Disgraceland

by Jake Brennan

  Chuck was used to it. In fact, he preferred it. From an early age, he learned to occupy that big brain of his. First with the family radio. Sitting alone, as a twelve-year-old, in his living room at 4319 Labadie Street in St. Louis, Missouri, listening to various jazz, blues, big band, and boogie-woogie artists popular at the time: Ella Fitzgerald, Big Joe Turner, Benny Goodman, Jelly Roll Morton, and Fats Waller were among his favorites. Then with his camera. His friend Harry had a darkroom, and Chuck loved it. The solitude, the attention to detail, the way it slowed down the world around him, and of course, the way it sped up his heart rate whenever pinup photos circulated through in need of development. Women, some of them white, in nearly see-through lingerie flirting with him from beyond the lens. Out of the darkroom they were strictly off-limits, but here, among the smell of the Eastman Kodak chemicals and within the climate-controlled temperature, he could at least speak to them if nothing else.

  Chuck dug the singular nature of it all. It gave him time to think about the things that teenage boys think about. To think about where he was. Who he was and what he wanted out of his life. And it gave him time to think about poetry. He put poems together in his head to pass the time. And soon he would begin to think about that poetry as music.

  Being alone was where it was at. It was how Chuck liked it. Even years later, while he was at the height of his success and financially able to employ bands big enough to rival his beloved Count Basie’s orchestra, Chuck preferred—no, insisted—on traveling alone. With no band. Just him, his guitar, and an open road. He didn’t even carry a guitar cord, never mind an amplifier. He’d roll from town to town in one of his late-model coffee-colored Cadillacs stone alone. No manager. No roadie. No handlers and no accompanying musicians. At about thirty minutes before showtime, he’d pull up to whatever ten- to twenty-thousand-capacity venue he was headlining that night near the backstage entrance, park wherever the hell he wanted, waltz into the promoter’s office confidently, and politely demand payment in advance. In cash. And usually—under the threat of not performing—extort an extra $1,000 cherry on top before going onstage.

  Once satisfied that the pockets of his polyester bell bottoms were properly lined, he’d walk on stage with his Gibson ES-335. Straight past his backing band—a combo of local musicians he’d yet to meet who stood scared shitless, with their instruments readied for the Great Chuck Berry’s cue. Chuck would then plug his guitar into whatever amp the promoter had set up for him and proceed to tune his guitar—loudly—in front of the entire auditorium and then, without having said one word or making any eye contact at all with his new band, he’d launch into one of his classic opening riffs and drag the terrified musicians along with him for a clumsy but exhilarating ride.

  Even onstage, playing with other people in front of thousands of fans, he was alone. In his own head while playing the hits and mugging for the crowd, occasionally allowing himself to get lost in tearing the ass out of one of his guitar solos. If he was really feeling it, by midset he’d turn to his band and playfully shout, “Play for that money, boys!” and if they were lucky (and good) he’d kick a grand back to them after the show on top of whatever the promoter was paying. But more often than not, he was gone after the last encore, without a word. Usually before the house lights were even on. Sometimes before the band had even finished the outro to his last song. Drifting off down some American highway into the night. Words moving through his head in slow motion. His guitar in its case, strapped in vertically in the passenger seat to his right, but otherwise he was totally alone.

  And so what? Chuck Berry didn’t need a band. He was Chuck Berry. Bands were just another expense. Another hassle. And who needed more hassle? Life was filled with them, going back as far as he could remember. Especially in St. Louis, Missouri in the 1930s and ’40s. It wasn’t quite the Deep South, but it was a racist social construct filled with hassles from as early as Chuck could remember. White cops were suspicious of everything you did, everywhere you went. Chuck learned to live with it. He had to. There was no other choice. But it wasn’t easy, especially as he hit puberty. A young man’s hormones don’t see in black and white, and Chuck burned for what Sam Cooke would later refer to as “the snow”—that is, sleeping with white women. But any sort of interracial romantic relationship was strictly taboo and likely to land a young black man in jail or, worse, swinging from a rope at the end of a poplar tree. In St. Louis at the time, if a black man and a white woman were stopped by a cop, they were at the very least immediately hauled into the police station for mandatory venereal disease shots.

