Chuck Berry
Chuck Berry can be booked through this site. Chuck Berry entertainment booking site. Chuck Berry
is available for public concerts and events. Chuck Berry can be booked for
private events and Chuck Berry can be booked for corporate events and
meetings through this Chuck Berry booking page.
Unlike most middle agents that would mark
up the performance or appearance fee for Chuck Berry, we act as YOUR agent in
securing Chuck Berry at the best possible price. We go over the rider for
Chuck Berry and work directly with Chuck Berry or the responsible agent for
Chuck Berry to secure the talent for your event. We become YOUR agent,
representing YOU, the buyer.
In fact, in most cases we can negotiate for
the acquisition of Chuck Berry for international dates and newer promoters
providing you meet professional requirements.
Chuck Berry Biography
Of all the early breakthrough rock & roll artists, none is
more important to the development of the music than Chuck Berry. He is
its greatest songwriter, the main shaper of its instrumental voice, one
of its greatest guitarists, and one of its greatest performers. Quite
simply, without him, there would be no Beatles, Rolling Stones, Beach
Boys, Bob Dylan, nor a myriad others. There would be no standard Chuck
Berry guitar intro, the instrument's clarion call to get the joint
rockin' in any setting. The clippety-clop rhythms of rockabilly would
not have been mainstreamed into the now standard 4/4 rock & roll
beat. There would be no obsessive wordplay by modern-day tunesmiths; in
fact, the whole history (and artistic level) of rock & roll
songwriting would have been much poorer without him. Like Brian Wilson
said, he wrote all of the great songs and came up with all the
rock'n'roll beats. Those who do not claim him as a seminal influence
or profess a liking for his music and showmanship show their ignorance
of rock's development as well as his place as the music's first great
creator. Elvis may have fueled rock & roll's imagery, but Chuck
Berry was its heartbeat and original mindset.
He was born Charles Edward Anderson Berry to a large family in St.
Louis. A bright pupil, Berry developed a love for poetry and hard blues
early on, winning a high school talent contest with a guitar-and-vocal
rendition of Jay McShann's big band number, Confessin' the Blues.
With some local tutelage from the neighborhood barber, Berry progressed
from a four-string tenor guitar up to an official six-string model and
was soon working the local East St. Louis club scene, sitting in
everywhere he could. He quickly found out that black audiences liked a
wide variety of music and set himself to the task of being able to
reproduce as much of it as possible. What he found they really
liked -- besides the blues and Nat King Cole tunes -- was the sight and
sound of a black man playing white hillbilly music, and Berry's
showmanlike flair, coupled with his seemingly inexhaustible supply of
fresh verses to old favorites, quickly made him a name on the circuit.
In 1954, he ended up taking over pianist Johnny Johnson's small combo
and a residency at the Cosmopolitan Club soon made the Chuck Berry Trio
the top attraction in the black community, with Ike Turner's Kings of
Rhythm their only real competition.
But Berry had bigger ideas; he yearned to make records, and a trip to
Chicago netted a two-minute conversation with his idol Muddy Waters,
who encouraged him to approach Chess Records. Upon listening to Berry's
homemade demo tape, label president Leonard Chess professed a liking
for a hillbilly tune on it named Ida Red and quickly scheduled a
session for May 21, 1955. During the session the title was changed to
Maybellene and rock & roll history was born. Although the record
only made it to the mid-20s on the Billboard pop chart, its overall
influence was massive and groundbreaking in its scope. Here was finally
a black rock & roll record with across-the-board appeal, embraced
by white teenagers and Southern hillbilly musicians (a young Elvis
Presley, still a full year from national stardom, quickly added it to
his stage show), that for once couldn't be successfully covered by a
pop singer like Snooky Lanson on Your Hit Parade. Part of the secret to
its originality was Berry's blazing 24-bar guitar solo in the middle of
it, the imaginative rhyme schemes in the lyrics, and the sheer thump of
the record, all signaling that rock & roll had arrived and it was
no fad. Helping to put the record over to a white teenage audience was
the highly influential New York disc jockey Alan Freed, who had been
given part of the writers' credit by Chess in return for his spins and
plugs. But to his credit, Freed was also the first white DJ/promoter to
consistently use Berry on his rock & roll stage show extravaganzas
at the Brooklyn Fox and Paramount theaters (playing to predominately
white audiences); and when Hollywood came calling a year or so later,
also made sure that Chuck appeared with him in Rock! Rock! Rock!, Go,
Johnny, Go!, and Mister Rock'n'Roll. Within a years' time, Chuck had
gone from a local St. Louis blues picker making 15 dollars a night to
an overnight sensation commanding over a hundred times that, arriving
at the dawn of a new strain of popular music called rock & roll.
