CHUCK BERRY
''ROCK AND ROLL MUSIC: ANY OLD WAY YOU CHOOSE IT, DISC TEN''
OCTOBER 17 2014
78:53
1 I'm Just A Name 03:38
2 Too Late 02:45
3 Turn On The Houselights (instrumental) 09:14
4 Swanee River 02:37
5 You Are My Sunshine 02:49
6 Johnny B. Blues (instrumental) 02:22
7 Dust My Broom 03:32
8 Don't You Lie To Me 03:43
9 My Babe 02:28
10 Here Today 04:18
11 I Just Want To Make Love To You 03:04
12 Rockin' (instrumental) 04:22
13 Shake Rattle And Roll 02:15
14 Baby What You Want Me To Do 02:36
15 Chuck's Beat 10:35
16 Bo's Beat 14:02
17 Bio 04:24
REVIEW/AMG
by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
There have been countless Chuck Berry compilations but never one like Bear Family's Rock and Roll Music: Any Old Way You Choose It, a mammoth 16-disc box containing his complete recorded works for Chess, Mercury, and Atco. Only the soundtrack to Taylor Hackford's star-studded 1987 documentary Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll is missing and it isn't missed much, not in the face of this abundance. Almost everything here is previously released -- Universal not only released Chuck's complete Chess recordings as three four-disc sets on Hip-O Select in the 2000s, they did a pretty good job clearing out the vaults in the '70s and '80s -- but with a set of this size, what counts is not rarities but context. Here, that context is not the original Chess singles of the '50s and early '60s, the smashes that became standards, but rather what happened afterward, when Chuck kept working and working, churning out records for Mercury as he played with pickup bands across the land. That said, the deeply detailed recounting of his pioneering first stint at Chess -- lasting from 1954 until 1966, barring a two-year hiatus to serve a prison sentence; here, the time line is expanded by a single he cut with Joe Alexander right before he signed with the Chess brothers -- remains rich and wondrous, illustrating how quickly Berry settled into his signature groove and how many variations he found within his blend of jazz, blues, and country. All this is familiar from the three Hip-O Select sets, but when the late-'60s recordings for Mercury are added to the picture, it becomes more apparent how Berry was eager to change with the times, adding swinging horns as a nod to the soul emerging from the South or jamming with the Steve Miller Band so he could please the crowd at the Fillmore. Berry was savvy. He knew how to change with the times, a talent that is plain on the live material here, including both dates recorded with the Motown rhythm section in Detroit in October 1963 and the Toronto Rock n Roll Revival from 1969, some BBC sessions, and cuts from the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958. On the earlier dates he's charmingly polite, but in 1963 he starts to loosen up with offhand jokes, and by 1969 he's happily leading a large audience through a dirty nursery rhyme. That schtick could play on college campuses and Chuck, alone among the original rockers, really made a play for the counterculture by recording such outlaw anthems as "Tulane," an ode to a pair of dope dealers that sounded like nothing but Chuck Berry. This box makes clear that this is one of the keys to Berry's genius: he always stood apart from the pack, so he could sell trends back to the audience, all filtered through the boogie, blues, and sliding guitar runs he loved so. He kept this up until 1979, the year he released Rock It, an underrated little record that contained "Oh What a Thrill," a song that proved he still could knock off a killer when he needed. It was the last time he needed to, however: he had already built a body of work that defined rock & roll and, in many ways, all the hopes and dreams of 20th century America. The glory of Rock and Roll Music: Any Old Way You Choose It is that it captures that work in all its incandescent glory.
BIOGRAPHY/AMG
by Cub Koda
Of all the early breakthrough rock & roll artists, none is more important to the development of the music than Chuck Berry. He is its greatest songwriter, the main shaper of its instrumental voice, one of its greatest guitarists, and one of its greatest performers. Quite simply, without him there would be no Beatles, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, nor a myriad others. There would be no standard "Chuck Berry guitar intro," the instrument's clarion call to get the joint rockin' in any setting. The clippety-clop rhythms of rockabilly would not have been mainstreamed into the now standard 4/4 rock & roll beat. There would be no obsessive wordplay by modern-day tunesmiths; in fact, the whole history (and artistic level) of rock & roll songwriting would have been much poorer without him. Like Brian Wilson said, he wrote "all of the great songs and came up with all the rock & roll beats." Those who do not claim him as a seminal influence or profess a liking for his music and showmanship show their ignorance of rock's development as well as his place as the music's first great creator. Elvis may have fueled rock & roll's imagery, but Chuck Berry was its heartbeat and original mindset.
