In the beginning there was a chuck

Memory of the legendary musician Chuck Berry

On March 18, in the United States, at the age of 90, Chuck Berry died, a man, largely thanks to which rock music appeared. In the 1950s, Berry came up with his own style of playing the guitar, behaved on stage and beyond as a rock star and wrote songs that were not all-bored at that time. For dozens of guitarists, he became a teacher, he inspired hundreds of thousands to pick up the instrument. In 2017, Chuck Berry was preparing to release the first studio album in almost 40 years-and after that “hang shoes on the wall”. Medusa recalls the legendary musician.

Chuck Berry did not invented rock and roll and was not a pioneer in creating an accelerated rhythm end-blouse, he just played very well, carefully looked around, took the best from the best and kept amazingly on the stage. The roots of his proprietary solo can be found in the music of the T-Bon of Walker; The raised bit from his songs by the mid-1950s (when Berry released the first hits) was already well known; The manner of writing popular songs, in which a rather deep meaning was hidden, goes back to country. But to Chuck, no one together united this together.

First of all, Chuck Berry is a guitar. Having studied the city blues in the early 1950s, Chuck discharged individual techniques, shifted the focus to repeated phrases in solo parties, developed several of his own techniques on how to play clockwork and quick losses, and thereby created modern rock guitar.

About Jimi Hendricks say that he created a dictionary of rock music; So, Berry came up with a letter for this dictionary. According to the guitarist Ted Vejent, if you do not know every guitar phrase from Arsenal Berry, playing rock music will not work, and this is pure truth. At the same time, any guitarist knows these phrases, even if he does not suspect this-Berry's style of game entered the canon of rock music so firmly and spread so much.

And, of course, Berry kept on stage like a real rock star. He realized early that you need to not only play well, but also look good, but also find your own style - behaving before the audience is not like others. Chuck held on the stage cheekily, walked with a branded “duck gait” and looked as “cool” as possible - now, of course, it seems to be clamped compared to modern guitarists, but at that time it was an incredible breakthrough.

The songs that Berry wrote were knocked out quite strongly from the canvas of popular music of the 1950s. There was a lot of irony in them, he managed to tell the complex stories about the search for the missing daughter , wrote about cars and sex - that is, what was most interested in teenagers in those years. These are not country, not blues, not pop music, but at the same time both, and another, and the third, and something else completely new. It was impossible to say exactly that he was black or in music that he was black - including therefore, he became a star both among the black audience and among the whites. Together with Elvis, who also connected a country with blues, Berry headed the victorious procession of rock and roll.

Berry's career developed extremely unevenly. In fact, he wrote all his main hits by the beginning of the 1960s-and they were sold by million circulations, largely with the presentation of the famous radio host of Alan Frida, who came up with the term “rock and roll”. Fried was listed as the co -author of the first hit Berry and received deductions, although in fact he did not write songs. Then Chaka began to resume, and the style formed by him gradually began to get out of fashion. Another blow is a year and a half prison for transporting a minor girl from one state to another (then this was considered a crime). The verdict was sentenced in 1963, the court stated that Berry had an arrested 14-year-old Indianka; He claimed that he was driving to work at his institution, and accused the court of racism.

While Chuck was sitting, it turned out that his music gave unexpected fruits in the UK. Berry, along with Robert Johnson, was one of the main sources of inspiration for Keith Richards from The Rolling Stones, one of the most influential guitarists in history. Chaka adored another Briton, Eric Clapton, among his fans were, of course, The Beatles. The British Invasion (as the Wave of the popularity of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in the United States was called the popularity of the popularity of the public in Berry himself.

After the prison, Chuck returned to music, recorded several albums, there were even hits, but in general he slowly disappeared from the field of view. Glory went about Berry as an extremely unpleasant person in his work, with whom it was never necessary to agree, respected only money. Since the 1970s, he spent 100 days a year in tours, traveling alone-Berry was sure that in any club of any city there was a drummer, bassist and guitarist who knew his songs, and was generally not far from the truth. The performances often took place disgusting, Chuck himself treated them only as a way to earn money (he always took cash and always before the concert, and not after) and, for example, could cut the concert at half the song if the agreed time was released.

Although Chuck has not written a single new song over the past forty years and did not experiment anymore, playing only in his corporate identity-everything that he did and came up with in the 1950s was enough to enter his name in the history of rock music. Chuck understood well that he really came up with all this - and he was not shy about teaching his colleagues on the stage. There is a legendary video where he explains to the middle -aged whale of Richards, how to play one piece from his song correctly, and Richards does not succeed. Once, by the way, he moved Richards - he in the dressing room touched the guitar of Chuck, and so one legendary guitarist hit the other. “It was his main hit ,” Richards joked. It was Keith who organized the 60th anniversary of Berry, during which Chuck played on the same stage with Richards, and with Clapton, and with other musicians, which, in fact, created.

It seems that Berry never ceased to concert. In recent years, he was played by his children Charles and Ingrid and other session musicians; There was no more speeches about hiring local performers right in front of the concert. In the fall of 2016, he announced that he was going to release the first album in 38 years, which has already been recorded. The plate was supposed to exit in 2017 and get the name "Chuck"; The 90-year-old musician, who did not stop making concerts from time to time, called the tribute to his wife Temette: he promised that after the album released “hanging shoes on a nail” and tie with music. On March 18, Chaka Berry was gone.

Pavel Borisov