Keys to the Highway
Johnnie Johnson Returns to the Rock & Roll Road with Johnnie B. Bad
Riverfront Times, September 4-10, 1991
Listen to any of Chuck Berry’s great hits from the mid-to-late ‘50s and early ‘60s – “Maybellene,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Little Queenie,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Back in the U.S.A” and so on – and it isn’t hard to understand what made them so exciting when they first took the music world by storm. They hit you like a freight train with their chugging, hillbilly-cum-jump-blues rhythms, Berry’s canny “motorvatin’ over the hill” poetics and his innovative, full-bodied guitar licks.
And then there’s the piano: masterful, quick-witted fills alternate with lightning-speed runs up and down the keyboard. As agile as they are insistent, they make explicit proto-rock’s deep affiliations with the blues and with jazz and boogie-woogie. Even today, that piano sound is a touchstone for rock & rollers the world over. It’s an essential component of a music that turned the world upside down for an entire generation, one member of which was a working-class kid from Dartford, Kent, named Keith Richards.
“I’ve always been a band man, really,” Richards recently told the RFT. “I might think, yeah, I like this guy’s record, but who else is inputting on this, who else is playing? And when we started to put the Stones together, we had (pianist) Ian Stewart playing with us. We would listen to those Chuck Berry records and Stu would say, “I’ll tell you who made those records what they are. Just listen to that piano, man. That’s the guy who’s holding it together. That’s Johnnie Johnson.”
Accolades such as that one have been few and far between, and certainly slow in coming to Johnson, 67, who still lives in a modest duplex in North St. Louis. After 28 years of recording and touring with Berry, Johnson has spent much of the past two decades gigging with his own small combo and continuing as a sideman for a number of artists, including even Berry on occasion.
But all that may be changing. Johnson recently released his major-label debut, Johnnie B. Bad, which was produced by Richards and by Terry Adams of NRBQ. It is one of five albums in the Elektra Nonesuch “American Explorer” roots-music series, which also includes fine efforts by Boozoo Chavis, Charlie Feathers, Vernard Johnson and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. In addition to Richards and Adams, it features performances by such stellar players as Eric Clapton, Steve Ferguson, Bernie Worrell, Steve Jordan, Michael Ray of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and the entire NRBQ band.
Johnnie B. Bad is getting rave reviews in various national publications, including Rolling Stone, and is receiving considerable airplay in a number of markets. It has also been selling well, which is remarkable for what is essentially an instrumental album. “I just got off the phone with a fella in New York and he says the record is hot as a pancake there,” Johnson beams. Adds Richards, who worked on the tracks “Key to the Highway” and “Tanqueray,” “I’ve been going up and down from Connecticut to New York every day, ‘cause I’m in the studio, and I turn on the radio and I’m hearing “Tanqueray.” And it’s like, ‘All right!’”
As if the excitement surrounding Johnnie B. Bad wasn’t enough, Johnson is also featured prominently on the bluesy Rockin’ Eighty-Eights, a survey of St. Louis piano greats that also includes Clayton Love and the late Jimmy Vaughn. It was released several months ago on the Modern Blues label. Recent gigs have found him in such far-flung locales as Toronto, Chicago, New York and San Francisco, where, in July, he jammed with members of Ry Cooder’s band at a birthday party thrown in his honor. Not bad for someone who has shunned the spotlight for most of his 45-plus years in music.
“I was always satisfied with being a sideman,” says Johnson, who is humble and unassuming, perhaps to a fault. “I never thought of putting myself out front. Just play my little music, get my money and go home. Whether I got recognition or not, I just wanted to do well enough that, whoever I played with, they would ask me back again. Now they all rush me, like they would enjoy playing with me. It makes you feel real good.”
Johnson was born in Fairmont, W. Va., a small coal-mining town just south of the Pennsylvania border. His introduction to the world of music was something of an epiphany. “When I was five years old, my parents bought me a piano,” he says. “It was one of them uprights. And when the movers brought it into the house, I just sat down to it and started playing. I wasn’t bangin’ on it, I was actually playing a song. My mother was hysterical. She said, ‘This is a gift from God.’ As the years gone by, I grew more into what I was doing and now this is it.”
Through his formative years, big-band jazz, swing and bebop were Johnson’s musics of choice. “Like Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines, Count Basie, Bud Powell and all them type,” he says. “For some reason, I just fell in love with piano. It wasn’t because my mother bought one. It was just – piano, I was obsessed with it. I’ve played other instruments like bass and drums, but nothing satisfies me like piano.”
