The Not-So-Private Life of Chuck Berry.

Rock legend Chuck Berry died this past March, and in a remembrance posted on Facebook, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards called him a “private man.” Precisely what he means by this is anyone’s guess, because throughout Berry’s career, many very private parts of his private life were thrust into the public spotlight.

Considering what we now know about Berry and his sexual proclivities, it’s fitting (albeit unfortunate) that his only No. 1 hit was 1972’s “My Ding-a-Ling,” a song whose unambiguous double entendre caused controversy when it was released. Many radio stations refused to play it — though it’s not clear if that’s because the song is about a dick, or because it’s ten minutes too long, and just plain dumb.

Even though Berry’s real-life ding-a-ling had already caused him legal troubles, in the early 1970s this popular cover song could still be appreciated as a dirty yet playful novelty. The musician’s darker days were yet to come.

When Berry became a rock ’n’ roll superstar in the 1950s, this then-thirty-something black guitarist was creating the soundtrack for white teenage America’s sexual awakening. Songs like “School Day,” “Sweet Sixteen,” and “Johnny B. Goode” were for the kids and about the kids, and his adoring fans, many of them teenage girls, would flock to see Berry perform. Good, clean, all-American fun.

But in 1959, at the height of his career, Berry was charged with violating the Mann Act — aka the White-Slave Traffic Act — for transporting a 14-year-old girl across state lines for “immoral purposes.” The underage girl was an alleged prostitute and an employee at his club, and two weeks after Berry fired her she turned him in. Accusations of sex in Berry’s Cadillac and motel rooms were thrown around, and after a drawn-out trial and multiple appeals with racist judges and all-white male juries, Berry was found guilty and spent 20 months in prison.

Following his release, Berry’s dick managed to avoid the spotlight for several years. But this all changed in 1990, when cops raided Berry’s Missouri estate. They were looking for drugs, but ended up finding video footage of women using the toilet in Berry’s house as well as in his restaurant, the Southern Air.

In a July 1990 memo faxed to Bob Guccione (images of the yellowed, crumpled pages are available on VICE’s website — worth seeing if only for the doodles in the margin), someone included transcripts from an interview with a DEA informant who’d been gathering evidence to justify the raid.

“It seems that Mr. Berry has been very BAD,” the letter writer says in his introduction. “I have…witnessed hours of the video tapes seized by the DEA — and they are unbelievable.”

Excerpts from the unnamed informant’s interview follow, describing what he saw on the footage: “Each toilet tape is edited so all you have is squat and wipe, squat and wipe, squat and wipe. Sometimes Berry would freeze the frame as the girl is discharging — let it stay frozen for a few seconds and then move on.”

When the story of the tapes finally broke — not in Penthouse, but in Spy magazine, in 1993 — Berry’s fetishes for pee and shit (defined as urolagnia and coprophilia, respectively) became a nationwide joke. In 1994, Berry settled a class-action suit filed by dozens of women who claimed they’d been filmed, paying over $1.2 million in damages.

But it was Berry’s homemade porn movies that secured his reputation as de facto poster boy for golden showers and scat play. And although the content of the footage didn’t become public knowledge until the Spy report, there’s a full description in the 1990 memo to Guccione:

“Berry is in Tahoe on New Year’s 1988, with his [young, blonde] girlfriend. She is laying in the circular bathtub naked and Berry is standing in front of her. Berry says, ‘Do you like what you see? Do you want it?’ Berry then slaps her repeatedly across her face with his wanker, which is never hard. You can hear the slaps…. Then he starts to piss on her. ‘Open your mouth, I want you to drink my piss.’ Which she does, but Berry sprays all over her face, eyes, and more in her mouth.”

When he’s finished, Berry wipes her face but refuses to kiss her: “I would baby but you smell like piss, take a shower!”

The transcript continues: “She then puts on this sexy dance in the shower and after toweling off, Berry barks, ‘Come here you bitch, it’s time for my breakfast!’ And she sits on his face and you can see her discharge into his mouth as he eats away while grunting like [an] ape.”

Rest in feces, Chuck Berry.

Photo: Getty Images / David Redfem