`Sideman.” It’s a word that has followed Johnnie Johnson like a three-legged stray for half a century, from his days as Chuck Berry’s right-hand man on through his forthcoming induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — not as an artist in his own right but in the recently established “sideman” category.
Still Johnson, 76, who will headline Friday at Buddy Guy’s Legends, is thrilled with the late-arriving recognition. The campaign to get the long-underappreciated pianist in the Hall picked up steam in recent years, as fans such as Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Bob Weir lobbied for his induction as one of rock ‘n’ roll’s primary architects. Richards is scheduled to induct him March 19 in New York.
For Johnson, the announcement that he’d finally entered the Hall — sideman or not — was too good to be true. “I feel like I’m batting 1.000,” he says. “Ever since I knew what the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was all about, and seeing some of the musicians that went into it, I said to myself, `One day I’m gonna make that.’ But I began to wonder if that day would ever come. I wasn’t getting any younger, that’s for sure. It’s nice that people fought for me to get in there. Now, here I am.”
Johnson comes across as a gentle soul, too soft-spoken to trumpet his successes or demand his fair share of the recognition and profit from a business that was his lifelong dream. “To play music fulfilled my biggest goal,” he says. “To travel was icing on the cake. I was satisfied.”
It was only in the last decade that the pianist began collecting songwriting royalty checks, from his string of recent solo recordings. A lawsuit filed last November against Berry in Federal District Court by Johnson contends that he co-wrote 57 songs with Berry from 1952 to 1966, including classics such as “Maybelline,” “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Back in the U.S.A.,” and was never properly credited or compensated. If the suit succeeds, Berry could owe Johnson millions in royalties, but Berry’s attorneys say their client is the songs’ sole composer and are confident the suit will fail on the grounds that the statute of limitations for the songs in question expired in 1970.
The suit is the latest chapter in a complex relationship that dates to New Year’s Eve 1952, when Johnson hired Berry to replace an ailing sideman in the pianist’s St. Louis blues band. Berry’s showmanship and evocative lyrics — about fast cars, pretty girls and the exuberance of youth — eventually put him at the forefront, but Johnson was his foil, his spectacularly fluid boogie-and-blues piano embroidering the singer’s country-flavored guitar licks.
Berry was appreciative of Johnson’s contribution; not for nothing did he write “Johnny B. Goode” for his pianist, and in recent years he lobbied for Johnson’s Hall of Fame induction. Yet a recent biography, “Father of Rock & Roll: The Story of Johnnie `B. Goode’ Johnson,” paints Berry as a manipulator who took advantage of Johnson’s easygoing manner and fondness for alcohol. The book’s author, Travis Fitzpatrick, is the stepson of Texas businessman George Turek, who threw his considerable financial weight behind both the Hall of Fame induction drive and the Berry lawsuit after Johnson played his wedding in 1993.
“Father of Rock & Roll,” which makes the case for Johnson as Berry’s collaborator, is the capstone to a decade in which Johnson’s benefactors and friends have sought to raise him out of the “sideman” quagmire he’s been in for decades.
Johnson says he approved the suit — “I realized that Chuck was only looking out for Chuck” — but is vague on the details: “People figured that something like this should have happened long ago, and that since I didn’t put a foot forward to do anything about it, they would. Actually, I don’t know what’s what.”
One thing Johnson is clear on is his musical relationship with Berry: “Chuck brought in his little poems, and we made up songs to go with them. We never wrote anything down. We just made it up as we went along.”
In much the same way, Johnson invented his signature sound. A self-taught pianist from West Virginia, he came to Detroit as a teenager and heard T-Bone Walker play the blues in 1946. “It froze me right in my tracks,” he says. “I was playing standards and jazz at the time, and T-Bone showed me something new.” He drifted to Chicago, where he played with Muddy Waters, and then to St. Louis, where he honed his formidable left-hand technique, shifting from the chopping and rolling bass lines of his youth to sustained chords augmented by lickety-split right-hand runs. Blend the pianist’s syncopated blues with Berry’s country-and-western guitar and — presto! — you’ve got rock ‘n’ roll.
Now one of the architects of that sound is getting his due, even if it means entering the Hall of Fame through the side door. “I’m hoping that me getting in as a `sideman’ will open the door to a lot more musicians who aren’t stars, who aren’t as well-known,” Johnson says. “I have run into many musicians during my travels who were truly awesome, who probably didn’t even know that there is such a thing as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They belong in there too. But it’s all about the breaks that come your way.” Greg Kot
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Hear Greg Kot on “Sound Opinions” at 10 p.m. every Tuesday on WXRT (93.1 FM)