After finishing high school in 1941, Johnson moved to Detroit, where he got a job in a defense plant and played music in jazz and blues clubs at night. He joined the Marines in 1943 and played in a service band called the Barracudas. “That was where I got the idea that music was what I wanted to do professionally,” he says.
Johnson did indeed try to make music his career, but found the going rough. “At that time, you had to know how to read music, mostly to get into the union and to get better jobs. Well, I never could sit down and read music, but I did know my chords. The musicians I would play with, they’d say, ‘Don’t worry too much about spot reading, just know your chords.’
“The competition was real tough at that time. You had some musicians walking the streets that would make musicians playing look like amateurs. It was just who you know. Matter of fact, when I started playing music professionally, two or three stretches I had to quit and take jobs in the steel mill ‘cause I just couldn’t make it playing music.”
Johnson decided to give the burgeoning blues scene of Chicago a try. Along the way, he met such established stars as Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf, all of whom let him sit in. “That was some experience,” he says. “I think blues took a hand on me then. I thought I could make it as a piano player, playing the blues. But as the years grew on and I got more familiar with it, I started playing jazz. I could do either. Whatever the trend in music was, I was right there.”
During another down period in his musical career, Johnson moved to St. Louis and took a job in a freight house over on the East Side. “For a while,” he says, “it looked like everywhere I went was a jinx, ‘cause work would fall off after I got there. But in the meantime, I had this little three-piece band going, and that’s when I met Chuck. I was playing at the Cosmo[politan] in East St. Louis and he was playing up the street from me at a place called Huff’s Garden. And he would come by the Cosmo if he finished before I did and we just got to be friends.
“One night, my saxophone player got seriously ill and couldn’t make it. So I got in contact with Chuck and he said, ‘Sure, I’ll come over.’ But Chuck, he was playing something different. You know, the public is always looking for something different. Chuck was playing this hillbilly music, what we would call rockabilly today. The audience would make a game out of it. He would play his ‘Ida Red,’ which eventually became ‘Maybellene,’ and they would get out and do a square dance. He just took to the people and we stuck together.”
Johnson and Berry became one of the hottest attractions on the local circuit, and Johnnie eventually ceded leadership of the group to Chuck, whose ability to gauge the public’s taste was as sharp as his business acumen. They recorded a demo of “Ida Red” and took it to Chess Records in Chicago. Leonard Chess liked what he heard, but insisted that the title be changed. “They already had a group out of Nashville that was playing a song called ‘Ida Red,’ on the Grand Ole Opry,” Johnson says, so we had to change it. And we looked over in the corner and saw this mascara box with ‘Maybelline’ written on it, and that’s how it got its name. And the rest is history.”
The pair formed a close working relationship and toured together, often using local bands to back them up – a practice each of them adheres to today, though Johnson would prefer to work with his regular group, the Magnificent Four. But he remembers his old experiences fondly, recalling how traveling together cemented his and Berry’s performing styles: “Chuck and I were so tight that way that we could be on jobs and we could just look at each other and know what to play. I don’t know what you’d call it, but we could feel it. In his book, he wrote that he could just look at me and know what to do next.”
Their work together carried on offstage as well, continuing into the realm of songwriting. Johnson has never received credit – not to mention royalty payments – for his contributions to Berry’s music. Yet he remains strangely unaffected by what looks to an outsider like an injustice, weighing his relatively modest circumstances against the spacious comfort enjoyed by his one-time partner out at Berry Park in Wentzville.
This is how Johnson describes his and Berry’s division of labor: “I did most of the driving, ‘cause we were traveling by car back then. Like, one time we went from Washington, D.C., to Norfolk, Va., and along the way, Chuck wrote a lot of lyrics. And when we got where we was going, he and I would sit down and he would read the lyrics to me and I would try to put some music to it for him. He would play something and say, ‘How would this sound?’ or ‘How would this fit in?’ and I would say, ‘Well, it sounds good, but let’s try this.’ And that’s how we would get our songs together. All the lyrics he wrote himself. I just tried to put some music behind it.”
Which would suggest to some that Johnson is entitled to a half-share of Chuck’s considerable fortune. Richards, above all others, has been vocal in pointing this out. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s been ripped off,” he says, “‘cause only Johnnie can say that. But otherwise, I think it’s pretty close. Let’s just say he got the short end of the stick.”
