Chuck Berry Sexcapades Memoir?

We’ve seen a few articles saying what a shame it is that the latest Rolling Stones cover of the True Blood cast in their birthday suits is getting all the attention when there is a great Chuck Berry interview inside. And there is a rare Chuck Berry interview inside, indeed. Whether it is great or not is another matter.

There really is quite a bit that journalist Neil Strauss learned in the 4 hours that he got to spend with the notoriously interview-shy 83 year old rock legend, but somewhere along the line the conversation takes a detour into how Chuck is collecting all his sexual escapades and recording them on the computer for a future memoir that he doesn’t even anticipate being around to write! Chuck Berry says he is talking about it a little to his son, so his son “won’t be shocked” when he actually reads it.

We actually saw a live Chuck Berry show once in Atlantic City when Chuck was just about a year away from his 70th birthday, and we love Chuck Berry music and his guitar playing so we were prepared to be awed — really blown away — but, to be honest, he came off like a dirty old man.

In this Rolling Stone interview, Strauss goes to great lengths to explain that to Chuck, “My Ding-a-Ling” is just another song and he is very proud of it. Strauss was told before he got to actually meet Chuck Berry that the length of the interview could be as short as 5 minutes if he said or did something that annoyed Chuck. So we guess neither he nor anyone else who wants to interview the eccentric rocker is going to want to tell him that at his age, it’s not really what we want to remember him for and it all comes off as rather disturbing!

And you might say, Well, why are you only focusing on that one aspect of the interview, when there was a lot of other stuff, like why Berry drives himself to his own concerts and how he mows his own lawn, even though he is a millionaire, and how he has been married to the same woman, Themetta, for 62 years come this October. So he was about 22 when he got married and he is now 83. Presumably, the sexual escapades he is recording are not of the marital type. One mention in the article is how Little Richard once made a pass at Chuck Berry. “He doesn’t deny it,” Berry says.

So, we’re not trying to put old Chuck down but we would have liked the interview a lot better had that stuff been left out, and we walked away from it with the same general impression that we got at his live show 15 years ago: Chuck Berry’s a dirty old man.

The September issue of Rolling Stone is on newsstands now. Or you can subscribe and read it online

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Tags: chuck, neil, richard, scandal