The hits started coming thick and fast over the next few years, every
one of them about to become a classic of the genre: Roll Over
Beethoven, Thirty Days, Too Much Monkey Business, Brown Eyed
Handsome Man, You Can't Catch Me, School Day, Carol, Back in
the U.S.A., Little Queenie, Memphis, Tennessee, Johnny B. Goode,
and the tune that defined the moment perfectly, Rock and Roll Music.
Berry was not only in constant demand, touring the country on mixed
package shows and appearing on television and in movies, but smart
enough to know exactly what to do with the spoils of a suddenly
successful show business career. He started investing heavily in St.
Louis area real estate and, ever one to push the envelope, opened up a
racially mixed nightspot called the Club Bandstand in 1958 to the
consternation of uptight locals. These
were not the plans of your average R&B singers who contented
themselves with a wardrobe of flashy suits, a new Cadillac, and the
nicest house in the black section. Berry was smart with plenty of
business savvy and was already making plans to open an amusement park
in nearby Wentzville. When the St. Louis hierarchy found out that an
underage hat-check girl Berry hired had also set up shop as a
prostitute at a nearby hotel, trouble came down on Berry like a
sledgehammer on a fly. Charged with transporting a minor over state
lines (the Mann Act), Berry endured two trials and was sentenced to
federal prison for two years as a result.
He emerged from prison a moody, embittered man. But two very important
things had happened in his absence. First, British teenagers had
discovered his music and were making his old songs hits all over again.
Second, and perhaps most important, America had discovered the Beatles
and the Rolling Stones, both of whom based their music on Berry's
style, with the Stones' early albums looking like a Berry song list.
Rather than being resigned to the has-been circuit, Berry found himself
in the midst of a worldwide beat boom with his music as the
centerpiece. He came back with a clutch of hits ( Nadine, No
Particular Place to Go, You Never Can Tell ), toured Britain in
triumph, and appeared on the big screen with his British disciples in
the groundbreaking T.A.M.I. Show in 1964.
Berry had moved with the times and found a new audience in the bargain
and when the cries of yeah-yeah-yeah were replaced with peace signs,
Berry altered his live act to include a passel of slow blues and
quickly became a fixture on the festival and hippie ballroom circuit.
After a disastrous stint with Mercury Records, he returned to Chess in
the early '70s and scored his last hit with a live version of the
salacious nursery rhyme, My Ding a Ling, yielding Berry his first
official gold record. By decade's end, he was as in demand as ever,
working every oldies revival show, TV special, and festival that was
thrown his way. But once again, troubles with the law reared their ugly
head and 1979 saw Berry headed back to prison, this time for income tax
evasion. Upon release this time, the creative days of Chuck Berry
seemed to have come to an end. He appeared as himself in the Alan Freed
bio-pic, American Hot Wax, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll
Hall of Fame, but steadfastly refused to record any new material or
even issue a live album. His live performances became increasingly
erratic, with Berry working with terrible backup bands and turning in
sloppy, out-of-tune performances that did much to tarnish his
reputation with younger fans and oldtimers alike. In 1987, he published
his first book, Chuck Berry: The Autobiography, and the same year saw
the film release of what will likely be his lasting legacy, the
rockumentary Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll, which included live footage from
a 60th-birthday concert with Keith Richards as musical director and the
usual bevy of superstars coming out for guest turns. But for all of his
off-stage exploits and seemingly ongoing troubles with the law, Chuck
Berry remains the epitome of rock & roll, and his music will endure
long after his private escapades have faded from memory. Because when
it comes down to his music, perhaps John Lennon said it best, If you
were going to give rock & roll another name, you might call it
'Chuck Berry'. ~ Cub Koda, All Music Guide
Written by Cub Koda