Johnson, though, remains vociferous in his defense of Berry. “I’ve never had any problem with Chuck,” he says. “He’s always treated me like royalty. Like, he would go on the road and I wouldn’t go with him, and he’d come back and pay me just like I had been on the job with him. But there’s many other people that didn’t fare quite that well with him. I’ve just always been the type of person that I am. Money don’t change me. My wife always tells me, ‘People just run over you.’ I say, ‘They don’t run over me, it’s just the way I carry myself.’ Everybody got a breaking point. I just never reached mine yet.”
Much of what is happening in Johnson’s career right now can be traced back to tree tumultuous weeks in 1986 when the Taylor Hackford film Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll was in production in and around St. Louis. It was then that Johnson met Richards and Clapton, two of rock music’s biggest stars who, he was surprised to find, were utterly in awe of him. In fact, Richards’ involvement in the project was contingent upon Johnson’s participation. Richards recalls, “Before he died, Ian Stewart said to me, ‘Never forget, Keith, Johnnie Johnson is alive and well and living in St. Louis.’ And when I got the chance to work with Chuck, one of the major conditions was, let’s get Johnnie in here. If we can do that, then we’ve really accomplished something.”
Richards also invited Johnson to play on his 1988 solo outing, Talk Is Cheap. A gold-record award for the album currently hangs over the bed in Johnnie’s apartment. And when the Rolling Stones’ “Steel Wheels” juggernaut rolled into town in 1989, Johnson joined them onstage at Busch Stadium. “That was great,” he says. “Here I am up on this big video screen and people’s cheering me on for being a St. Louisan. Keith thought enough of me and my playing to have me up there. And Mick Jagger, he was just having a fit. We went to the Majestic afterwards, and Mick says, ‘I really enjoyed singing with you. We have to do this again.’”
Eric Clapton, who performed “Wee Wee Hours” in Hail! Hail! also tapped Johnson to perform at his annual Royal Albert Hall concerts, which occur every February in London. “To work with, Eric is very beautiful,” Johnson says. “I mean, you see him onstage, and he doesn’t say much, but you get him backstage, boy, and he’ll talk you to death. All good stuff, though. He’ll tell you how he likes working with you and how you make his show a success. He’s just a jolly person to be around. He’s had a lot of tragedy in his life, but he’s still going. Life gone on, I guess.”
Richards and Adams both say they were elated to work with Johnson. “To me,” Richards says, “it was a chance to work with somebody that turned me on. And those things you can’t refuse, you know?” For Adams, it was also an opportunity to pay tribute to one of his childhood heroes. “When I was a kid,” he recalls, “I bought an obscure Chuck Berry single called ‘Mad Lad.’ I don’t think Chuck wrote it, but it’s one of my favorite records. The piano part had some kind of effect on my brain, you know? And to work with the guy who played on that, it was a real thrill.”
One of the most significant aspects of Johnnie B. Bad is that it contains Johnson’s first-ever recorded vocals on the tracks “Stepped in What?” and “Tanqueray.”
Johnson, it seems, has suffered a career-long bout with stage fright. “I can play piano in front of a million people and it don’t bother me,” he says. “But if I gotta say hello into the mike, I’d like to faint. And Elektra told me I gotta do something to put me out front on this record. So I said, ‘Well, maybe I’ll do a striptease or something, but I sure can’t sing.’”
“He’s a shy one when it comes to singing,” says Richards. “Usually, he chokes up when you say, ‘Now you gotta do the vocal track.’ But we said, ‘Come on, Johnnie, you can do it.’ I think if you give him the right vibe and the right guys with him, you can get things out of Johnnie that even he doesn’t know he can do. I just love his voice. It’s so expressive.”
As it turns out, Johnson did just fine, and the experience cured his stage fright. “I never thought I’d ever be out front calling myself a singer,” he says. “Now I can’t wait to get out front and do some more, get some records out under my own lyrics.”
And Johnson’s piano playing, Richards says, is as sharp as ever. “Yeah, sure, he’s getting on,” he admits. “But maybe if he’s lost anything in that incredible agility, he makes up for it with experience. I guess that’s what all musicians have to do. It always amazes me when I look at his hands and hear what’s coming out of them. Some of the notes and licks are so delicate, and the hands look like a bunch of bananas.”
