Berry’s Big Rip-Off of Graz’s Orpheum Regulars and Everyone Around Them Was a Total Success!

Venue: Orpheum Theater / Graz / Austria
Concert date: 11.11.2007
Attendance: 1000
Ticket price: 60,00€

Sunday’s Chuck Berry experience was an unforgettable musical event in every possible way, and on top of that it turned out to be one of the biggest turbo-capitalist rip-offs in show biz history. Forget the Rolling Stones! All of you who haven’t yet had your fill of tracing the footsteps of the heroes from the fat encyclopedia of rock & roll simply had to swing by Graz’s Orpheum last weekend, where the great Chuck Berry was giving off the last signs of life on this year’s definitely final (if the man himself is to be believed) concert tour.

Chuck Berry, legend of the fifties rock & roll movement, the man who beat the white rocker colleagues (much more palatable to the stunted narrow-mindedness of the wider American public) to honestly giving the world rock music by a full ten years. Berry’s influence on the development of rock music is unreal. Besides laying down the pioneering technical forms of rock & roll, Chuck was among the first to approach the genre with those typical blues-inspired themes. Women, cars, money, everything that still revolved around the image of the biggest rock stars decades later is basically the invention of the great Chuck Berry. One of the few (if not the only) long-since iconic figures, in 2007 he’d rather, instead of enjoying a well-earned retirement of carefree tea sipping and playing dominoes, treat us to an unimaginably unwatchable bit of stage shuffling, which at first glance looks less like an energetic rock & roll show and more like the private party of a long-fossilized mammoth, hanging out with five dumbstruck archaeologists and nostalgically running through a “hot ten” chart from the Triassic, Jurassic or Cretaceous, not bothered by a thing. Respect! Berry is Berry. The one and only. In barely fifty minutes of out-of-sync strumming, extremely distracting vocal stumbling and uncontrolled bullying of his visibly intimidated bandmates, the ancient grandpa of rock n roll managed to squeeze a full 60, even 70 euros out of a crowd of about a thousand dutifully seated dummies!

It’s hard to describe all the trauma and the impressive intensity of that constant feeling of unease in the pit of your stomach, which slyly stretched those (way too) short fifty minutes into a seemingly endless labyrinth of Chuck’s demented, senile delight in perversions of every possible shade. At the enviable age of eighty-one, Chuck seems as well preserved as can be and unexpectedly aggressive. The old man’s biting rhetoric was no less fun, and with it the aging guitarist at least slightly made up for his out-of-sync and totally off-key guitar playing. Take School Days or the funny Ding A Ling, Berry’s tribute to a companion I doubt has been standing proud for a long time now, which still defy time even live. Despite his advanced age, Berry of course knows full well how important the various entertainer tricks are, the ones that get the politely seated audience, emboldened, back on its feet again and again. So we weren’t deprived of the man’s trademark one-legged hopping either, which, over the shamelessly chopped-off rhythm of Johnny B. Goode and despite all the aforementioned shortcomings, sent the Orpheum into delirium without any particular trouble! Fun, no question! When, amid a flood of world tours by long-worn-out, long-surviving giants of the music world, you’ve sat through a Sunday-night rip-off like this one, all the way and back, you can safely just go and die! No hard feelings, Chucky!!

Chuck Berry lineup:

CHUCK BERRY: vocals, guitar
DARLIN INGRID BERRY: vocals, harmonica
CHARLES BERRY JR.: guitar
JAMES MARSALA: bass
DANIEL TRUSTRUP RØSSING: piano
JEAN-MICHEL BIGER: drums

Words: Daniel Pavlica
Photos: Jani Lah

Setlist

1.Roll Over Beethoven 2.Sweet Little Sixteen 3.School Days 4.Come On 5.Every Day I Have The Blues 6.Oh, Baby Doll 7.You Can’t Catch Me 8.Key To The Hughway 9.My Ding A Ling 10.Rock & Roll Music 11.Let It Rock 12.Carol/Johnny B. Goode