The ICON who invented Rock-N-Roll, Chuck Berry, revolutionary guitarist-songwriter, dead at 90!đ©
Chuck Berry, who died Saturday at 90, was one of the architects of rock ânâ roll, as a singer, songwriter and guitarist. More than any artist of the 1950s, his songs exploded with imagery that saw rock ânâ roll not just as a fad but as the future â a vision of freedom that transcended generation and race.
Berryâs opening solo on âJohnny B. Goodeâ blared reveille for subsequent generations of rockers. Every rock guitarist since is in his debt. In addition, Berry wrote and sang at least two dozen rock ânâ roll classics, including âMaybellene,â âRoll Over Beethovenâ and âBack in the U.S.A.,â many of them recorded at Chicagoâs Chess Studios in the 1950s and â60s and later covered by countless artists, including the Beatles, Beach Boys and Rolling Stones.
âIf you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it âChuck Berry,"' John Lennon once said.
Berry was one of rock ânâ rollâs defining figures and one of its most notorious â he was imprisoned three times over his life for various offenses.
St. Charles County police in Missouri said officers responded to a medical emergency on Buckner Road about 12:40 p.m. Saturday. Inside the home, they âobserved an unresponsive man" and immediately administered lifesaving techniques. Berry was pronounced dead at 1:26 p.m. The department released a statement confirming âthe death of Charles Edward Anderson Berry Sr., better known as legendary musician Chuck Berry.â
Born Charles Edward Anderson Berry in St. Louis in 1926, Berry grew up singing in church and listening to blues and country music on the radio. An admirer of Louis Jordan, T-Bone Walker and Nat âKingâ Cole, Berry began playing guitar in high school. As a teenager, he was sent to a reformatory after being convicted of attempted robbery. He moonlighted as a beautician in St. Louis and worked on an auto assembly line to support his family. While in his 20s, he led a three-piece blues group during regular weekend gigs.
Berry developed a sound that synthesized genres and created the most popular template for rock ânâ roll: a small, guitar-led combo performing original songs. A half-century before, country guitarists borrowed riffs and runs from blues performers. Berry flipped the formula; he was essentially a country-music guitarist who added blues inflections and a faster rhythm-and-blues beat. Plus, he played electric guitar, and the amplification enabled him to simulate the sound of two or three guitars playing at once. He thickened the sound by employing a two-string technique, sliding along the frets and bending them to create enormous power and drive. His tone evoked a trumpet.
Rock 'n' roll pioneer Chuck Berry, was back on stage in 2011 at Blueberry Hill, the St. Louis club where he has performed monthly since 1996. This was his first performance since he appeared to collapse on his keyboard during his January 1 show at Chicago's Congress Theater.
Berryâs staccato-laced rhythmic drive also derived from swing jazz and the ebullient boogie-woogie played by another St. Louis musician, pianist Johnnie Johnson, who would become his often-unsung collaborator.
Johnson would sue Berry in 2000 for songwriting credit on more than 50 songs, but the claim was dismissed because a judge determined too much time had passed since the songs were written. Together, they played counterpoint melodies and solos that raised the excitement level of countless classic songs, with Johnsonâs strong left hand and Berryâs hard strumming beefing up the rhythmic pulse.
Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who acknowledged that his own rhythm-guitar style was based on Berryâs technique, said the guitarist âalways was the epitome of rhythm and blues playing, rock and roll playing. It was beautiful, effortless, and his timing was perfection. He is rhythm supreme.â
The Berry-Johnson partnership was forged on New Yearâs Eve 1952, when the guitarist was enlisted as a last-minute replacement for an ailing saxophone player in the Johnnie Johnson Trio in East St. Louis. Berry became a regular in the well-established band, and soon became the star attraction with a style that included his signature âduck walk,â skipping across the stage in a half-crouch while playing his guitar.
âEvery weekend, theyâd be looking for Chuck,â Johnson told the Tribune in a 1992 interview. âWhen heâd play that guitar, the people would form a circle and square dance. Chuck did this song from the Grand Old Opry, âIda Red,â and the people loved it.â
It must have been startling to see a crowd of urban blacks dancing steps associated with rural whites, but such was the genre-blurring alchemy Berry achieved. In addition, his clear, precise diction as a vocalist was a departure from the wild, shouting style associated with the so-called race music of the day.
âA lot of places we played, they thought Chuck was white until they got a look at him,â Johnson said.
Even so, Berry came to Chicago in spring 1955 determined to become the next Muddy Waters. On hearing Berryâs guitar playing, Waters was impressed enough to introduce him to Leonard Chess, co-founder of Chess Records, who encouraged the handsome, articulate stranger with the big hollow-body guitar to make a demo tape.
The tape included Berryâs bid for blues stardom, the slow, sensual âWee Wee Hours,â with a lavish Johnson piano line. But Chess much preferred another song on the tape, âIda Red,â an old country song that Berry juiced up with comically exuberant boy-chases-girl lyrics involving a Cadillac Coupe DeVille and a V-8 Ford.
