Chuck Berry could be notoriously difficult to his backup bands. The rock and roll progenitor was known to use local pickup groups for his shows, giving many up-and-coming performers a chance to get real-world experience playing with an established artist. But as many discovered, Chuck liked to change things up onstage without alerting the band, creating some perilous moments for the musicians.
Unlike some of his peers, Nils Lofgren never had that rite of passage in his early years. But he did have a pair of memorable meetings with Berry once he became an established performer, including one particularly awful performance involving Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band playing live before a nationally televised audience.
Lofgren’s first meeting with the electric guitar–toting Father of Rock and Roll took place circa 1977 on the set of the following year's film American Hot Wax. The biopic about legendary DJ Alan Freed featured performances by rock and roll legends like Jerry Lee Lewis, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Berry.
The film was co-written and produced by Art Linson, who managed Lofgren's band Grin for a time. By then Lofgren was well established both with Neil Young's Crazy Horse and as a solo artist with a few albums of his own. Linson invited him to the theater where Berry’s performance was being filmed.
“Art said, ‘Come on, I want to introduce you to Chuck,’” Lofgren tells Guitar Player, “and I'm like, ‘I don't need to meet Chuck.’
“‘Oh, c’mon...’
“So we're at this theater and they're about to file in the extras — hundreds and hundreds of high school and college kids all dressed up like the ’50s. And Chuck's onstage in his beautiful, cream suit, just standing there waiting to eye all the people coming in. Probably looking at the girls, mostly.
“Art drags me out to the center of the stage and says, ‘Chuck, I want you to meet my friend Nils Lofgren, blah, blah, blah... He plays with Neil Young, he plays his own music. Say hi,’ and then he walks away and leaves me alone with Chuck.
“And Chuck's just standing there, ignoring me. I'm 5-3, he's like 6-2 or whatever, looks perfect.
“Finally, before I crawled off, I thought I'd ask a musician question. I said, ‘Hey, Mr. Berry, nice to meet you, sir. What kind of guitar are you playing these days?’
“He just ignored me, but then he slowly turned his head, looked down on me and waited a minute, then said, ‘Son, I play a six-string.’
“And that was my dismissal. It was classic! I just slithered off and said, ‘Art, don't you ever fuckin’ do that to me again.’”
(For the record, Chuck was well into playing Gibson ES-355 semihollow guitars by this point in his career, a model he loved so much that he was buried with one in his casket.)
Nearly 20 years later, Lofgren — then a member in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band — found himself in Berry’s company once again. This time he was onstage, backing the legend on his hit “Johnny B. Goode” on September 2, 1995. The occasion was the Concert for the Hall of Fame, at Cleveland's Municipal Stadium, a nearly seven-hour, nationally televised event to celebrate the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum that Labor Day Weekend.
Berry’s performance of “Johnny B. Goode” was the first of 68 songs performed that night by four generations of musicians, including Little Richard, Aretha Franklin, the Kinks, the Allman Brothers Band, John Mellencamp, the Pretenders, Bon Jovi and many more.
“Johnny B. Goode” was an appropriate start for such a show, and the performance — despite some obvious stage nerves — went off without a hitch.
But Berry's unpredictable nature wasn’t about to be kept down. It finally came out on the final song of the night, which, according to some reports, was supposed to be his 1957 hit “Rock and Roll Music.”
By then the show had been going on for nearly seven hours. The musicians onstage included not only Springsteen and the E Street Band but also guitarist G.E. Smith and the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde.
As Berry returned for the closing performance, he was clearly in freeform mode from the moment he began playing his guitar without announcing what he had planned.
“Yeah, we had one of those moments with Chuck,” Lofgren recalls with a laugh. “He was playing and moving keys and just not being a band leader. We were all trying to hang on. I remember the looks on all our faces.”
Apparently, the performance was so bad that no video of it exists on the Rock Hall’s YouTube channel — although it does host video of Lofgren explaining what went down that night.
“He's standing there, and he starts playing. We're all pros, so we started following along,” Lofgren says in the clip. “Somehow, a minute or two in, he shifts the song in gears and a key, without talking to us.
“Then he shifts keys again, and he shifts keys four or five times, I can only imagine to mess with us. I can't imagine what else has happened.”
Lofgren recalled the band members’ bewilderment. “We are making these horrible sounds, collectively, in front of a stadium — sold out! And we're looking at each other like, This can't be happening, right? We're not creating this thing we're listening to.Yes, we are.
“And at the height of it, when no one has an idea how to fix this, Chuck looks at us all and starts duck walking off the stage. He leaves the stage — leaves us all out there playing in six different keys, with no band leader, gets in a car and drives away.
“Now, if that's not rock and roll…”
As Lofgren tells Guitar Player, he and Springsteen took it all in good humor.
“In the van ride afterwards, riding back to the hotel, me and Bruce were howling and laughing uncontrollably at how bad we all sounded,” Lofgren says. “We were saying we haven't all sounded this confused and unsure and tenuous since we were, like, 14.
“You had to laugh. It was just one of those classic rock moments with one of our genius creators of the genre who still couldn’t help himself from messing with the musicians a bit. That's just embedded in him. And yet I don't think anyone really noticed except for us.
“It was still fun to play with him... and made for an even more historic night, ’cause that's part of rock and roll.”
