He is, like many of us, his own best advocate and his own worst enemy,
but the particular problem for Chuck is that, for all of the accolades
that have come his way (listen to Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee
Lewis celebrate his genius on the Million Dollar Quartet session, just
for a start), to this day he has not been unambiguously embraced in the
full artistic terms he deserves. There are undoubtedly a multiplicity of
reasons for this (race would certainly have to be factored in), but the
principal reason that Chuck has not been lifted up on a wave of
critical and biographical hosannas is Chuck himself. His unwillingness
to ingratiate himself. His unreadable apartness. The deep-seated sense
of anger and suspicion that can unexpectedly flare up and turn into
overt hostility, with or without provocation (check out the 60th
birthday, star-studded performance documentary, Hail! Hail! Rock N' Roll,
which is both brilliant for its uplifting artistry and maddening for
its self-inflicted failures). Most of all, I would guess, it comes down
to his determined, uncompromisingly defiant refusal to conform to anyone
else's expectations but his own.
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