Perhaps the only sour note that Johnnie can sound at this point – and he is very reluctant to sound it himself – is the fact that St. Louis musicians rarely, if ever, receive their due in their hometown. He plays here only sporadically, and even a recent gig at Union Station had to be booked out of New York. “I won’t say that the problem is just St. Louis,” he says. “It’s the States in general. In Europe they back you 100 percent, letting you know they appreciate your music. It’s much better than in the States.”
Richards, however is more adamant about getting Johnnie the proper recognition: “St. Louis, wake up, man! You’ve got one of the best there, one of the survivors. You should build a statue or something, take care of the man.”
As for whether Johnson’s place in rock & roll history is secure, Richards says, “The fact that you and I are talking about him right now says that some of the imbalance is being redressed. I just hope it goes on, because Johnnie deserves everything he didn’t get before. People should get out to hear him, and I hope he keeps playing for ages.”
And perhaps he will. On Valentine’s Day of this year, he remarried, and honored his wife Frances by naming a track on the Rockin’ Eighty Eights album after her. “About five years I chased her and finally she give in,” he says. “I guess she got tired of runnin’.” Johnson credits Frances with turning his life around completely. “I probably wouldn’t have been around too much longer if it wasn’t for her. I was living wildly. But after getting married and being perfectly satisfied, I’ll live a nice long life now.”
Johnson also says that the recognition he is receiving now is better than if it had never come at all. But it does take some getting used to. “Like when we was in San Francisco,” he says. “A fella came walking across the street toward us, and the way things are these days, I didn’t know if he was coming to speak or to rob me or what. And he comes right up to me and says, ‘Are you Johnnie Johnson?’ I said yeah and he says, ‘Great! I’m coming to your show tonight.’ And one morning I went to get a ticket to get on the plane and this fella says, ‘Hi, Mr. Johnson, I saw you on TV last night.’ All this just glorifies your life. It’s getting better and better all the time.”
Indeed. And it looks like Berry’s lyric to “Johnny B. Good,” which he wrote in honor of his friend, has turned out to be something of a prophecy: “Maybe someday your name will be in lights,” the song goes, “Saying ‘Johnny B. Goode Tonight.’”
For Johnnie Johnson, that someday is now. At last.
Johnnie Johnson Returns to the Rock & Roll Road with Johnnie B. Bad
Riverfront Times, September 4-10, 1991
Listen to any of Chuck Berry’s great hits from the mid-to-late ‘50s and early ‘60s – “Maybellene,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Little Queenie,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Back in the U.S.A” and so on – and it isn’t hard to understand what made them so exciting when they first took the music world by storm. They hit you like a freight train with their chugging, hillbilly-cum-jump-blues rhythms, Berry’s canny “motorvatin’ over the hill” poetics and his innovative, full-bodied guitar licks.
And then there’s the piano: masterful, quick-witted fills alternate with lightning-speed runs up and down the keyboard. As agile as they are insistent, they make explicit proto-rock’s deep affiliations with the blues and with jazz and boogie-woogie. Even today, that piano sound is a touchstone for rock & rollers the world over. It’s an essential component of a music that turned the world upside down for an entire generation, one member of which was a working-class kid from Dartford, Kent, named Keith Richards.
“I’ve always been a band man, really,” Richards recently told the RFT. “I might think, yeah, I like this guy’s record, but who else is inputting on this, who else is playing? And when we started to put the Stones together, we had (pianist) Ian Stewart playing with us. We would listen to those Chuck Berry records and Stu would say, “I’ll tell you who made those records what they are. Just listen to that piano, man. That’s the guy who’s holding it together. That’s Johnnie Johnson.”
Accolades such as that one have been few and far between, and certainly slow in coming to Johnson, 67, who still lives in a modest duplex in North St. Louis. After 28 years of recording and touring with Berry, Johnson has spent much of the past two decades gigging with his own small combo and continuing as a sideman for a number of artists, including even Berry on occasion.
But all that may be changing. Johnson recently released his major-label debut, Johnnie B. Bad, which was produced by Richards and by Terry Adams of NRBQ. It is one of five albums in the Elektra Nonesuch “American Explorer” roots-music series, which also includes fine efforts by Boozoo Chavis, Charlie Feathers, Vernard Johnson and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. In addition to Richards and Adams, it features performances by such stellar players as Eric Clapton, Steve Ferguson, Bernie Worrell, Steve Jordan, Michael Ray of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and the entire NRBQ band.
