Chuck Berry

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Chuck Berry
Image:Chuck001.jpg
Born October 18, 1926 (age 80)
St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Genre(s) Rock and Roll
Label(s) Chess Records
Years active 1955 - Present
Official site www.chuckberry.com

Charles Edward Anderson "Chuck" Berry (born October 18, 1926 in St. Louis, Missouri) is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter.

Chuck Berry is an immensely influential figure, and one of the pioneers of rock & roll music. Cub Koda wrote, "Of all the early breakthrough rock & roll artists, none is more important to the development of the music than Chuck Berry. He is its greatest songwriter, the main shaper of its instrumental voice, one of its greatest guitarists, and one of its greatest performers."[1] John Lennon was more succinct: "If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'."[2]

Berry was among the first musicians to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on its opening in 1986. He received Kennedy Center Honors in 2000 in a "class" with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Plácido Domingo, Angela Lansbury, and Clint Eastwood. And in 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked Chuck Berry[3]#5 on their list of The Immortals: 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.[4]

Contents

[edit] Biography

Born October 18, 1926 in St. Louis, Missouri (although some biographies establish San Jose, California as his birthplace), Berry was the third child in a family of six. He grew up in an area of St. Louis known as the Ville, one of the few areas of the city where black people could own property, which consequently made it synonymous with black prosperity. His father was a contractor and a deacon of a nearby Baptist church, his mother a qualified principal. His middle-class upbringing allowed him to pursue his interest in music from an early age and he made his first public performance while still in high school.

In 1944, before he could graduate, he was arrested and convicted for attempted burglary after taking a joy ride with his friends to Kansas City, Missouri.

In his 1987 autobiography Chuck Berry: The Autobiography he retells the story that his car broke down on the side of a highway and, not having a way home, he flagged down a passing car and when he got in he pulled the muzzle of a gun out of his coat (it wasn't a working gun—just the slide with no handle) and told the man to get out. The man went to a nearby pay phone and called the police who quickly pulled over Berry in the car and arrested him and his friends.

[edit] Early career

Chuck Berry had been playing the blues since his teens and by early 1953 was performing with Sir John's Trio, a band that played at a popular club called The Cosmopolitan, in East St. Louis, Illinois. The group included Berry's long-time collaborator and the group's namesake, piano man, Johnnie Johnson. Although the band played mostly blues and ballads, the most popular music among whites in the area was hillbilly. Berry wrote, "Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black audience began whispering 'who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?' After they laughed at me a few times they began requesting the hillbilly stuff and enjoyed dancing to it." [1]

In May, 1955, Berry traveled to Chicago where he met Muddy Waters who suggested he contact Leonard Chess of Chess Records. Signed to a recording contract, that September he released a unique version of the traditional fiddle tune "Ida Red" under the title "Maybellene". The song, which featured a new set of modern lyrics and a driving beat, eventually peaked at #5 on the Billboard magazine Billboard charts. At the end of June 1956, his song "Roll Over Beethoven" reached #29 on the Billboard charts. Berry's early LP records sometimes contained well-delivered blues standards to round out the customary dozen tracks. In the autumn of 1957 Berry joined the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly and other rising stars of the new rock and roll to tour the United States. The hits continued from 1957 to 1959, with Berry scoring over a dozen chart singles during this period, including the top 10 U.S. hits "School Days", "Rock and Roll Music", "Sweet Little Sixteen" and "Johnny B. Goode". Robert Palmer wrote that Chuck Berry’s songs tended to feature country-and-western inflected light blues melodies, along with plenty of guitar twang. He also had a taste for the "Spanish tinge", as in "La Juanda" and "Havana Moon".

