For Chuck Berry, the music business was a contact sport.
Heck, so was life.
The classic 1950s Berry image.
When he died Saturday, age 90, there was no rush to crown him Mr. Congeniality. It wasn’t that people disliked him, more that they saw a fighter’s instinct: Keep your guard up at all times. Look for every edge. Keep the world off-balance.
“This is a man who has been through it all,” Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone magazine in 2009. “The world treated him so nasty. But in the end, it was the world that got beat.”
As if to underscore that point, Berry’s death triggered universal praise for the quality, value, influence and, yes, importance of his music.
No matter how many miles of bad road he traveled, Chuck Berry delivered. That’s the first and most enduring truth about his life and career.
No one did what he did. Like Elvis Presley, his fellow pillar in the early pantheon of rock ‘n’ roll, time and place and talent made Chuck Berry singular.
All that said, we know some of what he went through to get there, and some of how he reacted when he did.
He grew up in the comfortable Elleardsville section of St. Louis. He started to learn guitar as a teenager, at which time he also spent three years in reform school for joining a botched penny-ante robbery.
Sprung in 1947 as he was turning 21, he worked at a General Motors plant before switching to hairdressing and cosmetology.
In October 1948 he married Themetta. They soon had two children, and he started to supplement his income by playing clubs at night.
He mostly played jazz, though he was conversant with blues, rhythm and blues, country, popular and Latin music as well.
In the early 1950s he joined a popular local club act, the Johnnie Johnson Trio, and soon became its de facto leader with the tacit consent of the laid-back Johnson.
By 1955 the group was one of the most popular in St. Louis, based at the Cosmopolitan Club.
Hoping to get bigger than that, Berry cut a couple of songs, “Oh Maria” and “I Hope These Words Will Find You Well.” With the help of Muddy Waters, this led him to an audience with Phil and Leonard Chess of Chess Records in Chicago.
For that meeting he cut another audition tune, paying $79 to record the country favorite “Ida Red.”
The Chess brothers liked it, so they joined with Berry to reconfigure it slightly as “Maybellene,” a humorous tale that turned a car chase between a Cadillac and a V8 Ford into a metaphor for the singer’s pursuit of his gal.
Berry said he picked the name because he liked Maybelline cosmetics.
So now, after years in the financially dicey nightclub world, he’s in the record game
First order of business: The Chess brothers arrange for influential disc jockey Alan Freed to get half the writer’s credit.
In return, Freed will play the record enthusiastically and often. “Maybellene” becomes a hit.
Berry didn’t like the deal, but he understood it. He wasn’t one of those pop stars who got spotted at 19 working the soda fountain and was on Bandstand a week later. He was almost 30. He’d been sweating to support a family for a decade.
He took the deal because it was the best available, and he worked with Freed for several years in an arrangement that benefited both their careers. Berry became a regular on Freed’s stage shows, TV shows and endearingly low-budget movies, including Rock Rock Rock and Mr. Rock and Roll.
Berry also established his own brand as a stage act, featuring his signature duckwalk. He built enough of a musical reputation that he was invited to the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, years before rock ‘n’ rollers were welcome there.
When he started making money, he minded it. He paid off his house and bought 30 acres in Wentzville, Mo., that he turned into the theme attraction Berryland Park.
Then on Dec. 1, 1959, while playing in El Paso, he met Native American Janice Escalante.
Finding her attractive and thinking she was 21, he said, he brought her back to St. Louis to work as a hostess at Berryland.
On Dec. 21 Berry was arrested under the Mann Act, charged with bringing an underage woman across state lines for immoral purposes.
Escalante was a prostitute, it turned out, and when she resumed work in St. Louis, it led back to Berry. There was testimony she was 14, though no birth certificate was produced.
Berry was convicted. The conviction was overturned because of racist remarks by Judge George Moore.
Prosecutors retried him and in 1962 he was sentenced to three years. He served 18 months, working in the kitchen and as a physical therapist and writing a new crop of songs to record after he was released in October 1963.
