Rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry dead at 90

Chuck Berry, who duck-walked his way into the pantheon of rock ‘n’ roll pioneers as one of its most influential guitarists and as the creator of raucous anthems that defined the genre’s early sound and heartbeat, died on Saturday at his Missouri home. He was 90.

Police in St. Charles County, outside St. Louis, said they were called to Berry’s home by a caretaker who reported he had fallen ill, and emergency responders found the performer unconscious. Emergency medical technicians tried to revive him with cardiopulmonary resuscitation, to no avail, and Berry was pronounced dead at 1:26 p.m. local time, police said.

Although Elvis Presley was called the king of rock ‘n’ roll, that crown would have fit just as well on the carefully sculpted pompadour of Charles Edward Anderson Berry. He was present in rock’s infancy in the 1950s and emerged as its first star guitarist and lyricist.

Berry hits such as “Johnny B. Goode,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Maybellene” and “Memphis” melded elements of blues, rockabilly and jazz into some of America’s most timeless pop songs of the 20th century.

He was a monumental influence on just about any kid who picked up a guitar with rock star aspirations – Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen among them.

Bob Dylan called Berry “the Shakespeare of rock ‘n’ roll,” and he was one of the first popular acts to write as well as perform his own songs. They focused on youth, romance, cars and good times, with lyrics that were complex, humorous and sometimes a little raunchy.

Both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, as well as the Beach Boys and scores of other acts – even Elvis – covered Berry’s songs.

“If you tried to give rock ‘n’ roll another name,” Lennon once said, “you might call it ‘Chuck Berry’.”

When Richards inducted Berry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, he said: “It’s very difficult for me to talk about Chuck Berry because I’ve lifted every lick he ever played. This is the gentleman who started it all.”

Berry’s legacy as one of rock’s founders was tarnished by his reputation as a prickly penny-pincher and run-ins with the law, including sex-related offenses after he achieved stardom.

Marking his 90th birthday in 2016 by announcing he would release his first album in 38 years, Berry listed T-Bone Walker, Carl Hogan of Louis Jordan’s band and Charlie Christian from Benny Goodman’s band as his guitar influences, but his lyrical style was all his own. Punchy wordplay and youth-oriented subject matter earned him the nickname “the eternal teenager” early in his career.

Berry came along at a time when much of the United States remained racially segregated, but it was hard for young audiences of any color to resist a performer who delivered such a powerful beat with so much energy and showmanship.

KEY COLLABORATOR

Berry said he performed his signature bent-knee, head-bobbing “duck walk” across more than 4,000 concert stages. He said he invented the move as a child in order to make his mother laugh as he chased a ball under a table.

Some critics suggested it was his former pianist, Johnnie Johnson, who composed the tunes while Berry only penned the lyrics. Johnson sued Berry in 2000 for song royalties, saying they were equal collaborators on many of the hits, but the case was dismissed on grounds that the statute of limitations had expired.

It was with Johnson that Berry first made his mark, playing at black clubs in the St. Louis area at the musically ripe age of 27. Berry started out filling in with Johnson’s group, known as Sir John’s Trio, in 1953, and Johnson eventually acknowledged Berry’s talent, charisma and business acumen by allowing the group to evolve into the Chuck Berry Trio.

At the suggestion of blues legend Muddy Waters, Berry auditioned for Chess Records, the white-owned Chicago label that put out scores of blues hits. The result was the rockabilly tune “Ida Red,” which became a hit after it was retitled “Maybellene” and discovered by white audiences.

When the record came out, Berry said he was stunned to see that pioneering rock ‘n’ roll disc jockey Alan Freed and another man he had never met, Russ Fratto, were listed as co-writers of “Maybellene.”

The shared credits deprived him of some royalty payments, but Berry dismissed it at the time as part of the “payola” system that determined which records got radio play in the 1950s. He later regained all the rights to his compositions.

ONLY ONE NO. 1 HIT

Berry and Johnson collaborated for some 30 years on such rock anthems as “School Days,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Back in the U.S.A.,” “Reelin’ and Rockin’,” “Rock & Roll Music,” “No Particular Place to Go,” “Memphis” and “Sweet Little Sixteen.” But Berry’s only No. 1 hit was “My Ding-a-Ling,” a throwaway novelty song that seemed to be a juvenile sex reference.

