Chuck Berry’s Dark Side Was Jaw-Dropping

Chuck Berry’s Dark Side Was Jaw-Dropping

An absolute Titan of the music industry, Chuck Barry‘s contribution to contemporary sound is indisputable, with a road to stardom equally decorated by success and controversy. The father of rock forces each of us to ask ourselves whether we can separate the art from the artist. Chuck Barry was always getting up to no good, but things took a truly twisted turn in 1990. That was the year that officers raided Barry’s home, hoping to find evidence for a possession charge. Instead, they stumbled upon heinous proof of the rock star’s sinister side, but more on that later.

Chuck Barry was born on October 18th, 1926, to an unassuming middle-class family, being the fourth of six children. Barry was no stranger to a sense of community. Their neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri, however, was quite segregated in certain respects, specifically from a racial standpoint. Barry lived in such a segregated neighborhood that it took a fire for him to first see a white person, being only three years old. Barry recalled thinking that the firefighters’ faces were simply chalk-white with fear and having to deal with such a roaring blaze, but his father explained things to him properly.

Despite his somewhat isolated youth, Barry found a sense of true belonging in one specific place. From the very beginning, music was present in Barry’s life. Barry’s father was a local church deacon; the church choir familiarized him with music from an extremely young age, and he had joined the choir by the time he was six years old. One day, Chuck Barry and some of his friends went on a joyride in a stolen vehicle before sticking up several local businesses. Despite being a minor, he ended up scoring a ten-year sentence.

He would spend the next portion of his life at the Intermediate Reformatory for Young Men. In spite of his rather bleak situation, Barry still managed to make the most of things behind bars. Musically speaking, Barry didn’t skip a beat. In fact, he took it upon himself to form a musical quartet with some other convicts to sing for the reformatory’s church services. Their musical ensemble impressed everyone so much that they played at a handful of venues outside the confines of the prison.

After serving only three years of his sentence, they released Barry early on good behavior. It wasn’t long after tasting freedom that he started to turn his life around. After his release from the reformatory, Barry quickly established a new life for himself. In 1948, he married Themetta Tody Suggs. They would be together for the rest of his life. Soon after their marriage, they had their first child together. All of a sudden, Barry had a family of his own, but there was one problem plaguing his happiness: stardom was still relatively far off for this working family man.

Barry took on all kinds of jobs just to pay the bills. He labored as a factory worker, janitor, and beautician. After some hard work, Barry and his family were financially stable enough to purchase a lovely house, settling into their new home in 1950. After a small hiatus from music, Chuck Barry got back into the local gig scene in St. Louis. A show here and a gig there served as a source of reliable side income, but nothing more. Eventually, ambition kindled in the soon-to-be star’s heart, and he went in search of a record deal, his destination Chicago, the Windy City.

It was a recommendation from a friend that transformed Barry’s life forever. Muddy Waters advised Barry to contact Leonard Chess, the co-founder of Chess Records in Chicago. Barry did just that and soon secured a deal with the label. Within the same month, Barry recorded his breakout track, Maybelline. People went nuts for Maybelline, believed by many music scholars to be the first rock and roll song. Maybelline was the catalyst that spurred decades of success for Barry. Listeners were eager for more, and Barry was more than happy to oblige.

The creative floodgates had opened, and it would be a while before they dried up. To call Barry prolific would be a gross understatement. A slew of more singles were released in the wake of Maybelline, many of which were finding their way onto the charts. Hits included Rock and Roll Music, Johnny B. Goode, and Sweet Little Sixteen. With a cavalcade of instant classics, it came as no surprise that everybody wanted their piece of the money pie. Soon after the release of Maybelline, Barry found himself back in the court of law, only this time he was the prosecutor.

Much to his annoyance, Barry had noticed a couple of names claiming writing credit for his music, which of course guaranteed them a certain amount of royalties—royalties that Barry was unwilling to part with. He took them to court and was able to reclaim full writing credit for Maybelline and all the respective royalties. If music groups as popular as The Beatles are huge fans of your work, you know you’re doing something right. The late John Lennon once said that if you try to give rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Barry.

Barry’s role as a muse for bands like The Beatles made for some great musical hits, but there was a time when they took a little too much inspiration from his music. Barry’s publisher at the time, Big Seven Music, sued John Lennon over similarities between Barry’s song You Can’t Catch Me and The Beatles’ recently released song Come Together. They were finally able to come to a resolution when Lennon agreed to record some music for Big Seven. By the late fifties, the rising star seemed unstoppable.

He had attended and played at countless clubs and eventually decided to open one of his very own, naming the flashy new venue Barry’s Club Bandstand. As a testament to his mass appeal, Barry opened the club in a predominantly white district. The venue was indicative of his incredible success, but it also acted as the catalyst for one of the most disturbing points in Barry’s life. Barry found himself in a world of trouble after hiring a new waitress for his club. As it happens, he’d made the mistake of mixing business with pleasure, and the young woman turned out to be a young girl who was only fourteen years old.

Barry’s poor decisions ushered in a second sentence, five years behind bars. He ended up appealing the court’s decision and received a lower sentence of only three years. In the end, however, the star would only end up serving a mere one and a half years for his actions. Despite this apparent good fortune, he would never quite be the same after serving his second prison sentence. Close friends and co-workers noticed a dramatic shift in Chuck Barry’s temperament. Carl Perkins described the new Barry as distant and bitter.

