The Chuck Berry Collectors Blog

My hometown of Essen, Germany is in the center of a densely populated area with more than five million people. There's all kind of cultural activities here, which is expressed by the town's election to be Europe's Culture Capital 2010.
However, while there is lots of music, true Rock and Roll is not found very often. And I don't count yesterday's concert of ZZ Top as true Rock and Roll
Things changed on Thursday, when "Buddy" the probably well-known musical about Buddy Holly premiered at the Colosseum Theater. I had the opportunity to see the show and join the after-show party. So here's my biased review:
Alan Janes wrote this musical about Buddy's life in the late 1980's. It premiered in London in 1989. Since then multiple versions have been touring world-wide. The German version is best known from it's multiple year stay in Hamburg where a special musical hall was built right in the center of the Hamburg harbor. The updated new version will be played in Essen for the next months.
The piece is not really a musical. It is in fact a tribute concert presenting a sequence of Holly's greatest hits. A large part of the first half and the complete second half are more a concert than anything else. There are just a few spoken scenes in the whole second half. All the rest is pure music. However, a Buddy-Holly-Revival concert can easily go wrong if the artists cannot sound the way we all know from the original records. But here it did not go wrong!
The whole cast has to be both actor and musician as all songs are played live on stage. There is no band behind in the wings. When the "Crickets" perform, they really do. Best of all was Matthias Bollwerk acting as the title role. Matthias is a local singer, just 22 years old, and was intended to be the backup for Buddy Holly. But as Dominik Hees hurt his knee two weeks ago, Matthias became the number one act. And he took his chance. He looks like the young Buddy Holly, acts funny and realistic, plays his guitar quite well, and he performs both the fast songs and the slow ones excellently. I liked best the scene when just he and Maria Elena (Yara Hassan) sat on the empty stage with Matthias singing "True Love Ways" accompanied just by his acoustic guitar. Great!
They even included Chuck Berry music: In the first part, the Crickets perform "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" quite well. They even got most of the lyrics right. The second part ends with the stage getting dark and a radio voice announcing the death of the three stars. When the lights go on again, we see most of the cast walking slowly across the stage like at a burial. Then a female singer starts singing a slow blues, just two lines: "Deep down in Lousiana ...". Another singer picks up the bluesy rhythm with the next two lines of text. And so every member of the cast gets his segment of "Johnny B. Goode" which accelerates a bit with every other singer. When Ritchie Valens (Vinicius Gomes) and JP Richardson (Patrick Stanke) enter the stage, the songs almost reached the original speed. Then Buddy Holly comes through the audience, unpacks his guitar and performs the whole song again. To me this was one of the finest versions of this Chuck Berry song I ever heard. I have to admit, that the audience did not get it. During the bluesy phase, nobody near me even moved or recognized the song. And I admit that the Buddy Holly fans I later talked with had preferred the use of a Holly composition here.
Talking about fans, very little were there. Stage Entertainment had invited more than 1,000 people to the premiere and after-show party, but I doubt more than twenty of them were true Rock and Roll fans. So while the majority enjoyed U.S.-style food, meeting lower-class celebrities, or dancing to recent pop music (not a single Buddy Holly record was played all night long), I had great talks with Klaus Kettner (Germany's number one Bill Haley expert), Heinz-Günther Hartig (Germany's most knowing Buddy Holly fan), and Dieter Moll (the walking encyclopedia on Rock and Roll music).
In any case I had a great evening listening to a very good Buddy Holly cover band, meeting with friends and learning about one of the best versions of "Johnny B. Goode" I ever listened to.

[Disclosure: Stage Entertainment provided me with a free ticket and access to the after-show party.]

[Addition, Jan 21st, 2010]
In the meantime there is a live recording available which includes both Chuck Berry covers, though sung by Dominik Hees. Also included is a nice bonus track called Buddy to Buddy which is a duet version of True Love Ways sung by both Buddys, Dominik and Matthias. Recommended listening. Click here to listen to excerpts of the songs or to purchase the CD.

Reader Brian wrote:

There’s a new live album of Chuck called Rock And Roll Live which has a song called "Carolina Bound." I suspect it is actually "Promised Land" in a new packaging of old live recordings, but do you know anything about it?