Berry’s reputation for being greedy and grouchy was evident in the 1987 documentary “Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll,” which focused on a 60th-birthday concert that Keith Richards organized for him. The movie’s makers said Berry refused to show up for filming each day unless given a bag of cash.

“He was an oddly cheap character in some ways,” Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger told Mojo magazine. “He … was always rude to everyone. He became too much of a parody of himself.”

Berry was born Oct. 18, 1926, the third of six children whose father was a contractor and church deacon and whose mother was a schoolteacher. They lived in a relatively prosperous black section of St. Louis known as the Ville.

In the first of his brushes with the law, Berry was sent to a reformatory as a teenager for armed robbery. After his release at age 21, he worked in an auto plant and as a photographer and trained to be a hairdresser.

As he became a star, Berry irked some in St. Louis by acquiring property in a previously white area and opening his own nightclub, where another legal scrape nearly ended his career.

At a show in Texas in 1959, Berry had met a 14-year-old Native American girl and hired her to work at the St. Louis club. She was later fired and then arrested on a prostitution charge, which led to Berry being convicted for violating the Mann Act, transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. He was sent to prison in 1962 for a year and a half and wrote several songs while incarcerated, including “No Particular Place to Go.”

Berry had more trouble in 1979 when he was convicted of tax evasion, serving four months in prison, and in the 1990s when a number of women accused him of videotaping them in the bathrooms of his restaurant-club in Wentzville, Missouri.

While the hits did not keep coming for Berry, the tributes never stopped, and he continued playing a monthly show at a St. Louis nightclub into his late 80s. He received a Grammy award for lifetime achievement in 1984 and his 1986 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame made him part of the inaugural class.

Illustrating his influence, a recording of “Johnny B. Goode” was included in a collection of music sent into space aboard the unmanned 1977 Voyager I probe to provide aliens a taste of Earth culture.

Despite his reputation as a womanizer, Berry and his wife, Toddy, were married more than 60 years.

source: interaksyon.com

The Beatles' great rock bromance

The Beatles rooftop concert in ‘Let It Be’ is a template for every great band reunion moment — and possibly every romcom — to come.

Forty-five years ago, the Beatles were kaput, having called it quits in a flurry of torts and acrimony. A final studio album, “Abbey Road,” meant to show them as a functioning unit in 1969, was overtaken by “Let It Be,” recorded earlier but released later as a documentary and album, awash in Phil Spector strings and choirs. (It still won an Oscar for Best Song.)

The documentary is one of life’s painful reminders that people — even Beatles — grow tired of one another. Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Let It Be takes us behind the scenes as John, Paul, George and Ringo — but mostly Paul — try to pull an album together out of general ennui.

At this point in time, after the death of manager Brian Epstein, the end of touring, John’s recent infatuation with Yoko Ono and George’s commitment to spiritual detachment, there were few cheerleaders left in the Beatles. Paul, the task-driven Gemini, still fit the bill, and he is the one that takes up the reins on this project.

Lindsay-Hogg’s camera dotes on Paul. He’s there in the opening in a tight shot, vamping some Bach-like inventions on piano (just so you know he’s the “serious” musical Beatle); Paul also gets loving close-ups singing Let It Be and The Long and Winding Road, the kind of close-ups where he’s much too aware of the camera, trying to win it (us) over.

Underneath the surface, though, the rest of the Beatles are wary, weary, disaffected. Ringo sits next to Paul as he improvises on piano, looking miles away, but also appropriately supportive; George sits and previews a new song, I Me Mine, for Ringo and others, with this caveat: “I don’t care if don’t want it.” (After all, he was amassing enough solo songs to release a triple solo album, “All Things Must Pass,” a year later.) John abruptly stops a rough run-through of I Dig a Pony and sighs: “Has anybody got a fast one?”


Only Paul comes to the party prepared, full of esprit de corps for a group that is now more corpse than corps. His songs are meticulously detailed, and he’s determined that the band hammer them into shape — literally, in the case of Maxwell’s Silver Hammer (which ended up instead on “Abbey Road”).

