Everyone interested in Chuck Berry's music knows the Toronto concert. This is because Berry's performance at the Toronto Rock&Roll Revival festival of September 13th, 1969 has been recorded professionally both on film and on audio tape.
The audio was published on hundreds of vinyl and CD albums starting with the 2-LP set
Live in Concert (Magnum LP-703) in 1978. The optical recording was used as early as 1970, most importantly in D.A. Pennebaker's movie
Keep On Rockin' from 1972.
The interesting thing to collectors is that none of the audio or video releases contains the entire performance. The 2-LP set has, very uncommon for a live recording, each song completely separated with faded start and ending. The movie contains just a selection of songs as well as some in-between talks, but cut and spliced as it fitted to the director.
it is totally unclear why there has never been a complete release of the entire show. At least in the 1980s and 1990s a more complete source still existed, as budget re-releases of the concert contained indeed MORE than the original Magnum album. For instance a French LP album contains half a minute of introduction between
School Day and
Wee Wee Hours.
Thus at least in the 1990s some company still owned a more complete, maybe entire tape of the show they could license. Some labels used this, though never in total.
It is unclear whether this tape still exists somewhere. When Bear Family in 2014 released their huge Berry box, they tried to find it, but didn't succeed. Therefore Bear Family extracted the only song from the show still missing an audio release (the short
Bonsoir Cherie) from Pennebaker's movie.
We all thought this would be the end of the story. But a few days ago, Sunset Blvd. Records released another audio CD with music from Toronto, but promoted their release with a prominently placed large sticker:
Even those like me who already have dozens of records containing the same show, felt tempted to buy one of the (pretty expensive) CDs.
Don't do it!
Also Sunset Blvd. Records (SBR) did NOT find the original audio tape. Instead they cut and spliced available and well-known material trying to recreate the original concert. There's nothing wrong trying so. I did the same in 1997. However, I used all the material from all the sources. SBR obviously only had the Magnum album and Pennebaker's film.
This means that several of the transitions between songs are missing from this CD. And it means that what sounds like on-stage chatter and comments is not at the correct place, since Pennebaker already had cut and spliced segments from all over the concert and shuffled them around.
The songs are not in the correct sequence and parts of the show are omitted even though already known. The only interesting thing is that SBR included Kim Fowley's introduction to Berry.
So this is a fake! And at some time SBR must have recognized it. MC Kim Fowley is heard twice at song endings applauding Berry. One is at the non-medley version of
Johnny B. Goode and thus also on the SBR CD. A second time is at the end of
Maybellene.This and its placement at the end of the Magnum 2-LP set lets me assume that this song is one of the rare encores in a Berry concert. SBR instead decided to place
Maybellene after
I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man which ends with Berry asking "You name it, we play it."
Maybellene starts with "Did I hear Maybellene?" Fits, thought the people at SBR. But this required them to cut off Kim Fowley from the end of the song and to fade over into
Too Much Monkey Business.
And indeed it's too much monkey business here. Why to spend all the effort to create such a fake? Either you have the original tape or you don't. But don't pretend to have it.
Interestingly the liner notes refer to and correctly name our database as a source. So they must have found this site. But why didn't they read
the long chapter we have dedicated to this concert alone? All this leaves us fairly disappointed.
To end with a positive note: Have a look at Don Pennebaker's description about how the title
Keep On Rockin' got selected and about his visit to John Lennon's bedroom showing him the film:
https://phfilms.com/films/sweet-toronto-keep-on-rockin/#summary
Somehow Pennebaker misses to tell that Lennon demanded payment for his appearance and thus had to be cut from the film.