‘You Never Can Tell’: The disgusting perversions of Chuck Berry
John Lennon once famously said that if you gave rock and roll another name, it would be Chuck Berry. Lennon may have been absolutely right about this, just not for any of the reasons he was thinking of.
Because there’s always been a dark side to rock and roll music, hasn’t there?
A shadow cast by the facade of joyous abandon and youthful rebellion that might just have been as seductive to generations of young people as any riff or shout-along chorus. Yes, you get the fame and the self-expression and the money, and you get it on your own terms (in a few vanishingly rare cases). However, you don’t have to look hard at the history of rock to see that this can have a corrosive effect on the morals of the people who play it. Chuck Berry was, seemingly, patient zero for this phenomenon.
Unlike the thousands of others who came after him, his tilt against the modern culture of the time was totally justified. He was a black man who came of age in the United States of America in the mid-20th Century. Any idea of that culture having any sort of moral authority must have been even more ludicrous than it is today. Thus, Berry became something of a proto-punk rocker. Once he became one of the most exciting names in music, he’d be the sharp-dressed African-American man driving a gaudy Cadillac with a pretty white girl next to him precisely because it would get him in a lot of trouble.
If it stayed there, we could all appreciate him for the trailblazer he absolutely was. However, the tragic combination of money, fame and a gigantic chip on his shoulder seemingly made him charge down a much darker path. One where every barrier became one he had to break. Some of these were absolutely worth breaking, like the ones put in place to prevent Black people from achieving anything in 1950s America.
Then there were barriers put in place to prevent women and young girls from being abused, and he broke those, too.
The sex crimes of Chuck Berry
In December 1959, Berry was arrested for trafficking a 14-year-old girl across state lines for the purposes of having sex with her. A crime for which Berry served a year and a half in prison after initially being sentenced to five.
The year before, he’d been arrested with a 17-year-old girl in his car and was let off with a fine for missing license plates and a warning. After his release in October 1963, Berry set about murdering his career with (fittingly enough) an almost sexual degree of relish, letting all his worst impulses take the lead.
We wouldn’t know how true this was until 1990, however. In the decades since his heyday, Berry had bought a restaurant, Southern Air, in Wentzville, Missouri. A few years after that, a number of waitresses he hired sued him for installing a number of cameras in the women’s bathroom. Berry maintained that these were there to keep an eye on any staff member who tried to rob him, rather than for personal use. However, when his home was raided in connection with the case, several of those tapes were found in his personal collection, along with several more involving him being defecated on by numerous sexual partners.
Due to an absolutely hapless prosecution case against him, Berry was able to settle out of court and avoid more jail time for his numerous cases of sexual assault against his employees. It wasn’t even that this case was kept out of the limelight at the time; it was the most high-profile Berry had been in decades, but that quite simply didn’t matter. The man had seen all boundaries as worth breaking and had made a good living out of breaking them all.
So why would this one be any different? Chuck was just being Chuck, no matter who got hurt as a result.