Chuck Berry On Stage album finally on CD

CHESS LP 1480, Chuck Berry On Stage, is one of the strangest albums released during Chuck Berry's work with Chess Records.
Released while Berry was in jail, the Chess brothers had no new material available. Therefore they looked through their archive and found some lower quality tracks from older sessions. Even combined with some greatest hits, the album did not look as if it could be a commercial success. Thus, the Chess brothers went one step further.
By adding noise from an audience crowd and some shouting MC they made the album look like it would have been recorded live in concert. Next they changed the titles of some songs for further obfuscation. So Sweet Little Sixteen became Surfing USA, and Let It Rock became Rocking on the Railroad.
It didn't help and interest for this album was low. Seems like record buyers are not as stupid as companies want to believe.
When CDs became popular, nobody expected sales from re-releasing this album. Especially as the previously unreleased tracks became available without the fake applause over the years, one after the other which, however, took until 2009. If you were interested to listen to the original album with all the damage Chess introduced, you had to go to your Vinyl collection.
Finally, as part of the new series of album replicas issued by Universal Music Japan, CHESS LP 1480 is available on CD now!



The CD contains the original contents of the CHESS album including all the fake applause and shouts. It also includes How High the Moon which was not listed on the original cover, though on the disk. To fill up the re-issue CD, Universal added a true live concert from 1963, which makes the album title correct in some sense. The Detroit concert has been published before on You Never Can Tell - His Complete Chess Recordings 1960-1966 (HIP-O-Select B0012485-02, 2009). Note that the "enhanced" versions having the fake applause were omitted from that complete set. Here they are, finally.
To get the Japanese re-issue, click here: UICY-94630