Once Johnnie Johnson Played a Key Role in Chuck Berry’s Success, Now He’s Stepping Out on His Own : ROLLICKING AND ROLLING

Think of Chuck Berry and what comes to mind are a brash guitar style that transformed popular music, lyrics informed by an observant eye and a wry sense of humor, and a showman’s flair.

But listen to Berry’s records, and the ear is drawn as well to Berry’s unassuming piano sidekick, Johnnie Johnson. In the spaces between the master’s famous turns of phrase and stuttering guitar bursts, Johnson’s fingers danced jaunty, nimble steps that were fundamental to Berry’s music and to the development of rock ‘n’ roll piano.

Johnson emerged on the national scene with Berry in 1955 and toured and recorded with him into the 1970s. In all that time, Johnson says today, he never craved the spotlight or sought to step out on his own. Playing the piano was enough.

This is how the 68-year-old Johnson sums up his years with Berry: “I got everything I think I should have out of that. I was satisfied in playing and getting my money. I had no desire to be a leader. We used to sit down and work things out together, but I never wrote songs. I just helped him with the music.”

During a recent phone interview from his home in St. Louis, Johnson’s speaking manner was almost the antithesis of his style on those prime Berry recordings, which was full of quick, light, joyful stinging in the piano’s high registers.

Far from paralleling the motion of his rollicking, rolling fingers, Johnson’s tongue works deliberately, his voice deep and slow, his sentences laconic.

For more than 30 years, Johnson was happy taking a place in the background, feeling no need to get over what he once called his “microphone fright.”

Then, a few years ago, he found himself in a New York City recording studio, where Berry’s greatest emulator, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, had enlisted Johnson to dab that signature piano sound onto a track destined for Richards’ 1989 solo album, “Talk is Cheap.” The recording process was going slowly, and Johnson started amusing himself by doodling patterns on his piano during a long delay.

“Keith said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘I’m just killing time before we get set up.’ ” Richards heard the makings of a song in Johnson’s meandering. They wrote the song together, with Johnson spinning the lyrics out of a casual remark he made to Richards: “I said, ‘I could sure stand a drink of Tanqueray now.’ He said, ‘Let’s call it ‘Tanqueray.’ ”

The song, a warm, relaxed blues in which Johnson sings about wanting to lift a glass of Tanqueray gin with an old, apparently estranged friend, emerged last year on “Johnnie B. Bad,” the album that at last marked Johnson’s emergence as a recording artist in his own right. He says that “Tanqueray” was the first song he had ever written.

Johnson credits Richards and another English rocker, Eric Clapton, with coaxing him toward his belated turn in the spotlight. But nobody had to coax Johnson when it came to playing the piano.

“My mother bought me a piano when I was 5,” he recalled. “When they moved it into the home, I started playing it. She said it (his talent, not the piano) was a gift from God.”

Johnson’s boyhood living room in Clarksdale, W. Va., became his first stage. “Back then, there weren’t too many black families who had pianos. Those that had them, people would come from miles around to listen to people play on it.”

Johnson’s father, also named Johnnie, was a coal miner who wanted better things for his son. His mother, Cora, saw musical possibilities for the young prodigy. “They just encouraged me. My mother wanted me to be a player and a singer. But it wasn’t up till year before last that I even thought of singing. I was content just getting to play.”

Johnson played in a high school group called the Blue Rhythm Swingsters that performed at school events. He took his influences from the radio, emulating jazz players such as Earl Hines and Art Tatum. “If I heard (a song) on the radio, I’d keep humming it till I got to a piano. Then I could sit down and learn it.”

At 17, with World War II on, Johnson went off on his own, moving to Detroit and finding a job in a Ford auto plant that had been retooled to build tanks. He played his first professional gigs in Detroit, until the war interrupted.

“I was drafted into the Army, but I chose the Marine Corps. I liked the way they dressed--they had this sharp uniform, and I wanted one. I didn’t know you had to buy it.” Johnson shelled out for a set of dress blues, and the Marines sent him to the South Pacific--but, he says thankfully, not into harm’s way.

“After an island was taken, (Johnson’s unit) would go in and secure it. And we’d have entertainment for the troops.” Playing for soldiers, Johnson realized he wanted to earn his living with the piano after he got out of the service.

His hitch in the Marines ended in 1946, and Johnson headed to Chicago. Working in an automobile plant by day, he gravitated in his free time toward the city’s blues scene, where he got to play with Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf.

“I would sit in. I was never on any of them’s payroll, but it was a big thrill to me.”

