Chuck Berry

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Mister Mike
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Re: Chuck Berry

#1569817

Post by Mister Mike »

From the UK Daily Mail...

As one might guess from his aggressive guitar playing and the defiant tone of many of his songs, Chuck Berry had a hard edge.

Although Berry complained bitterly that he spent his life as a victim of racism, it was difficult to blame all his offences — including armed robbery, tax evasion and secretly filming dozens of women in a restaurant lavatory — on white prejudice.

His first significant brush with the law came when he was 17 and still in high school. He and two friends from his racially segregated neighbourhood of Missouri decided to drive to California.+2

Berry took along a broken pistol and the trio began an armed robbery spree, holding up local businesses and stealing a replacement car at gunpoint, until they were arrested by a police officer.

Berry, who insisted it was nothing more than adolescent high jinks, received the maximum sentence of ten years in prison, but served only three years in a reform school.

Friends say the defining moment of his life came in 1959, when the 33-year-old star was convicted under a law prohibiting the transportation of women or girls across state lines ‘for immoral purposes’.

Berry was accused of having sexual intercourse with a 14-year-old Apache waitress, Janice Escalante, whom he had met in Mexico.

Berry took her on tour with him and then brought her home to Missouri, ostensibly to work in the cloakroom of his nightclub. Two weeks later, he sacked her — and she went to the police.

It emerged that Escalante had worked a prostitute and Berry insisted she was ‘anything but innocent’. But she was a child.

He was tried before an all-white male jury and portrayed as a sexual predator, although his initial conviction was thrown out on appeal because the original judge had shown clear evidence of racial bias, continually using the word ‘nigra’.

Retried in 1961, Berry — who complained that he was targeted by police for associating with white women — was jailed for 20 months.

‘Never saw a man so changed,’ said the singer and musician Carl Perkins, who toured with Berry in Britain in 1964, shortly after his release from prison.

The formerly easy-going performer earned a reputation for high-handed petulance, including to fellow musicians he saw as stealing his thunder.

His fan and sometime collaborator Keith Richards revealed how Berry once kicked him off a stage in Hollywood for playing too loudly and, on another occasion, punched him backstage after the Rolling Stone tapped him on the shoulder.

Berry also threw a lighted match down Richards’ shirt at Los Angeles airport.

Berry was back behind bars in 1979 when, just three days after being honoured by President Jimmy Carter at the White House, he was jailed for 120 days for tax evasion and filing false returns.

The U.S. taxman conducted a five-year investigation and found he had avoided paying about $109,000 in taxes in 1973 — equivalent to $600,000 today. At his sentencing, he reportedly twice burst into tears.

He served his sentence in a minimum security prison in California, where he wrote most of his autobiography. In his memoirs, Berry lightly dismissed his more criminal behaviour as his ‘naughties’ but admitted: ‘Every 15 years, in fact, it seems I made a big mistake.’

There were more ‘big mistakes’ to come. In 1987, he was arrested on assault charges in New York, where a woman claimed he had beaten her up. He admitted harassment and was fined $250.

Three years later — Berry by this time in his 60s — there was one final scandal. The husband of one of his employees at his restaurant in Missouri accused him of being a ‘peeping tom’ after a hidden video camera was discovered in the ladies’ toilet there.+2

Several women sued.

Berry claimed he had installed it to catch a worker who he suspected of stealing from the restaurant, but his accusers said the tapes were ‘created for the improper purpose of the gratification’ of his ‘sexual fetishes’.

While his guilt was never established at trial, he paid off 58 women by settling a class action lawsuit. A biographer estimated it cost him $1.2 million as well as substantial legal fees. A subsequent police raid on his home reportedly found guns, drugs and videotapes of women using the lavatory as well as underage girls in sexual poses.

Berry escaped what could have been serious child sex abuse charges as a result of this when his prosecutor was embroiled in a separate scandal. Admitting solely to possessing marijuana, Berry got off with a six-month suspended prison sentence.

The man who wrote Johnny B. Goode often had a hard time living up to that injunction himself.


