Chuck Berry has had enough of people’s concern since he appeared to collapse onto a keyboard and couldn’t continue his Jan.1 show at Chicago’s Congress Theater.
“I just got a call from Pine Bluff, Ark.: ‘How do you feel?’” the 84-year-old rock ‘n’ roll pioneer recounted last week in a rare interview in the tiny backstage dressing room at Blueberry Hill, the St. Louis club where he has performed monthly since 1996. “I’ve been asked, oh, I guess, 600 times. Well, come on, that can get monotonous, you know.”
So what does he say to them?
“I want to say, ‘I feel like kicking butt,’” Berry said with a smile. “But I don’t. I say I’m OK. I just left the stage because I had to go somewhere. I turn it into a joke. Anybody that eats food does that.”
Well, regardless of whether the Berry health scare really was just a matter of his needing a bathroom break rather than suffering from exhaustion or other maladies after playing two New Year’s Eve shows in New York City, the mood in Blueberry Hill’s Duck Room was electric in anticipation of the singer-guitarist’s first stage appearance since then.
Berry said he has no intention of discontinuing these performances. “If they pay, I play,” he said, laughing while communicating his long-held ethos. But many fans felt a certain urgency to catch him now nonetheless.
Ean Christman, a blues guitarist, said he’d been saving money to see Berry eventually but decided he’d better make the drive up from Dallas this month. “When that thing happened Jan.1 in Chicago, I said I have to cash in my bottle caps,” Christman said. “There’s no more waiting.”
Nancy Elner, a nurse, flew in from Boston not even knowing whether she could get a ticket to the sold-out show. She decided to take the risk because “I don’t know how much longer he’s going to be playing.” (Someone at the bar had one spare ticket to sell.) Mike McCarthy, CEO of the St. Louis Blues hockey team, also was spurred to see Berry for the first time last Wednesday night.
“It’s on the St. Louis bucket list for sure,” he said.
“I think we’re about to see a great show tonight,” Blueberry Hill owner and Berry friend Joe Edwards said upon emerging from the dressing room. “It’s the first show of the new year. It’s the first show after Chicago. He just seems very buoyant and enthusiastic.”
As has been the case for decades, when Berry is on the road, he requires the promoter to supply a backing band for each show, and they usually hit the stage together with no rehearsal, the star not shy about expressing any displeasure. (He even feuded with one-time band leader Keith Richards for the1986 concert that became the film “Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll.”) So it may not be surprising that Berry said that one of the problems in Chicago was his trio of hired guns.
“The band was bad,” he said. “The band was not in tune.” He also complained that one member didn’t know “Johnny B. Goode.”
Contacted in Chicago, pianist Vijay Tellis-Nayak said he and the drummer and bassist had been studying Berry’s set lists and rehearsing his songs together since October, but on stage there was no way they could keep up with Berry’s changing keys midsong or having his guitar out of tune. “I definitely would not say that there’s anything we could have done to salvage the situation in terms of knowing the songs better,” Tellis-Nayak said.
Berry’s St. Louis residency shows, in contrast, take place not in auditoriums that hold thousands but a basement room with a capacity of 340, and he plays with the same musicians month after month, year after year. Joining bassist Jim Marsala, keyboardist Bob Lohr and drummer Keith Robinson are two of Berry’s children: Charles Berry Jr. on guitar and Ingrid Berry Clay on harmonica and the occasional roof-raising lead vocal.
“It’s like being with the family at the Thanksgiving dinner, where everything is jovial and warm,” Clay said of being alongside her father and brother on stage.
At 10 p.m. sharp, Berry strolled onto the stage in a white captain’s hat, purple glittery shirt and slim charcoal slacks and announced, “Here we go again,” while the crowd stood and cheered. He kicked the band into a rickety version of his 1958 hit “Carol” before abruptly shifting to the lyrics of his 1956 hit “Roll Over Beethoven.”
On the subsequent “Memphis, Tennessee” and “School Day” he established a pattern of singing behind the beat yet still in rhythm, all while he banged out jagged, sometimes dissonant counterparts on his hollow-body Gibson, sometimes slapping the neck percussively. Yet just when you’d think the song was about to break down, it might kick into high gear, as if Berry had preserved his vigor for youthful shouts of “Hail, hail, rock ‘n’ roll!” and “Rock! Rock! Rock ‘n’ roll!”
Someone in the audience muttered that the show was like a roller coaster ride. A tightrope walk also might be an apt metaphor, or perhaps a loose-wheeled wagon whipping around a winding mountain road with no guardrails.
Berry’s memory and hearing aren’t what they used to be; backstage he acknowledged that he forgets lyrics, and he said, “Being in front of those amps for 50 years, my hearing is beginning to wiggle.”
His guitar strayed out of key and out of tune, and sometimes he got lost amid his poetically pile-driving lyrics.
But unlike when he was touring alone and playing with strangers, here he had a support team that could pull him back from the cliff. So when he faltered singing B.B. King’s blues song “Rock Me Baby,” Clay stepped up to deliver a ferocious purr to the sensuous lyrics, prompting her beaming father to pronounce, “Ain’t it good to have a daughter to help her old man out?”
And when Berry was clicking and his band could go full tilt, the results were thrilling, as on a blazing “Let It Rock,” and a finale of “Johnny B. Goode” that ended with about15 women from the audience dancing on either side of him.
When an audience member requested “Maybellene,” his rambunctious1955 single that kick-started his career and perhaps the entire genre of guitar-driven rock, Berry quipped, “You’re calling all these fast ones to see if I can still cut the mustard.”
He played it anyway, not at the original’s breakneck speed, but, hey, the guy is 84 years old. (Earlier, after telling the crowd his age, he launched into his most juvenile hit, “My Ding-A-Ling.”) He even crouched into position to do his trademark duck walk before standing back up and announcing, “I don’t want to fall, y’all!”
That line got a big laugh, yet during “Johnny B. Goode” he did duck-walk across the stage, prompting McCarthy in his seat to proclaim, “Holy (moly)! I can’t believe I just saw that! That’s royalty.”
“Is everybody happy?” Berry called out at the end of his hourlong set, and as loud and enthusiastic as the crowd’s response was, his own face indicated he was right there with them.
He really did feel like kicking butt after all.
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