Crying Steel's Third Strike - Chuck Berry and Keith Richards live 1986

I don't know the people behind Crying Steel Records, but they must be regular readers of this site.

Their first release 'Deliver Me From The Days Of Old' (Crying Steel Records CSR001, 2007) contained all of Berry's Records which I had described as being released on CD or Vinyl before but concurrently being extremely hard to find on CD. This included the Newport 1958 concert which was back then only available in Sweden or the two Japanese concerts which were at that time only available on Vinyl.

While it is doubtful that CSR001 was a legal release, it not only looked like one. It also came with a professional booklet containing many great photos and useful discographical information.

Crying Steel's second release 'Live At Winterland, San Francisco '67' (Crying Steel Records CSR02, 2014) gave us a CD copy of the three 1960s concerts which had been found in the archives of promoter Bill Graham. These had been made available for online listening through the commercial site Wolfgang's Vault, now Concert Vault. I reported on these concert in blog entries here on January 12, 2008 and on October 23, 2009.

Again it is doubtful whether Crying Steel had the rights to publish Graham's recordings of Berry's performances. But it is also not clear whether Concert Vault has the right to broadcast thise in the first place. See this recent article from Billboard.



Now I received Crying Steel's third strike: a CD called 'Long Live Rock 'n' Roll - 60th Birthday Celebration' (Crying Steel Records CSR03, 2015). Source for this CD is another concert recording available for listening at concertvault.com

I had reported on the availability of this recording in October last year in this site's chapter on Berry's 60th Birthday Celebrations. This concert was recorded on October 17, 1986 and is the second show from the Fox Theatre, St. Louis used for the preparation of Taylor Hackford's documentary called 'Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll' (released 1987). For all the details on this show read the corresponding chapter of the main site.

The Concert Vault recording of the show is about 85 minutes long. It contains most of the concert including various stage banter and impromptu jamming. To make it fit on a single CD, Crying Steel Records excluded most of the in-between talks/waits as well as some of the instrumental jams. Instead they added one more recording from this show: 'School Day' was the big finale of the show as it can be seen in the movie. It was missing from Concert Vault, though.

As no good quality first-hand recording of this final track was available, the people at Crying Steel copied it from the movie, probably from one of the commercially available DVDs. While doing so, they concurrently also extracted four other live recordings from the movie: 'No Money Down', 'Nadine', 'Almost Grown', and 'No Particular Place To Go'. These had been included in the film, but were recorded during the other of the two shows. Just like the remaining songs from the first show which were used in the film or on the soundtrack album, these audio tracks have been post-produced in Los Angeles. During this post-production some vocal parts were overdubbed. I have not yet had the time to compare the post-produced versions to the original recordings where available.

Together with the original soundtrack album, the Crying Steel CD presents a nice overview of the two Fox Theatre shows. They even added two of the Cosmopolitan Club performances also seen in the movie.

As the broadcast on Concert Vault splits the concert into individual tracks, Crying Steel made some effort to glue these parts back together. In most cases this worked quite well. Sometimes volume or cuts do not match correctly, though. They also did not notice that the introduction for Eric Clapton was included twice by error. Finally I found it irritating that at least during the Etta James segment they re-ordered the sequence of the recordings.

Again this professionally looking CD comes with a nice six-page booklet containing photos taken during the Fox Theatre shows. I really don't like the outlook of the track listing and the liner notes, though. Like with last year's release they took a strange, almost unreadable font. And the type size is so small you need a magnifying glass to read it. So, Crying Steel Records, if you read these comments, please return to the CSR001 style!

And I really wish these recordings would be released in a way that the artists, composers, and producers would get their share from the income. I'd be glad to pay.