He was born Charles Edward Anderson Berry to a large family in St. Louis. A bright pupil, Berry developed a love for poetry and hard blues early on, winning a high school talent contest with a guitar-and-vocal rendition of Jay McShann's big band number, "Confessin' the Blues." With some local tutelage from the neighborhood barber, Berry progressed from a four-string tenor guitar up to an official six-string model and was soon working the local East St. Louis club scene, sitting in everywhere he could. He quickly found out that black audiences liked a wide variety of music and set himself to the task of being able to reproduce as much of it as possible. What he found they really liked -- besides the blues and Nat King Cole tunes -- was the sight and sound of a black man playing white hillbilly music, and Berry's showmanlike flair, coupled with his seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh verses to old favorites, quickly made him a name on the circuit. In 1954, he ended up taking over pianist Johnny Johnson's small combo and a residency at the Cosmopolitan Club soon made the Chuck Berry Trio the top attraction in the black community, with Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm their only real competition.
But Berry had bigger ideas; he yearned to make records, and a trip to Chicago netted a two-minute conversation with his idol Muddy Waters, who encouraged him to approach Chess Records. Upon listening to Berry's homemade demo tape, label president Leonard Chess professed a liking for a hillbilly tune on it named "Ida Red" and quickly scheduled a session for May 21, 1955. During the session the title was changed to "Maybellene" and rock & roll history was born. Although the record only made it to the mid-20s on the Billboard pop chart, its overall influence was massive and groundbreaking in its scope. Here was finally a black rock & roll record with across-the-board appeal, embraced by white teenagers and Southern hillbilly musicians (a young Elvis Presley, still a full year from national stardom, quickly added it to his stage show), that for once couldn't be successfully covered by a pop singer like Snooky Lanson on Your Hit Parade. Part of the secret to its originality was Berry's blazing 24-bar guitar solo in the middle of it, the imaginative rhyme schemes in the lyrics, and the sheer thump of the record, all signaling that rock & roll had arrived and it was no fad. Helping to put the record over to a white teenage audience was the highly influential New York disc jockey Alan Freed, who had been given part of the writers' credit by Chess in return for his spins and plugs. But to his credit, Freed was also the first white DJ/promoter to consistently use Berry on his rock & roll stage show extravaganzas at the Brooklyn Fox and Paramount theaters (playing to predominately white audiences); and when Hollywood came calling a year or so later, also made sure that Chuck appeared with him in Rock! Rock! Rock!, Go, Johnny, Go!, and Mister Rock'n'Roll. Within a years' time, Chuck had gone from a local St. Louis blues picker making 15 dollars a night to an overnight sensation commanding over a hundred times that, arriving at the dawn of a new strain of popular music called rock & roll.
The hits started coming thick and fast over the next few years, every one of them about to become a classic of the genre: "Roll Over Beethoven," "Thirty Days," "Too Much Monkey Business," "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," "You Can't Catch Me," "School Day," "Carol," "Back in the U.S.A.," "Little Queenie," "Memphis, Tennessee," "Johnny B. Goode," and the tune that defined the moment perfectly, "Rock and Roll Music." Berry was not only in constant demand, touring the country on mixed package shows and appearing on television and in movies, but smart enough to know exactly what to do with the spoils of a suddenly successful show business career. He started investing heavily in St. Louis area real estate and, ever one to push the envelope, opened up a racially mixed nightspot called the Club Bandstand in 1958 to the consternation of uptight locals. These were not the plans of your average R&B singers who contented themselves with a wardrobe of flashy suits, a new Cadillac, and the nicest house in the black section. Berry was smart with plenty of business savvy and was already making plans to open an amusement park in nearby Wentzville. When the St. Louis hierarchy found out that an underage hat-check girl Berry hired had also set up shop as a prostitute at a nearby hotel, trouble came down on Berry like a sledgehammer on a fly. Charged with transporting a minor over state lines (the Mann Act), Berry endured two trials and was sentenced to federal prison for two years as a result.
