Chuck Berry: The Biography

by JohnCollis (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2002

  $14.55

  Chuck Berry is one of the greatest talents in popular music, and also an individual legendary for his difficulty and capriciousness. It's no exaggeration to say that, with songs like 'Roll Over Beethoven', 'Johnny B. Goode', 'No Particular Place to Go' and a whole host of others, he invented rock and roll. Literally dozens of his songs are now timeless classics still performed by bands in clubs and pubs every night across the world. As a wordsmith he also set a benchmark for intricate, dazzlingly witty and memorable lyrics unequalled by perhaps anyone apart from Bob Dylan. And he invented the duck walk. But as a musician he has been respected rather than ever loved by his peers - after producing the birthday-tribute film, 'Hail, Hail, Rock and Roll', for him, Keith Richards even remarked that he 'wouldn't warm to Chuck Berry if he was cremated next to me'. Berry would always tour by himself, and use a different clutch of pick-up musicians in every town, to avoid the expenses of keeping a band on the road; he would always insist on payment in cash up front before he'd even go on stage; he'd usually perform the contractual minimum of a short set; and he'd not only invest his considerable wealth in property and a stable of cars but also shamelessly congratulate himself on his acquisitiveness. And his career has been overshadowed, and more than once stalled, by trouble with the law, and time in jail for a relationship with an under-age woman. Until now, Chuck Berry's own maverick autobiography has been the main source for anyone wanting to read about the life of this extraordinary genius, for there is no other word. But now, John Collis has interviewed Berry's fellow musicians, as well as former promoters and tour managers, and researched the truth about Berry's life back in his home city of St Louis, to produce the first rounded, objective, and sometimes shocking portrait of a man who, even in his seventies, is still treading the boards and singing of 'Sweet Little Sixteen'.