Good guess, Brian! In former times you had to run and find a shop which carries the album, buy it, and check it out at home. Producers still think they could make their money from such.
However, thanks to the Internet we can save a lot of money. First we find out that this is not a new CD album, but simply an MP3 "album". And that there are several shop which offer a 30-second sample segment from each song.
So you go to amazon.com (or your favourite shop). Search for the unknown title. And you click on "Play".
Listen by yourself at amazon.com.
What do you get? Not "Promised Land", but close. Of course it's the same old Toronto concert in a new packaging again. And indeed it's a segment from the long medley. But instead of "Promised Land" we hear "Carol". That's where they got the Carolina from.
Save your money, check first.

Last year I talked about the various Chuck Berry concert recordings available from San Francisco 1967. Fred Rothwell now told me that there's another concert recording from this era freshly at Wolfgang's Vault. Here's the link.
This third concert at Wolfgang's Vault is closely related to the last of the SF concerts described which was from December 29th. The newly released concert was the first of this set, recorded at the Winterland on December 26th, 1967.
Again Berry is backed by the Steve-Miller-less Miller band, i.e. Peterman, Turner, and Davis. All three are very quiet in the background, though. You almost cannot hear them. Also there's next to no audience noise. I leave it to you to decide whether this is good or bad.
The released concert is a little over 30 minutes long, so I expect some parts are missing. What's included is interesting, though. I don't remember many live tapes (if any) in which Berry performs "No Particular Place to Go" or "Back in the U.S.A.". Therefore a five minute version of the latter comes as a true surprise. Recommended listening.

I rarely use the word, but I HATE spammers. They are the true 21st century pest.
Whoever praises 21st century social networks, the Web 2.0, or whatever you call it, they totally mask out those who abuse all the interesting things.
Indeed it is an interesting opportunity when readers can comment articles or add useful information thereto. This weblog was my testbed for an interactive webpage, a place where you could add opinions to what I write.
However I had to learn what does not work:

• Trackbacks
  Trackbacks are an automated way to link related information over many weblogs. So if I link to some text on a different blog such as Tulane's, the other blog will receive an automatic notification and can then link back to my page. Vice versa if someone links to a blog entry here, you should see a trackback URL next to the article. Useful, but abused. I had to shut down this feature within the very first weeks as all trackbacks I received were from spammers pointing to totally unrelated sites.
• Unrestricted comments
  You are free to comment on the articles here and I welcome you to do so. But the very first comments placed here had nothing to do with the topics but were instead automated spam messages. So I added a captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). This is the image you have to read before placing your comment. Only humans can read the characters in the image, so spam bots are locked out.
• Unmoderated comments
  OK, I never allowed unmoderated comments because I know that readers tend to put unrelated questions into comments, rude language or private data. So every comment you post is read by me first then then published here.

So you think this should be sufficient to exclude all the spammers? Wrong. Here's an excerpt from a comment just posted to the article "Rare 1970's Vinyl Boots on ebay":

You might think for a pair of practical and fashion boots to pass this winter. Now I will introduce this brand to you.

Get it? Someone wrote a comment on boots = shoes to my article on bootlegs! And the comment of course included lots of links to the super cheap boot store.
How can this happen? Someone broke the captcha system and had a computer post the comment? No, worse:
To post such kind of spam into weblogs and other kinds of social networks, spammers employ poor people in Africa or China who spend the whole day reading the Internet locating keywords. And when they find an article about "boots" they manually post the spam message. Isn't that horrible? you see why I hate spammers?