Berry appeared in two early rock 'n' roll movies. The first was Rock Rock Rock released in 1956. He is shown singing "You Can't Catch Me". [2] He had a speaking role as himself in the 1959 film Go, Johnny, Go! along with Alan Freed, and also shown performing his songs "Johnny B. Goode", "Memphis, Tennessee", and "Little Queenie". [3]

[edit] Career scandals

In December 1959, after scoring a string of hit songs and while touring often, Berry had legal problems after he invited a 14-year-old Apache waitress that he met in Mexico to work as a hat check girl at Berry's Club Bandstand, his nightclub in St. Louis. After being fired from the club, the girl was arrested on a prostitution charge and Berry was arrested under the Mann Act. Berry was convicted, fined $5,000 and sentenced to five years in prison. This event, coupled with other early rock and roll scandals—such as Jerry Lee Lewis' marriage to his 13-year-old cousin and Alan Freed's payola conviction—gave rock and roll an image problem that limited its acceptance into mainstream U.S. society. However, when Berry was released from prison in 1963, his musical career enjoyed a resurgence due to many of the British Invasion acts of the 1960s—most notably the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—releasing cover versions of classic Berry hits. In 1964–65 Berry resumed recording and placed 6 singles in the U.S. Hot 100, including "No Particular Place To Go" (#10), "You Never Can Tell" (#14), and "Nadine" (#23).

In 1990 Berry was sued by several women who claimed that he had installed a video camera in the ladies' bathrooms at two of his St. Louis restaurants. A class action settlement was eventually reached with 59 women on the complaint. Berry's biographer, Bruce Pegg, estimated that it cost Berry over $1.2 million plus legal fees. A Miami purveyor of celebrity sex videos is currently marketing video footage purporting to show Berry urinating on a young woman in a bathtub. Although the voice sounds similar to Berry's his face is never visible on the tape, making positive identification impossible.[4]

[edit] Exit and return to Chess

In 1965 Berry left Chess Records, moving to the Mercury label. For a variety of reasons—including changing musical tastes and different production techniques—the hits dried up for Chuck during the Mercury era. He returned to Chess from 1970 to 1975.

He did release a hit single, in 1972, for Chess—a live recording of a song he had initially recorded years earlier as a novelty track "My Ding-a-Ling". Despite its lightweight nature it is, infamously, Berry's only No. 1 single, ever, and it remains popular today. A live recording of "Reelin' And Rockin'" was also issued as a follow-up single that same year and would prove to be Berry's final top-40 hit in both the U.S. and the UK.

[edit] Touring as Chuck Berry, the legend

In the 1970s Berry toured on the basis of his earlier successes. He was on the road for many years, carrying only his Gibson guitar, confident that he could hire a band that already knew his music no matter where he went.

Among the many bandleaders performing this backup role were Bruce Springsteen and Steve Miller when each was just starting their careers. Springsteen related in the video Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll that Berry did not even give the band a set list and just expected the musicians to follow his lead after each guitar intro. Neither did he speak to nor thank the band after the show. Nevertheless, Springsteen backed Berry again when he appeared at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.

This type of touring style, traveling the "oldies" circuit in the 1970s—where he was often paid in cash by local promoters—added ammunition to the Internal Revenue Service's indictment that Berry was a chronic income tax evader. The third time that Chuck Berry would face criminal sanction was after pleading guilty to tax evasion and was sentenced to four months imprisonment and 1,000 hours of community service—doing benefit concerts—in 1979.

In 1979, Berry released Rockit for Atco Records, his last studio album to date.

[edit] The post-studio era

In 1986, Taylor Hackford made a documentary film, Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, of a celebration concert for Berry's sixtieth birthday. Keith Richards was the musical leader. Eric Clapton, Etta James, Robert Cray and Linda Ronstadt, among others, appeared with Berry on stage and film. During the concert, Berry played a Gibson ES-355, the luxury version of the ES 335. Richards played a black Fender Custom Telecaster, Cray a Fender Stratocaster and Clapton a Gibson ES 350T, the same guitar Berry used on his early recordings.

Ironically, the highlight in the film version was a historic exchange between Keith Richards and Chuck Berry on how to set an amplifier for a guitar. Image Entertainment released a new version of the film in June 2006, which contains the original movie and bonus material such as rehearsals and documentaries.

In the late 1980s, Berry owned a restaurant in Wentzville, Missouri, called The Southern Air. He also owns an estate in Wentzville, Berry Park. For many years, Berry hosted rock concerts throughout the summer at Berry Park. He eventually closed the estate to the public due to the riotous behaviour of many of the guests.

Berry continues to perform regularly, playing both throughout the United States and overseas. He performs one Wednesday each month at Blueberry Hill, a restaurant and bar located in the Delmar Loop neighbourhood in St. Louis.

