Berry in 1965.
Then ensued what the first of his uncountable greatest hits collections dubbed Chuck Berry’s golden decade. But “golden” is poetic license, and so is “decade.” Berry was a major star from 1955 to 1959 as well as a legendary concert draw throughout the high ’60s and long after. But note that although the three key teen anthems as well as the guitar hero foundation myth “Johnny B. Goode” all went pop top 10 in the ’50s (on what were then called the Best Sellers in Stores and Top 100 charts), not one reached No. 1, and Fats Domino and Little Richard never hit No. 1 either. Fact is, although Berry’s racial breakthroughs will always signify, his ’50s hits did somewhat better on the R&B chart, which also welcomed such canonical coups as “No Money Down” and the comic protest anthem “Too Much Monkey Business.” And in the Beatlemania-fueled 1964 comeback that followed his second prison term, the warmly pro-black but also pro-American “Promised Land,” a history of the Freedom Rides so subtle few figured it out at the time, didn’t make the top 40.
The second prison term — involving a 15-year-old girl he had reason to believe was older and always denied sleeping with, but with Chuck Berry you never know — was a turning point. The first trial was transparently and disallowably racist, the second less obvious about it. But that doesn’t mean Berry was innocent, because he was always a very bad boy — as in the 1986 autobiography replete with enticing blondes, written during the 1979 tax evasion prison term where all those cash payments caught up with him; or the 1989 lawsuit alleging that he’d set up peeping cameras in the ladies’ room of a restaurant he owned, which he escaped with a $1.5 million class action settlement plus a suspended sentence for marijuana possession. Or consider the Keith Richards-instigated 1987 Taylor Hackford documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll, which, instead of turning into a publicity coup, Berry sabotaged by overamping his guitar and demanding extra cash upfront. Many stars age poorly, but the fairest guess here is that the theoretically post-racial Berry was deeply embittered by an American racism that remained in force — and was also something like a predator perv.
John Lennon, Berry and Yoko Ono on The Mike Douglas Show in 1972.
Yet although Chuck Berry both missed out on and misused too much of the fun he transmuted into a core value, the art with which he achieved that transmutation was always playful — sly sometimes, in fact often, but devoid of the meanness that marred his personal interactions. Plus, he was a funny guy. And for millions if not billions of people, that fun continues to inhere in music that remained indelible no matter how assiduously imitated. Its sheer musicality was irresistible. But Chuck Berry is loved first and foremost as a lyricist, and as a writer I second that emotion.
Under his own recognizance, with no say-so from anyone I’m aware of, Chuck Berry materially enriched a disreputable dialect of the English language that he clearly savored. Although he had no particular place to go and never ever learned to read or write so well, he took the message and he wrote it on the wall, and soon the folks dancing got all shook up. From irresistible words like “motorvating,” “coolerator” and “calaboose” to inevitable phrases like “any old way you choose it” and “campaign shouting like a Southern diplomat,” he was a master of the American demotic. Even after that second prison term threw him for a loop, he started back doing the things he used to do — find the late diptych “Tulane”/“Have Mercy Judge.” It’s no wonder that very late in life he not only won Sweden’s Polar Music Prize but shared the first PEN songwriting award with Leonard Cohen.
Chuck Berry cut down hard on touring a decade ago. Yet when he turned 90 he announced that he’d soon go on the road to support his first new album in 38 years. It has long seemed passing strange that four of the teen heroes in the Hall of Fame’s freshman class — Berry, Lewis, Domino and Little Richard — were living long enough to be knocking on immortality’s door. One explanation is that their musical gifts were powered by a pitch of innate vitality known to few humans. So don’t forget that Chuck Berry has a new album coming out. It’s called Chuck.
This article originally appeared in the April 1 issue of Billboard.
Article Appeared @http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/magazine-feature/7735698/chuck-berry-rock-n-roll-teenagers-inventor