Chuck Berry
| Chuck Berry | |
|---|---|
 Berry in Örebro, Sweden on July 18, 2007.
| |
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Charles Edward Anderson Berry |
| Born | October 18 1926 (age 97) 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 October 18, 1926 in St. Louis, Missouri) is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter.
Chuck Berry is an influential figure and one of the pioneers of rock-and-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." In terms of performance, song writing, instrumentation, and guitar playing, Berry is considered one of, if not, the greatest of the breakthrough rock-and-roll artists.
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 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Chuck Berry number five on their list of The Immortals: The First Fifty. He was also ranked sixth on Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included three of Chuck Berry's songs (Johnny B. Goode, Maybellene, and Rock & Roll Music), of the 500 songs that shaped Rock and Roll.
Biography
Early life, career
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, 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 at Sumner 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. Berry was released from the Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men at Algoa, near Jefferson, Missouri on his 21st birthday in 1947.
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,," and used both guitar riffs and grandstanding done earlier by jump-blues player T. Bone Walker. By early 1953, Berry 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." [1]
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." [2]
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" sold over a million copies, reaching number one on Billboard's Rhythm and Blues chart and number five on the Hot 100.
Ascent to stardom
At the end of June 1956, his song "Roll Over Beethoven" reached #29 on the Billboard Top 100 chart.
In 1956, Berry toured as one of the "Top Acts of '56." He and Carl Perkins became friends. Perkins said that "I knew when I first heard Chuck that he'd been affected by country music. I respected his writing; his records were very, very great." As they toured, Perkins discovered that Berry not only liked country music, but knew about as many songs, and Jimmie Rodgers was one of his favorites. "Chuck knew every Blue Yodel," and most of Bill Monroe's songs as well. Perkins remembered, "He told me about how he was raised very poor, very tough. He had a hard life. He was a good guy. I really liked him." [3]
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." 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."
Prison, career resurgence
By the end of the 1950s, Berry was an established star with several hit records and film appearances to his name, as well as a lucrative touring career. He had also established his own St. Louis-based nightclub, called Berry's Club Bandstand.
But in December 1959, Berry encountered legal problems after he invited a 14-year-old Apache waitress whom he met in Mexico to work as a hat-check girl at his club. After being fired from the club, the girl was arrested on a prostitution charge and Berry was arrested under the Mann Act. After a trial and retrial, 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.
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. Additionally, The Beach Boys' hit "Surfin' USA," while originally credited as composed by Brian Wilson, is in large part a direct copy of Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen." Berry has since been given full writer credit (both lyrics and music) on the track.
In 1964–65 Berry resumed recording and placed six singles in the U.S. Hot 100, including "No Particular Place To Go" (number 10), "You Never Can Tell" (number 14), and "Nadine" (number 23).
Exit, return to Chess; touring
In 1966, Berry left Chess Records, moving to the Mercury label. 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 was still a top concert draw, however, and in July 1969 Berry was the headliner of the Schaefer Music Festival in New York City's Central Park, along with The Byrds, Miles Davis, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, B.B. King, The Beach Boys, Frank Zappa, and Patti LaBelle.
After a hitless four-year stint at Mercury, Berry returned to Chess from 1970 to 1973. Although his 1970 Chess effort Back Home yielded no hit singles, in 1972 Chess released a new live recording of "My Ding-a-Ling," a song Berry had initially recorded years earlier as a novelty track. The track became Berry's only number-one 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. Both singles were featured on the part-live/part-studio album "The London Chuck Berry Sessions" which was part of a series of several albums by that title which included other Chess mainstay artists Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf.
Berry's second tenure with Chess ended with the 1973 album Bio, after which he did not make a studio record for six years.
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. [1]
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 either speak to or 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.
White House performance, post-studio era
Berry's 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. Also in 1979, Berry released Rockit for Atco Records, his last studio album to date.
Berry continued to play 70 to 100 one-nighters per year in the 1980s, still travelling solo and requiring a local band to back him at each stop.
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 that he favored on his 1970s' tours. Richards played a black Fender Telecaster Custom, 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 testy 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.
