Chuck Berry Dead At 90
SAVIDGE: Berry was hailed as the father of rock 'n' roll. The man how made rolling -- rolling guitar solos and songs about cars, women the hallmark of what would eventually become the new sound of rock 'n' roll. Watch him onstage in the 1950s and you see the beginnings of everything that was to come. Historian, Douglas Brinkley, was friends with Chuck Berry -- that was a revelation to all of us -- he has helped teach some of your classes, is that right?</s>DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, FRIEND OF CHUCK BERRY (on the phone): Yes, good morning to you.</s>SAVIDGE: Good morning.</s>BRINKLEY: Losing Chuck Berry is like losing a national monument of some kind. He's just so important to our culture. Back in 1992, I had an on road class I did at Hofstra University called The Majic Bus. And students would live on my bus for the semester and I ended up in a newspaper article -- wrote an article about Chuck Berry being a poet, and it got into my article and he loved it because he thought of himself as a poet, and, you know, his lyrics that sometimes we take for granted are very intricate like "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," had some lyrics that are decisively about attack the Jim Crow racism in the south. But at any rate we -- what he said when you come to St. Louis all your students are -- could be hosted by Chuck Berry, so we would visit with him and his daughter Ingrid at and him at Blueberry Hill restaurant. And we would dine with him and talk with him, answer questions, he'd sign his book, then he'd let some of my students interact with him in the basement on instruments and talk about the whole history of rock 'n' roll. This sort of thing due (ph) to (ph) my friend Joe Edwards in St. Louis we kept doing it. And so just this past year, just a few months ago, Chuck Berry and his wife reached out to me to write the liner notes for what would be his last C.D. He recorded an album called "Chuck" which will be coming out very soon. And here's a man in his -- did this -- recorded these songs in his late 80s and these are mostly original compositions. And a couple of them -- when people hear them in a few weeks their minds are going to be blown that somebody in his 80s can play rock 'n' roll with such passion.</s>PAUL: What can you tell us about him perhaps, Doug, since you did have that sort of relationship with him that maybe we would never know about him?</s>BRINKLEY: That there were two people, there's Charles Berry and there's Chuck Berry, and Charles was a southern squire country gentleman, so kind, warm and polite, and that's who I got to know but there's also Chuck. Chuck Berry is somebody that got ripped off by so many bogus managers and promoters that he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder. And so if he felt that you were trying to hassle him he could -- he could, you know, turn on you. And, you know, he had to protect his own turf if he'd like. But in the person I knew as somebody who loves St. Louis, more than anybody you could ever meet, and he could have lived anywhere in the world. He stayed there in St. Louis. He loved the Mississippi River. He loves St. Louis Cardinals. He would regularly go down to this bar, Blueberry Hill, on Delmar Avenue, and play whenever he felt like it. And he just was a -- blowtorch of a man and had great physical stamina to the very end and was smart as a whip.</s>SAVIDGE: You know, I covered when he was inducted into the rock 'n' roll hall of fame in New York in 1986, the hall of fame is of course in Cleveland. I spent time with him in a broadcast truck. He was extremely down-to-earth. There was never any hint of celebrity around him. He was just a regular guy and a great guy to talk to. Did he ever tell what you his favorite song was?</s>BRINKLEY: He never told me his favorite song, although he, you know, the song "Promised Land" I know was close to him. You know, you talked about down-to-earth, he invited me into a recording studio with him a few years ago, there's nobody there. It was in the outskirts of St. Louis and I was there with his sound engineer and himself. And then he just -- we hopped in his little Toyota. We just drove to a Wendy's and just had a frosty, fries, you know, the whole bit, and he would sit there. He was -- wear a captain's hat, like a sailor's cap, and I asked him about that that afternoon and he said, I don't wear baseball caps. Chuck Berry is not a hip hop salesman.</s>PAUL: But --</s>BRINKLEY: But he would sit there and everybody would come up and ask for an autograph and he just -- not only did he give them an autograph on a menu or a piece of paper, he would draw a smiley face next to it. He did never needed anything luxurious or posh. I'm afraid the real biography of Chuck Berry our country treated him very badly when he became a bit hit in the late 1950s and early '60s. He got entangled with the law, and a few things, and some of these were of the, you know, were racists sort of encounters he had had with police. They (ph) thought that Chuck Berry was pushing the cultural noise level in America too high. But he was a</s>SAVIDGE: Yes, his influence on other rockers who were to come is just hard to even fathom. So many of the next generation rock 'n' roll were influenced by Chuck Berry.</s>PAUL: No doubt about it.</s>SAVIDGE: Yes. Doug, thank you very much for joining us. Remembering back and looking at the life of Chuck Berry.</s>PAUL: We appreciate it, Doug. Thank you.</s>BRINKLEY: OK.</s>PAUL: And we're so sorry for your loss, really, at the end of the day, I mean, this has got to hit him. All right. Still to come, the number two guy at the NSA weighing in on President Trump's wiretapping claims calling it nonsense. We delve deeper into how this all started. What the implications are now for the future of international relations?</s>SAVIDGE: Plus, Northwestern may have lost in the NCAA tournament, but one of their young fans is winning the internet. We'll explain all of that coming up.