Casey Henry
As you know, Murphy and I were vacationing, driving all over six different states last week. Murphy told you some about it, but there is oh-so-much-more to tell. Especially about seeing Chuck Berry play in St. Louis. He plays once a month at Blueberry Hill’s downstairs concert venue, called the Duck Room. Every month it is sold out, and every month they don’t announce the next month’s date until after he’s already played. So you have to watch the website like a hawk. When the tickets for the September concert went on sale I was driving from Nashville to Clarkesville, GA. I had planned to pull over and order them (just think about this next time you’re about to text while driving), but the reception in the mountains was too bad and I was afraid it wouldn’t go through. So I called Murphy and got her to order them on her computer. Success!
We planned to arrive at the venue an hour before the show, right about the time the doors opened. Too late, as it turned out. Unbeknownst to us there are not seats for everyone in the Duck Room, so unless you get there early enough to get one, you’re standing up the whole time. So we stood up, which I hate, but I couldn’t complain as most of the other folks standing were much, much older than I am. And Murphy said if we had gotten a seat, she would have felt compelled to give it up to one of the elderly folks, so even though our feet hurt, we weren’t wracked with guilt.
The opening band (a local group called the Transmitters) played for an hour and they were quite good and very enjoyable. Since everyone was there just to see Chuck Berry, Murphy wondered why they had an opening band at all. I supposed it was so that they could sell more beer!
We speculated that Chuck would play for an hour, which he did, almost to the minute. When he came out—they opened with “Roll Over Beethoven”—it was instantly obvious that he still has charisma to spare, and he still has his guitar chops, and he can still sing. We had worried that the show might be tired renditions of the songs, sounding just like the 40-year-old recordings, but all the material felt lived-in and still vibrant (although I found it a little creepy to hear an 82-year-old man sing “Sweet Little Sixteen”). Chuck’s singing style is a little bit like talking, not in a rap way, but in a straightforward, no-frills delivery kind of way. It struck me as a brilliant adaptation as it’s probably physically easier to pull off and is less dependent on pitch than traditional hold-out-long-notes singing.
And his guitar playing—WOW! He uses very few notes but has impeccable timing and huge tone. It’s almost an impressionistic or minimalist guitar style. The notes he chooses are perfectly placed and couldn’t be more bluesy if they tried. It was a joy to hear. Granted he did occasionally forget what key they were playing in (a couple times he turned around and asked his son Charles, who plays guitar in the band, what key they were in) but after all he is 82 and some exceptions can be made. Also, he wasn’t wearing glasses so I suspect that he couldn’t actually see the neck, making it even more difficult to find his way back to the correct key once he got off.
His daughter also played in his band and she is a monster harmonica player! I’m not a harmonica fan, so it takes someone who is really, really good to make it bearable for me, and she was killer.
The closing song was “Johnny B. Goode,” of course. The club’s staff ushered a bunch of women up on stage to dance and Chuck played his way off the stage, walking into his dressing room while still picking. The door closed behind him and thanks to the wireless pickup we could still hear him! No encore.
I’m so glad we got to see Chuck Berry play. It was worth the long drive (actually, our hotel was so awesome it alone was almost worth the drive: Moonrise Hotel) and our dinner the next night (at RowHouse) was also worth the ten-hour drive from Nashville on it’s own merits. But you’ll hear more about that in the future!
