine. His didn't work, either.
Friction.
The man is telling this story in the backseat of a coffee-colored Toyota Avalon. The car is in an alleyway behind a little club in St. Louis, Missouri. Sixty years ago, on the stages of some other little clubs in St. Louis, all of them gone now, he did go on to invent something eternal, something that didn't lose energy as it went but instead gained it. He watched it happen so many times. The energy he put out would come back at him a hundredfold. And he watched it spread, to other people, other stages. Eventually it was no longer in his control, and eventually he couldn't have stopped it even if he'd wanted to.
It's still going. You still hear it today, everywhere, both the raw primary stuff and the mutated but still recognizable descendants. It's part of the fabric of the world. Beyond the world, even. One of the first records he made was tucked away inside the Voyager spacecraft, chosen to represent humanity itself to the cosmos, and that spacecraft is now somewhere way out there, on the edge of the solar system, barreling through the frictionless vacuum.
So he succeeded where his father failed. He created something that will go on forever.
It's almost showtime, and Chuck Berry groans himself out of the backseat and shuffles after the club's owner into the rear entrance, through the kitchen, toward the little stage in the little basement room where he'll play tonight.
Chuck Berry invented rock 'n' roll.
Okay, nobody invented rock 'n' roll.
It's not a single-stemmed thing. It came from a lot of different places and people. It's a patchwork of blues and country and folk, and it's more than that, too. Some musicologists say that the first rock 'n' roll record was actually recorded by a different guy, Ike Turner, who came up playing in the same club scene as Chuck Berry. "Rocket '88,' " the song's called. Ask Berry about that theory, though, and he'll shake his head.
"He was totally Afro-American," he'll say, by way of explanation, about Ike Turner and Ike Turner's music.
Chuck Berry's music wasn't totally anything.
His first single, "Maybellene," was built out of an old white hillbilly country song, then fed through the blender of Berry's guitar and Willie Dixon's bass until something entirely new poured out.
And whatever that was, that new sound, that white-black hybrid, Berry ran with it, and the rest of the world did, too.
And though you could argue that some sort of proto-rock might have existed prior, there's no arguing that the songs that Berry wrote in the mid-1950s — songs like "Johnny B. Goode," "Sweet Little Sixteen," and "Roll Over Beethoven" — are the bedrock substrates underlying pretty much everything we now call rock 'n' roll.
But the origins of rock 'n' roll, and Chuck Berry's part in it, are subjects you could parse and bicker about forever. Or you could just let John Lennon have the last word.
"If you tried to give rock 'n' roll another name," he said, "you might call it Chuck Berry."
Chuck Berry is wearing a red sequined shirt and a nautical cap and baggy black slacks, and he's got stooped shoulders and big hands, and he's holding on to his Gibson and playing it hard, and the band's playing hard behind him, and they're playing "Memphis Tennessee," and that's such a great song, and it's going pretty good, but then he repeats the whole final verse, the one that begins "The last time I saw Marie she's waving me goodbye / with hurry-home drops on her cheeks that trickled from her eye," twice in a row, which is kind of awkward, but the band just pushes through. The next song is an old Hank Williams tune called "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)," and it starts out fine until, after a verse or two, out of nowhere, he starts singing the final verse of "Memphis" again, at which point the rhythm-guitar player, who happens to be his son, walks over and shouts something in his ear and he gets back on track.
He and his band play on this tiny stage in this cramped basement room pretty much every month. He's eighty-five years old, and this is the only regular gig he has. The club, Blueberry Hill, isn't very old, but this room has got an old feel to it, and it looks a hell of a lot like some of the other little rooms in the long-gone St. Louis clubs where he got his start.
There aren't more than two hundred people here tonight, and even though the thirty-five-dollar ticket price is double the price of tickets to some of the other acts that play here — Rachael Yamagata, Florida Georgia Line, Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers — he's still not really raking it in. And anyway, he has money, money's not a problem.
Watching Chuck Berry play here tonight is a little like watching Einstein if Einstein had decided to spend his last years in a makeshift replica of his old patent office, retranscribing the theories of his youth.
Here's what happened to Einstein after his ideas changed everything: He became the most famous and lauded man in the world. He became close friends with presidents and movie stars but was something more than a peer to them. His most essential work was done before the age of thirty, but that didn't really matter. He was offered the presidency of Israel but turned it down. He became a sort of secular pope and retained that privileged and almost universally admired position until he died.