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Re: Chuck Berry

#1569921

Post by elvis4life »

http://nypost.com/2017/03/21/the-dark-past-of-chuck-berrys-scandal-filled-sex-life/

Chuck Berry was more than a rock icon — he was also a huge pervert

By Bruce Golding

March 21, 2017 | 12:48am

When it came to sex and drugs, rock ‘n’ roll legend Chuck Berry rang all the bells — and then some.

Berry, who died of natural causes on Saturday at age 90, is widely credited with helping create rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s with a string of hits including “Johnny B. Goode” and “Roll Over Beethoven.”

But he would come to set a standard for rock-star depravity that few of his disciples would hope — or even want — to match.

Following two trips to the slammer — first at the height of his fame in the early 1960s for transporting a 14-year-old girl across state lines for sex, and again in 1979 for tax evasion — Berry was busted over a 1990 drug raid on his estate in Wentzville, Mo.

Although authorities suspected him of transporting huge loads of cocaine in his guitar case as part of a multimillion-dollar drug operation, the search only turned up about two ounces of pot, some hashish, two rifles and a shotgun, as well as more than $122,000 in cash.

But the cops also found a huge stash of pornography, including dozens of videotapes, trays of photographic slides and books — some of which appeared to show underage girls.

Berry, who publicly denied ever using coke, was charged with pot possession and three counts of child abuse for the underage porn.

He sued the county prosecutor, William J. Hannah, accusing him of filing malicious and politically motivated charges, and later cut a no-jail plea deal in which the child-abuse charges were dismissed and he dropped his civil case.

Chuck Berry poses for a portrait in a scene from the movie “Go Johnny Go.”
Michael Ochs Archives

The seizure of Berry’s porn collection, however, led to a scandalous 1993 report in the since-defunct Spy magazine that went way beyond the earlier scandals — revealing a penchant for sexual fetishes involving bodily excretions and a predilection for spying on women in bathrooms.

The magazine described a homemade video in which Berry and “an attractive blond white woman” both relieved themselves during a New Year’s Eve romp in the bathroom of a hotel suite in Lake Tahoe, Nev.

The report also detailed how Berry allegedly installed hidden cameras in the women’s restroom at the Southern Air restaurant in Wentzville after he bought it in 1987. One camera “was evidently behind the toilet seat,” according to Spy, while others captured “aerial views of the toilets’ contents during the seconds after the women stood but before they flushed.”

The recordings were then reportedly “painstakingly” edited and compiled in a pair of “toilet tapes” that showed hundreds of women and girls “in the act of relieving themselves.” “Sometimes the frame is frozen for a few seconds, lingering on moments that must have been considered particularly moving,” Spy reported.

In 1994, Berry settled for $830,000 a class-action suit filed by dozens of women who claimed they had been taped using the bathroom, and also settled a similar suit filed by a former restaurant worker and another woman for $310,000.

Chuck Berry performs at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis, Minn., on July 1, 1984.
Michael Ochs Archives

Chuck Berry with wife Themetta in 2011
UPI

Berry was also publicly shamed when the High Society nudie magazine in January 1990 published photos of him posing naked with different women, with the publication claiming to be “the only magazine with the balls to show Chuck’s berries.”

The “School Days” singer’s first brush with the law came as a youth, when he was sent to reformatory for three years for pulling off an armed carjacking with a pair of buddies.

After getting sprung, he got a cosmetology degree and worked as a beautician, and in 1948 married Themetta “Toddy” Suggs, with whom he had four kids.

His music career began in the early 1950s. Berry scored his first hit in 1955 with “Maybellene.”

But by 1959, he was in trouble again, busted over a racially charged incident at a dance at the Meridian, Miss., high school.

According to Berry’s autobiography, “one of the girls threw her arms around me and hung a soul-searching kiss that I let hang a second too long.”

Someone shouted out that “this n—-r asked my sister for a date!” and a mob chased him outside, where the cops caught him hiding in a nearby building.

Berry was charged with disturbing the peace — which he settled by spending a night in jail and surrendering the $700 seized from his pockets.

