What Chuck Berry learned in Fayetteville

“Richard Nader, a concert promoter, recalls a story Berry told him about a show he had played in Fayetteville, North Carolina [in the 1950s].  After agreeing on a fee of $750, Berry made the 800-mile trip from St. Louis only to find a audience of 20 teenagers in a seedy ice-cream parlor. Berry played the show, only to be handed at the end of the night a fee of $1.75 and a list of expenses. ‘[The promoter] had everything down there,’  Nader recalled Berry saying, ‘down to the light bulbs.’

“It was a lesson that would shape Chuck Berry’s view of the music business from then on.”

– From “Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry” (2002) by Bruce Pegg

Chuck Berry died Saturday. He was 90.