Why was Chuck Berry pissed off with Keith Richards?
As a wise man once said, “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry’.”
The man is a titan in his field, embodying all the contradictions that arguably mark the starting point of modern pop culture. A blend of daring radicalism and respectful traditionalism. Explosive self-expression mixed with rigid commercialism (this is, after all, someone who admitted he would have stayed a janitor if the pay had been better). A joyous party-starter with a pronounced, shockingly dark undercurrent lurking beneath the surface.
The argument that he’s the first true rock ‘n’ roll musician is almost impossible to dispute, despite his back catalogue not quite rising to the level of his peers. After all, Bo Diddley was releasing solid soul-inflected records the year Berry released ‘My Ding-a-Ling’. All that pales in comparison to the sheer force that Berry was as a live act, though. The tips and tricks he borrowed from his idol and mentor T-Bone Walker set him up for life better than any song of his save for maybe ‘Johnny B Goode’.
However his singles were doing on the charts, you could always count on Berry to play live shows. From a hundred plus a year in his prime, all the way up to the constant residency he was playing at the Duck Room in his St Louis hometown until a few years before his passing. He became a master at his particular craft. I mean that literally as, infamously, he would barely ever play with a consistent backing band.
Berry, ever the businessman, reasoned it was cheaper to make sure he could his part perfectly. Then, he could go from town, hire the cheapest backing band available and rehearse at the soundcheck. Who was paying to see the backing band anyway!? A couple of decades of this made sure no one was going to tell him any differently. Not even the man who, in 1986, would organise a whole tribute concert to him, Rolling Stones icon Keith Richards.
The concert, immortalised in the 1987 documentary Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, is more than a good time. However, the glimpses it gives into working with the rock icon aren’t exactly great. Case in point: the legendarily tetchy rehearsal scenes between Berry and Richards. Richards, though a Berry die-hard, is not exactly the note-perfect sideman that Berry expected him to be.
What begins with a few aborted attempts at his songs, and Berry guiding Richards through his riffs bend-by-bend, descends into a shouting match with Berry reminding Richards that “we’re going to play this the way Chuck Berry plays this.”
Pity the poor backing band, one that Richards assembled himself, who sit in awkward silence as the two icons of rock try and mostly fail to put their egos behind each other for the sake of some great music. It all worked out in the end, but it does make sense that Richards’ other great memory of Chuck Berry is being punched in the face by him.
