The best rock and roll has always been made by rugged, and sometimes ragged, individuals—musicians so strong, willful, and full of rebel spirit there’s only one word to describe them: badasses. Their iconoclastic natures empower them to change the course of the music. It also makes them outlaws. Some live to tell, others don’t, but they all earn their place in history.
Click here for Part II of Gibson Lifestyle's Baddest Badasses of Rock.
ROBERT JOHNSON
Before you protest that he was a bluesman, consider what we know about Johnson’s flashy performing style, his quicksilver slide and melody playing, his superfly threads, and his way with the ladies. Ol’ RoJo was a rock star, baby—a Delta Jimi Hendrix so far ahead of his era that “Sweet Home Chicago” has never left the blues canon (although it’s probably time that it did), and his “Cross Road Blues” became a staple of ’60s rock when pop culture finally caught up with his high-flying coattails.
Johnson’s lifestyle caught up with him one night in 1938 at a juke joint outside of Greenwood, Mississippi, when a jealous husband fatally poisoned him. Thus he became the founder of rock’s notorious “27 Club,” whose members include Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, the Minutemen’s D. Boone, and Kurt Cobain—all of whom died at that age. It’s a first Johnson undoubtedly would have preferred to skip, but proof that being a badass sometimes comes with a heavy price.
JERRY LEE LEWIS
Goodness gracious, if there’s still a whole lotta shakin’ going on in Jerry Lee Lewis’ Nesbit, Mississippi, home, it’s likely the bones of the skeletons in his closet.
During his early career heyday at Sun Records, Lewis became the first white performer to embrace the use of sexual double entendre that was popular in African-American R&B. But Lewis was badass for more than that chicken in the barn and those great balls of fire he had the guts to sing about.
Nobody played with such pure frenzy. For Lewis, pounding his piano was an act of demonic possession—literally. He believed his music was a direct affront to God, yet kept right on doing it. Whether defying God is badass or a mortal sin depends on your religious convictions. And speaking of convictions, Lewis’ arrest record contains a banner year. In 1976 he was tagged for drunk driving in Memphis on November 11, only to reappear later that night outside the gates of Elvis Presley’s Graceland, brandishing a pistol and demanding to see the King. Also in ’76, he was booked for firing his pistol at a bottle, missing and hitting his bass player—nearly making his nickname "the Killer" literal.
Lewis’ personal life has been struck by various tornadoes. On December 12, 1957 he married his 13-year-old cousin Myra Gale Brown. It was his third marriage—the second, to Jane Mitcham, took place 23 days before his divorce from his first wife was final—and became a red flag the next year when word got out during a tour of England. Scandalized promoters cancelled shows, and Lewis went from $1,000 concerts to $100 one-nighters.
A foray into country music put Lewis back on top, but his personal losses have been great. His two sons died in auto and swimming pool accidents. Lewis nearly succumbed to bleeding ulcers, and has detoxed at the Betty Ford Clinic.
But through it all he’s remained an uncompromising showman who, at 77, can still play piano with his boots and toss off a flourish with the speed and pageantry of a peacock unfurling his tail. In 2006 he released an album with the bravado title Last Man Standing, in case we hadn’t noticed.
CHUCK BERRY
With a Gibson ES-335 strapped over his shoulder, Chuck Berry seemingly duck walked to fame. But what really won him a spot on rock and roll’s Mt. Olympus wasn’t his performing style. It was his subversive thinking. Berry was not only the first rock songwriter; he was a black adult man writing and performing for white teenagers. You don’t think that’s badass? Consider this.In 1955, Berry’s "Maybellene" hit No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 5 on the Hot 100. That same year, 400 miles away from Berry’s St. Louis, Missouri, home, 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered for whistling at a white women on the front porch of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi.
Early on, Berry baffled segregationist concert promoters, who’d heard him on the radio and thought he was white until he appeared at their stage doors. Sometimes the result was instant audience integration.
With an audacious attitude and a bulletproof catalog of boogie, Berry played a critical role in bringing rock and roll across racial divides—rightfully earning him the badass tag.
JOHNNY CASH
Sometimes the sweetest guys on the planet can also be the most ornery. For proof, refer to the famous 1969 photo of Johnny Cash flipping off a cameraman who got in his way one time too many during a rehearsal for his San Quentin State Prison concert recordings.
Cash was a badass because he was a cultural warrior, and he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought about it. He stood up for Civil Rights and took a stand against the Vietnam War. He argued for prison reform. He championed controversial artists like a young Bob Dylan. He also, along with fellow Sun Records innovators Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, helped invent the beat of rock and roll with early hits like "Cry, Cry, Cry" and "I Walk the Line." And until his death in 2003, Cash was a monumental link to some of American music’s earliest roots.