There is no narrative behind Let It Be, save for the narrative Paul tries to insert through short interview bits — telling Lindsay-Hogg that he and John wrote “hundreds of songs” back in Liverpool before becoming famous, and how some of these unrecorded gems were “brilliant.” It’s this urge to “get back” to those innocent days that is constantly at odds with the other musicians.

Tensions mount, and it’s fair to say the first half of “Let It Be” is a discordant bummer. There’s Paul “instructing” the band how to play the guitar break in I’ve Got A Feeling over and over again, as though he’s orchestrating the Wrecking Crew. There’s George getting sulky with Paul, then Paul lowering his voice as though to escape the cameras: “I’m trying to help you, but I always hear myself annoying you.” And George shrugging back, getting on with it: “I’ll play whatever it is you want me to play, or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play; whatever it is that pleases you, I’ll do it.”

Almost by design, the first half of the film proceeds without shape or form; the Beatles play raggedly, warts and all. In their nascent form, the songs fail to inspire, despite Paul’s loud declarations that this is all just another day in showbiz. Clearly, these are four men weary of one another.

Yet moments of light still shine through. It’s when the music catches fire, or sets them free, that you can actually believe these were the men that inspired Beatlemania. It’s there when John starts dancing with Yoko during a run-through of the waltz-like I Me Mine; it’s there when Linda Eastman’s little girl Heather (not Stella McCartney, as some believe) shows up to watch the band and laughs as John runs through a riotous Dig It with Billy Preston on keyboards; it’s there when Ringo does a comical reaction take as another child hits a nearby cymbal.

These unscripted bits are what remind us of the Beatles’ natural chemistry with one another, and with the camera’s eye. (They were movie stars, after all, in A Hard Day’s Night and Help.) It’s when they forget they’re on film that the film comes alive. Moments such as when John and Paul share a mic on a rock version of Two of Us (intriguing in itself); or when Paul and Ringo serve up a Jerry Lee Lewis duet on piano.

Other moments reveal a nurturing spirit: George is shown helping Ringo work out the chords for Octopus’s Garden on piano. And always — though not as intrusive as some remember — there is the figure of Yoko, quietly sitting by, listening to the band, but mostly to John.

But a shift occurs in the second half: in the classic rock bromance fashion, John and Paul resolve their differences; they come together through the power of music. When the movie really clicks is the final 20 minutes: a rooftop concert is staged at Apple headquarters, 3 Savile Row, and it provides a perfect antidote to the chaos that had been brewing earlier. Having worked out a rough “set,” the Beatles begin playing for the neighborhood passersby, and it’s as though the cool London air ignites them: crowds take to adjacent rooftops to hear the band run through Don’t Let Me Down, I’ve Got A Feeling, Get Back and One After 909. Magically, they find the connection that has eluded them in the studio setting; they are a band once again.

And it’s a moment that serves as a template for every great band reunion movie (and possibly every romcom) to come: that final scene from This Is Spinal Tap — where Nigel and David reunite onstage after bitter estrangement — takes its heart and soul from this moment in Let It Be. The only difference is, Spinal Tap went on to tour Japan shortly after reuniting (and even became an actual touring band in real life). The Beatles simply dissolved and went their separate, adult ways, their own reality show suddenly cancelled.

source: philstar.com

Kelly Clarkson Has a Nonstop Dance Party with Her Boyfriend

A little bit country, a little bit rock 'n' roll!

After performing in Chicago on Saturday night, Kelly Clarkson and boyfriend Brandon Blackstock swung by Nellcôte for a private after-party with fellow tour mates The Fray.

Dressed in a T-shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, the Duets mentor, who recently earned a Country Music Association award nomination, "didn't stop dancing" with Blackstock all night, an onlooker tells PEOPLE.

"She was smiling from ear to ear and got excited when the deejay played the Jackson 5," the source adds.

Just after midnight, Clarkson and Blackstock bid the staff farewell and headed out for the evening. But The Fray kept the party going as they sipped on Red Stag cocktails and snacked on Neapolitan-style pizzas.
– Lesley Messer

source: people.com