Saw Chuck 3 times.  GREAT once...at the Toronto Pop Festival/Varsity Stadium.  Crappy in Winnipeg.  Backing band were amatreurs.  His fault.  He was too cheap to carry his own 'show'.  Average in the middle.  GREAT R 'n' R song writer.  Told easy to relate to stories.  Everybody who matters recorded his songs.

He made more of a mark than most.

Let 'er RIP Chuck.

Oddly enough, Chuck Berry made headlines last October, when he announced on his 90th birthday that he would be releasing his first album since 1979, a collection of mostly new originals on an LP simply called "Chuck" (see cover shot, below.)

It was supposed to be out in 2017, but to my knowledge has not been released - although I'm betting it soon will be now that he's passed away. The label, Dualtone Music Group, still has it listed as "coming soon" on its website.  

From October:  Chuck Berry, 90, will release his first new album in nearly 40 years

unclefester wrote:

Tonight I just finished watching Mr. Berry's porn tapes (they're freely available via Google)  

Some find different ways to grieve


K.
 

It’s only natural that when a music icon dies, most of what is remembered about him is the good stuff.
 
While Bilboard mentions his run-ins with the law, the obit in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis is the city where Berry was born, resided and died on Saturday) goes much deeper into his clouded past.
 
“In the summer of 1944, after graduating from Sumner High School, he and two friends hopped into his Oldsmobile for a trip to California and robbed several stores in western Missouri to pay for car repairs. When the Olds broke down near Columbia, the trio was busted on robbery and weapons charges, and Berry spent three years in the Algoa reformatory in Jefferson City.”
 
Fast forward to 1958.
 
“When Berry’s Cadillac broke down near St. Charles with a pistol under the driver’s seat and a young white woman from Kansas in the passenger seat, he was arrested on a weapons charge, and police tried in vain to get the teenager to implicate Berry on a morals rap.
 
The concealed-weapons charge was reduced, but soon Berry was arrested again. An American-Indian teenager he had met near El Paso, Texas, and hired to work at Club Bandstand was suspected of being a prostitute. Berry was charged with violating the Mann Act, the law that made it illegal to transport a minor across state lines for immoral purposes.
 
After a trial marred by racist innuendo and an appeal that acknowledged judicial misconduct, his conviction was upheld and Berry was sentenced to prison in April 1962."
 
And finally…
 
“...in 1979, his career-long insistence on being paid in cash upfront cost him his freedom. He was convicted for under-reporting his income to the IRS and served four months in the Lompoc Prison Camp in California.
 
What’s most interesting to me about all this is that during his second stint behind bars, Berry actually wrote two of his most famous songs – “Nadine” and the aptly titled “No Particular Place To Go.”
 
He certainly wasn’t perfect and even if you weren’t a fan of his output, there’s no denying his massive influence on pop music.
 
St. Louis Post-Dispatch obit

RadioActive wrote:

He certainly wasn’t perfect and even if you weren’t a fan of his output, there’s no denying his massive influence on pop music.
 

Two words.  Johnny Cash.