“He never left St. Louis,” Chuck Berry’s dear friend and confidant Joe Edwards said of the father of rock & roll, who died in his St. Louis-area home on Saturday, March 18, 2017, at the age of 90. “That’s one thing I always admired about him. Most musicians leave St. Louis to make it. Chuck did it his own way.”
Edwards last saw his friend in the flesh a few weeks before his passing. He remembers shaking “those magnificent humongous hands” that created a new way to play the guitar, and his deep laughter.
“When he really enjoyed something, his laughter was even better than his singing,” Edwards said. “It was deep and innocent at the same time. It was open.”
Edwards also remembered his friend’s masterful command of the English language during their last conversation. Berry created the verbal, as well as the musical, language of rock & roll by melding North St. Louis street corner toasts with a self-taught bookworm’s quirky erudition.
“He had such command of the English language,” Edwards marveled.
For all of his eloquence, Berry did not want to be bothered with talking to most of the people attracted by his fame. In fact, Edwards’ intimacy with Berry deepened because of his value as a wing man. Edwards was skilled at deflecting people from Berry without causing the scene that the garrulous great man himself might have caused without a smooth wing man stepping in.
It was Edwards who encouraged and convinced Berry to go accept, alongside Leonard Cohen, PEN New England’s first literary awards for songwriting. Once Edwards pried Berry out of his beloved St. Louis to hobnob with the swells at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, he spent the evening with Berry, Cohen, Paul Simon, Keith Richards and Salman Rushdie.
Edwards played wing man when Berry was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s first class in 1986. The Everly Brothers were at the table with them. The only person between Edwards and the stage was Quincy Jones. “Gee whiz,” Edwards said. “The things you see with Chuck. The things I’ve overheard.”
Just as Berry entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on the first ballot, he also walked onto the St. Louis Walk of Fame on the first ballot in 1989, when Edwards spearheaded that effort on the University City Loop.
Edwards has had many fantasy camp tours with Berry over the years. They went to Chicago for a blues festival, and Berry guided a windshield tour of the Chess Records studios where his invention of rock & roll was committed to posterity. The tour was guided by Berry in his unique mobile home, featuring whiplash corners on elevated overpasses where Edwards was certain that he and the father of rock & roll would topple over to their death.
Berry gave his friend (and, in his later years, manager) a windshield tour of his spots in Los Angeles. When Berry drove them by The Roxy, Stevie Wonder was out front, shooting a video and a PSA for not drinking and driving. Edwards was freaked out that he got to meet and hang out with the immortal Steve Wonder.
Driving away from The Roxy, Edwards was getting hyped to his road dog that they just got to meet Stevie Wonder and how amazing that was, when he suddenly realized his road dog that he was hyping to was the most important figure in the history of rock & roll.
“It was absurd,” Edwards said. “But our friendship was so close, so familiar. You forget that it’s Chuck Berry you’re talking to. I would be way more ga-ga about meeting Chuck Berry than even Stevie Wonder, but Chuck is my friend and he’s driving me around in his … I’d hate to call it ‘bus.’”
It is Edwards’ belief that Chuck Berry is the most important figure in the history of rock & roll that seeded the close bond between them, though they had to get past a piece of business first.
About a decade before the craft beer revolution started without him, Edwards started a craft Rock & Roll Beer line, and he insisted on having Chuck Berry’s face and legacy on his first can of Rock & Roll Beer. Edwards, now a transformative and wealthy developer, was then a semi-struggling pub owner, indie label guy, blues band manager and real estate speculator along a sketchy stretch of Delmar Boulevard. But he wanted Chuck Berry’s face on his first can of beer, and he had a sense of what endorsement deals should pay someone of Berry’s stature, so he offered the going rate.
Chuck Berry, not a man known for accepting a first offer, accepted Edwards’ first offer. That established their pattern of not fighting over money. The only way to stay Chuck Berry’s friend was not to fight with him over money. Berry defended his economic interests with great vigilance at all times and played strictly by the business rules that he set forth.
In a business where many have played and were never paid, Berry would not take the stage without payment in advance. He stuck by this simple principle at great detriment to his career, since the audience tends to blame cancellations on the artist. Once Edwards became wing man, then also manager, for Berry, he would step in at times and front Berry’s advance so that the show could go on, then Berry would sign his check over to Edwards at the end of the gig – one autograph that Joe could not keep.
Edwards’ pub Blueberry Hill on the U. City Loop still stands as a living memorial to Chuck Berry, with Chuck memorabilia everywhere you look. It’s also the pub where Chuck played his last gig, his 88th birthday concert, on October 18, 2014. Thanks to Berry’s unique trust in Edwards, he played a local basement bar gig in his hometown for years, allowing thousands of people from every corner of the earth to see the father of rock & roll in a small room much like the North St. Louis rooms he worked with Johnnie Johnson’s band in the early 1950s, when rock & roll was created.
And Chuck Berry has not put out his last record yet. He passed away on the eve of the release of his record “Chuck” on Dualtone Records out of Nashville, his first new material in 38 years. Edwards was disappointed that “Chuck” will now be seen by some as a rushed, posthumous affair, when in fact it was made by a very much alive artist who expected to be alive to celebrate its release.
“I wish that record could be judged by its own merits,” Edwards said. “I do wish he had hung on for that.”