âThe big beat, cars and young love,â Leonard Chess later said. âIt was a trend and we jumped on it.â
Chess liked the songâs upbeat tempo and saw it as a way for his blues label to break into the teenage pop market. He was right. By Aug. 20 of that year, the song he retitled âMaybelleneâ was the No. 5 pop record in the country.
The song was as distinctive lyrically as it was musically. In the first line of his first hit, Berry coined the term âmotorvatinâ,â as if he were bent on reinventing the English language even as he invented rock ânâ roll. The longtime critic Robert Christgau called him âthe greatest rock lyricist this side of Bob Dylan.â Narratives populated with images of cars, girls and school brimmed with humor and underdog charm.
At a time when most grown-ups sneered at rock ânâ roll as mere juvenilia, Berry invested it with poetic power. Rock ânâ roll, in his telling, was more than just a passing fad, âkids musicâ that would be dismissed and forgotten in a year or two. In the vision laid out in Berry songs from âRoll Over Beethovenâ to âBack in the U.S.A.,â rock ânâ roll was a world of endless possibility, a promised land where even a poor black kid could be a star.
His lyrics invariably identified with teenagers in their endless struggle with adult authority, and championed the idea that fun was just as much a part of growing up as preparing to be an adult. But he also infiltrated the charts with seemingly upbeat songs that painted subtle portraits of racism (âBrown Eyed Handsome Manâ) and satirized the workday runaround (âToo Much Monkey Businessâ).
He also celebrated his newborn sound and its break from the past. As an African-American who had his fill of the status quo, there was double-edged meaning when he sang, âHail, hail rock ânâ roll / Deliver me from the days of old.â
The narrators and protagonists in his songs were inevitably thinly veiled alter egos, never more so than âJohnny B. Goode,â the little country boy âwho could play his guitar just like a-ringinâ a bell.â He also demonstrated a feel for Latin music in âHavana Moon,â doo-wop in âAlmost Grownâ and deep blues in âChildhood Sweetheart.â From 1955 to 1959 he had nine Top 40 hits, an African-American in his 30s who embodied the yearning, joy and frustrations of a largely white, teenage audience.
But legal troubles derailed his career at its peak. Two controversial, racially tinged trials in which Berry was accused of transporting an underage girl across state lines in violation of the Mann Act (prohibiting white slavery and the interstate transport of females for âimmoral purposesâ) ended with the singer serving a year and a half in prison.
When he was released in 1963, Berry found his songs as popular as ever, thanks to covers by the Beatles, Stones and Beach Boys. His chart successes slowed to a trickle, even as he recorded classic songs such as âMemphis,â a poignant portrait of a divorced father looking to reunite with his young daughter.
He finally scored his first No. 1 single in 1972, albeit with one of his most trivial songs, the smutty âMy Ding-A-Ling,â while substantive songs such as âTulaneâ and âHave Mercy Judge,â which loosely chronicled his misadventures with the law, were largely overlooked.
Berryâs last studio album arrived in 1979, but he maintained a robust touring schedule, demanding a hefty fee upfront in cash. His cash-and-carry routine made him a target of Internal Revenue Service investigators, who charged him with tax evasion in 1979. Berry pleaded guilty and served four months in prison.
He got into further legal trouble in 1990 when he was sued over allegations that he planted a video camera in the womenâs bathroom at a restaurant he owned in Missouri. He settled a class action suit out of court with 59 accusers for a reported $1.2 million. A police raid at his home turned up marijuana and the bathroom videotapes, including one allegedly showing a minor. Berry pleaded guilty to misdemeanor drug possession and was given a six-month suspended jail sentence and probation.
Berry the stage performer also had a checkered history. He played monthly shows at his hometown club Blueberry Hill from 1996 to 2014 that could be galvanizing. But he could also come off as petulant in his travels, voicing his displeasure with the pickup bands hired to perform with him around the world and cutting shows short.
The heavy road schedule eventually took its toll. At a Jan. 1, 2011, concert at the Congress Theater in Chicago, he collapsed after about an hour onstage and had to be escorted off, suffering from exhaustion.
Berryâs place in rock history was already ensured. He was among the first musicians inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, and the next year he was celebrated in a Taylor Hackford documentary, âHail! Hail! Rock ânâ Roll,â with acolytes such as Richards, Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen, Robert Cray and Linda Ronstadt paying homage. He is at best a reluctant and often a surly participant in the party captured on film, as if carrying decades of accumulated bitterness for various insults and indignities, both real and imagined.
Here was an artist on intimate terms with various forms of imprisonment, both racial and legal, and music was his way of breaking the shackles. Little wonder he provided the movie â and by extension, his life â with its cornerstone statement: âRock ânâ roll ⊠itâs freedom.â
He was to release his final album, simply titled âChuck Berry,â in 2017.
R.I.P ICON!
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