{"id":109084,"date":"2017-03-21T17:20:48","date_gmt":"2017-03-21T21:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=109084"},"modified":"2017-03-21T18:15:14","modified_gmt":"2017-03-21T22:15:14","slug":"mr-berry-and-mrs-blavatsky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/21\/mr-berry-and-mrs-blavatsky\/","title":{"rendered":"Mr. Berry and Mrs. Blavatsky"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

From the cover of Chuck Berry in Memphis<\/i>, 1967.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

My first girlfriend grew up in Saint\u00a0Louis and, as a young girl, would sneak over to Chuck Berry\u2019s house and sit by his guitar-shaped swimming pool. There were always a few little blonde nymphets lounging by his pool, and if you were clever, you could get there by slipping\u00a0around one of the hedges\u2014you never had to go near the main house, which was, so I hear, out of bounds. But the pool was open, and this would\u2019ve been in the late sixties, back when his songs were part of our national currency but no longer on the radio: before \u201cMy Ding-a-Ling\u201d became a number one record, swelling his bank account but degrading his currency precipitously, turning a national treasure into a dirty joke. Imagine if the Beatles\u2019 biggest hit was \u201cOctopus\u2019s Garden.\u201d It\u2019s worse than that.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook, I ain\u2019t no big shit, all right<\/a>,\u201d Berry told Rolling Stone <\/em>in 2001:\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nat King Cole\u2019s diction, Maya Angelou\u2019s poetry, Duke Ellington\u2019s elegance \u2026 My music, it is very simple stuff. I wanted to play blues. But I wasn\u2019t blue enough. I wasn\u2019t like Muddy Waters, people who really had it hard. In our house, we had food on the table. We were doing well compared to many. So I concentrated on this fun and frolic, these novelties. I wrote about cars because half the people had cars, or wanted them. I wrote about love, because everyone wants that. I wrote songs white people could buy, because that\u2019s nine pennies out of every dime. That was my goal: to look at my bank-book and see a million dollars there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At once overly modest and overly cynical, Berry undersells his gifts by a country mile. His lyrics (Maya Angelou\u2019s poetry? Really?) not only sing themselves, they sound like they\u2019ve been singing themselves forever:\u00a0\u201cAs I was\u00a0motorvating over the hill \u2026 \u201d\u00a0\u201cMy uncle took the message, and he wrote it on the wall \u2026 \u201d \u201cUp in the morning and out to school \u2026 \u201d \u201cShe moves around like a wayward summer breeze \u2026 \u201d They\u2019ve got the clarity and toughness of the best lines from Raymond Chandler, but they swing from here to\u00a0next Tuesday, and without them you\u2019d never get to Dylan\u2019s \u201cThe pump don\u2019t work \/ \u2019Cause the vandals took the handles.\u201d Not a chance.<\/p>\n

Those songs are part of my DNA, but I know next to nothing about their writer other than the occasional scrap of gossip\u2014about playing with unrehearsed pick-up bands, wanting to be paid cash on the barrelhead, and tales of run-ins with the law over crossing state lines with young women while being black. Race, he said, was not a factor in his songs, but of course it was one in his life.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0know, from my friend, that he loved having blonde girls sitting around his pool, because\u2014well, why not?\u2014and because then, as now, the Saint\u00a0Louis police didn\u2019t take kindly to the politics of cool or the mingling of races.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis girl Marcie was the one who dared me into going over with her,\u201d my friend told me:<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was a bad girl, she smoked behind the gym and dressed like one of the Shangri-La\u2019s, a Catholic-school uniform but way too tight. She\u2019d been there before, she knew how to get in. But I kept going over, and she moved on to other adventures. I\u2019d bring schoolbooks over and read them by the pool while the other girls were there with movie magazines. Things weren\u2019t so good at home, there were fights, but there I could sit and read my homework. Dickens. Dostoyevsky. \u2018Crime and Punishment<\/em>?\u2019 He saw what I was reading and gave me a funny look.<\/p>\n

\u201c \u2018Have you read it?\u2019 I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201c \u2018Yes I have,\u2019 he said and walked away.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a cousin who was interested in Eastern religions and spirituality. I was there with a book she\u2019d given me by Edgar Cayce, and he got very agitated, wanted to know if I believed in reincarnation and in the beyond. And he started telling me a story.<\/p>\n

\u201cBo Diddley had been backstage with him one time and was talking about magic and the radio. Back then a lot of people believed that the radio was magic, that sound waves traveled to different dimensions, maybe all the way to heaven. You ever get this little shiver in your spine, Bo Diddley asked him, like it\u2019s hot and cold at the same time? That means someone\u2019s been making love while a song of yours is on the radio. It goes right through the air and slips back into your soul. You know?<\/p>\n

\u201cI think Mr. Berry might\u2019ve chuckled a bit, but he was uneasy. He was a private man. It was one thing for teenage girls to come and sit by his pool, quite another for strangers to come into his soul unannounced and uninvited.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then, you ever get a sudden pain in your left foot, sharp, like a needle\u2019s gone into it? That means somebody died while your song was on the radio. Somebody died.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was too much. It spooked him, and he\u2019d gone to the library and checked out all the books they had on mysticism and magic. Madame Blavatsky and books on past lives and the occult. He read through most of them, but it made his head spin, and he stepped away from all of that.<\/p>\n

\u201c \u2018I don\u2019t know,\u2019 he said, and he shook his head. \u2018I wouldn\u2019t let any of them work on my car. Not one of them.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cHe pointed to my book.<\/p>\n

\u201c \u2018What do you think? Do you believe in heaven?\u2019 I sat there looking down. \u2018What about the devil? You believe in hell?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201c \u2018If you\u2019d been to my home, you wouldn\u2019t ask,\u2019 I said. \u2018You wouldn\u2019t ask that.\u00a0I don\u2019t know why I said that. It just came out. But his face changed, and his voice got soft.<\/p>\n

\u201c \u2018Do they hit you?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cI shook my head.<\/p>\n

\u201c \u2018Not ever?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cI shook my head.<\/p>\n

\u201c \u2018They ever hit you, you know you can come here.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I can\u2019t tell you why, but after, I never went back.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Brian Cullman is a writer and musician living in New York City.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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