[edit] Influence

A pioneer of rock and roll, Chuck Berry was a significant influence on the development of early rock and roll guitar techniques and a major catalyst in the rhythm and blues to rock & roll transition. He was the first to define the classic subjects of rock and roll in his songwriting; cars, girls and school. His guitar style is legendary and many later guitar musicians acknowledge him as a major influence in their own style. When Keith Richards inducted Berry into the Hall of Fame he said, "It's hard for me to induct Chuck Berry, because I lifted every lick he ever played!". Richard Berry (no relation) drew on Chuck Berry's "Havana Moon" as an inspiration for his own song, the now classic "Louie Louie". John Lennon, another devotee of Berry, borrowed a line from Berry's "You Can't Catch Me" for his song "Come Together", and was subsequently sued by Berry's music publisher Morris Levy. Nevertheless, they became good friends and played together on more than one occasion.

Chuck Berry's famous duckwalk, often used by Angus Young of AC/DC and many other rock guitarists.
Chuck Berry's famous duckwalk, often used by Angus Young of AC/DC and many other rock guitarists.

Angus Young, of AC/DC, who has cited Berry as one of his biggest influences, is famous for using Berry's duckwalk as one of his gimmicks.

Although, by July of 1954 (a full year before Berry's first single hit the airwaves), Elvis Presley was already recording at Sun Records, in Memphis, TN, his own type of rockabilly (a fusion of C&W and R&B), from the first moment he, as well as Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison (all at one point or another members of the Sun stable, as well as Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly, to name just a few of the other rock founders) heard Berry's first recordings, they were immediately taken in, mesmerized by the sensibility and rhythm of Berry's revolutionary lyrics and innovative guitar riffs.

Berry was also a large influence on such second generation rockers as The Who and Bob Dylan. The Beach Boys' hit "Surfin' USA" resembled Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen" so closely that they were forced to give Berry a co-writing credit in order to avoid a lawsuit. In the '80s George Thorogood created a reasonable career out of what was essentially a Chuck Berry tribute show. Covering a number of Chuck Berry songs and appropriating the duckwalk, Thorogood toured relentlessly as a high-energy, rock and roll revival act.

While there is debate about who recorded the first rock and roll record, Chuck Berry's early recordings, including "Maybellene" (1955), are among the first fully synthesized rock and roll singles, combining blues and country music with lyrics about girls and cars, with impeccable diction alongside distinctive electric guitar solos and an energetic stage persona. Chuck Berry also popularized the use of the boogie in rock and roll.

Most of his famous recordings were on Chess Records with pianist Johnnie Johnson from Berry's own band and legendary record producer Willie Dixon on bass, Fred Below on drums, and Berry's guitar—arguably the epitome of an early rock and roll band. It should be noted, however, that Lafayette Leake, not Johnnie Johnson, played the piano on "Johnny B. Goode", "Reelin' and Rockin'", "Sweet Little Sixteen", and "Rock & Roll Music". Additionally, Otis Spann played the piano on "You Can't Catch Me" and "No Money Down".

As quoted in the liner notes of Berry's album 28 Greatest hits producer Leonard Chess recalled laconically:

"I told Chuck to give it a bigger beat. History, the rest, you know? The kids wanted the big beat, cars and young love. It was a trend and we jumped on it."

Clive Anderson wrote for the compilation Chuck Berry—Poet of Rock 'n' Roll:

While Elvis was a country boy who sang "black" to some degree ... Chuck Berry provided the mirror image where country music was filtered through an R&B sensibility.

Berry's musical influences included Nat King Cole, T-Bone Walker, Louis Jordan—and Muddy Waters, who was both the singer and guitarist vital in the transformation of Delta blues into Chicago blues and the man who introduced Berry to Leonard Chess at Chess Records.

Throughout his career Berry recorded both smooth ballads like "Havana Moon" and blues tunes like "Wee Wee Hours" but it was his own mastery of the new form that won him fame. He recorded more than a dozen Top Ten R&B chart hits, crossed over to have a strong impact on the pop charts with seven top ten U.S. pop hits and four top ten pop hits in the UK and he found his songs being covered by hundreds of blues, country and rock and roll performers.

Berry was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984.

In 2003 Rolling Stone Magazine named him number six on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. [5]

His compilation album The Great Twenty-Eight was also named 21st on the magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. [6].

