The Chuck Berry Vinyl Bootlegs, Vol. 1: Rare Berries

A note on bootleg records first: A bootleg record is a factory-produced vinyl record released and sold without authorization by the artist or owner of the recording. Bootleg records may contain known recordings, but most often bootleg records either contained studio outtakes or live performances. The first bootleg records were seen at the end of the 1960's. During the 1970's and 1980's lots of different bootleg records were produced. In the early 1990's bootleggers changed to use CDs instead of vinyl records. I do not encourage the production and sale of bootleg records as I find that artists, composers, producers, and the rest of the recording industry deserve a financial compensation of their work.

This series of articles is going to describe the Chuck Berry vinyl bootlegs released in the 1970's and 1980's. For any record collector these items are important to know of, even though you don't necessarily need to have them. Omitted from all the usual discographies, information about these records is next to void. Given the secret nature of the bootlegger business there are no exact dates, numbers, or origins. I have tried to collect this information from various sources and mostly from my own collection of records. If you can add anything of worth to the information given here, I'd be glad to know!

Let's begin this series with the record I use for the thumbnail of the Chuck Berry Rarities section of this blog. This may be the first Chuck Berry vinyl bootleg, or not.

Chuck Berry - Rare Berries - Kozmik KZ-501

As with most of the early bootleg records, Rare Berries did not have a printed cover but instead came in a plain white envelope. Attached were two sheets of paper which are black and white photocopies. All copies of this record I have seen so far have these sheets glued to the two sides of the record cover, so I don't know if they were delivered loosely initially. Both sheets don't have any standard paper size, so it's quite possible that they were already glued on the cover at their initial sale.

The front sheet shows a (poor) photo of Berry. He wears the colorful stage outfit he used to wear by the end of 1972 and early 1973. So this indicates a production date of not earlier than 1972. And probably also not much later as fully printed covers became common with bootlegs in the mid 1970's.
In addition the front sheet (225x292mm) tells the artist name in capital letters, the record name in all lower-case letters, the logo KOZMIK and the record number KZ-501.

The back sheet (207x283mm) repeats label, artist and record name. Next is a sentence explaining the record as "A Limited Edition album, featuring Chuck Berry's most obscure recordings, taken from the outset of his musical career." Following is a track listing and discographical details of the recordings.

The tracks on this record are as follows (spelling as on the back sheet):
Side A

1. RUN AROUND
2. ROLLI POLLI
3. WORRIED LIFE BLUES
4. HEY PEDRO
5. IT DON'T TAKE BUT A FEW MINUTES
6. BLUE FEELING
7. SWEET SIXTEEN

Side B

1. OUR LITTLE RENDEZVOUS
2. DEEP FEELING
3. MERRY CHRISTMAS BABY
4. INGO
5. HOW YOU'VE CHANGED
6. BERRY PICKIN'
7. BLUES FOR HAWAIIANS

As you can see from the track listing, these are not the usual bootleg recordings. Instead of unreleased studio stuff or obscure live recordings, this album contains nothing more than previously released Chess material, though some of the lesser known. But definitely not 'rare'. All of these recordings could have been found in used-record shops even in the 1970's. No later than with the release of Chuck Berry's Golden Decade Volume 3 in 1974 almost all of these tracks were commercially available even on new records. Therefore I would date the release of Rare Berries to 1972 or 1973.

There are at least two different variants of this bootleg differing by the record label print. This points to at least two production runs.

Variant 1 has green labels. The text is written with a typewriter, the label name is written using a lettering guide. The labels must have been created in haste as they even did not re-type the B side label after mistyping £ for a 5 in the record number. And on Side A they weren't even sure of the (probably conceived) label name: Where the front sheet and Side B spell KOZMIK with a Z, the label of Side A has KOSMIK with an S.

Variant 2 has a much more professional looking multi-colored label. Besides the consequent spelling of KOZMIK it also tells 'Mono', '33 1/3 RPM', 'Jewel Music' as the song publisher, and the standard saying that 'copying of this record is prohibited'. If one wouldn't know better (and would miss the cover), this could be mistaken for a legitimate release. Interesting is the hint to Jewel Music Publishing, Inc. which was Chuck Berry's publisher in the UK at that time. This could point to the origin of this record.

Both variants seem to have been produced using the same master disk. The etching in the dead wax reads 'KZ 501 A/B' on both records.

To read the other parts of this series on Chuck Berry vinyl bootlegs, click here:

• The Chuck Berry Vinyl Bootlegs, Vol. 2: Six Two Five
• The Chuck Berry Vinyl Bootlegs, Vol. 3: America's Hottest Wax
• The Chuck Berry Vinyl Bootlegs, Vol. 4: Telecasts