Johnnie B. Bad is getting rave reviews in various national publications, including Rolling Stone, and is receiving considerable airplay in a number of markets. It has also been selling well, which is remarkable for what is essentially an instrumental album. “I just got off the phone with a fella in New York and he says the record is hot as a pancake there,” Johnson beams. Adds Richards, who worked on the tracks “Key to the Highway” and “Tanqueray,” “I’ve been going up and down from Connecticut to New York every day, ‘cause I’m in the studio, and I turn on the radio and I’m hearing “Tanqueray.” And it’s like, ‘All right!’”
As if the excitement surrounding Johnnie B. Bad wasn’t enough, Johnson is also featured prominently on the bluesy Rockin’ Eighty-Eights, a survey of St. Louis piano greats that also includes Clayton Love and the late Jimmy Vaughn. It was released several months ago on the Modern Blues label. Recent gigs have found him in such far-flung locales as Toronto, Chicago, New York and San Francisco, where, in July, he jammed with members of Ry Cooder’s band at a birthday party thrown in his honor. Not bad for someone who has shunned the spotlight for most of his 45-plus years in music.
“I was always satisfied with being a sideman,” says Johnson, who is humble and unassuming, perhaps to a fault. “I never thought of putting myself out front. Just play my little music, get my money and go home. Whether I got recognition or not, I just wanted to do well enough that, whoever I played with, they would ask me back again. Now they all rush me, like they would enjoy playing with me. It makes you feel real good.”
Johnson was born in Fairmont, W. Va., a small coal-mining town just south of the Pennsylvania border. His introduction to the world of music was something of an epiphany. “When I was five years old, my parents bought me a piano,” he says. “It was one of them uprights. And when the movers brought it into the house, I just sat down to it and started playing. I wasn’t bangin’ on it, I was actually playing a song. My mother was hysterical. She said, ‘This is a gift from God.’ As the years gone by, I grew more into what I was doing and now this is it.”
Through his formative years, big-band jazz, swing and bebop were Johnson’s musics of choice. “Like Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines, Count Basie, Bud Powell and all them type,” he says. “For some reason, I just fell in love with piano. It wasn’t because my mother bought one. It was just – piano, I was obsessed with it. I’ve played other instruments like bass and drums, but nothing satisfies me like piano.”
After finishing high school in 1941, Johnson moved to Detroit, where he got a job in a defense plant and played music in jazz and blues clubs at night. He joined the Marines in 1943 and played in a service band called the Barracudas. “That was where I got the idea that music was what I wanted to do professionally,” he says.
Johnson did indeed try to make music his career, but found the going rough. “At that time, you had to know how to read music, mostly to get into the union and to get better jobs. Well, I never could sit down and read music, but I did know my chords. The musicians I would play with, they’d say, ‘Don’t worry too much about spot reading, just know your chords.’
“The competition was real tough at that time. You had some musicians walking the streets that would make musicians playing look like amateurs. It was just who you know. Matter of fact, when I started playing music professionally, two or three stretches I had to quit and take jobs in the steel mill ‘cause I just couldn’t make it playing music.”
Johnson decided to give the burgeoning blues scene of Chicago a try. Along the way, he met such established stars as Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf, all of whom let him sit in. “That was some experience,” he says. “I think blues took a hand on me then. I thought I could make it as a piano player, playing the blues. But as the years grew on and I got more familiar with it, I started playing jazz. I could do either. Whatever the trend in music was, I was right there.”
During another down period in his musical career, Johnson moved to St. Louis and took a job in a freight house over on the East Side. “For a while,” he says, “it looked like everywhere I went was a jinx, ‘cause work would fall off after I got there. But in the meantime, I had this little three-piece band going, and that’s when I met Chuck. I was playing at the Cosmo[politan] in East St. Louis and he was playing up the street from me at a place called Huff’s Garden. And he would come by the Cosmo if he finished before I did and we just got to be friends.
“One night, my saxophone player got seriously ill and couldn’t make it. So I got in contact with Chuck and he said, ‘Sure, I’ll come over.’ But Chuck, he was playing something different. You know, the public is always looking for something different. Chuck was playing this hillbilly music, what we would call rockabilly today. The audience would make a game out of it. He would play his ‘Ida Red,’ which eventually became ‘Maybellene,’ and they would get out and do a square dance. He just took to the people and we stuck together.”