He emerged from prison a moody, embittered man. But two very important things had happened in his absence. First, British teenagers had discovered his music and were making his old songs hits all over again. Second, and perhaps most important, America had discovered the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, both of whom based their music on Berry's style, with the Stones' early albums looking like a Berry song list. Rather than being resigned to the has-been circuit, Berry found himself in the midst of a worldwide beat boom with his music as the centerpiece. He came back with a clutch of hits ("Nadine," "No Particular Place to Go," "You Never Can Tell"), toured Britain in triumph, and appeared on the big screen with his British disciples in the groundbreaking T.A.M.I. Show in 1964.
Berry had moved with the times and found a new audience in the bargain and when the cries of "yeah-yeah-yeah" were replaced with peace signs, Berry altered his live act to include a passel of slow blues and quickly became a fixture on the festival and hippie ballroom circuit. After a disastrous stint with Mercury Records, he returned to Chess in the early '70s and scored his last hit with a live version of the salacious nursery rhyme, "My Ding a Ling," yielding Berry his first official gold record. By decade's end, he was as in demand as ever, working every oldies revival show, TV special, and festival that was thrown his way. But once again, troubles with the law reared their ugly head and 1979 saw Berry headed back to prison, this time for income tax evasion. Upon release this time, the creative days of Chuck Berry seemed to have come to an end. He appeared as himself in the Alan Freed bio-pic, American Hot Wax, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but steadfastly refused to record any new material or even issue a live album. His live performances became increasingly erratic, with Berry working with terrible backup bands and turning in sloppy, out-of-tune performances that did much to tarnish his reputation with younger fans and oldtimers alike. In 1987, he published his first book, Chuck Berry: The Autobiography, and the same year saw the film release of what will likely be his lasting legacy, the rockumentary Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll, which included live footage from a 60th-birthday concert with Keith Richards as musical director and the usual bevy of superstars coming out for guest turns. But for all of his off-stage exploits and seemingly ongoing troubles with the law, Chuck Berry remains the epitome of rock & roll, and his music will endure long after his private escapades have faded from memory. Because when it comes down to his music, perhaps John Lennon said it best, "If you were going to give rock & roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'."
WEBSITE
TO THE TOP
''ROCK AND ROLL MUSIC: ANY OLD WAY YOU CHOOSE IT, DISC TEN''
OCTOBER 17 2014
78:53
1 I'm Just A Name 03:38
2 Too Late 02:45
3 Turn On The Houselights (instrumental) 09:14
4 Swanee River 02:37
5 You Are My Sunshine 02:49
6 Johnny B. Blues (instrumental) 02:22
7 Dust My Broom 03:32
8 Don't You Lie To Me 03:43
9 My Babe 02:28
10 Here Today 04:18
11 I Just Want To Make Love To You 03:04
12 Rockin' (instrumental) 04:22
13 Shake Rattle And Roll 02:15
14 Baby What You Want Me To Do 02:36
15 Chuck's Beat 10:35
16 Bo's Beat 14:02
17 Bio 04:24
REVIEW/AMG
by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
There have been countless Chuck Berry compilations but never one like Bear Family's Rock and Roll Music: Any Old Way You Choose It, a mammoth 16-disc box containing his complete recorded works for Chess, Mercury, and Atco. Only the soundtrack to Taylor Hackford's star-studded 1987 documentary Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll is missing and it isn't missed much, not in the face of this abundance. Almost everything here is previously released -- Universal not only released Chuck's complete Chess recordings as three four-disc sets on Hip-O Select in the 2000s, they did a pretty good job clearing out the vaults in the '70s and '80s -- but with a set of this size, what counts is not rarities but context. Here, that context is not the original Chess singles of the '50s and early '60s, the smashes that became standards, but rather what happened afterward, when Chuck kept working and working, churning out records for Mercury as he played with pickup bands across the land. That said, the deeply detailed recounting of his pioneering first stint at Chess -- lasting from 1954 until 1966, barring a two-year hiatus to serve a prison sentence; here, the time line is expanded by a single he cut with Joe Alexander right before he signed with the Chess brothers -- remains rich and wondrous, illustrating how quickly Berry settled into his signature groove and how many variations he found within his blend of jazz, blues, and country. All this is familiar from the three Hip-O Select sets, but when the late-'60s recordings for Mercury are added to the picture, it becomes more apparent how Berry was eager to change with the times, adding swinging horns as a nod to the soul emerging from the South or jamming with the Steve Miller Band so he could please the crowd at the Fillmore. Berry was savvy. He knew how to change with the times, a talent that is plain on the live material here, including both dates recorded with the Motown rhythm section in Detroit in October 1963 and the Toronto Rock n Roll Revival from 1969, some BBC sessions, and cuts from the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958. On the earlier