Review: RJ Smith’s Chuck Berry biography take a close look at the rock pioneer.
At first, Berry couldn’t run: He lay on the floor, rigid, face not moving, “as stiff as a board,” his tour manager recalled. But then Berry was on his feet, eyes glowing red, plugging in his guitar and cranking out “the most maniacal rock & roll riff you can imagine.” The fans were still rushing out, but when they heard these thunderous chords on the far side of the gas clouds, suddenly they were rushing back in. “It wasn’t dedication,” said the tour manager. “It was chaos.
Actually it was both. To some degree, all rock bios are about sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, yet the biggest takeaway from “” has to do with a fourth element: sheer force of personality. Berry, who died in 2017 at 90, didn’t invent rock single-handedly — “he didn’t do it alone and he didn’t do it on purpose,” writes RJ Smith, who has also written books on James Brown and photographer Robert Frank. But when you listen to his music, you wouldn’t be blamed if you thought that he could have.
Put it all together, and the end product is rock-and-roll, a phrase that people started using to explain “what music they liked,” as Smith writes, and “then it expressed what in life they liked, and then it was them.” Berry liked to compose with other musicians, throwing words and riffs out and moving slowly till a critical mass that had been long in the making seemed to arrive out of nowhere.
He became unreachable, even to his intimates. A longtime lover said: “Either he was a very complicated man, or there was noYet out of that rage came “Johnny B. Goode,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” and a dozen other additions to the rock canon. Most saints aren’t artists, and the reverse is even more true. Smith observes that names near Berry’s on the St. Louis Walk of Fame include those of William S. Burroughs, who shot his second wife in the head, and T.S.
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