Johnson and Berry became one of the hottest attractions on the local circuit, and Johnnie eventually ceded leadership of the group to Chuck, whose ability to gauge the public’s taste was as sharp as his business acumen. They recorded a demo of “Ida Red” and took it to Chess Records in Chicago. Leonard Chess liked what he heard, but insisted that the title be changed. “They already had a group out of Nashville that was playing a song called ‘Ida Red,’ on the Grand Ole Opry,” Johnson says, so we had to change it. And we looked over in the corner and saw this mascara box with ‘Maybelline’ written on it, and that’s how it got its name. And the rest is history.”
The pair formed a close working relationship and toured together, often using local bands to back them up – a practice each of them adheres to today, though Johnson would prefer to work with his regular group, the Magnificent Four. But he remembers his old experiences fondly, recalling how traveling together cemented his and Berry’s performing styles: “Chuck and I were so tight that way that we could be on jobs and we could just look at each other and know what to play. I don’t know what you’d call it, but we could feel it. In his book, he wrote that he could just look at me and know what to do next.”
Their work together carried on offstage as well, continuing into the realm of songwriting. Johnson has never received credit – not to mention royalty payments – for his contributions to Berry’s music. Yet he remains strangely unaffected by what looks to an outsider like an injustice, weighing his relatively modest circumstances against the spacious comfort enjoyed by his one-time partner out at Berry Park in Wentzville.
This is how Johnson describes his and Berry’s division of labor: “I did most of the driving, ‘cause we were traveling by car back then. Like, one time we went from Washington, D.C., to Norfolk, Va., and along the way, Chuck wrote a lot of lyrics. And when we got where we was going, he and I would sit down and he would read the lyrics to me and I would try to put some music to it for him. He would play something and say, ‘How would this sound?’ or ‘How would this fit in?’ and I would say, ‘Well, it sounds good, but let’s try this.’ And that’s how we would get our songs together. All the lyrics he wrote himself. I just tried to put some music behind it.”
Which would suggest to some that Johnson is entitled to a half-share of Chuck’s considerable fortune. Richards, above all others, has been vocal in pointing this out. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s been ripped off,” he says, “‘cause only Johnnie can say that. But otherwise, I think it’s pretty close. Let’s just say he got the short end of the stick.”
Johnson, though, remains vociferous in his defense of Berry. “I’ve never had any problem with Chuck,” he says. “He’s always treated me like royalty. Like, he would go on the road and I wouldn’t go with him, and he’d come back and pay me just like I had been on the job with him. But there’s many other people that didn’t fare quite that well with him. I’ve just always been the type of person that I am. Money don’t change me. My wife always tells me, ‘People just run over you.’ I say, ‘They don’t run over me, it’s just the way I carry myself.’ Everybody got a breaking point. I just never reached mine yet.”
Much of what is happening in Johnson’s career right now can be traced back to tree tumultuous weeks in 1986 when the Taylor Hackford film Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll was in production in and around St. Louis. It was then that Johnson met Richards and Clapton, two of rock music’s biggest stars who, he was surprised to find, were utterly in awe of him. In fact, Richards’ involvement in the project was contingent upon Johnson’s participation. Richards recalls, “Before he died, Ian Stewart said to me, ‘Never forget, Keith, Johnnie Johnson is alive and well and living in St. Louis.’ And when I got the chance to work with Chuck, one of the major conditions was, let’s get Johnnie in here. If we can do that, then we’ve really accomplished something.”
Richards also invited Johnson to play on his 1988 solo outing, Talk Is Cheap. A gold-record award for the album currently hangs over the bed in Johnnie’s apartment. And when the Rolling Stones’ “Steel Wheels” juggernaut rolled into town in 1989, Johnson joined them onstage at Busch Stadium. “That was great,” he says. “Here I am up on this big video screen and people’s cheering me on for being a St. Louisan. Keith thought enough of me and my playing to have me up there. And Mick Jagger, he was just having a fit. We went to the Majestic afterwards, and Mick says, ‘I really enjoyed singing with you. We have to do this again.’”
Eric Clapton, who performed “Wee Wee Hours” in Hail! Hail! also tapped Johnson to perform at his annual Royal Albert Hall concerts, which occur every February in London. “To work with, Eric is very beautiful,” Johnson says. “I mean, you see him onstage, and he doesn’t say much, but you get him backstage, boy, and he’ll talk you to death. All good stuff, though. He’ll tell you how he likes working with you and how you make his show a success. He’s just a jolly person to be around. He’s had a lot of tragedy in his life, but he’s still going. Life gone on, I guess.”
