Chuck Berry: The Autobiography [Paperback]

Published in 1988 this is the story of the highly influential Berry told very much by the man himself. Unfortunately Chuck's insistence on going on his own with the book is a mixed blessing. Apparently he began it in 1959 only for other priorities to get in the way and resumed writing during a short prison stretch for tax evasion in 1979. You can't help wondering why the second delay, search for a publisher to put up with him perhaps?
In any case its a patchy effort. Much of it is written in the style of an earnest 16 year old. I've no doubt Chuck had other priorities at the time than English composition but if his proficiency as a guitarist/song writer/performer was at the same level we would never have heard of him.

The first half is by far the the best. He is genuinely engaging in his description of adolescence, early trouble with the law, (armed robbery no less, albeit with fake gun.), unrequited love, early sexual experience etc. Unfortunately he seems to have assumed his continued pursuit of such habits of peeping at unclothed ladies to be of more interest to us than his music. Once we get past his first hit: Maybellene -there is precious little insight into his music career. Instead we got told about his business interests, tax problems etc, and always there is his strange attitude towards sex. He devotes at least three complete chapters to various women and while he is largely coy about his 'relations', with them, he does provide several clear contenders for the worst sex writing prize,
e.g."Only the voluptouesness I had anticipated over the months I had known her mattered in those minutes. Little was heard except the sound of human pleasures passing."
Worse still are the incessant poems he keeps dropping in:
"But from all the women I've been with
The beautiful thing I cite
is the pleasure that I've found
In the yellow and brown
Is equal to that of the white."(final verse of 10.....)

At one point Chuck is proud to tell us that he has never been divorced, this seems down to the tolerance of Mrs. Berry to me. He also promises us a further book devoted to his sexual appetites (My ding a ling perhaps) -----although won't divulge why he has a fantasy of himself as a negro houseboy in plantation times.....got me there Chuck.
There are of course points of interest along the way. Its just that Chuck doesn't seem too interested himself, eventually listing his likes and dislikes as if he was being interviewed for a teen magazine in the 60s.
Overall this is tedious and strays into the embarrassing far too often.

In his brilliant introduction, Bruce Springsteen describes the day he played in Chuck Berry's backing band. "We were all really nervous. There wasn't supposed to be an extra guitar player, so I came up to him and I said, 'Gee, is it okay if I play?' and he said 'Yea, yea, you can play.' And I said, 'Well Chuck . . . ' and he said, 'What?' And I said, 'What songs are we going to do?' And he said, 'Well, we're going to do some Chuck Berry songs.' That's all he said."

Unlike just about every other celebrity autobiography, Chuck Berry wrote this book himself - and it is the better for it. He wrote it and his beloved wife Toddy and his secretary Fran read the proofs. No ghost writer penned this one under the strap line 'as told to . . .' No 'creative editor' rearranged the words to fit a house style. Charles Edward Anderson Berry wrote this book and he did so with the same zest, humour, poetry and soul he put into his songs. I read all 360 pages in one sitting and it was so good, I have begun reading it all over again.

Berry grew up in an all-black neighbourhood and never saw a white man until the neighbour's shed burnt down and white firemen came to put out the blaze. "Not knowing them to be Caucasian, I thought they were so frightened that their faces were whitened from fear of going near the big fire."

Music was baptist hymns with his mother Martha Banks Berry at the family piano. Piano lessons and Beethoven gave way to the guitar and 'Roll Over Beethoven.'

Fifty-five years ago, Charles Berry gave Leonard Chess a demo tape of a song he had recorded at home called Ida May. He had the idea that if he took a blues tune and put a speeded up 'hill-billy' (as C&W was then known) beat behind it, it would gain a wider appeal. He had been playing to mixed audiences (i.e. black and white) and had noticed that some songs would get the one or the other crowd onto the dance floor, but speed up a blues tune to a country beat and they both hit the floor.

"Free, black, twenty-one, single and unbelievably horny." is how Chuck Berry describes himself after three years jail for armed robbery. He does not gloss over the mistakes or try to be something he was not. It is written in the old-fashioned style of an educated black man from the South. He speaks of "the nobility of the moment" on one page and "I was sho nuff a family man" on the next, as he moves effortlessly from being a Southern Gentleman one minute to a 'Yassir Boss!' negro the next, giving us a sly wink and poking fun at our attitudes to both.

Ida May was changed to Maybellene and on May 21st 1955, rock-and-roll was born. "It was just my attempt to sing country and Western, which I have always liked!" Mr. B (as Fran and his other employees called him) makes no claim to any special place in history.

But he does quietly and skilfully put other claimants in their place: "In 1943 Big Joe Turner was appearing one night at the Rum Boogie nightclub in Chicago on 55th and South Parkway (now Dr. Martin L King Drive). I climbed up to a window of the club where I saw and heard him sing 'Rock Around the Clock,' a tune Bill Haley copied ten years later."

In that one statement, he alludes to the common practise of white song smiths 'lifting' black tunes and becoming wealthy in the process.

One is given a clear idea of what it was like to be black back then and today. The book begins with the birth of Cellie Wolfolk to Mistress Wolfolk, owner of the Wolfolk Plantation in Kentucky. But Cellie's father was one of the house servants and little Cellie was "a fair-skinned negro" and therefore was born into slavery. Cellie was Chuck Berry's great-grandmother.

Throughout the 360 pages there is always that underlying theme. Whereas other nations may be defined by class or religion, Americans and the people of the southern states in particular are defined by the colour of their skin. As a Scotsman, I have always been baffled by this obsession and Mr. Berry goes a long way to explain it. Just one hundred years earlier, his great-grandmother was somebody's property.

Is the book self-indulgent? Yes (it is an autobiography after all!) Did he have affairs? Yes. Does he try to hide it? No, he even goes so far as to devote a couple of chapters to the more interesting girls he has known. My wife assures me that Chuck Berry is one of the most interesting and good looking men she has ever seen, so I suppose it was inevitable. I've been in the music business for some forty years and I have done the same, it's just that nobody wants to read about it! But then I didn't create rock-and-roll, I am just one of the thousands that were swept up to become part of this giant industry that began over fifty years ago.

For one blinding moment, one brown eyed handsome man picked up the ultimate phallic symbol and thanks to an invention by Leo Fender, woke up the World. Those tunes were covered and copied by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and every other rock band that ever followed them. When I was a kid at college, we played Chuck Berry tunes. We copied the open riffs to 'Johnny B Good,' 'Carol,' 'Queenie' and all the other songs note by note and beat by beat. It's how we learnt to play rock-and-roll.

Now, thanks to that industry, I own a recording studio in Scotland and we get to record music by people from all over the World. And if I am honest, the songs may have other titles and other words, but all these years we have been doing Chuck Berry songs.