He also threatened legal action himself against Brian Wilson, who worshipped him, after the Beach Boys lifted Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” for their own “Surfing U.S.A.” A deal was worked out.
By now the pop charts were crowded with British Invasion artists who grew up on Berry’s music and whose sound often reflected it. He still returned to the top 10 with “No Particular Place to Go,” which remade his own “School Day.”
The hits faded again, by which time Berry had become a self-contained industry. He had enough classics to tour on his past, and by the late 1960s he became one of the first “rock ‘n’ roll revival” artists.
Was he frustrated he had to play Chuck Berry riffs every night and couldn’t break out some jazz or R&B or Latin sounds? Hard to imagine he sometimes wasn’t.
But he knew this deal, too, and maximized his take by creating the most economical touring operation ever. His entourage was himself and a guitar.
Because his riffs were a fundamental tool for every rock guitarist, he’d come into town, whistle and have a pickup band happy to play behind Chuck Berry. It’s easy, he’d say. When I do this with my right hand, you do that.
Unsurprisingly, shows could be uneven. But they were Chuck Berry music and that was enough.
In 1972 he scored his only No. 1 hit, a live rendition of “My Ding-a-Ling,” a mildly risqué song written 20 years earlier by Fats Domino’s partner Dave Bartholomew.
Possibly the slightest song Berry ever recorded, it was a golden gift for his stage shows.
By the end of the ‘70s, a month after he played for President Carter at the White House, he reported to Lompoc Prison in California to serve five months for tax evasion.
Just as he used his earlier prison time to write new songs, this time he started his autobiography, which would be published nine years later.
When he got out, he resumed touring and gradually eased into a revered elder statesman role.
Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction dinner, January 1986.
He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1985 and was the first inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. Later that year Keith Richards organized a 60th birthday tribute show that would be filmed for the movie Hail Hail Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Berry had always said his relationship with other musicians was cordial, that when they got together they were like colleagues in any other profession.
Performers can be more high-strung than office workers, though, and soon after the anniversary show, Richards remarked, “He’s the most difficult person I ever worked with. I wanted to punch him out.”
Richards added he also loved him, which was why the maddening frustration was worth it.
In the middle of one song – captured in the film – Berry randomly wants to change keys, which would throw all the musicians off for no reason.
Almost a decade later, at the 1995 opening concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he did the same thing during the “Rock and Roll Music” finale, leaving a stagefull of musicians like Bruce Springsteen and Nils Lofgren scrambling to follow and mostly not succeeding.
Lofgren said in a later Hall interview that there was only one possible explanation: that Berry wanted “to mess with us.”
In the end, no one held a grudge. After all, this is the guy who, in “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” wrote the line “two-three the count” even though 1) that’s impossible and 2) the correct “three-two the count” would have had the same cadence.
Maybe he just amuses himself by messing with us. Maybe he’s a contrarian. Wouldn’t be the first.
Or maybe it’s the fighter, hands always up, keeping all others off-guard, maintaining control in a world where, if you lose it, someone else takes it.
This is an artist who wouldn’t perform his 1960s Chess songs in concert because he felt Chess had short-sheeted him on payments. An artist who did not take the stage until he was paid in full, in cash. An artist who waited 30 years to get back the full writing credit for “Maybellene.” An artist who took legal action against John Lennon, another man who worshipped him, for using the Berry phrase “Here come a flat-top” in a Beatles song.
Lennon settled by agreeing to put three Berry songs on his next album.
By almost all outward appearances, Bob Dylan was right. Chuck Berry won.
He lived a long, comfortable life in a big home, which among other amenities housed an impressive collection of expensive collectable cars. He worked when he wanted to work, in later years driving to downtown St. Louis once a month or so to play at a small convenient club.
On stage and in interviews, Chuck Berry was gracious, easygoing and relaxed. You hope he felt some of that when the cameras and microphones were off.
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