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Chuck Berry walked on stage April 17, 1998, at the Blue Note in Columbia, Mo. He was 71 years old.

I was in the club's crowd that night. I was 19 and with my college buddy Rich.

My Aunt Bonnie was there, too. She was 41 and had given birth to my youngest cousin about five months earlier. It was her first night out without the baby.

In the hour or so that Berry performed that night, everyone felt like teenagers.

Berry's music stretched across generations, and that impact was on display that night in Columbia. By the standards of popular music, I should not have been at the show.

I was born just about the time Berry released his last album and 20 years after a prison sentence under the Mann Act ended Berry's prime. That's not the parts of a resume that attracts many 19 year olds. The math says my aunt didn't remember Berry at his peak either.

But like every kid my age, I saw Michael J. Fox perform "Johnny B. Goode" in "Back to the Future." Years after that, I became a huge fan of the Rolling Stones, and had read enough about them to know how important Berry was to them and every teenager at the dawn of rock 'n' roll.

So in that first year of college at the University of Missouri, when I heard Berry would play at the most popular club in town, I hurried and paid the $15 to buy a ticket.

Rich saw "Back to the Future," too. Figuring Berry couldn't keep this up much longer, Rich wanted to see him before he died. Bonnie wanted a night out. She and her sister-in-law arrived separately. Rich and I found them after the show.

Berry wore what all the photos of him after 1987 depict him wearing: a bright button-down shirt, slacks and a white hat with a short, black bill and some gold symbol on the front that made the entire headpiece look like he stole it off "The Love Boat."

And, of course, Berry carried an electric guitar. It was the kind with the wide, rounded back end. His band that night looked only a little younger than him.

Berry probably played all his biggest songs. There's only one I remember clearly. (Columbia bartenders in those days treated the legal drinking age as more of a suggestion.)

It's "Little Queenie," one of Berry's odes to teenage girls. The college students, townies and Bohemians in the Blue Note that night had been jumping around, hollering and clapping the whole show and reached their peak in the song's chorus.

"Go, go, go, little queenie," everyone shouted.

Even Berry seemed impressed. He was notorious for walking off stage as soon as his contract said he could do so. And that night in Columbia, not long after he did his duck walk, Berry said it was time for him to go.

But he was having fun, he said with a smile, so he would play a few more songs. We jumped and sang with them. We were all young with no particular place to go.

Nate Carlisle is a reporter at The Salt Lake Tribune. If you want to drink out of plastic cups taken from a bar and swap stories of Columbia, send an email to ncarlisle@sltrib.com.