Chuck Berry poses for a portrait circa 1958.
Michael Ochs Archives

That incident paled in comparison, however, with the case brought later that year, when he was charged with violating the federal Mann Act — also known as the White Slave Traffic Act — which prohibits transporting women across state lines for “prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”

The victim in question was a 14-year-old waitress and prostitute whom Berry picked up while traveling in Mexico and brought back to St. Louis to work as a hostess at his Club Bandstand nightclub.

Berry — who later claimed the girl told him she was 21 — fired her after several weeks, after which she was busted for prostitution and told the cops that Berry repeatedly had sex with her while they were on the road, including in the back of his Cadillac.

Berry was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to the maximum five years in the slammer by Judge George Moore, who told him “I have seen your kind before” and denied him bail pending appeal.

“I would not turn this man loose to go out and prey on a lot of ignorant Indian girls and colored girls, and white girls, if any,” he added.

The conviction was overturned based on racist remarks made by the judge, but a second jury also convicted Berry and he wound up serving 20 months behind bars, during which time he wrote several songs.

Chuck Berry performs on stage in Crocus City Hall on April 14, 2014, in Moscow, Russia.
Getty Images

The lyrics to one of them, the 1964 widely covered “Promised Land,” recount a cross-country trip from Norfolk, Va., to Los Angeles — even though Berry said prison officials “were not so generous as to offer a map of any kind, for fear of providing the route for an escape.”

Berry ran afoul of the law again in 1979, when he was slapped with tax charges and quickly struck a plea deal in which he admitted cheating the feds out of $110,000 in income taxes.

He twice broke into tears during his sentencing, at which the judge slapped him with 120 days behind bars and four years’ probation.

The court session came little more than a month after Berry had entertained then-President Jimmy Carter and his family on the lawn of the White House.

‘Those who knew him well told me about what a wonderful family man he was. He was a walking contradiction, that’s for sure.’ - Bruce Pegg on Chuck Berry

Years later, Berry admitted the tax case “was no bum rap” — but claimed that the government had inflated its losses.

“It was straight, true. It was a bum rap in the sense that . . . it was about 15 percent that they added, but that’s nothing to kick about,” he told Goldmine magazine. “In other words, they were about 85 percent right and 15 percent wrong.”

Berry long cultivated a reputation as a cheapskate, in large part because he used local “pick-up” bands while on tour instead of hiring regular performers, often resulting in sloppy performances with the musicians he met just moments before hitting the stage.

In 1987 — a year after his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — he even admitted that he became a rock ‘n’ roller for the money, and that “the Big Band era is my era.”

“Rock ‘n’ roll accepted me and paid me, even though I loved the big bands,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

Chuck Berry’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
Getty Images

“I went that way because I wanted a home of my own,” he said. “I had a family. I had to raise them. Don’t leave out the economics. No way.”

Later that year, Berry was accused of punching a woman in the mouth during an early morning dispute at the Gramercy Park Hotel.

Friends described victim Marilyn O’Brien Boteler as a 30-something rock singer who dated Berry — whom she slapped with a $5 million suit that claimed she needed five stitches as result of the smack.

Berry was also charged with assault but failed to appear in court in June 1988, leading to a bench warrant for his arrest.

He later plea-bargained to a lesser charge of harassment and was sentenced to a $250 fine.

Author Bruce Pegg, who wrote a 2002 biography titled “Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Times of Chuck Berry,” described the musician as a complicated man.

While Pegg said he believed the Mann Act conviction “was racist in nature” and the videotape scandal “began with a personal grudge,” he also said Berry was no saint and someone who “kept on giving everyone a 2-by-4 big enough to hit him with.

“Yet at the same time, those who knew him well told me about what a wonderful family man he was,” Pegg added.

“He was a walking contradiction, that’s for sure.”




Topic author
Mister Moon

Re: Chuck Berry

#1570056

Post by Mister Moon »

Nobody ever said a great musician had to be a nice chap.

I've got a rockin' pneumonia, I need a shot of rhythm and blues.




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Re: Chuck Berry

#1570130

Post by brian »

You'd think Chuck Berry would have been very rich just from songwriting royalties.



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James27
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Re: Chuck Berry

#1570464

Post by James27 »

All James Brown's musicians complained about how "difficult" he was too, sometimes fining them for bum notes or being late or appearing high or with a hang-over. I think he had good reason for being "difficult" and that reason is perfectionism.

