Chuck Berry performing in St. Louis, MO, at The Duck Room on Wednesday night.
Chuck Berry At the Duck Room at Blueberry Hill in St. Louis on Wednesday
Pigs flew, snowballs thrived in hell, and Chuck Berry, of all people, lost the backbeat in St. Louis. Rock and roll as we once knew it is dead; long live rock and roll.
Berry, 84, made news when on New Years Day he collapsed while performing at Chicago's Congress Theatre. Exhaustion was the given reason for the hero's troubled performance.
Wednesday he was back on stage for his regular monthly appearance at an intimate basement club in native St. Louis. For the first time in decades, Berry, the inventor of a sweet-sounding but rebellious art form, had something to prove.
"You're calling for the fast ones to see if I can still cut the mustard," Berry said midway through his hour-long set, after some of the more blissful members of the crowd shouted for the rapid-beat Maybellene. But by the time he began faintly singing about a disloyal woman who had "started doing the things you used to do," it was already clear that Berry wasn't near capable of doing the things he himself used to do.
In a sparkly purple shirt and a white ship-captain's hat, the still-lean octogenarian appeared eager and lucid, but his playing was erratic - his red Gibson ES-335 producing more wrong notes than a tone-deaf cat on a hot tin keyboard.
The singer who once crooned in a poetic and succinct manner now did so unsurely and flat, with iconic original lyrics reduced to suggested text, to be adhered to or not. After Nat King Cole's tender ballad (I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons was aborted early, an embarrassed and apologetic Berry made mention of the Chicago "front page" incident. "If I do something weird up here," he said, "I'll make it up to you."
And yes, on Rock and Roll Music, the 1957 manifesto which assured a young generation that a vital new music had a "backbeat, you can't lose it," Berry did precisely that on a shambling version that his valiant four-piece band (plus daughter Ingrid Berry on vocals and harmonica) couldn't rescue.
It's hard to say what the cheery sold-out room of 300 was thinking; if they were noticing Berry's diminished capacity to rock - and they must have been - they weren't showing it. They applauded everything from Berry's trademark stage scoot (not really a true duck walk any longer) to the naughty novelty My Ding-A-Ling. That parts of Roll Over Beethoven were played on a couple of different occasions didn't seem to matter.
Speaking for myself, singing along with the lessened master to his Johnny B. Goode was something of a muted thrill - a buzz somewhere between buying lampshades with a befuddled Thomas Edison and joining Jesus in Handel's Messiah chorus.
A scan of the room revealed an audience ranging in age from 25 to 65, roughly. Many of them joined in on the freeing chorus to School Days: "Hail, hail rock 'n' roll, deliver me from the days of old." But what days of old are we singing about?
Children for years have listened to same music as their parents. Rock lives on, but the edgy rebellion has softened. And now the music's inventor is past it too. Who's going to tell Tchaikovsky the news this time?