Chuck Berry
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Background information
Birth name Charles Edward Anderson Berry
Born October 18, 1926 (1926-10-18) (age 81)
St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Genre(s) Rock and roll
Occupation(s) Guitarist, Songwriter
Instrument(s) Guitar, Vocals
Years active 1955 - present
Label(s) Chess
Mercury
Atco
Website
http://www.chuckberry.com/
Notable instrument(s)
Gibson ES-335
Gibson ES-125
Charles Edward Anderson "Chuck" Berry (born 18 October 1926, St. Louis, Missouri) is an iconic and influential American guitarist, singer and songwriter.
Chuck Berry is an influential figure and one of the pioneers of rock & roll music. According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's website, "While no individual can be said to have invented rock and roll, Chuck Berry comes the closest of any single figure to being the one who put all the essential pieces together."[1] 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."[2] John Lennon was more succinct: "If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'."[3]
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. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Chuck Berry #5[4] on their list of The Immortals: The First Fifty.[5] He was also ranked 6th on Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.[6]
Biography
Born in St. Louis, Missouri (although some biographies incorrectly establish San Jose, California as his birthplace), Berry was the third child in a family of six. He grew up in the north St. Louis neighborhood known as "The Ville", an area where many middle class St. Louis blacks lived at the time. 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 of armed robbery 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, flagged down a passing car. Berry attempted to commandeer the man's car at gunpoint with a non functional pistol. The carjacked man called the police from a nearby pay phone who quickly pulled over Berry in the car and arrested him and his friends.[citation needed] Berry was released from the Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men at Algoa, near Jefferson, Missouri on his 21st birthday in 1947.[3]
Early career
Chuck Berry had been playing the blues since his teens and according to the 1987 Taylor Hackford film "Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll," by early 1953 was performing with the Johnnie Johnson Trio, a band that played at a popular club called The Cosmopolitan, in East St. Louis, Illinois and whose namesake would become Berry's long-time collaborator. 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." [7]
Berry's calculated showmanship began luring larger white audiences to the club. He also began singing the songs of Nat King Cole and Muddy Waters. "Listening to Nat Cole prompted me to sing sentimental songs with distinct diction," he said at Blueberry Hill. "The songs of Muddy Waters impelled me to deliver the down-home blues in the language they came from. When I played hillbilly songs, I stressed my diction so that it was harder and whiter. All in all, it was my intention to hold both the black and the white clientele by voicing the different kinds of songs in their customary tongues." [8]
In May 1955, Berry traveled to Chicago where he met Waters himself, who suggested he contact Leonard Chess of Chess Records. Berry thought his blues material would be of most interest to Chess, but to his surprise it was an old country and western recording by Bob Wills, entitled "Ida Red" that got Chess's attention. In recent years, Chess had seen the blues market shrink and was looking to move beyond the rhythm and blues market, and he thought Berry might be that artist who could do it. So on May 21, 1955 Berry covered, "Ida Red" (renamed "Maybellene") with Johnny Johnson, Jerome Green (from Bo Diddley's band) on the maracas, Jasper Thomas on the drums and blues legend Willie Dixon on the bass. "Maybellene" soll over a million copies, reaching #1 on Billboard's Rhythm and Blues chart and #5 on the Hot 100. [9][10]
At the end of June 1956, his song "Roll Over Beethoven" reached #29 on the Billboard Top 100 chart. 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." Author/producer[Robert Palmer wrote that 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." [4] 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." [11]
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 whom 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's 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 Berry's songs. In 1964-65 Berry resumed recording and placed six 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.[5]
Exit and return to Chess
In 1966 Berry left Chess Records, moving to the Mercury label.[12] During his brief time at Mercury, he recorded several albums, including an album of re-recordings of his Chess hits, and an album dominated by an 18-minute-long instrumental, "Concerto in B. Goode". 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". This song is Berry's only No. 1 single, 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.
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. The All Music Guide has said that in this period his "live performances became increasingly erratic, [...] working with terrible backup bands and turning in sloppy, out-of-tune performances" which "tarnished his reputation with younger fans and oldtimers" alike. [6]
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 accusations that Berry was a chronic income tax evader. Facing criminal sanction for the third time, Berry pleaded guilty to tax evasion and was sentenced to four months imprisonment and 1,000 hours of community service ?- doing benefit concerts ?- in 1979.
At the request of Jimmy Carter, Chuck Berry performed at The White House on June 1, 1979. [12]
In 1979, Berry released Rockit for Atco Records, his last studio album to date.
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, Julian Lennon, 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.
One of the highlights in the film version was a historic exchange between Richards and 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.[13] 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 neighborhood in St. Louis.
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 and 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 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.
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.
Chuck Berry's famous duckwalk, often used by Angus Young of AC/DC and many other rock guitarists.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 1980s, 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 his cover of the 1938 country hit "Ida Red", entitled "Maybellene" (1955), are among the first fully synthesized rockabilly singles, combining blues and country music with lyrics about girls and cars.
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. 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 and 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, Leonard Chess recalled:
"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.
Throughout his career Berry recorded both smooth ballads like "Havana Moon" and blues tunes like "Wee Wee Hours". 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 named him number six on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. [14]
His compilation album The Great Twenty-Eight was also named 21st on the magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. [15].
