Although it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when rock
and roll started, it would not be untoward to say it was born in The
Cosmopolitan club in East St.
Louis,
Illinois.That is where a band called The Johnny
Johnson Trio entertained its audience with a mix of ballads and blues.Although East St. Louis was predominantly black, about a third of
the audience comprised whites, and the band's guitarist Chuck Berry decided
to incorporate a little hillbilly music into the mix.The audience ate it up.What was this strange new
sound?It was a mixture of
rhythm-and-blues and country-and-western that would soon come to be known
as rock and roll.In one fell
swoop, Chuck Berry had not only brought together black and white music, but
its fans.It was a significant
step in the history of music and the history of American culture.It was also the beginning of the
Chess and checkered career of Chuck Berry.In 1955, he went to a Muddy Waters concert in Chicago,
Illinois, and introduced
himself.To his surprise,
Waters encouraged him to check out Chess Records, a blues label that was
flagging at the time and needed some new blood. Berry
thought, great, here's my chance to lay down some blues numbers on
vinyl.To his astonishment,
Leonard Chess was much more interested in a remake Chuck had done of an old
Bob Wills tune called "Ida Red".It was the kind of hillbilly music The Johnny Johnson Trio had been
playing at the club, but now a record executive was taking it
seriously.On 21st
May 1955, Berry, along with Johnson, Willie Dixon, Jerome Green, and Jasper
Thomas layed down a recording of "Ida Red" which they had rename
"Maybelline".It rocketed to
#1 on the rhythm and blues chart and crossed over onto the pop chart.In the summer of 1956, a follow-up
entitled "Roll Over Beethoven" went to #29.A year later, he found himself on stage with The Everly
Brothers and Buddy Holly in a tour of the U.S., exposing his music
to a national audience, which couldn't have hurt the subsequent
success of hits such as "Johnny B.
Goode
", "Rock and Roll
Music", "School Days" and "Sweet Sixteen", all of which reached the top
ten.Trouble was brewing for Berry,
however, in December 1959.He
had hired a 14-year-old Mexican girl to work at a nightclub he had started
in St. Louis called Berry's
Club Bandstand.Things might
have been all right if she hadn't been arrested for prostitution, which
violated the Mann Act, the former White-Slave Traffic Act which had been
expanded to protect women from being trafficked for "immoral purposes". Berry
would spend the next three-plus years in prison.When he got out, he found himself faced with The British
Invasion.It was a movement
that had been kind to him by keeping his music in the limelight during his
days behind bars.Acts like The
Beatles
and The Rolling Stones had been covering his songs and
imitating his guitar licks.The Beach
Boys had imitated him a little too well.
" Surfin' U.S.A."
was so similar to "Sweet Little Sixteen" that Berry accused Brian
Wilson
of ripping off the melody.Unbeknownst to Brian, his father Murry signed over all
rights to the song to Chuck Berry, including the lyrics, making a bad
situation even worse.(The
mistake was remedied some twenty-five years later.)When he
wasn't having a battle of the bands with The Beach
Boys
, Berry
was still cranking out the hits, including "Nadine", "No Particular Place
To Go", and "You Never Can Tell", all released in 1964.He would not hit the charts again
for another eight years.When
he did, he did it in a big way:It was a novelty song he had
performed in adult venues called "My
Ding-A-Ling
" that finally gave him his first #1.A live version of "Reelin' and Rockin'" reached #27 in
the U.S. and #18 in the U.K.It was the last time Chuck
Berry would hit the charts.It
was not, however, the last of his legal woes.A class action lawsuit was filed against Berry
in 1990 by fifty-nine women who claimed he had videotaped them in the
bathrooms of two restaurants he owned in St. Louis.The lawsuit cost him well over a million dollars.Johnny Johnson filed a lawsuit
against him in 2001 for rights to songs he claimed to have re-written with Berry,
although it was dismissed for lack of any physical documentation. Berry's
sixtieth birthday was physically documented, however, by filmmaker Taylor
Hackford in Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, a celebratory concert that included Eric Clapton,
Robert Cray, Etta James, Keith Richards, and Linda
Ronstadt
.Richards would later participate in Chuck Berry's induction into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when it opened in 1986.Three years later,
Berry
was given his own star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame at 6504 Delmar in The
Loop, just outside Blueberry Hill, where he still performs once a month.
