RJ Smith - Chuck Berry: An American Life

Chuck Berry didnt say much about cars to writers, who didn t much ask about them. Little mattered more. They were a way to present himself to the public as he chose to be seen, and a way to hide from those he did not want looking at him. Cars were a sign of his mastery of success; cars offered a way out. Cars, to Berry, were self-evident in their importance. He loved their surfaces, wrote songs about the freedom they made possible. And once youve written a song about a thing, what else is there to say about it? That was how he viewed the situation.

It was the summer of 2011, and Berry parked his Cadillac behind Blueberry Hill. The St. Louis club was his favorite place to play in the world. Berry entered the back door and took the low stage with his band waiting.

Fans and band alike knew what to expect. On the road he had long played with whatever underpaid local rockers the promoter rounded up, but here at home Berry had his regular band of family members and longtime associates who knew what he wanted. When the Blueberry Hill shows had begun, in 1996, they were barely advertised. Tickets went on sale on Wednesdays, and locals knew to buy early, because by Friday they would be gone for a room that held only 340. Over the years shows these shows became legendary, and by 2011 Berry fans from all over the world were buying airplane tickets to see him. They realized what a big deal this was.

A local fan who had heard him dozens of times remembers. Standing in the middle of the room and counting the number of accents he heard from around the world. There was definitely an element of Im not gonna be here forever. And it was interesting to me how many people I know, major music fans, would say, Oh yeah, Ive got to do that sometime and had never done it.

It was a late-period Berry show, and the bands work was made as clear to them as if rules were posted on the dressing room wall. Their instructions were to know the material and to not in any way reinvent it, to offer an experience of the music as it had lived onstage now for years and not as it once had existed on a record. The records were pretty irrelevant. To watch when his foot went up at the beginning of the song, and again when he had enough of it. To cast a proper light on the moment, or, really, to keep him centered in that light: a focus that was unfussy, undramatic, neither too revealing nor flattering but that was pitched for a night out in a bar. To clear out of the way for the duckwalkmodified for this stage and this age, customized into something he called the scoot, a bas-relief chicken strut. The performance was a string of bright flashesthe introduction of a song echoing through time, a guitar sound that was dirty and jarring in fresh ways, a solo that cracked open the spaces between the drummers two and four like an axe in a hickory log. A flow that jumped from one song to the next without messing up, a set of railings that he could comfortably stay between, and then to effortlessly replant the railings in a different place as Berry invariably changed keys, skipped ahead to a different song, forgot lyrics, and shot his bass player a confused look.