Richards and Adams both say they were elated to work with Johnson. “To me,” Richards says, “it was a chance to work with somebody that turned me on. And those things you can’t refuse, you know?” For Adams, it was also an opportunity to pay tribute to one of his childhood heroes. “When I was a kid,” he recalls, “I bought an obscure Chuck Berry single called ‘Mad Lad.’ I don’t think Chuck wrote it, but it’s one of my favorite records. The piano part had some kind of effect on my brain, you know? And to work with the guy who played on that, it was a real thrill.”
One of the most significant aspects of Johnnie B. Bad is that it contains Johnson’s first-ever recorded vocals on the tracks “Stepped in What?” and “Tanqueray.”
Johnson, it seems, has suffered a career-long bout with stage fright. “I can play piano in front of a million people and it don’t bother me,” he says. “But if I gotta say hello into the mike, I’d like to faint. And Elektra told me I gotta do something to put me out front on this record. So I said, ‘Well, maybe I’ll do a striptease or something, but I sure can’t sing.’”
“He’s a shy one when it comes to singing,” says Richards. “Usually, he chokes up when you say, ‘Now you gotta do the vocal track.’ But we said, ‘Come on, Johnnie, you can do it.’ I think if you give him the right vibe and the right guys with him, you can get things out of Johnnie that even he doesn’t know he can do. I just love his voice. It’s so expressive.”
As it turns out, Johnson did just fine, and the experience cured his stage fright. “I never thought I’d ever be out front calling myself a singer,” he says. “Now I can’t wait to get out front and do some more, get some records out under my own lyrics.”
And Johnson’s piano playing, Richards says, is as sharp as ever. “Yeah, sure, he’s getting on,” he admits. “But maybe if he’s lost anything in that incredible agility, he makes up for it with experience. I guess that’s what all musicians have to do. It always amazes me when I look at his hands and hear what’s coming out of them. Some of the notes and licks are so delicate, and the hands look like a bunch of bananas.”
Perhaps the only sour note that Johnnie can sound at this point – and he is very reluctant to sound it himself – is the fact that St. Louis musicians rarely, if ever, receive their due in their hometown. He plays here only sporadically, and even a recent gig at Union Station had to be booked out of New York. “I won’t say that the problem is just St. Louis,” he says. “It’s the States in general. In Europe they back you 100 percent, letting you know they appreciate your music. It’s much better than in the States.”
Richards, however is more adamant about getting Johnnie the proper recognition: “St. Louis, wake up, man! You’ve got one of the best there, one of the survivors. You should build a statue or something, take care of the man.”
As for whether Johnson’s place in rock & roll history is secure, Richards says, “The fact that you and I are talking about him right now says that some of the imbalance is being redressed. I just hope it goes on, because Johnnie deserves everything he didn’t get before. People should get out to hear him, and I hope he keeps playing for ages.”
And perhaps he will. On Valentine’s Day of this year, he remarried, and honored his wife Frances by naming a track on the Rockin’ Eighty Eights album after her. “About five years I chased her and finally she give in,” he says. “I guess she got tired of runnin’.” Johnson credits Frances with turning his life around completely. “I probably wouldn’t have been around too much longer if it wasn’t for her. I was living wildly. But after getting married and being perfectly satisfied, I’ll live a nice long life now.”
Johnson also says that the recognition he is receiving now is better than if it had never come at all. But it does take some getting used to. “Like when we was in San Francisco,” he says. “A fella came walking across the street toward us, and the way things are these days, I didn’t know if he was coming to speak or to rob me or what. And he comes right up to me and says, ‘Are you Johnnie Johnson?’ I said yeah and he says, ‘Great! I’m coming to your show tonight.’ And one morning I went to get a ticket to get on the plane and this fella says, ‘Hi, Mr. Johnson, I saw you on TV last night.’ All this just glorifies your life. It’s getting better and better all the time.”
Indeed. And it looks like Berry’s lyric to “Johnny B. Good,” which he wrote in honor of his friend, has turned out to be something of a prophecy: “Maybe someday your name will be in lights,” the song goes, “Saying ‘Johnny B. Goode Tonight.’”
For Johnnie Johnson, that someday is now. At last.