In 2004 six of his songs were included in the Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list, namely "Johnny B. Goode" (# 7), "Maybellene" (# 18), "Roll Over Beethoven" (# 97), "Rock and Roll Music" (#128), "Sweet Little Sixteen" (# 272) and "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" (# 374). [7]

Also in 2004, Berry was rated #5 in Rolling Stone Magazine's 100 Greatest Artists of All Time feature.

[edit] Chuck Berry songs

Many of his songs are among the leading rock and roll anthems:

His other hits, many of them novelty narratives, include:

  • "Maybellene" - car, girl, rival, jealousy—tune based on the traditional Bluegrass standard "Ida Red". (Berry was familiar with the 1938 recording of "Ida Red" by western swing band Bob Wills & his Texas Playboys.)
  • "Too Much Monkey Business" - teenage attitudes, predecessor to rap, "Same thing every day, gettin' up, goin' to school, no need of me complaining, my objection's overruled". Also inspired the Bob Dylan song, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", Johnny Thunders' "Too Much Junky Business" play on title
  • "Promised Land" - Cross country journey in song, from Norfolk, Virginia to the Promised Land, California
  • "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" - adult attitudes, racism, "arrested on charges of unemployment"
  • "Back in the U.S.A." - which inspired The Beatles' "Back in the USSR".
  • "No Particular Place To Go" - car, girl, "parking way out on the ko-ko-mo", frustration because he can't get the safety belt loose.
  • "Memphis" - unique beat, sweet story. Lonnie Mack and Johnny Rivers both built entire careers starting with this song.
  • "My Ding-a-Ling" - his only #1, a New Orleans novelty song that he had been singing for years and fortuitously included on a live recording in London in 1970.
  • "Run Rudolph Run" - his top Christmas song
  • "You Never Can Tell" - song included in the movie Pulp Fiction. Also recorded by Emmylou Harris, and Bob Seger on his Greatest Hits album, under the title "C'est la Vie."

Among his blues tributes:

His songs are collected on albums like:

[edit] References in popular culture

  • In the 1985 film Back to the Future, Marty McFly performs "Johnny B. Goode" at a 1955 school concert. During the performance, the band's lead singer is shown on the phone saying "Chuck, Chuck, it's Marvin! Your cousin, Marvin Berry?! You know that new sound you're looking for? Well, listen to this!"
  • In the novel by Stephen King, Christine, at the start of many chapters there are pieces of lyrics from Chuck Berry songs.
  • In the Bob Seger song "Rock and Roll Never Forgets," one line states that "All of Chuck's children are out there, playin' his licks."
  • In the Saturday Night Live broadcast of April 22, 1978, Steve Martin appeared as a psychic in a mock news show entitled "Next Week in Review." His psychic character revealed that next week, Earth will receive the first official message from extraterrestrials. The message: "Send more Chuck Berry."
  • On the Disney cartoon The Proud Family, Sticky Webb, in a flashback of Penny Proud's in "I Had A Dream", was dressed up as Chuck Berry. However, Penny's response to this claim was "Who's Chuck Berry?", and when Penny told Sticky about it after waking up, he asked "Chuck Who?".
  • In the episode "Lisa's Pony" from the cartoon "The Simpsons", a blue-haired student sings "My Ding-a-Ling" at a school talent show and is promptly removed from the stage due to how inappropriate the song sounds when taken out of the original context of the song.
  • In the film Pulp Fiction, John Travolta and Uma Thurman's characters dance in a Twist competition to the song "You Never Can Tell."
  • In the episode "Chick Cancer" from the cartoon "Family Guy", A commerical for a parody of welshey juice is made with chuck berry as the new spokesperson for the juice to replace Oliva, Stewie's acting partner and now lover/wife.