Here's what happened to Chuck Berry after his ideas changed everything: He became famous, yes. He became a famous black man, touring around Mississippi and Alabama and Texas in the 1950s, playing concerts to theaters full of screaming white teenage girls. Is it any surprise what happened next? Is it any surprise that he had to take shelter from angry mobs in police stations after his concerts? Is it any surprise that his record company stiffed him for a big chunk of his songwriting royalties? Is it any surprise that when he invested some of the remaining royalties into opening his own club in St. Louis, an underage prostitute working there as a hat-check girl went to the police after Berry fired her and claimed she'd had an affair with him? Is it any surprise that the transcript of the resulting trial is filled with examples of the judge making statements like "By Mr. Berry, do you mean this Negro, the defendant?" Is it any surprise that he eventually got three years? Is it any surprise that the newspapers loved it, and that some of the same reporters who'd sent him skyward now relished pulling him back down to earth? Is it any surprise that he spent his time in prison studying accounting and business, and that after he got out, he became notoriously ruthless in his negotiating with record companies and concert promoters, refusing to do anything at all until he'd been paid in full? Is it any surprise that he eventually served another prison term, for tax evasion? Or that, years later, after a cache of embarrassing sex tapes was stolen from his home, triggering yet another of his life's many scandals, he retreated even further from the public eye, deeper into himself?
A couple years ago, Chuck Berry played a concert in Brazil. After the show, someone rushed over to let him know that the concert promoter, who may or may not have had ties to organized crime, had just been dragged off the streets of São Paulo and killed.
Chuck Berry nodded, considering the news, then gave a look that was hard to read.
"At least he paid us first," he said.
Watch him with an interviewer.
Berry once punched Keith Richards in the face for tapping him on the shoulder, and has a reputation for being both ornery and withdrawn, but today he isn't either of those things. He's gracious, in a southern sort of way. Pleased to meet you. He shakes hands and his hands swallow up the hands of his guest. He once was as handsome as Elvis, and he's still got a great face, and eyes that don't seem so much cruel or aloof as just kind of wry and sharp and maybe a bit amused, like he's in on some sort of joke.
In his autobiography, which has been out of print for more than a decade, Berry explains his reasons for turning down almost all interview requests: "I was not interested in dramatics, only music, and I wrote my own." The book is overall a strange and entertaining one, both revelatory and obfuscatory. He's a talented writer, and his words have a lilt and flow to them on the page not unlike the lilt and flow of his songs, but those flowing words sometimes contradict one another.
Example.
Page 139, Chuck Berry on his songwriting process: Whatever would sell was what I thought I should concentrate on.
Page 143, Chuck Berry on his songwriting process: I have yet to mix commerce with passion.
After some preliminary chitchat, the interviewer asks Berry about that tension between these sentences.
On one page you wrote, "Whatever would sell was what I thought I should concentrate on."
Now say that word for word. Whatever I ... ?
Whatever would sell. That people would buy.
Whatever I thought?
Whatever would sell in the stores.
What are you saying that sounds like "saw"? Whatever you?
Sell. Whatever sells.
Song?
S-E-L-L. Whatever sells in the stores. Whatever the public buys. Whatever sells the most.
Oh yeah. Sell. Okay.
Whatever sells is what I should concentrate on.
Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. Okay.
Later in the book, you said, "I have yet to mix ..."
To what?
To mix. To combine.
M-I-X?
M-I-X. Yeah. "I have yet to mix commerce ..."
Commerce?
"...commerce with passion." Commerce with passion.
Well, if I said that.
You said that.
Yeah, okay.
At which point the interviewer has pretty much forgotten what he was trying to get at in the first place, and has also come to the realization that Berry's forgotten hearing aid, which the interviewer had been warned about prior to the interview, was going to be a much bigger obstacle than anticipated.
An hour passes quickly and, mostly, excruciatingly.
As Berry gets up to leave, the interviewer tells him in a half shout that he'd like to spend more time with him, maybe even just follow him around for a day or two. People want to know what the father of rock 'n' roll is like now.
Berry laughs. He knows they'd like to know. They'd like to know what color his drawers are, too, he says.
"Polka dot," are the last two words he says before walking out of the room, leaving the interviewer with a notebook full of unanswered questions and the dawning suspicion that Berry forgot his hearing aid on purpose.
She remembers her dad's piano player, Johnnie Johnson. She remembers how Johnnie's fingers whirred over the ivory, the mesmerizing speed of them, practicing his rolls and trills and scales. She remembers the bar, the cramped little stage at the front, the bright sign outside. She was five years old, and these are among her first memories. She had done her chores, had cleaned her room, and so as a reward he's taken her here tonight, for a few hours, to be with him. This is where her dad works, when he's not working construction with her grandfather. She wanders from the front room into the back, and she remembers seeing him there. He's sitting in front of a typewriter. She remembers the look on his face. She asks what he's writing.
"A song," he says.
She asks what it's called.
"Wee Wee Hours."
She starts to ask him something else, and then he gives her a look, and she reads it and stops asking questions.
It's the summer of 1955, and everything is about to change. He's about to take "Wee Wee Hours" and the other songs he's been writing, and load up his cherry-red Ford Country Squire station wagon, and drive to a studio in Chicago, and start making records.
She was his first child. He had named her Ingrid, after Ingrid Bergman. He had always loved those old movie stars. Even later, even after he and the others who played his songs — Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones — began provoking a level of frenzy way beyond what those actors ever did, he never considered himself a star, not like them, at least. Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable were stars, he would say. He was a moon, at best. One of the greatest thrills of his life was once getting a chance to sit next to Lucille Ball and hold her hand during an episode of Sammy Davis Jr.'s TV show.