Radio station records and CDs contain pre-recorded radio shows produced by the large American broadcasting corporations or by dedicated companies. They are sent to the small FM stations all over the U.S.A. who don't have the funds or manpower to produce all their radio shows by themselves.
Collecting radio station records is one of the last true research projects in popular music as no catalogs exist to explain which records were produced and what they contain. Those radio station albums of interest to the Chuck Berry collector are listed in a special section of this page. View here.
Most radio station records contain a DJ playing popular hits. That's far from interesting. Some shows, though, contain material not available on records or CDs anywhere else. With Chuck Berry these are several interviews which made it to radio station albums. And there even is a live concert available on a radio station album which is not published anywhere else.
So when fellow collector Hans recently found another radio station album claiming to contain Chuck Berry Live, I was very interested to learn more about it.
The show Hans found is part of the Cruisin' America with Cousin Brucie series published by CBS RADIORADIO (no typo). The three-hour show was to be broadcast on April 22-24, 1988. It contains the usual hit selection from Tutti Frutti to Who'll stop the rain.
At the end of the program in hour three, segment four finally comes In Concert: Chuck Berry with three songs: Memphis, Tennessee, Maybellene, and Johnny B. Goode. But if you expected to listen to unreleased material, you'd be disappointed. The first two are the standard Chess recordings with live audience dubbed onto them. They are taken from the original Chess fake-live album Chuck Berry On Stage. The third song indeed is a live recording, but a very well known one taken from the 1972 Chess album The London Sessions.
So while the contents itself was disappointing, learning about this show was not. Thanks to Hans for letting us know and providing the scan below.

Strange things happen ...

While I was busy earning some money, someone decided they could earn some money as well.

By re-releasing the "After School Session" album ...

In mono ...

On Vinyl !!!

Yes: Doxy Records DOY 608, released in the UK in February 2009 is a NEW vinyl album. It comes on 180g vinyl in mono. It uses the original front cover, but has DOXY printed in the upper right corner where we used to read CHESS.

All this information is from descriptions I found on the net. I have not seen a physical copy and I do not intend to spent money for it, but if you do, let me know some more details.

Here's a link to a sellers page: offer on ebay

I'm busy - and there's nothing new for the Chuck Berry record collector. Therefore no new posts here.

However, reader Doug was so kind to point me to an interesting offer on eBay:

The 1991 UK box set by Charly is currently on sale! It is expensive and misses the booklet, but this is the only legal way to get Chuck Berry's 1970's output on CD.

Update (July 13): The item did not sell for $500. Now the seller tries with a lower asking price:

Click here to see if this offer is worth that much for you!

I recently sold spare copies of the original Kozmik and Maybelline 1970s vinyl bootlegs from my collection to a fellow reader of this blog.
This let some other reader tell me that he's currently offering his copies on ebay UK. So for those of you who missed my original sale, here's a second chance now. Both records have a very low starting price, but don't be fooled. A reasonable selling price will be much more than 0.99 UK pounds!
Here are the links to the ebay pages:

• this is the Rare Berries from Kozmik
• and here's the Maybelline Records version of Six Two Five

Good luck in case you bid!

I have completed the links to the amazon MP3 offers.
This means you can now listen to excerpts of

• all Chuck Berry recordings from Chess records between 1955 and 1966
• more than half of the Mercury recordings
• some of the later Chess tracks
• the 60th birthday concert
• the Atco recordings
• and various live recordings from Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Coventry, Wembley and Peterborough

99% of the 334 MP3 clips are offered by amazon U.S.A., a few are only available from amazon UK or amazon Germany. In those cases I added links to the corresponding files on these sites.
I think I have found all the Chuck Berry tracks offered by amazon. This turned out to be much more complicated than what you would expect. Here are some of the problems I ran into checking out the almost 1.000 MP3 clips listed by amazon's search function:

• amazon (or the suppliers) digitize albums, not songs. Therefore one and the same recording such as the Chess version of Maybellene is listed 12 times from various albums. And don't be confused that running times may vary several seconds.
• Especially the live versions such as from Toronto vary in length a lot, but we know this from the CDs already.
• Sometimes the same recording is listed under various titles.
• There's a huge mix of incorrect spellings both with song titles and artist names.
• Almost none of the live version contains any kind of information about recording date or place.

Due to this there may be errors. If you find one, let me know! Within a week there have been more than 1.000 accesses to the MP3 pages. Even though most of this were by search engines, it looks as if you find this addition to my site helpful. Tell me if I can make something even better. And no - there is no way to play the complete songs without paying for it.

