Chuck Berry: An American Life - by RJ Smith

There‘s a new book out about Chuck Berry. Hachette Books was so kind to send me a review copy and I spent much time of my holidays to read through it. But with every chapter read I became more and more frustrated and angry. Until I came to RJ Smith‘s remarks on the next to last page:

“What we have is more interesting. A choice of threading through the details of his life or working around them completely – your call! - and simply hearing him. To pull the joy and poetry out of the music he created and have it take us where it wants to go – not where he went. To live our lives with it, and not live his life. That’s a lot.”

As the creators of this website we have made our choice a long time ago. These pages here are about the music of Chuck Berry and only about his music. We do not discuss any other aspects of Berry‘s life in this blog or on the main page. For us there were at least two very good reasons for this decision. For one, we are deeply convinced that Berry‘s music is much more entertaining than his criminal, sexual and business affairs. And secondly we think that with recordings and records we have at least a small factual base to build our research upon. RJ Smith in his new „Chuck Berry: An American Life“ decided to concentrate on all the other stuff instead.

Chuck Berry was a control freak, a sex maniac and business-wise everything but a nice person. His criminal records included armed robbery, tax evasion, and what we would call today child abuse, plus many more. All this is no new news. We have read about these in newspapers and books as well as all over the Internet.

RJ Smith quotes Berry saying he wants the people to tell the truth about him. But there are many truths. There is the truth about a strange man with a weird character and perverse habits. But there also is the truth about the musical artist whose output had a huge impact on what became popular music during the last 70 years.

It might have been interesting to discuss Berry’s personality from a psychological perspective. Or it might have been interesting to analyze how this pathological mindset affected Berry‘s music or lyrics.

None of this you will find in this book, though. Instead RJ Smith has taken a huge effort to document Berry‘s failings. Most has been known before and is documented in detail e.g. in Bruce Pegg‘s excellent biography. Smith dug even deeper into court documents and he tried to get quotes from witnesses not published before. However, most of the contents is a simple repetition from old sources such as Berry’s own autobiography – even repeating errors included.

Where Smith’s book enhances the previously published biographies is the coverage of Berry’s last years. That’s the advantage of a biographer who waits until his subject has deceased. So here we get a few additional pages about his latest tours, the release of his last record, and we learn how his family declared Berry incompetent.

Smith in many aspects tries to write a different biography and succeeds in doing so. He completely concentrates on Berry’s personal and business matters, almost ignoring his musical work. Only for one song Smith reserves a complete chapter: My Ding-A-Ling. And again the author accomplishes something different as this song was left out of any serious discussion about Berry’s œuvre so far.

One peculiarity of this text is a bit confusing for European readers: All over the book RJ Smith tries to find arguments to justify Berry’s behavior as a result of black versus white America. As being no part of the American society, we are not qualified to judge on RJ’s findings. From a musical point-of-view I think it is a bit far fetched to locate racially related hints in the lyrics of e.g. Promised Land.

Is this a book you want to read? If you love Chuck Berry, don’t do it. If you are interested in Chuck Berry’s music, there’s nothing to gain from reading it. But if you want to learn about Berry’s porn collection or any other aspect of his life, there’s almost too much information in “Chuck Berry: An American Life”. But in the end it definitely is “your call”: a choice of threading through the details of his life or working around them completely.

“Chuck Berry: An American Life” by RJ Smith (Hachette Books, ISBN 978-0-306-92163-6) is available in every better book store near you.