The David Bowie Guitarist Who Talked Back to Chuck Berry and What He Learned From It: “You Did Not Talk to Chuck”

As a member of the historic Apollo’s house band, guitarist Carlos Alomar worked with countless musical icons, from Chuck Berry to James Brown to Chic to David Bowie. Getting to share the stage with these players, for however long or briefly, allowed Alomar an up-close-and-personal look into how these musicians wrote, rehearsed, performed, and interacted with their colleagues. Sometimes, these practices and habits led to fruitful and dynamic collaborative relationships. Other times…not so much.

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Take, for example, one of Alomar’s clearest memories of the late, great Chuck Berry, which Alomar shared in a 2025 interview with Guitar Player. “I got this phone call to do a job at the Rye Playland,” Alomar recalled. “It was an amusement park. But they had entertainment there under the giant tent and everything. I get there, and in walks Chuck Berry with his electric guitar. He walks right up to us and says, ‘When I do like this,’ and he takes his headstock and moves it sideways, ‘you stop.’ ‘And when I do like this,’ and he moves his headstock up and down, ‘you play.’ That was it.”

Describing himself as in his “early twenties and naive,” Alomar said he called out for Berry as he went to leave the room. “I said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Berry. Are we gonna rehearse?’ That man turned around and looked at me and said, ‘Boy, I ain’t gonna rehearse no rock ‘n’ roll.’ He turned around, walked out.”

Chuck Berry Was One of Many Big Personalities Carlos Alomar Worked With

Carlos Alomar retelling his first memory with Chuck Berry sounds par for the course for the rock icon behind hits like “Maybellene” and “Johnny B. Goode”. Even The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards exchanged words with Berry. The guitarist was notoriously brash, no-nonsense, and aggressively averse to feeling like his time was being wasted. But even without all the surprisingly confrontational behavior, Alomar said that performing with Berry was “amazing, and to this day, I still kind of conduct the same way that Chuck Berry did. To me, the biggest lesson was you don’t rehearse rock ‘n’ roll. You either know it, or you don’t.”

“I also learned that you did not talk to Chuck. Chuck talked to you.” Alomar admitted he remembered Berry as a “mean drunk,” while clarifying that he knew that wasn’t all there was to the late musician. “You only remember your last experience with someone. It’s like a song. You can do a whole song. But if you mess up the ending, all you remember is the messed-up ending. Chuck Berry is like that song.”

If Alomar thought Berry was a strict rock ‘n’ roller, he was in for a rude awakening when he went out on the road for a short stint with James Brown. After missing an improvised cue on stage, Alomar remembered collecting his money and realizing his cut was short. “I looked at the guy and said, ‘Hey, there’s $20 missing,’” Alomar once told Guitar World. “He said, ‘Yeah, Mr. Brown said you didn’t hit back.’ I was intelligent. My father gave me a mantra: ‘If you can’t explain it, defend it.’ So, I learned to talk real fast and to explain exactly what I wanted, and I was fired.”

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