Johnson’s next move took him to East St. Louis, where he had a brother who helped him find work in a railroad warehouse. He supplemented the day job with weekend earnings leading a trio that played danceable jazz and blues in nightclubs.

As Johnson tells it, there was nothing fancy about the Johnnie Johnson Trio: “We just played music, and they got up and danced to it, and that was it.” But on New Year’s Eve of 1952-53, the trio took a sudden, flamboyant turn.

Johnson says his band’s saxophone player suffered a stroke, and he needed to find another player for the New Year’s Eve show at his regular spot, the Cosmopolitan Club. Chuck Berry played in another nearby club, and the two musicians had seen each other perform and struck up a friendship.

“Chuck wasn’t working that night. I called and asked if he could give me a hand. It was the first time we played together. He was playing what he played with his band. He also had country and Western, and that went over real big with the people. They asked me if he was going to stay with me,” and Johnson in turn put the question to Berry.

“He said, ‘Sure, as long as we can play, we’ll play.’ ”

In his 1987 autobiography, Berry wrote that “Johnnie Johnson was reserved and jolly . . . and we didn’t have any clash on stage when I would express myself and perform in excess of his own performance. In the beginning, when I would get applause for a gesture, I would look back at Johnnie and see him smiling in approval of what I’d spontaneously added to the song or the show.”

“I was very pleased with it,” Johnson said of Berry’s stage extroversion, which at the time already included the guitarist’s trademark “duck walk” and bits of pantomime. “It was something fun and different. The people were looking for something different, and it went over real big.”

Berry soon took over Johnson’s role as bandleader--which Johnson said was fine with him. “Chuck was a hustler. He had a car; he was more of a talker than I was. He could get jobs. If he could get jobs, why not name the band after him?”

Johnson isn’t one to spin detailed yarns about his days with Berry. Nor does he care to offer his memories and observations concerning the other influential piano players of ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll, with whom Berry and his band were often billed.

Asked his opinion of Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Fats Domino, Johnson simply says, “I feel everybody’s the best in his own field.” He saves his enthusiasm for jazz pianist Oscar Peterson: “Nobody’s got his style. I tried (to emulate it). I think I got a couple of things from him.”

After leaving Berry in the 1970s, Johnson continued to play on his own in the Midwest. Occasionally he would hook up with Berry for special shows. One of them was the tribute concert that was the centerpiece of the 1987 film documentary, “Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll.” That’s when Johnson met Richards, who organized the all-star back-up band for the occasion, and Clapton, one of the film’s featured guests.

Johnson credits them with planting the idea that he should try for a higher-profile career of his own.

“Keith had a lot to do with it, and Eric Clapton, too. Both told me, ‘You can make it on your own, you don’t have to be a sideman.’ ”

Johnson realized that would require some singing--something he had never done.

“After a while, I said, ‘I’ll go ahead and try and maybe that’ll get (Richards) to stop bothering me when he sees I can’t sing. But it backfired on me.”

Johnson included a couple of his own relaxed, half-spoken vocals on his “Johnnie B. Bad” album. “I can’t sing,” he says with a chuckle. “I just have a lot of nerve.” In concert, Johnson said, he usually performs some Berry songs but lets his guitar player handle the singing.

On his album, Johnson got help from a strong assortment of players, including Richards, Clapton, and NRBQ, which served as his primary backup band.

Before his upcoming dates on the West Coast (in which he’ll be backed by a St. Louis-based trio), Johnson was planning a week-long stop-over in Nashville to record an album with backing by the country-rock band Kentucky Headhunters.

Johnson said he’s planning “a little bit of everything. Country, blues--but it’s more blues than country.” As for Johnson vocals, “I doubt there will be more (than on ‘Johnnie B. Bad,’) but it will be some.”

Johnson’s manager, Glen Knight, said that he and Johnson met the Headhunters’ Richard Young at a Grammy Awards party in New York last February. “He said (‘ “Johnny B. Bad”) is my favorite album.’ We all started talking, and one thing led to another.”

Thrice married, with seven children, four stepchildren, six grandchildren and a great-grandchild, Johnson is down-to-earth about his late emergence from the background to the spotlight.

Ask him what’s changed for him, and he says, matter-of-factly, “the money.”

“You get a lot of recognition, and people go out of their way to do things for you that they wouldn’t do when you were a sideman. There’s better accommodations at hotels and places you eat. You get more respect.”

Does he regret not having asserted himself sooner?

“I’m just enjoying it as it happens. What’s in the past is in the past. Now I’m living for the future.”