Now, Chuck Berry was much less perfectionistic, especially in later years, about his live performances, often playing out of tune himself and not caring too much, and often playing with shabby local pick-up bands, travelling alone from town to town, state to state, with just his bags. LOL He used to say "that's they way we do it !" when spotted with his bags at an airport. So funny. He was definitely a penny-pincher, but what a music genius !

Sometimes, once in a blue moon, the local pick-up band wasn't so shabby as Bruce Springsteen remembers of his soon-to-be-famous band once backing up Chuck in a 70s concert ! (see "Hail Hail Rock 'n' Roll interview footage) !

Of course, there were exceptions like this one:

By the mid-80s Keith Richards decided to offer him a top-notch band for his special celebration in a movie, and it was noticeable. The end result showed Chuck in absolute top form, although they had to re-do some (or all?) of his vocals in a studio later, because Chuck had blown out his voice at another show prior to the main filmed one :shock: 8) Rock 'N' Roll !


Joe Krein interview with Sherril Nielsen: "YOU KNOW YOU FORGET HOW GOOD HE REALLY WAS. I SAID MY GOODNESS. YOU KNOW WHEN YOU ARE WITH HIM YOU ARE SO WRAPPED UP DOING THE SHOW, BUT HERE NOW 20 YEARS LATER, I HEAR HIM AND REALIZE WHAT A GREAT TALENT HE WAS. HE WAS THE REAL DEAL.


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Re: Chuck Berry

#1570665

Post by elvis4life »

http://www.showbiz411.com/2017/03/22/listen-chuck-berry-sounds-amazing-on-his-posthumous-single-big-boys-is-its-a-total-hit-he-even-sings-in-french

(Listen) Chuck Berry Sounds Amazing on His Posthumous Single “Big Boys” — It’s a Total Hit, He Even Sings in French

by Roger Friedman - March 22, 2017 11:59 am

Chuck Berry recorded a whole new album right before he died. “Chuck” will be released on June 16th. The first single, “Big Boys,” is so great– a total hit. Chuck sings and plays guitar like it’s 1959. Why didn’t he do this five years ago? Well, at least he did it. The albums features guest spots from Gary Clark Jr., Tom Morello, Nathaniel Rateliff, as well as some of Chuck’s kids and grandkids, who all have the music gene.

You’re going to listen to this a few times. In dreary times, it’s a real pick me up:




elvis4life
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Re: Chuck Berry

#1570667

Post by elvis4life »

And here's the preorder folks:

1.Wonderful Woman
2.Big Boys
3.You Go To My Head
4.3/4 Time (Enchiladas)
5.Darlin'
6.Lady B. Goode
7.She Still Loves You
8.Jamaica Moon
9.Dutchman
10.Eyes Of Man




Topic author
poormadpeter2

Re: Chuck Berry

#1570677

Post by poormadpeter2 »

From what I can gather, the notion that Berry recorded the album in his final years isn't REALLY true. One report has said that he was working on it on and off from the late 1970s through to 2014!



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Re: Chuck Berry

#1570909

Post by TJ »

poormadpeter2 wrote:From what I can gather, the notion that Berry recorded the album in his final years isn't REALLY true. One report has said that he was working on it on and off from the late 1970s through to 2014!
Yes, the journalist who witnessed "Big Boys" being recorded said it was during the Bush presidency, so it's at least nine years old.


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James27
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Re: Chuck Berry

#1571382

Post by James27 »

I've heard it and it sounds great, witty macho lyrics, great storyline, great stinging guitar, what a fine final goodbye and reminder of how great he was.


Joe Krein interview with Sherril Nielsen: "YOU KNOW YOU FORGET HOW GOOD HE REALLY WAS. I SAID MY GOODNESS. YOU KNOW WHEN YOU ARE WITH HIM YOU ARE SO WRAPPED UP DOING THE SHOW, BUT HERE NOW 20 YEARS LATER, I HEAR HIM AND REALIZE WHAT A GREAT TALENT HE WAS. HE WAS THE REAL DEAL.
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