This is a site about music. But it has been a site without music - until now.
In contrast to other music sites I had not included any sound clips or complete songs within this site. There was a good reason: If you use music for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, you have to pay the musician and the composer. Since I do not earn any money from this site, I cannot afford to license music for inclusion here. I know that other webmasters think and act differently and simply use music they cut from records or copied from somewhere. However, such is not only unlawful, in my opinion it is highly unfair against the creator of the music. How can you expect someone to create music if nobody is willing to pay them for it? It is really poor if like some weeks ago someone (himself a musician) asks me questions about some Berry tracks because he had a downloaded copy of a CD only - and not the commercial one with a great booklet answering his questions. Sigh!
OK, back to music. I recently found a legal way to provide you with excerpts from almost each and every Chuck Berry recording. Yes!
I started with Berry's original Chess era and added sound to every recording listed therein. That means you can now check out each and every recording Berry made between 1955 and 1966, including alternate takes and more. Isn't that great?
So if you see me mentioning as song such as

Maybellene

simply click on the loudspeaker symbol behind the song name. Try it!
Your browser will open a new tab or window where you should see one or in this case multiple Amazon MP3 Widgets. If it does not, this is because the widget needs both JavaScript enabled and a recent Adobe Flash Player installed. I'm sorry for that as this site nowhere else requires additional software other than a W3C-compatible Webbrowser (which I am proud of), but I decided that in this case the benefits overweight.
In the case of Maybellene there will be one widget for the original Chess version, one for the Mercury re-recording and several widgets for different live versions. If there are alternate takes, those will be displayed as well. Click on a widget to listen to this specific version. The widget displays controls for volume, pause and more.
This service is provided free by amazon.com. But of course you will not be able to listen to the complete track. There is a thirty seconds excerpt of each variant. That is all that is provided for free. If you are located in the U.S.A., you can use the widget's Buy MP3 button to purchase a DRM-free MP3 file of the complete track. Unfortunately amazon.com does not sell these MP3s to other countries and to make matters worse, other amazon stores do not stock all of the songs you find at amazon.com. That's a pity, but I cannot change it. Maybe I will add links to non-U.S. shops in the future like I did with the CD offers, but that's many days of work.
Please enjoy the new addition to this site and let me know what you think of it.

Angie, webmistress of fumbleontheweb.com, was so kind to tell us about a nice concert report written by Des Henly of the Fumbles:

Just some information plus a question: I am (besides being a great fan of Chuck Berry's music) a friend of the 1970s band Fumble who had many of Chuck's songs in their repertoire and also recorded some Chuck Berry songs like 'No Money Down' or 'Let It Rock'. In their new blog 'Des Henly's Rock Years', Des Henly talks about Fumble's experiences when they backed Chuck Berry at a festival in Frankfurt in June 1973. Great story, and perhaps you find it interesting to read.

Yes, Angie, I found it interesting to read. So will the other readers of this site. Look here: http://www.fumbleontheweb.com/archive/memories/blog_chuckberry.htm
Angie's question is:

Do you know if there is any video material of that event existing? Because I have heard rumours that there is...

I have not seen any video material from the Radstadion Frankfurt concert of July 22nd, 1973. I know there is an audience tape of this Chuck Berry performance in front of 20.000 people. Also there are various photos from this event used both in magazines (e.g. Posterpress) and on record covers. Here's a cut-out from Bellaphon BL15107 "Original Oldies Vol. 3" from 1974 (Click it for a larger version). If any reader knows more about this concert, let us know.

Update [2010-03-01]: According to several other photos of this Berry performance it seems to be sure that the photos used on the Bellaphon cover have been taken by famous German photographer Barbara Klemm.

