CHUCK BERRY: A Legend in Exile

Somewhere outside of St. Louis, living in an estate beside an amusement park long since closed, sits a legend. At 81, he’s not physically ailing, he’s not mentally infirm and he still has a sizable audience on both sides of the Atlantic, but he has long ceased to be a creative force of any sort.

Somewhere outside of St. Louis, living in an estate beside an amusement park long since closed, sits a legend. At 81, he’s not physically ailing, he’s not mentally infirm and he still has a sizable audience on both sides of the Atlantic, but he has long ceased to be a creative force of any sort. Still tall and lean, Chuck Berry is a living statue of the man who largely forged the vocabulary of rock music’s language, and his legacy still echoes through every 14-year-old who plugs in an electric guitar. Elvis might be called the King, but Berry is rock music’s prime architect, the pop poet laureate who established the primacy of the guitar solo in Western pop music-the man who seemingly has little interest in reminding us how great he really is.

Today, Berry is a lost legend, apparently content to let 1987’s Hail! Hail! Rock ‘N Roll-the documentary of his star-studded 60^th birthday-be his epitaph. In that film, Berry was in fine form, swaggeringly charming one minute, angry and argumentative the next, and seeming altogether disinterested in his status as rock’s elder statesman. As the credits rolled, Berry was shown in shadow, playing a mournful lap steel melody by himself in his home rehearsal space. Still young and virile, it wasn’t hard to imagine that he would pen at least a few more classics before he hung up his Gibson ES-350T for good, but that image is the one that we’re left with-an artist content to sit alone as the credits roll.

For the former auto assembly line worker who eventually cranked out rock standards one after another (often about cars, appropriately enough), it seems that the pen that produced “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and “Rock and Roll Music” has gone dry. How could a songwriter who so effortlessly and voraciously produced songs that expressed the innocence and idealism of youth simply stop working? Did he grow too old to inhabit the teenage mind convincingly? Or, being the consummately shrewd businessman, did he simply decide that his days would be wasted in the studios when he could make $35,000 a night on the road?

On that front, Berry has been far from inactive, continuing the same pattern as he has for the past 30 years, still performing 75 to 100 shows a year, many in Europe. He still holds rigidly to his standard contract: a Lincoln Town Car for him at the airport, a Fender Bassman amp on the stage and a backing band provided by the venue. He still plays 55-minute sets, not a minute more or less. Stop in to St. Louis’ Blueberry Hill restaurant where he plays one Wednesday each month, and you might see the man who virtually invented the rock and roll guitar solo sitting on the cramped stage, but otherwise, you’ll have a hard time finding him.

Still, Chuck Berry is never far away; we hear him every time we turn on the radio. Keith Richards, George Harrison, Bruce Springsteen-nearly everyone working in the rock idiom in the 1960s and 1970s cut their teeth on Chuck’s songs and readily admitted it when asked. But while he’s not exactly the J.D. Salinger of rock music, Berry has done precious little to update his body of work. Since a bawdy novelty song titled “My Ding-a-Ling” became his one and only Top 40 pop hit in 1972, Berry has made only a handful of albums, the last arriving with 1979’s decent, but forgotten, Rock It. Rumors of an imminent comeback release have circulated for more than a decade-he was reported to have entered the studio with as many as six cardboard boxes of demos as recently as 2002-but Chuck’s second coming remains perpetually on hold.

The great artists of his generation have all cashed in on (or at least acknowledged) their legacies, from Jerry Lee Lewis’ spirited all-star duets album on 2006’s Last Man Standing to Fats Domino’s lovingly compiled 2007 tribute and Little Richard’s appropriately silly appearance in a Geico commercial. Yet Chuck Berry has never been one to embrace a caricature of himself, and he probably has far too much pride to play the fool to sell car insurance. What isn’t clear is just why he has been so reticent to promote himself like the living rock and roll ambassador he could be. Guarded and aloof, he has always been an uneasy fit for whatever category you placed him in.

Of all of rock’s originators, he’s the only one who grew up outside of the South. Raised in a middle class African-American family before the era of civil rights, he faced all of the stereotypes of being a young black man, but couldn’t claim the same poverty that was shared by the majority of his peers. To that end, he considered himself too privileged to sing the blues like his hero Muddy Waters, and his adoption of supercharged country guitar licks pushed him away from the seminal r&b bands of the pre-rock era. He aimed his music at white teenagers when he, himself, was already nearing 30. And while his peers were busy making movies, falling into addiction, and dying young, he was a teetotaler who started touring alone because he didn’t want to deal with drug dabbling band members. He was then and remains now his own man. But for an artist who was once accused of building his success upon pandering to white audiences, Berry has been downright obstinate about doing things on his own terms, not willing to change his working habits for anyone.

No doubt, there have been disappointments along the way, and it’s easy to understand why Berry would have a chip on his shoulder. Berry Park, conceived by Berry as a Rock and Roll Disneyland of sorts, had to be closed because of destructive concertgoers. He has run afoul of the law and done three separate jail sentences (for tax evasion and transporting a minor over state lines), and he still considers himself a victim of racial profiling and sensationalized press. Prickly with promoters and not interested in doing interviews, he shows no signs of sitting down for his Larry King close-up or enlisting Rick Rubin to produce his return album any time soon. He’s a character no less full of contradiction and redemption than Johnny Cash, but it’s a story he isn’t interesting in telling.

Maybe it’s to Chuck’s credit that he has chosen to slip off into the twilight without an awkward last step. With no misguided genre experiments, no unnecessary re-recordings of old hits, no awkward attempts to modernize his music for a new generation, Chuck’s take-it-or-leave-it stance has ensured that he remains firmly planted in an earlier era of music. But you can’t help but feel a bit cheated that he never fully explored his prodigious gifts as a songwriter. What if Picasso had stopped right before cubism? What if Dylan had never gone electric? Berry never got to reinvent himself, never issued a commentary on the death of ‘50s innocence, never made a meditation on middle age, never got to grow up and turn his eye for detail to more mature themes. For an artist who could have done just about anything, his choosing to do nothing is nothing short of a disappointment.

Of course, given the often awkward and unsatisfying comeback efforts of many artists from his generation, maybe it is best that Chuck just leaves us with our memories, allowing him to duck walk into eternity without ever tripping over his own feet. Like James Dean or Buddy Holly, Berry is forever frozen as the handsomely grinning icon of a simpler era of American life, belonging as completely to the ‘50s as hula-hoops and fallout shelters. Maybe Berry himself said it best. “In a way, I feel it might be ill-mannered to try and top myself,” he told The London Independent in 2002. “The music I play, it is a ritual. Something that matters to people in a special way. I wouldn’t want to interfere with that.”