But while the star wouldn’t quite reach the same heights of popularity as before, he was the furthest thing from unsuccessful. Despite his many personal low points, Barry’s career was far from flatlining. In fact, in many ways he reached new heights. By 1972, his music had reached the top of the charts, with his live rendition of My Ding-A-Ling being the song to finally do the trick. The artist hadn’t lost his touch, musically or otherwise. The seventies also marked a shift in focus for Barry.

By the seventies, Barry was no stranger to touring, but this would be the decade that he would hit it hard, trading time in the studio for more opportunities on stage. The mobile rock and roller had no trouble filling venues with nothing but well-earned confidence and his Gibson guitar. Barry attracted audiences to his shows not just for his music, but for the wild energy he displayed on stage. Chuck Barry‘s live performances weren’t just about the music; he famously delivered incredibly entertaining shows due in large part to his stage presence.

His explosive energy, paired with a respectable repertoire of signature dance moves like the duck walk, ensured that audiences were enraptured. During his heavy touring years of the seventies, Barry made a strange request to any venues that would have him: he demanded that they pay him in cash for his gigs, and you can bet he was making more than just spare change. Now, if they paid him in cash, then he wouldn’t necessarily have to report that income to the government. It was only well-planned tax evasion.

This resulted in him having large amounts of cash on hand, but it didn’t end well in the case of prospective prison time, proving that the third time really isn’t the charm. Barry’s many cash-only dealings with music venues finally caught up to him in the form of one of the world’s scariest entities: the IRS. This resulted in his shortest prison sentence, four months, and one thousand hours of community service. If you were to hire Chuck Barry for live performances during the seventies, you only got him and his guitar; the venue would have to supply the backing band and instruments themselves.

In 1972, the Rolling Stones’ legendary guitarist, Keith Richards, was part of the backing band for one of Barry’s gigs. Things seemed to be going well for this collected supergroup until, that is, Barry shouted into the mic during the show that the keyboardist and guitarist Keith Richards should get off the stage. To make matters worse, Barry soon admitted that he didn’t even recognize Richards, one of the most famous guitarists in the world. There’s a rock star lifestyle, and then there’s Chuck Barry’s lifestyle.

This was no doubt an equally hilarious and soul-crushing moment for the Rolling Stones guitarist, but this wasn’t the only eventful encounter between the two stars, as Barry would end up bruising more than Keith Richards’s ego. In one famous encounter, Richards got a little too comfortable backstage at one of Barry’s shows and earned himself a punch in the face for his transgressions. While Barry performed at many venues in the seventies, there was one that was without a doubt the most exclusive. Whether or not Barry, or anyone for that matter, agreed with then-President Jimmy Carter’s political ideologies, the big man nonetheless invited Barry to perform at the White House.

Just as he was one of the first rock stars, Barry was also the first to receive a certain accolade related to the genre. It seems like a given that Chuck Barry would be the first inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—he helped invent the genre, after all. But can you guess who swore him in? None other than one of his biggest fans and fellow rock stars, Keith Richards. It seemed that no matter what he did, Keith Richards would continue to idolize Chuck Barry. Richards even went as far as to organize a celebratory birthday concert for his idol’s sixtieth birthday.

The event managed to convey just how cherished Barry was, as it included legendary musicians such as Eric Clapton. As yet another sign of Barry’s level of superstardom, his sixtieth birthday party concert was also made into a documentary film, Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll. It worked out to be a celebration of the rock star and all of his contributions to the world of music. It seems that the most unsettling events surrounding Barry’s life happened in the establishments that he owned. In 1990, several women sued Barry for installing a camera in the bathroom of his restaurant.

While the accusations didn’t result in any convictions, Barry ended up paying over a million dollars in legal fees. That same year, authorities raided Barry’s house. They found evidence of some of Barry’s darker actions, including scathing proof of child abuse. Barry‘s wrongdoings remained serious, but he seemed to get better and better at escaping any real repercussions. The star managed to dodge the most serious charges that came out of the raid and consequently only received two years of unsupervised probation for possession of illicit substances.

After a thirty-eight-year hiatus from recording studio albums, Barry figured he still had one left in him. The ninety-year-old rock and roll legend graced audiences with a new one titled Chuck. Barry dedicated the album to his wife, Tody, but it would be the last one he’d ever release. Barry’s impressive discography, paired with the amount of time since his last release, could leave some to assume that his last record would be disappointing. Those people would be wrong. Yes, Barry still had it. Chuck received overall positive reviews from music critics, many of which praised the album for recapturing the iconic artist’s style while still remaining unique from previous releases.

Unfortunately, Barry wouldn’t be around to receive his due praise. The much-anticipated Chuck was released in June 2017 to the joy of many listeners, but unfortunately, its creator wasn’t around to see its reception. On March 18th, 2017, emergency services arrived at Barry’s home after the star suffered a heart attack. The rock legend passed away at the age of ninety. Whether you boycott an artist for their personal actions or not, we feel it’s important to know somebody in their entirety.

Publications today still discuss the acclaimed artist Chuck Barry. Both sides of him, his music and his controversies, will endure alongside each other, and we think that’s a good thing. The one thing we know for sure is that the world won’t forget about Chuck Barry anytime soon. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up; we’d really appreciate it. We also invite you to check out the companion article in the description below if you want to see even more videos on historical figures. Please subscribe to the channel.