In 2004 six of his songs were included in Rolling Stone's "The 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). [16]
Also in 2004, Berry was rated #5 in Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Artists of All Time feature.[17]
Chuck Berry songs
Many of his songs are among the leading rock and roll anthems:
"Johnny B. Goode" - the autobiographical saga of a country boy ("colored boy" in the original lyrics) who could "play a guitar just like ringing a bell". It was chosen as one of the greatest achievements of humanity for the Voyager I collection of artifacts. The song was also featured in the feature film Back to the Future. The band The Grateful Dead recorded this song in the 1970s. Judas Priest did so as well in the 80's. (Johnny Winter's version boasts "he could play a guitar like a bat out of Hell".)
"Rock and Roll Music" - recorded by The Beatles on their 1964 album Beatles for Sale and by the Beach Boys on their 1976 album 15 Big Ones.
"Sweet Little Sixteen" - with new lyrics, became a hit for The Beach Boys as "Surfin' USA"
"Roll Over Beethoven" - and "tell Tchaikovsky the news" a battle yell for rock and roll. In 1973, new owners of New York City classical music station WNCN announced a change of format to rock and roll by interrupting a performance of the Mozart Requiem with "Roll Over Beethoven". The station's classical audience was so outraged they successfully petitioned the FCC to force a return to the previous format. [7]. The song is referred to in AC/DC's "Let There Be Rock"; the Beatles recorded it on their 1963 album With the Beatles with George Harrison singing the lead; Jeff Lynne's Electric Light Orchestra made an 8-minute version of this song for their 1973 album's ELO 2. The Sonics also covered the song on their album Here Are the Sonics.
"School Days" - its chorus, "Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll", was chosen as the title of the documentary concert film organized by Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones as his tribute to Chuck, who appears in the film with many others. It was also recorded by "hard" rock & roll band AC/DC on their second album, T.N.T. (Australia).
"Let It Rock" - fantasia of gambling railroad workers that lives up to the title, written under the pseudonym E. Anderson. It is a rare performer who can turn a line like "There's an off-schedule train comin' two miles out" into a Dionysian cry. It was famously covered by the Rolling Stones during their 1971 UK Tour.
"Around and Around" - describes how "the joint was rockin', goin' 'round and 'round." This song has been recorded by David Bowie, The Animals, The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, and Maureen Tucker of The Velvet Underground.
"Little Queenie" - covered by many artists, notably the Rolling Stones on the live album Get Yer Ya-Yas Out and in 2007 as a duet with Jerry Lee Lewis and Kid Rock on the Lewis DVD Last Man Standing Live. T. Rex borrows the line, "Meanwhile I'm still thinkin", at the conclusion of "Bang A Gong". David Bowie paraphrases the song in his tune The Jean Genie - Go, Go, Go, Little Genie.
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" is a play on the 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", covered by the MC5 and the Modern Lovers.
"No Particular Place To Go" - car, girl, "parking way out on the ko-ko-mo".
"Memphis, Tennessee" - 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 included on a live recording in Coventry in February, 1972.
"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:
"Come On" -- recorded by the Rolling Stones and was their first song and single ever released.
"Confessing the Blues" - signature tune of the famed Kansas City, Missouri jazz band of Jay McShann
"Worried Life Blues" -- originally by Chicago piano man Big Maceo
"Merry Christmas, Baby" - originally by Charles Brown
"Route 66" - written by Bobby Troup and originally performed by Nat King Cole. Similar to Berry's "Come On", the Rolling Stones recorded a cover of it, which appeared as the first track on their first album.
"The Things That I Used to Do" by Louisiana's Guitar Slim
"Wee Wee Hours", his own blues song, B-side to "Maybellene".
His songs are collected on albums like:
The Great Twenty-Eight is Berry's definitive greatest hits album, but the two-CD Anthology set has better sound and provides a more complete overview of his musical output.
References in popular culture
In the 1985 film Back to the Future, Marty McFly anachronistically 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!" Marty also uses the same guitar as Berry, a cherry red Gibson ES-345, even though the guitar is wrong for the time period. The Gibson ES 335, 345 and 355 were not produced until 1958.
In Stephen King's novel Christine, many chapters open with lyric fragments from Berry's 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 (responding to the Voyager Golden Records). 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 Simpsons, a blue-haired student starts singing "My Ding-a-Ling" at a school talent show and is promptly removed from the stage.
In the episode "Chick Cancer" from the cartoon Family Guy, A commercial for a parody of Welch's juice is made with Chuck Berry as the new spokesperson for the juice to replace Oliva, Stewie Griffin's acting partner and now wife.
In the ABC mini-series Kingdom Hospital, the head maintenance person is named "Johnny B. Goode" who eventually turns out to be played by Stephen King.
Dar Williams references Chuck Berry in her song "I Wont Be Your Yoko Ono," singing "and when he whispered old Chuck Berry only then would Yoko set him free."
The Toasters have a song called Chuck Berry about the musical genre ska. The lyrics say, "In their eyes where does Chuck Berry fit? Well he influences the Ska, that's the long and the short of it. He played his guitar and they heard it on the radio. And the rest is history, just as everybody knows..."
Gilberto Gil created a song Chuck Berry Fields Forever about the creation of Rock and Roll.
the sun is shining somewhere !