Profile/Copyright © 1972, 2006 by Jim O’Donnell
If they don't stop making teenagers, Charles Edward Anderson Berry (who goes by the phone directory name of Chuck Berry) may play on forever.
He is pop music's master at tuning into the adolescent soul with words. He sings for kids, and their wallet photos, in what kids regard as a legible hand—straight-ahead street talk chewed through sly humor.
Romance, school, work, parents, coolerators, V-8 Fords are his subject matter. Even music itself—who but so vital a talent as 1957 Chuck Berry could write a song called "Rock and Roll Music"?
Chuck Berry, anybody will tell you, was put on this earth to write and sing rock tunes. Juke joints jive his feet. Guitar chords itch his bones.
All he ever needed—or needs — in terms of "motivation" is a guitar strap on one shoulder and someone to point him to the stage.
He used rock to strike a chord deep into adolescent con¬sciousness and identified rock as the source of his fabulous energy.
The first song to designate adolescents as a group of their own was Chuck Berry's "Almost Grown."
Along with chiseling out lyrics that fine-tuned adolescents' perception of themselves, he gave rise to the electric guitar as the essential purveyor of the rock 'n' roll idiom.
His stage timing—like his musical timing—is uncanny. You realize it when he does his famous "duckwalk"—dancing one-foot pigeon-toed across the stage, his red Gibson guitar stiff and straight and pointed out like a fin.
Chuckleberry's Fin.
The story is that he first duckwalked in 1956 at the Brooklyn Paramount to hide the wrinkles in his suit. But I doubt it. He does it too well. He probably could duckwalk before he could humanwalk.
Chuck Berry was born in 1926, or thereabouts; grew up in Elleardsville, Missouri; started singing in church when he was six; and fooled around with guitar in high school.
He worked at an assembly line at a G.M. Fisher car body plant before he went into the cosmetology business.
In the early 50s, Berry attended night classes at the Poro School of Beauty Culture, and meanwhile developed into a blues singer-guitarist.
He was in the hair business about six months when his song, "Maybellene," hit in 1955. It helped him land a $400 recording contract.
"Maybellene" had been cut in May. It was a hit by July. He had heeded the wild call of the blues emanating from Chicago's South Side, and when he got there Muddy Waters let him sit in on a set.
Impressed, Waters directed Berry around the block to the late Leonard Chess, founder of Chess Records.
It was Chess who released "Maybellene" that May of '55, and then sent Berry out on tour.
Producing songs like "School Days," "Roll Over, Beethoven," "Thirty Days," and "No Money Down," Berry seldom left the road for about five years.
He did 240 one-nighters just in 1957. His career was on a roll and the cash was flowing in.
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Then he hit a wall in late 1959. He'd picked up a girl while on tour in El Paso, Texas, and had brought her back to his St. Louis club—Chuck Berry's Club Bandstand—to be a hat check girl.
When he eventually fired her, she went to the cops, said she was 14, and had been a prostitute for a year. Berry was arrested for violation of the Mann Act—transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes.
He went through two trials over two years, and was convicted in 1962 on two counts. He entered the Federal Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana, in February, 1962, and was released two years later.
At the moment of his conviction, the strings in his music had gotten more lushy than lashy, softer than harder. There were no Chuck Berry records of either type around until the release of "Nadine" in March, 1964.
He emerged not licking his wounds, but licking a guitar. Still, he'd become the kind of guy who checks the cards under a bright light before he cuts the deck. Chuck Berry had seen too much monkey business.
He'd always been a cash-on-the-barrelhead performer. Now he'd gotten so hard and distant, they'd never even get to stick him with a traffic ticket.
While offstage he was stoical, onstage he'd lost nothing. He'd moved into Berry Park, his country-club-size estate in Wentzville, Missouri, and scheduled a return concert in Detroit.
He faced a packed house. Talent being one of those accidents of nature that can't be undone, he was an all right Chuck Berry, which is a lot to be. The time, however, was all wrong. His fans and era had passed.
But more importantly, his records hadn't. Many English kids—like John Lennon and Mick Jagger—had been listening to them all the time, and learning from them, and covering them.
American kids eventually found that out, and wizened old Chuck Berry was back again in the rock march against time with the late 60’s revival shows.
He now drives May-sky-blue Cadillacs and hard bargains. A man who has never been broke, he keeps a good table. There's not a gray hair in sight, and he doesn't need bifocals to see his guitar-fingering or the audience.
Seventeen years after his first single, Chuck Berry finally, scored a No. 1 record with "My Ding-a-Ling" in 1972.
He is an older guy who never got out of his younger bag—maybe, in fact, the finest pop songwriter ever to scribble down some words on a brown paper bag.
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CD: Chuck Berry, The Definitive Collection. Chess, 2006.
Book: Chuck Berry, Chuck Berry: The Autobiography. Harmony, 1987.
Websites: http://www.chuckberry.com, http://www.chuckberry.de
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