There’s a clip of Chuck Berry performing live on a TV show in 1958 that seems to distill what he was and what he made. He’s playing “Johnny B. Goode,” one of his hits that year. At this point Berry already has been a star for three years. He’d come from a respectable working-class family in The Ville, attended Sumner High School, served time for armed robbery, and trained as a beautician. He started working in St. Louis clubs as a guitarist with Johnnie Johnson’s trio in 1953, playing tasteful blues and ballads. But he’d learned something about performance from T-Bone Walker’s aerobic style and something about music from Country songs—hillbilly music—on the radio. So when he got a chance to record in 1955, he mashed the two together and what came out owed nothing to Walker’s blues or any other African-American musical tradition. It was like rockabilly, already a pared-down, sped-up form of Country, but stripped further and, live, made more acrobatic.
This is the look and sound of a revolution. It’s a noise that must have been almost incomprehensible for a moment, like a Harley suddenly splitting the suburban calm, the way the Sex Pistols would be 20 years later. For some that moment was never-ending. Look at the faces of that polite, impassive audience sitting on the stage in folding chairs, about a minute into the clip above; for many of them the puzzlement wouldn’t cease even as the radio was gradually taken over by the Beatles and the Stones and hundreds of other bands who heard Berry and knew not just what they wanted to do, as Keith Richards says here, but how to do it. Because that was part of Berry’s genius, too: like the Ramones, he made it look easy. And for the squares he made it look scary.
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That clip comes from Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, a 1987 documentary about Berry, directed by Taylor Hackford and chronicling two concerts held on Berry’s 60th birthday. All of Berry is on display in it—the inventiveness, the chops, the rigidity, the genius, the fighting side, and the reflective side. It’s a terrific way to see him.
Today Berry turns 84. And you can still see him, in the flesh, performing on Wednesdays once a month at Blueberry Hill.
Happy birthday, Chuck! Long may you run.