Cash absorbed songs from the past through his contact with Maybelle Carter, his wife June’s mother, and one of the architects of country music. He was also influenced by other, older musicians who passed along music they’d learned from parents, neighbors, fellow parishioners, and itinerant Appalachian banjo pickers or Delta bluesmen. Cash gave voice to sharecroppers and prospectors, lovers and murderers, preachers and sinners, and his recordings are just the tip of the mountainous repository of American folklore he kept in his head.
But he was an archetypal rock and roll bad boy too. Just before Cash left Sun he got hooked on amphetamines. June helped him kick the pills in ’67, but not before he’d kicked out the footlights of the Grand Ole Opry stage and spent a night in a Mexican jail for smuggling his stash over the border. Throughout the rest of his life he’d struggle with addiction, at times seduced by speed or painkillers.
In 1958, Cash blew up a brand new Cadillac in an incident involving pills and an open tank of propane. He also started a fire that raged while he nodded off in California’s Los Padres National Wildlife Refuge, killing 49 of 53 endangered condors that lived there. When a judge asked Cash if he felt sorry for his rare bird barbecue, he mouthed off about not giving a damn about “buzzards” and paid a hefty fine. Decades later, Cash almost died when an ostrich on his Tennessee ranch tried to gut him with its enormous hind claw. Avian revenge?
JAMES BROWN
If bandleader Louis Jordan was rock and roll’s spark plug, James Brown was its nuclear bomb. Sure, Elvis put enough pelvis in his performances to make bobbysoxers shriek, but Brown was a full-grown man who wasn’t too proud to beg for what he wanted. Right from 1956’s "Please, Please, Please," Brown’s performances were rituals of moaning and shouting vocal ecstasy and splits, swoops, and steps that let both the ladies and the gents know who was the cock of the walk.
As the late musician and journalist Robert Palmer explained in his The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll entry on Brown, the South Carolina native’s early blend of gospel harmonies, driving horns, and exaggerated shuffles wasn’t unique. But Brown began incorporating Latin cross-rhythms, and his guitarist Jimmy Nolen invented a choked style of playing chords that amped up the band’s rhythmic thrust. By 1964, Brown’s group had become so percussive the entire unit had morphed into, essentially, a giant drum kit. It was a style that placed a distinctly Western pop-, blues-, and gospel-informed crown atop the fundamentals of African music. Many of his compositions were based on a single chord, offset by one-, two-, or three-note bursts from the horns, staccato guitar riffs, and bass lines of two or three notes. It was mesmerizing, and, at its best—in tunes like "Cold Sweat" and "Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag"—almost heart-stopping.
Brown was on his way to becoming the most popular artist in America until the British Invasion nudged him aside. As it was, Brown prepared the mainstream for Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Joe Tex, Al Green, and other soul testifiers who followed him up the charts, and continued to influence the direction of popular music. His sound provided the foundation of disco, and spread across the world to embed itself in reggae and in the Afro-beat pioneered by Fela Kuti, and the juju exemplified by King Sunny Adé. When hip-hop arrived, Brown became the most sampled man in show business. The beats of "Funky Drummer" alone have been used more than 100 times by rappers. That’s badass.
Beyond music, Brown said it loud: he was black and proud. He befriended Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his success as a self-managed African-American businessman with his own publishing company, booking agency, three radio stations, and a Lear jet made him a role model. It also gave him power. After Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, and rioting broke out in many major U.S. cities as African-Americans reacted in pain and anger, Brown used his Boston concert the next night to keep peace in the racially simmering Hub.
That’s the good stuff. The shadowy half of Brown’s badass personality made him a rule breaker and drug taker nearly till the end. In the 1970s he got whacked for back taxes and had to sell his jet and radio stations to pony up $4.5 million to the IRS. In 1987, brandishing a shotgun and high on PCP, he disrupted a business meeting in a building he owned, then led police on a chase that won him his second jail stretch. Nine years ago he was sentenced to 90 days rehab after firing a rifle and leading another cop race.
Even Brown’s death, in December 2006 at the age of 73, wasn’t without controversy. Following a memorial service fit for royalty at New York’s Apollo Theater, Brown’s children quarreled over his final resting place so that the Godfather of Soul wasn’t buried until a full 10 weeks after his death. It was as though Brown’s strong will had survived him. Indomitable in death as he was in life, James Brown will always be remembered as the hardest working man in show business.
Click here for Part II of Gibson Lifestyle's Baddest Badasses of Rock.