dates he's charmingly polite, but in 1963 he starts to loosen up with offhand jokes, and by 1969 he's happily leading a large audience through a dirty nursery rhyme. That schtick could play on college campuses and Chuck, alone among the original rockers, really made a play for the counterculture by recording such outlaw anthems as "Tulane," an ode to a pair of dope dealers that sounded like nothing but Chuck Berry. This box makes clear that this is one of the keys to Berry's genius: he always stood apart from the pack, so he could sell trends back to the audience, all filtered through the boogie, blues, and sliding guitar runs he loved so. He kept this up until 1979, the year he released Rock It, an underrated little record that contained "Oh What a Thrill," a song that proved he still could knock off a killer when he needed. It was the last time he needed to, however: he had already built a body of work that defined rock & roll and, in many ways, all the hopes and dreams of 20th century America. The glory of Rock and Roll Music: Any Old Way You Choose It is that it captures that work in all its incandescent glory.
BIOGRAPHY/AMG
by Cub Koda
Of all the early breakthrough rock & roll artists, none is more important to the development of the music than Chuck Berry. He is its greatest songwriter, the main shaper of its instrumental voice, one of its greatest guitarists, and one of its greatest performers. Quite simply, without him there would be no Beatles, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, nor a myriad others. There would be no standard "Chuck Berry guitar intro," the instrument's clarion call to get the joint rockin' in any setting. The clippety-clop rhythms of rockabilly would not have been mainstreamed into the now standard 4/4 rock & roll beat. There would be no obsessive wordplay by modern-day tunesmiths; in fact, the whole history (and artistic level) of rock & roll songwriting would have been much poorer without him. Like Brian Wilson said, he wrote "all of the great songs and came up with all the rock & roll beats." Those who do not claim him as a seminal influence or profess a liking for his music and showmanship show their ignorance of rock's development as well as his place as the music's first great creator. Elvis may have fueled rock & roll's imagery, but Chuck Berry was its heartbeat and original mindset.
He was born Charles Edward Anderson Berry to a large family in St. Louis. A bright pupil, Berry developed a love for poetry and hard blues early on, winning a high school talent contest with a guitar-and-vocal rendition of Jay McShann's big band number, "Confessin' the Blues." With some local tutelage from the neighborhood barber, Berry progressed from a four-string tenor guitar up to an official six-string model and was soon working the local East St. Louis club scene, sitting in everywhere he could. He quickly found out that black audiences liked a wide variety of music and set himself to the task of being able to reproduce as much of it as possible. What he found they really liked -- besides the blues and Nat King Cole tunes -- was the sight and sound of a black man playing white hillbilly music, and Berry's showmanlike flair, coupled with his seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh verses to old favorites, quickly made him a name on the circuit. In 1954, he ended up taking over pianist Johnny Johnson's small combo and a residency at the Cosmopolitan Club soon made the Chuck Berry Trio the top attraction in the black community, with Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm their only real competition.
But Berry had bigger ideas; he yearned to make records, and a trip to Chicago netted a two-minute conversation with his idol Muddy Waters, who encouraged him to approach Chess Records. Upon listening to Berry's homemade demo tape, label president Leonard Chess professed a liking for a hillbilly tune on it named "Ida Red" and quickly scheduled a session for May 21, 1955. During the session the title was changed to "Maybellene" and rock & roll history was born. Although the record only made it to the mid-20s on the Billboard pop chart, its overall influence was massive and groundbreaking in its scope. Here was finally a black rock & roll record with across-the-board appeal, embraced by white teenagers and Southern hillbilly musicians (a young Elvis Presley, still a full year from national stardom, quickly added it to his stage show), that for once couldn't be successfully covered by a pop singer like Snooky Lanson on Your Hit Parade. Part of the secret to its originality was Berry's blazing 24-bar guitar solo in the middle of it, the imaginative rhyme schemes in the lyrics, and the sheer thump of the record, all signaling that rock & roll had arrived and it was no fad. Helping to put the record over to a white teenage audience was the highly influential New York disc jockey Alan Freed, who had been given part of the writers' credit by Chess in return for his spins and plugs. But to his credit, Freed was also the first white DJ/promoter to consistently use Berry on his rock & roll stage show extravaganzas at the Brooklyn Fox and Paramount theaters (playing to predominately white audiences); and when Hollywood came calling a year or so later, also made sure that Chuck appeared with him in Rock! Rock! Rock!, Go, Johnny, Go!, and Mister Rock'n'Roll. Within a years' time, Chuck had gone from a local St. Louis blues picker making 15 dollars a night to an overnight sensation commanding over a hundred times that, arriving at the dawn of a new strain of popular music called rock & roll.
