SUNDAY morning. The phone rings and it’s a journalist from BBC Scotland. He has read a crit I’d written after seeing Chuck Berry on stage back in 1994 and picked up that I was a fan. He wants my thoughts on the man.
I tell him and the journalist informs it’s not the sort of comment he was looking for. The BBC, in the hours after his death were (rightly) looking for someone to say wonderful things about the creator of hits such as Johnny B. Goode.
But I couldn’t bring myself to rhapsodise over the rock n’roller because I couldn’t un-know what I know. And what I know about Berry leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
It’s possible to push aside the fact he went to jail early in his life (everyone can make a mistake and learn from it), when he and his friends went on an armed robbery spree. And he did pay the time, spending three years in reform school as a result.
But it’s much harder to put the blinkers on when you remember he next went to jail for transporting a 14-year-old girl across the state line, with the intent of having sex with her.
There are those at the time who argued this was part of Southern American culture, highlighted by the fact Jerry Lee Lewis had married his 13 year-old cousin. And that Berry’s girlfriend was a working girl.
But disdain for others always clung closer to Berry than the strap of his semi-acoustic guitar. Berry had a stinking bad temper. It was (sort of) easy to accept he once kicked Keith Richards off stage for playing too loudly, and that he punched the Stone for no other reason than he had tapped him on the shoulder. Yet to watch Berry berate a hired piano player on stage during a Glasgow gig was like watching someone kick a three-legged labrador puppy.
The tax evasion charges were hardly a surprise, Berry was tighter than banjo strings but who could ignore his hiding a video camera in the female toilets of a restaurant he owned? How he avoided the sex offender’s register was down to his fame.
Yet, having put the phone down on the BBC man, the afterthought hit me. Chuck Berry was the reason I first picked up an electric guitar. Memphis, Tennessee wasn’t a song, it was a rallying call to the young, to learn how to play bar chords, to produce great, fun music. Chuck’s Chess albums had me mentally duck shuffling across my mother’s already worn Stoddard’s carpet.
And who among those in the entertainment world has not sinned? (Except Cliff). Sinatra, even though he had a God-given voice often acted like the Devil incarnate. He had legs broken. He may even had his thug pals do worse. But have the Sinatra CDs gone in the bin? Not at all.
It made me realise perhaps we have to separate the product from the perpetrator, to think only of Phil Spector’s music, of Roman Polanski’s great movies. And perhaps we have to push Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic rants to the back of the mind, try to ignore the fact John Wayne was a Donald Trump role model.
Perhaps we have to accept that great talent seldom arrives unaccompanied.
Yet, we don’t have to sing their praises when they shuffle off.
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