  A young Chuck tried not to stare at the bat. If he fixated on it, they’d be more likely to use it. Under the high-watt fluorescent lightbulb in the St. Louis district police headquarters’ interrogation room, he tried not to look at anything at all. But his eyes just couldn’t help glancing back to the bat.

  The 1949 Louisville Slugger was an especially strong baseball bat, but in the years following World War II, after having served its country by supplying the U.S. Army with wooden gunstocks and billy clubs, the Louisville Slugger company took its wartime knowledge and improved upon what was previously considered perfect, the Model 125. Turning it out of select second growth ash wood, Louisville Slugger created a new batch of incredibly powerful bats. The stick of choice for all-timers like Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. Oil tempered and finished in a distinct saddle tan finish, the 1949 Model 125—being born from war—was imbued with violence.

  Chuck Berry knew none of this as he sweated and kept looking to and fro, trying to find some appropriate place for his eyes to land as he tried not to stare at the men across the table from him in a confrontational way, or at that damn baseball bat. All he could think of were his brains being painted onto the wall if the police sergeant positioned above him with the Model 125 Louisville Slugger cocked on his shoulder decided to get all Stan Musial and swing at Chuck’s skull for the cheap seats. Two on. Nobody out.

  “Did ya fugger?” asked the police captain. Sergeant Stan The Man kept the bat held high, staring right through Chuck, sitting hot in the box. Daring him to say the wrong thing.

  Chuck lobbed one straight down the middle, “No sir. A white woman? No sir!”

  Chuck was scared. He’d been informed, after being picked up by the cops on a tip by a jilted boyfriend of a white girl he’d been messing around with, that if one word of his statement was a lie, Sergeant Stan The Man would swing for the fences.

  Even then Chuck knew what his audience wanted; they wanted fear. The racist white cops needed to feel like they were in control. So Chuck gave them what they wanted. He was indeed legitimately frightened, but now he played to the cheap seats, laying it on thick. Overdramatizing a wince here and a shudder there until finally, both the captain and the sergeant broke into laughter. Amused at what they believed they had done: brought a young black man to his knees. He was eventually let go, but the gravity of the incident was never lost on him. He knew the cops could have killed him at their will and no doubt frame it up as justifiable. From then on, Chuck would think twice about which women he slept with and where.

  But regardless, thinking about sleeping with women was most of what he did in prison. And there was lots to think about. Chuck Berry had been a successful entertainer for most of his adult life. Women were never a problem. Or, depending on how Chuck looked at it, women were always a problem.

  Chuck Berry: Stone alone en route to the next gig.

  Even before he was “Chuck Berry,” he was Chuck Berry, which is to say he was a tall, charismatic, brown-eyed handsome man. And he invented rock ’n’ roll.

  It started at the Crank Club on Venderventer in St. Louis, Missouri, back in 1954 with the Chuck Berry Combo: Chuck on guitar and vocals, drummer Ebby Hardy, and piano player Johnnie Johnson. The sets were long and the audiences were a demanding mix of black and white country and blues fans. For musicians at the time, if you wanted to keep the gig, you needed to keep the patrons dancing. Make them thirsty enough t
o keep buying drinks. Chuck caught on quick. When it came to music, Missouri was largely hillbilly country. So Chuck laid it down for the white audience. He overemphasized his diction like the country artists he’d heard on the radio and projected his voice hard over that fast country backbeat. When it came time for a break, Chuck leaned on his hero Nat King Cole’s repertoire. St. Louis wasn’t entirely unsophisticated, and Nat’s songs were well known to both black and white music fans. Chuck’s voice and personality were naturally suited to deliver Nat’s velvety melodies. And to bring it on home again, Chuck dug down into the Delta for those Muddy Waters songs that got him at his core. The band’s regular weekend performances had a predictable rhythm to them. The audience loved it and continuously came back for more.