[edit] Discography

[edit] Singles

Release date Title Chart Positions
US Hot 100 US R&B UK
1955 "Maybellene" (A-Side) #5 #1
→ "Wee Wee Hours" (B-Side) #10
1955 "Thirty Days" #2
1955 "No Money Down" #8
1956 "Roll Over Beethoven" #29 #2
1956 "Too Much Monkey Business" #4
→ "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" (B-Side) #5
1956 "You Can't Catch Me"
1957 "School Days" #3 #1 #24
1957 "Oh Baby Doll" #57 #12
1957 "Rock and Roll Music" #8 #6
1958 "Sweet Little Sixteen" #2 #1 #16
1958 "Johnny B. Goode" #8 #2
1958 "Beautiful Delilah" #81
1958 "Carol" #18 #9
1958 "Sweet Little Rock and Roller" (A-Side) #47 #13
→ "Jo Jo Gunne" (B-Side) #83
1958 "Merry Christmas Baby" (A-Side) #71
→ "Run Rudolph Run" (B-Side) #69 #36
1959 "Anthony Boy" #60
1959 "Almost Grown" (A-Side) #32 #3
→ "Little Queenie" (B-Side) #80
1959 "Back In The USA" (A-Side) #37 #16
→ "Memphis, Tennessee" (B-Side) #6
1959 "Broken Arrow" #108
1960 "Too Pooped To Pop (Casey)" (A-Side) #42 #18
→ "Let It Rock" (B-Side) #64 #6
1960 "Bye Bye Johnny"
1960 "I Got To Find My Baby"
1960 "Jaguar and Thunderbird" #109
1961 "I'm Talking About You"
1961 "Come On" (A-Side)
→ "Go Go Go" (B-Side) #38
1963 "Diploma For Two"
1964 "Nadine (Is It You?)" #23 #27
1964 "No Particular Place To Go" #10 #3
1964 "You Never Can Tell" #14 #23
1964 "Little Marie" #54
1964 "Promised Land" #41 #26
1965 "Dear Dad" #95
1965 "It Wasn't Me"
1966 "Ramona Say Yes"
1967 "Laugh and Cry"
1967 "Back to Memphis"
1967 "Feelin' It"
1968 "Louie to Frisco"
1969 "Good Looking Woman"
1970 "Tulane"
1972 "My Ding-A-Ling" (live) #1 #42 #1
1972 "Reelin' and Rockin'" (live) #27 #18
1973 "Bio"
1975 "Shake, Rattle and Roll"
1979 "California"

Note that not all of Berry's UK singles were released in the same year as the initial US release, and not all of Berry's UK singles featured the same A-Side/B-Side configurations as in the US.

Billboard did not publish a separate R&B singles chart in 1964, hence Berry's absence from the R&B charts for the singles "Nadine" through "Promised Land".

[edit] Studio albums

[edit] Live albums

[edit] Anthologies

  • Chuck Berry's Golden Decade (1967)
  • Chuck Berry's Golden Hits (1967)
  • Chuck Berry's Golden Decade Vol. 2 (1973)
  • Chuck Berry's Golden Decade Vol. 3 (1974)
  • Chuck Berry's Greatest Hits (1976)
  • The Best of the Best of Chuck Berry (1978)
  • Chuck Berry's 16 Greatest Hits (1978)
  • Chuck Berry All-Time Hits (1979)
  • The Great Twenty-Eight (1982)
  • 20 Hits (1983)
  • Reelin' Rockin' Rollin' (1983)
  • Rock 'N' Roll Rarities (1986)
  • The Chess Box (Box Set) (1988)
  • On the Blues Side (1994)
  • Roll Over Beethoven (1996)
  • Let It Rock (1996)
  • The Best of Chuck Berry (1996)
  • Guitar Legends (1997)
  • Chuck Berry - His Best, Vol. 1 (1997)
  • Chuck Berry - His Best, Vol. 2 (1997)
  • The Latest & The Greatest / You Can Never Tell (1998)
  • Live: Roots of Rock 'N' Roll (1998)
  • Rock & Roll Music (1998)
  • 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection: The Best of Chuck Berry (1999)
  • Johnny B. Goode (Legacy) (2000)
  • Anthology (2000)
  • Blast from the Past: Chuck Berry (2001)
  • Johnny B. Goode (Columbia River) (2001)
  • Crown Prince of Rock N Roll (2003)
  • Gold (2005) - Simply 2000's Anthology Repackaged

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Chuck Berry biography. allmusic. Retrieved on 2006-10-05.
  2. ^ Brainy Quote - John Lennon. Retrieved on 2006-10-05.
  3. ^ Chuck Berry. Joe Perry. Rolling Stone Issue 946. Rolling Stone.
  4. ^ The Immortals: The First Fifty. Rolling Stone Issue 946. Rolling Stone.

[edit] External links

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