“He was as deaf as Beethoven. People would criticize him: ‘He’s playing in the wrong key. What’s he doing?’ It’s because he could not hear”: How Chuck Berry’s struggles with hearing loss shaped his playing

Chuck Berry – one of the most iconic guitar players who ever lived – may have been larger than life, but like all humans, he was constantly fighting his own battles

These included hearing loss, as revealed by his son, Charles Berry Jr., in a new interview with Guitarist.

“One other tidbit about my father: he was as deaf as Beethoven,” Berry Jr. says in the latest issue. “I mean, nearly stone deaf. And people would criticize him: ‘Well, he’s playing the right stuff, but in the wrong key. What’s he doing?’ It’s because he could not hear.”

Berry Jr. reveals that while his dad was playing the right structure of, say, a solo, he would be playing it in the wrong key because of his hearing loss.

“Sometimes he would glance over, and we’d be like, ‘E!’ and he’d go back into the right key, or we’d hold up our hands, like, ‘[Go] here on the neck!’ ‘Ah, oops!’ ‘But it just guaranteed that someone going to see my father was seeing the real thing, and that was very important to him.”

Regardless of the wrong notes, what mattered to the guitar legend wasn’t accuracy, but that the audience was swept up in an experience that felt entirely authentic.

Chuck Berry Live in London 1972 - YouTube

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Berry Jr. adds, “He said, ‘No matter what they say, I just want them to understand that I’m real and what I’m doing is honest.’ Because he had to go through the lip-sync era like The Beatles and The Stones. And he was like, ‘I absolutely hated doing that. Why can’t we just play it live?’”

Berry played his final concert on October 15th, 2014 – just a couple of days shy of his 88th birthday.

Despite his hearing difficulties, “the audience was with him the whole way,” as Joe Edwards, owner of Blueberry Hill, where Berry played once a month for over two decades, told Rolling Stone in a 2017 interview. This demonstrated the rock ’n’ roll pioneer’s commitment to his fans and an authentic live experience until the end.

Elsewhere in his Guitarist interview, Berry Jr. looked back on what set his father apart from everyone else.

For more about Chuck Berry, pick up issue 543 of Guitarist from Magazines Direct.