The hits started coming thick and fast over the next few years, every one of them about to become a classic of the genre: "Roll Over Beethoven," "Thirty Days," "Too Much Monkey Business," "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," "You Can't Catch Me," "School Day," "Carol," "Back in the U.S.A.," "Little Queenie," "Memphis, Tennessee," "Johnny B. Goode," and the tune that defined the moment perfectly, "Rock and Roll Music." Berry was not only in constant demand, touring the country on mixed package shows and appearing on television and in movies, but smart enough to know exactly what to do with the spoils of a suddenly successful show business career. He started investing heavily in St. Louis area real estate and, ever one to push the envelope, opened up a racially mixed nightspot called the Club Bandstand in 1958 to the consternation of uptight locals. These were not the plans of your average R&B singers who contented themselves with a wardrobe of flashy suits, a new Cadillac, and the nicest house in the black section. Berry was smart with plenty of business savvy and was already making plans to open an amusement park in nearby Wentzville. When the St. Louis hierarchy found out that an underage hat-check girl Berry hired had also set up shop as a prostitute at a nearby hotel, trouble came down on Berry like a sledgehammer on a fly. Charged with transporting a minor over state lines (the Mann Act), Berry endured two trials and was sentenced to federal prison for two years as a result.
He emerged from prison a moody, embittered man. But two very important things had happened in his absence. First, British teenagers had discovered his music and were making his old songs hits all over again. Second, and perhaps most important, America had discovered the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, both of whom based their music on Berry's style, with the Stones' early albums looking like a Berry song list. Rather than being resigned to the has-been circuit, Berry found himself in the midst of a worldwide beat boom with his music as the centerpiece. He came back with a clutch of hits ("Nadine," "No Particular Place to Go," "You Never Can Tell"), toured Britain in triumph, and appeared on the big screen with his British disciples in the groundbreaking T.A.M.I. Show in 1964.
Berry had moved with the times and found a new audience in the bargain and when the cries of "yeah-yeah-yeah" were replaced with peace signs, Berry altered his live act to include a passel of slow blues and quickly became a fixture on the festival and hippie ballroom circuit. After a disastrous stint with Mercury Records, he returned to Chess in the early '70s and scored his last hit with a live version of the salacious nursery rhyme, "My Ding a Ling," yielding Berry his first official gold record. By decade's end, he was as in demand as ever, working every oldies revival show, TV special, and festival that was thrown his way. But once again, troubles with the law reared their ugly head and 1979 saw Berry headed back to prison, this time for income tax evasion. Upon release this time, the creative days of Chuck Berry seemed to have come to an end. He appeared as himself in the Alan Freed bio-pic, American Hot Wax, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but steadfastly refused to record any new material or even issue a live album. His live performances became increasingly erratic, with Berry working with terrible backup bands and turning in sloppy, out-of-tune performances that did much to tarnish his reputation with younger fans and oldtimers alike. In 1987, he published his first book, Chuck Berry: The Autobiography, and the same year saw the film release of what will likely be his lasting legacy, the rockumentary Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll, which included live footage from a 60th-birthday concert with Keith Richards as musical director and the usual bevy of superstars coming out for guest turns. But for all of his off-stage exploits and seemingly ongoing troubles with the law, Chuck Berry remains the epitome of rock & roll, and his music will endure long after his private escapades have faded from memory. Because when it comes down to his music, perhaps John Lennon said it best, "If you were going to give rock & roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'."
WEBSITE
TO THE TOP
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