Review: 'Chuck Berry: An American Life'

I don't envy RJ Smith, who took on a very tricky project when he decided to write Chuck Berry's autobiography in the current era. How do you write about a black man who faced racism his whole life--even after he became celebrated by all races as the man who invented rock and roll--a guy who created a metric ton of amazing music and inspired a gigaton more, a creep who did some truly horrible things, leaving a lot of fans confused about how to regard his life, work, and death?

I guess the key is to dive in and be as honest as you can, which is basically what Smith does with Chuck Berry: An American Life. Naively, I was surprised by how much racism loomed over his whole life since Berry did such a heroic job of uniting people with his music. Muddy Waters and Nat King Cole, both black artists of course, seemed to be the only people he really idolized, but he fused Muddy's blues thump and Cole's unwaveringly smooth delivery with white country music, both because he genuinely liked country and because he consciously wanted to appeal to white listeners. Not because he specifically wanted to bridge some sort of racial gap to foster more understanding between his fellow people but because he knew that selling records to white people was where the real money was. 

You could hardly blame Berry, who grew up poor, patronized, and threatened, for his lifelong insistence on getting paid before doing anything, even playing encores, considering how so many people--particularly those with his skin color--had been screwed in the music industry. A lot of the other things he did are hard to overlook, and I'm not just talking about the well-known controversies involving transporting underage girls, toilet voyeurism, and battery. There's one little-known, chaotic, stomach-churning story involving his daughter, his girlfriend, a horde of free-roaming prisoners, and a movie camera that makes it clear that Berry was a sociopath whose difficult background isn't enough to explain away his worst behavior. 

But then there's all of his music, which remains witty, poetic, and electrifying. There's his way with a guitar, which is so effortlessly fluid yet so difficult to authentically recreate. There's his artistic imagination. For those who argue that you can dislike the artist but love the art, Chuck Berry would make a pretty good Exhibit A. Chuck Berry: An American Life will not get you to like Chuck Berry the person, but it may help you to gain a little more understanding of why he was the way he was: a curmudgeon, a voyeur, a tremendously hard worker, a tireless inventor, an amoral deviant, a cynic, a poet, a courter of danger, a victim, an abuser, a survivor, and a seriously damaged individual.