  His band took it all in stride. Understanding that it was the Chuck show. That it was his name in lights. They backed him with the requisite balance of group support and individual personality, but long sets coupled with even the most diverse repertoire of traditional blues, country, and jazz can get stale for the musicians playing it over and over again. The Chuck Berry Combo began to experiment.

  Chuck and Johnnie developed a natural call-and-response on guitar and piano. The crowd ate it up. Particularly on the fast numbers. Chuck grew bored with the songs from other artists that he was covering and began putting his own words to the familiar country and blues chord progressions. Within no time, Chuck was writing his own tunes. His poetry now had a beat.

  The combo stretched out in these originals in front of the crowd at the Crank Club. Johnnie would eventually tire of playing the rhythm on piano (keeping that left hand pulsing along all night was real work). He’d give it a rest and let his right hand drift lazily along the high keys in response to whatever Chuck was spitting out for vocals. In effect, they created a vacuum. A rhythm vacuum. And without a bass player in the combo, there was a void where there was once a piano pounding out the rhythm in tandem with the drums. The audience picked up on the letdown. Their disinterest was palpable to Chuck. Rather than lay it all back on Johnnie, Chuck figured out how to play Johnnie’s piano rhythm by himself, on guitar. He heavily emphasized the second and fourth beats instead of accenting every downbeat. In doing so, Chuck had molded the traditional country/rhythm and blues piano rhythm into what has become the single most influential element in all of rock ’n’ roll: Chuck Berry’s rhythm guitar riff.

  Chuck’s rhythm guitar riff, not to be confused with his two-string lead riff, “the Chuck Berry lick” that introduces many of his greatest hits and is the guitar part he is most identified with. Chuck’s rhythm riff is the thread that ties together the most influential rock ’n’ roll artists of all time, and this riff did not fully exist before Chuck Berry. Guitar players know it well. It’s the root 6 or root 5 power chord that stretches the pinky up two frets on the neck. Non–guitar players, think of the rhythm guitar part appropriated by Marty McFly in Back to the Future.

  This is the same riff that the most consequential guitar players of all time could not leave alone. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones recorded it in their covers of early Berry classics and then morphed it into something of their own with “Back in the U.S.S.R.” and “Get Back” from the Beatles, and “Midnight Rambler” and “Rip This Joint” from the Stones.

  Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Pete Townshend borrowed it. The Beach Boys rewrote Chuck’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,” turning it into “Surfin’ USA.” Jimi Hendrix, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, and Stevie Ray Vaughan all hung their wide-brimmed hats on the riff. AC/DC built their careers on the back of the riff, and seminal punk rock bands like the New York Dolls, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and the Clash sped the riff up and nearly drove it off the road. Guns N’ Roses, Green Day, and more recently the White Stripes, the Black Keys, and Low Cut Connie have all incorporated it into their songwriting.

  Sure, there are other towering and influential early rock ’n’ roll figures, like Ike Turner, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and even Elvis Presley, who contributed greatly to the form in its nascent years, but none of them have one singular contribution that is shared so widely among rock ’n’ roll artists throughout each period of rock’s history. Music journalists will tie themselves in knots trying to get you to bite down on the idea that the hard-strumming Sister Rosetta Tharpe invented rock ’n’ roll, but her influence simply isn’t palpable enough. Critics would also like you to believe that Ike Turner invented rock ’n’ roll with Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” from 1951, a song that Ike wrote well before Chuck Berry began recording. They’re right to point to the greatness of “Rocket 88,” but the song is a shuffle, and rock ’n’ roll grew its wings on the back of the straight-ahead backbeat. The shuffle was a signifier of the past. Rock ’n’ roll was about the future. You can’t give credit to Elvis Presley’s “That’s All Right” from 1954 because it’s too hillbilly sounding, and Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” from 1956 was genre defying but, as such, not genre defining. Little Richard? Jerry Lee Lewis? Not enough guitar. Rock ’n’ roll grew into a guitar-dominated genre of music, not a piano-dominated genre.