Today
Currently, Berry usually performs one Wednesday each month at Blueberry Hill, a restaurant and bar located in the Delmar Loop neighborhood in St. Louis. In the spring of 2008, Berry toured Europe, with stops in Sweden, England, Ireland, Switzerland, and Spain. He also played in the Virgin Mobile Music Festival 2008 in Baltimore, Maryland.
Legacy
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, famously on the Mike Douglas Show.
Jerry Garcia, of The Grateful Dead, cited Chuck Berry as a major influence along with other musicians such as Wes Montgomery and Bill Monroe. The Grateful Dead have played and recorded "Johnny B. Goode," "Around and Around" - AKA - Reelin' and Rockin' and "Promised Land," at least and possibly others. Jerry Garcia performed "Let It Rock" on his **Compliments** - 1974. Both his and the Dead's efforts may have been a little more laid-back, because of the nature of their improvizational approach, but musically they were pretty much bang on the head of the nail. Angus Young, of AC/DC, who has cited Berry as one of his biggest influences, is famous for using Berry's duck walk as one of his gimmicks.
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.
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-10 R&B chart hits, crossed over to have a strong impact on the pop charts with seven top-10 U.S. pop hits and four top-10 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.
His compilation album The Great Twenty-Eight was also named twenty-first on the magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. In 2004, six of his songs were included in Rolling Stones "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list, namely "Johnny B. Goode" (number seven), "Maybellene" (number 18), "Roll Over Beethoven" (number 97), "Rock and Roll Music" (number 128), "Sweet Little Sixteen" (number 272) and "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" (number 374). Also in 2004, Berry was rated number five in Rolling Stones 100 Greatest Artists of All Time feature.
Discography
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 U.S.A." (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".
Studio albums
- Rock, Rock, Rock (with The Moonglows and The Flamingos) (1956)
- After School Session (1958)
- One Dozen Berrys (1958)
- Chuck Berry Is on Top (1959)
- Rockin' at the Hops (1960)
- New Juke-Box Hits (1961)
- Chuck Berry Twist (1962)
- Chuck Berry's Greatest Hits (1964)
- Two Great Guitars (with Bo Diddley) (1964)
- St. Louis to Liverpool (1964)
- Chuck Berry in London (1965)
- Fresh Berry's (1965)
- Chuck Berry's Golden Hits (1967) - re-recordings
- In Memphis (1967)
- From St. Louie to Frisco (1968)
- Concerto In B. Goode (1969)
- Back Home (1970)
- San Francisco Dues (1971)
- The London Chuck Berry Sessions (1972)
- Bio (1973)
- Sweet Little Rock and Roller (1973)
- Wild Berrys (1974)
- Flashback (1974)
- Chuck Berry (1975)
- Rock It (1979)
- Alive and Rockin' (1981)
- "Retro Rock" - Chuck Berry - Broadcast Week (1982)
- Chuck Berry (1982)
Live albums
- Chuck Berry on Stage (1963) (Actually studio recordings with overdubbed M.C. and audience.)
- Live at the Fillmore Auditorium (1967) (bonus tracks included on 1994 re-release)
- The London Chuck Berry Sessions (1972) (Side 2)
- Chuck Berry Live in Concert (1978)
- Chuck Berry Live (1981)
- Toronto Rock 'N' Roll Revival 1969 Vol. II (1982)
- Toronto Rock 'N' Roll Revival 1969 Vol. III (1982)
- Hail! Hail! Rock 'N' Roll (1987)
- Live! (2000)
- Live on Stage (2000)
- Chuck Berry - In Concert (2002)
Notes
- ↑ Chuck Berry
- ↑ Chuck Berry News
- ↑ Go, Cat, Go! by Carl Perkins and David McGee 1996 pages 215,216 Hyperion Press ISBN 0-7868-6073-1
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Berry, Chuck. Chuck Berry: The Autobiography. New York: Harmony Books, 1987.
- Collis, John. Chuck Berry: The Biography. London: Aurum, 2002. ISBN 978-1854108739
- Pegg, Bruce. Brown-eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry: An Unauthorized Biography. New York: Routledge, 2002. ISBN 978-0415937481
External links
- Official website
- Chuck Berry Collector's Guide - Most complete discography.
- Chuck Berry at Rolling Stone
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