I saw him once about twenty five years ago. I'd told the people that that accompanied me to the show that he was a scatological lunatic but apparently they didn't believe me until he told a joke of sorts (this was billed as some kind of family event and there were tons of little kids there) that involved his playing the role of a bear in the woods that dramatically wipes his ass with a white rabbit. It was even more bizarre than that sounds, and in the context just completely crazy.
But that's not the story I want to tell. The first few songs he's playing a red guitar. It was pretty cool, you know, there's Chuck Berry, right there in front of you. He did the duckwalk and everything. Then, a couple of songs in, he breaks a string. Fine. Dude appears after the song with a black guitar that he trades for the red one. Chuck straps it on, the band crashes into the next song and when Chuck begins to play the result is a hideous cacophony that is unlike anything I have ever heard. I mean, it is extreme dissonance, makes Sonic Youth or Schoenberg sound like Smokey Robinson. The only person in the place that didn't seem to notice was Chuck Berry, who soldiered through a couple of numbers with a guitar that appeared to have been tuned by a deaf man in the middle of an epileptic seizure. Everyone's looking at each other like What. In. The. Actual. Fuck.
So after a couple of songs of this he stops between selections to address some remarks to the crowd, maybe tell a joke, who knows. As he's chatting he glances down at the neck of his guitar and exclaims, Hey! There's my pick! I've been looking for that!
Guitar players will often thread their pick through the strings of their guitar. It does not take a particularly experienced guitarist nor a particularly attentive person to notice that you are playing a guitar whose strings are hindered in their natural vibration by some foreign object.
Thinking back on it, I do wonder what he meant when he said he'd been looking for it. Perhaps he'd been casting glances at the stage floor as he duckwalked about the area. I guess I'll never know.
A number of years earlier when I was in college I had a part time job at a bookstore. Chuck had an autobiography out and one day he came by the store where I worked for a scheduled signing. I wasn't scheduled that day but after the event I spoke with someone who was. He had been tasked with parking Chuck's rental car. He told me that the radio was tuned to a talk station. That seemed really weird to me at the time. Now, much less so.