In December 2008 the long-awaited film about Chess Records premiered in the U.S.
Just four months later the movie Cadillac Records was released on DVD. While the movie itself did not make it to this part of the world yet (the announced starting day for Germany is April 23rd), at least it is possible to watch it on DVD here - kind of ...
So I went to amazon and ordered the DVD when it became available two weeks ago. Click here for the corresponding amazon pages.
Of course the DVD did not play in my DVD player as the DVD is region coded fot the U.S. and Canada. I really, really do not understand what line of reasoning is behind limiting audience and market of a DVD and movie, but Sony will know.
To watch the U.S. DVD you need to have a region-free DVD player. I use a computer for such.
As you will have read otherwise, Cadillac Records tells the story of the Chess record label in Chicago. Of course, a movie has to concentrate on excerpts from a 15 year story. So the producers took some liberties in removing characters and in highlighting others. The main characters in the movie are Leonard Chess, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry, and Etta James. Bo Diddley is not noted at all, and even Phil Chess is never mentioned by name, if I watched carefully. The DVD has a deleted scene in which Phil at least is introduced.
If you are not familiar with the Chess story, chances are low you will want to watch the movie. But if you are interested in Chuck Berry's music, the Chess story is an important part thereof. So I recommend you have a look on the movie. But I recommend much more that you read the books on Chess Records, especially the one by Nadine Cohodas Spinning Blues into Gold.
Unfortunately the writers of the movie did not use Cohodas' book but went more for Rich Cohen's Machers and Rockers. As I write in this site's chapter on Berry-related books, Cohen's book concentrates on the two characters of Leonard Chess and Muddy Waters and is full of errors and omissions. And likewise Cadillac Records concentrates on the characters of Leonard Chess and Muddy Waters and is full of errors and omissions. Sigh!
What interests us the most is Chuck Berry's role in the movie. Berry is played by Mos Def, or Dante Terrell Smith, musician and actor. I have never thought of Mos Def as a Rock'n'Roller, so his performance as Berry is surprising - and surprisingly good! There are three or four acting scenes and a number of on-stage performances mainly to show that Chess and Berry took down the barriers between C&W and Blues, between Black and White.
Mos Def plays Berry as a musician and comedian, which may come close to the truth in the 1950s. There's a funny scene where Berry and Chess visit Alan Freed, and there's a scene in which Berry is refused to perform because the promoter thinks of Berry as a white Country artist. This story is also told by Berry himself in his Autobiography, so it may have happened. But if it did, it definitely happened after Berry got national attention with his first Chess hits. In the movie this scene takes place before Berry joins Chess. One of many factual errors. The errors continue in the selection of Berry titles in the movie.
The writers have known that Maybellene was Berry's first Chess hit. So Mos Def plays it, and quite good. But all the other songs Mos Def performs before Berry's first imprisonment are completely wrong: No Particular Place to Go, Promised Land, and Nadine (of which only the intro is heard) have all been recorded five to ten years later than when they appear in the film. That's poor.
It's interesting to note that the Deluxe version of the soundtrack album (see here) also contains Mos Def's cover of Come On which did not make it into the movie. You can use the amazon MP3 widget below to hear excerpts of Mos Def's cover versions.
If you buy the DVD, don't forget to watch the extra features. I found the film about costumes and design most interesting. All the sets are very well made to show the 1950s, so that's reason enough to watch the movie - and to see Mos Def play Chuck Berry.

    

I haven't had time to report here on Chuck Berry-related eBay offers, so you may have missed some true bargains sold lately.
Probably the most interesting item which went for a much too low price was

• CHESS EP 5119 Rock And Roll Music with picture sleeve which sold for - hold your breath - less than $8!!!

OK, you may have missed it because this offer wasn't visible on eBay US. But what about last week's sale of

• CHESS EP 5118 and CHESS EP 5121 which sold for $16? Together! Though without sleeves.
• or the very rare NBC Radio Special from 1980, which contains Berry interviews never published anywhere else? It was offered for $20 and did not find a buyer!

They often sell very interesting items on eBay at low prices, simply because only very few are interested in them. But the contrary is happening on eBay as well. This one is rare, but I had not expected such a high price:

• the Japanese CD version of Concerto in B. Goode sold for $66!

Compare this to the best Chuck Berry CD set ever, which you could have got for less:

• the mega-rare and Must-Have Charly CD set Poet of Rock'n'Roll went for as low as $56!

You don't want to miss such, do you? Due to this I compiled a list of items currently on sale at eBay. You can click on the items to go directly to the corresponding eBay page. In case you bid: Good Luck!