  The term rock ’n’ roll had been in use for a good while by the time Chuck came along, but it didn’t come to be defined as a genre or fully realized stylistically until Chuck Berry recorded and released “Rock and Roll Music” in 1957. This song is rock ’n’ roll’s big bang. It is the first rock ’n’ roll song, and it has nothing to do with the song’s title. It’s about everything else: the beat, the lyrics and the production—but it’s especially about Chuck’s rhythm guitar. It’s the first recorded appearance of his signature riff on the airwaves. The riff that he took out of his piano player’s hands and then shredded through his tiny, distorted amp.

  Chuck Berry’s innovation and artful melding of country and rhythm and blues would soon launch him out of the Crank Club and into a chance meeting with his hero, Muddy Waters, which would in turn lead him to a recording contract with Chess Records. His first single for Chess, “Maybellene,” was quick to blanket the airwaves, and Chuck Berry was on his way.

  “Maybellene” hit No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 5 on the pop chart. And it was largely due to the efforts of a DJ in New York named Alan Freed. Freed spun the song one night on his show for two hours straight. One song. Over and over again. For two hours straight. When Chuck heard, he was shocked at the passion Freed had shown for his song, but that would wear off quickly when Chuck learned that the DJ was credited alongside Chuck as one of the songwriters of “Maybellene” in a scam set up by Leonard Chess (owner of Chess Records), who gave Freed songwriting credit as an incentive to spin the song and rack up publishing royalties to line his pockets with. Chuck Berry had just learned the most important lesson in the music business the hard way: Never trust your record label.

  Regardless, the song was a hit and Chuck was a star and touring frequently. All over America. From the Midwest to New England to the Deep South. It being the 1950s, traveling through the Deep South as a successful young black man was not easy and was downright dangerous if you weren’t careful.

  Chuck didn’t mean to kiss her. She threw herself at him. Right there onstage. In front of everyone. Chuck was feeling loose. His set was tight. The crowd was jazzed. The adrenaline from everyone on- and offstage was pumping. It was a small, intimate dance for some college students in a renovated Army barracks in Meridian, Mississippi. The girl couldn’t have been younger than eighteen. It didn’t matter. Her tongue, when it hit his, took him completely out of the moment and delivered him to someplace far away. His mouth sunk into hers. Right there on the stage. Under the house lights that were now on and blasting down upon the couple. The moment didn’t last. Chuck snapped himself out of it and pulled away. This was Mississippi. She was white. He was black.

  When he opened his eyes, she was staring at him as if to say, What’s the matter? Don’t you want me? A question he would have happily answered if it weren’t for the staring eyes of the rest of the crowd, which now—a few minutes
removed from his performance—had snapped back to reality. The crowd had just witnessed a black man kissing a white girl in a segregated hall where the black kids weren’t even allowed to sit next to white kids. That was Chuck’s cue. He unplugged his guitar, quietly stepped off the stage, and made his way to the side door of the makeshift auditorium under the glaring eyes of the crowd.

  The place was stone-cold quiet. Chuck was nearly at the door. Nearly free until a frat boy rose up in front of Chuck flanked by seven of his brothers. Big. White. Dumb.

  “Chuck, did you try to date my sister?”

  Chuck was quick to the point, “No, of course not!”

  Another lunkhead, this one to the side of the original frat boy pointed at Chuck and shouted, “He did! He’s a Yankee like the rest of ’em!”

  This was the cue for the other frat boys to chime in with their own racist accusations. The crowd turned on Chuck. Boos were swelling up from throughout the auditorium. Chuck could feel the fear. It cooled the sweat on his skin.

  That’s when he saw it. The gleam of the switchblade. Extended menacingly from the hand of the first lunkhead. The promoter saw it, too. Fearing the worst, he decided to play peacemaker and jumped between the knife and Chuck, pushing him aside. Chuck, while being dragged away, out of the mob and backward toward the exit, started singing. It was an unconscious, visceral attempt to quash the violence in the air: “It was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well.”