Still Reelin', Still Rockin'

By RICHARD CORLISS

Mom always said it was the devil's music. So why shouldn't the father of '50s rock 'n' roll look like every white kid's slumber-party dream of Satan? A slim body, supple as sin. Wavy hair, drenched in Valvoline and just full enough to hide those telltale horns. A face already etched with pain and promises. Cocoa-color skin drawn taut over Jack Palance cheekbones. A smile that offered a great time on the way down. Chuck Berry might sing about School Days and Johnny B. Goode, but teens knew that his songs -- from the opening guitar riff through the four-on-the-floor chorus to the florid finale -- were siren calls to cut class and feel good. "You know my temperature risin', the jukebox blowin' a fuse,/ My heart beatin' rhythm and my soul keep a-singin' the blues./ Roll over Beethoven. Tell Tchaikovsky the news."

The news quickly became history, and Chuck Berry made both. For he defined the music, moods, moves and malevolence of rock 'n' roll. His twangy blues guitar fused -- indeed, electrified -- rhythm and blues and country music, even as his popularity helped desegregate early rock. His lyrics rollicked with internal rhymes, subversive satire and a wit that bent and broadened the language. He demolished the pop-music wall that had long separated singer and songwriter; now a man could perform his own compositions and do it with amazing sass. He could do wrong too, and here again Berry was a pioneer. Through decades of one-night stands, too much monkey business and a few command performances in stir, he fixed the image of the rock artist as outlaw.

If a statesman is a politician with a paunch, then an elder statesman of rock is an outlaw who has honorably served his time. Next week Chuck Berry turns 61. But last week rock's black prince saw his time come again. It began with a standing ovation at the New York Film Festival for the world premiere of Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, a slick, irreverent documentary with enough bop-till-you-drop golden hits to leave the springs broken in every Lincoln Center seat. On Tuesday Berry was back in his hometown of St. Louis to preside at the movie's local opening. On Thursday he showed up in Los Angeles to have his legend buffed with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And all week he was happily promoting Chuck Berry: The Autobiography (Harmony Books; $17.95), an unghosted, unfettered reminiscence about Berry's family, his music and, for seekers of the salacious, the "naughty-naughties I would commit from time to time."

Together, book and movie create a portrait of the shaman as showman -- demanding everything of himself and his sidemen so he can give everything onstage. The autobiography shows him honing his lyrics, teasing the word "motoring" into "motorvating" for Maybellene, finding inspiration for a verse of Brown Eyed Handsome Man from Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus in Furs, fretting that while in prison he cannot gain access to a map that would help him chart Po' Boy's itinerary in Promised Land. And once he got it right, he always wanted it to be the same kind of right. In Taylor Hackford's Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll, which chronicles the preparation and performance of Berry's 60th-birthday concert in St. Louis last year, tempers simmer as Berry keeps running Keith Richards, the concert's music director, through the opening guitar slur for Carol. And yet at the end of their concert -- which features guest shots by Linda Ronstadt, Eric Clapton, Etta James, Robert Cray and Julian Lennon -- Richards can feel satisfied that he provided a fine backup band for his loner-hero.

In the movie Berry is a little reticent about his rambunctious private life, which he discusses at length in the book. "This is a movie about my music," he said last week, "not about my life. To put my life in it, it would have to be a nine-hour movie. Like Roots." Roots with raunch. As he says in the book: "I like to play music, softball, twenty questions, chess, croquet, house, and around." In the vocabulary of a courtly hipster, he records his struggles with concupiscence ("Her temptation was awaiting my default and ate at my ethics like an itch"), though he does admit that one night he declined an invitation to visit the hotel room of an amorous Little Richard. Chapters are devoted to each of Berry's three jail terms (for armed robbery as a teenager, for a Mann Act violation in the '60s and for tax evasion in the '70s). Every 16 years or so, he would emerge from prison and savor freedom without letting it cramp his style. "My next fall is due around year end of 1996," he observes, "so I have a while yet." Chuck Berry is never likely to be out on good behavior.

"Conformity," he writes, "is not the fragrance found in my fantasies." But that is not quite the whole truth. He wants it all: to enjoy the rock star's sweet sybaritic life while residing in the house of propriety. On the road he is not immune to celebrity groupies, yet he remains devoted to Toddy, his wife of 39 years. He surely takes pride in his rowdy eminence, yet he considers himself and his rock peers mere "moons and satellites" to Hollywood stars like Bogart and Hepburn; a man who has spent a third of a century in the show-biz sideshow cannot shake his awe for celebrities in the main ring. He continues to play rave-up rock 'n' roll -- by now he must have performed Sweet Little Sixteen more times than Judy Garland ever sang Over the Rainbow -- but mostly for middle-class whites whose average age skirts closer to 60 than to 16. He is a goodie playing to oldies.

"It is my job to sing," he said last week. "It is my philosophy to sing what the people want." So people attending a Chuck Berry concert will hear the '50s jukebox blowin' the familiar fuses. Those who see Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll will find a musician who charms and exasperates. Those who read The Autobiography will have a great time inside the perpetual-motion mind of rock's prime performer. The devil is alive and well. And onstage or on the page, he still makes motorvating music.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York