Some true rarities:

• the bootleg variant of CHESS 1700, that is the one having County Line on the flip side, is on sale for multiple weeks and obviously not found.
• judging from the item photo, this copy of Berry's very first 78rpm record is simply beautiful!
• this Funckler EP is very seldom seen. But at $100 asking price, Brandnew Berry Blockbusters is not really a bargain.
• the asking price for this may be high, but Beautiful Delilah on London is not seen very often
• here's the rare cassette version of Bio with its unique cover, and still sealed.
• don't trust them when they shout MEGA-RARE - but this here is it! The Japanese-only, promotional-only single containing two songs from the Tokyo Sessions album. $100 is cheap for this!

Some more promotional records:

• Chess 1709 - the record the company could not spell.
• Chess 1683 Sweet Little Sixteen - cheap but damaged
• a PR copy of the Bio album
• From St. Louie to Frisco to Memphis, a Mercury promo
• this Chess sampler is from 1970 and contains Tulane

Some beautiful picture sleeves (PS):

• You don't want to pay $50 for My Ding-A-Ling? But look at this cover!
• again My Ding-A-Ling, cheaper and with its Dutch PS
• and while we're at it, here's the German PS which can be found often
• the picture sleeve for Club Nitty Gritty is much harder to find
• the French Chess series has nice concert photos, here's Nadine
• and you will really like this Italian PS!

Some more picture sleeves, from the Dutch Funckler series:

• the prettiest Roll Over Beethoven, but beware of the sticker
• here's Fraulein, available only in Europe
• Song series #10: No Particular Place to Go
• this is Let It Rock
• finally Little Marie on Dutch Chess

Some foreign country albums:

• an Argentina-only album
• this French-only 6-LP set was sold in supermarkets for little money. Today it's hard to find.
• here's a Japanese-only LP
• again Japan-only, this Rolling Stones LP is very Berry-related
• the Japanese version of on CHESS/Victor
• or the same album on red vinyl on Oriental

Some collectibles:

• a concert programme on Berry's first performance in France on Feb. 7th, 1965
• Chuck Berry is King - well, at least on this French playing card
• another, less interesting board game card
• here's the famous RCF amplifier Chuck B.

Some autographed guitars (which I do not count as bargains):

• here's one for as little as $1500
• this Stratocaster goes for $1800
• and this Gibson costs only $2700

In 1999 CBS produced and broadcast a four-hour mini-series called "Shake, Rattle And Roll: An American Love Story". The series runs through the 1950s Rock'n'Roll history by following a fictional band called The HartAches. Many well-known artists are portrayed such as Elvis, Little Richard, or Bill Haley. Chuck Berry is played by actor Cornelius Bates. I have not seen this TV broadcast as it was not shown in Germany and the video tape seems to be sold out.
In addition to the movie, MCA produced a soundtrack CD (see here). Here you hear 1999 artists perform classical rock'n'roll songs such as Slippin' and Slidin' or Summertime Blues. These cover versions were used in the TV soundtrack. Also on the CD are two original tunes: The Chords' Sh-Boom and The Platters' Only You. Probably the most important track on the album is Fur Slippers written by Bob Dylan and performed by B. B. King. There is no Chuck Berry on the soundtrack CD.
However, and this is why I talk about it here in the Chuck Berry Rarities column, there IS a variant of this CD which contains Chuck Berry! As a "Musical Preview" MCA sent out a promotional CD to radio stations. It seems that this promo CD was sent out before the final soundtrack CD was completed. The HartAches' version of Side by side is missing on the promo CD, but there is an additional HartAches (i.e. Peter Beckett) recording: Lucille. Also only on the promotional variant of this CD there is a version of The Glow-Worm by a band called The Melody Knights, and there is Chuck Berry's Maybellene. Although this is the original master and not a re-recording, it makes this promotional CD another Chuck Berry Rarity.
Here is the cover of the promo CD which also differs from the final copy.

Since several European readers asked about how to get the new 4CD set at reasonable shipping costs:
Amazon and other online stores have started pre-ordering for the set with shipping announced for March 29th.
Click here for the corresponding pages at amazon