After those records he made in Chicago started coming out, he dropped his construction work, of course. And he stopped playing at that old converted grocery store, the Cosmopolitan Club, and instead began living on the road, playing bigger and bigger theaters all over the country. And during those strange, stratospheric years, even when Ingrid was good, even when she'd done all her chores and finished her homework, she wasn't allowed to come be with him. Her reward instead became her allowance. And what she would do with that allowance was she would go to the local record store and look for the little blue-and-gray 45's that Chess Records made, and she would take one of her dad's latest singles up to the front counter, and she would buy it and bring it home. Late into the night, she would sit and listen to him sing in the privacy of her room.
She's been surrounded by music and musicians all her life, and so it's no surprise, really, that she went on to become a musician herself. She's got a great voice, and she's also tried picking up various other instruments over the years. She studied the piano first, but her teacher, a ruler-wielding scold, stripped the instrument of all the joy she used to see in Johnnie Johnson's rolling fingers. Her mother's from the South, and whenever Dad was away, which was most of the time, their home throbbed with her mom's collection of blues records. Ingrid liked the blues, liked the way it sounded, and there was one instrument in particular that she liked the most. It sounded almost like a person crying.
At Blueberry Hill, Chuck Berry is playing "Roll Over Beethoven," and he's having fun with it, messing with his delivery so that it sounds playful and new. Then toward the end he slows it down, and the sharp rock jangle shifts into the thicker, more pulsing sound of the next song. He moves closer to the mic, closes his eyes.
"In the wee wee hours," he sings, "that's when I think of you."
And then a beautiful sixty-one-year-old woman in tight gold pants steps onto the stage and brings a harmonica to her lips.
Later, when you ask her what it feels like to play with her dad, like she does at pretty much all his shows now, trading licks, he on his guitar and she on her harmonica, Ingrid will start to cry.
But right now, she just lets it wail.
There's new material.
He's got a Pro Tools studio in his home. He uses it. For decades, he's noodled around with different ideas. He'll lay down the demos himself, just a drum machine and his guitar. He's used to this sort of thing, to recording by himself. That's how he recorded that song, "Memphis Tennessee," for example. Just him alone in his business office one afternoon in 1958, the door closed, his guitar, his voice, and a reel-to-reel.
Of course, to take those raw ideas and flesh them out, make them whole, he sometimes uses collaborators. His most famous collaborator is probably Johnnie Johnson, the piano player he started playing with in 1953. That's when he joined Johnnie's band, which had a regular gig at the Cosmopolitan Club. That's how the dynamic was at first. Berry was the guitar player in
Johnnie Johnson's Sir John's Trio. Then the dynamic shifted. Johnson began backing him rather than the other way around.
Johnson was a great piano player, had amazing talent.
He also had a drinking problem.
He did himself a lot of damage and ended up supporting himself by driving a St. Louis bus. In his final years, Johnson filed a huge and hugely frivolous lawsuit against his old guitar player, claiming he deserved co-songwriting credits on pretty much all of the songs he'd played on.
Berry hardly ever drinks.
He likes to be in control.
And so is it any surprise that all that new material, all those unreleased songs, are kept in his total control? The old ones might have seeped into every corner of the world by now, but these new ones, they've never moved beyond the few thousand square feet of his home.
He certainly won't play any of them tonight at Blueberry Hill.
This despite the fact that the people who have heard them, who've actually played on them, like Bob Lohr, the piano player/criminal-defense lawyer who has replaced Johnnie Johnson in Chuck's lineup, swear up and down that some of the tracks are "as good as anything he's ever done." People have begged Chuck to just throw one of the new songs up on iTunes and see what happens, but he just nods and considers it and then never does it. It's baffling. Just like it's baffling that he never sells merchandise, no overpriced T-shirts or posters or picture books, at any of his live shows. That's basically free money. But he just won't do it.
On rare occasions, he has let journalists listen to some of the unreleased stuff. But even that makes him wary.
Ask him why and he'll point to the side of his head.
"You know, your ears record," he says. "You might can sing a song once you hear it. You're selling what you heard."
He has seen the way his ideas, his songs, can careen away from him, out of his control, to be sold or claimed by others. Listen to his song "Sweet Little Sixteen," then listen to the Beach Boys' song "Surfin' U. S. A.," which they recorded eight years later. Hell, listen to any of his songs and then listen to just about any guitar riff of the last half century.
He waves one of his huge hands up at a light in the ceiling.
"The man that invented the electric bulb," Chuck Berry says, "he made it. Everybody's using it."
And what Berry invented, those world-changing first songs of his, well, he still uses them himself, for his own reasons. Every month, on this little stage, alongside his son and his daughter, playing late into the night, until the show ends and they turn up the lights, and all that's left is a noise in your ears like a ringing bell. Ω
[Luke Dittrich is an Esquire Contributing Editor. He lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, which is 160 miles north of Juneau. The temperature where he lives can get down to -40F.]
Copyright © 2011 Hearst Communications, Inc.
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Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves by Neil Sapper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at sapper.blogspot.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.
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