The Chuck Berry Collectors Blog

Re-issues of Chuck Berry's old hits and albums exist by the hundreds or even thousands. No serious collector tries to get them all. Even Morten Reff, author of the ultimate book on Chuck Berry records "The Chuck Berry International Directory", tells me he lost track of all the cheap re-issues released month after month.
And with the Hip-O-Select CD boxes claiming to contain Chuck Berry's complete recorded output for Chess, there's another reason gone to even check out re-releases. What could be found of interest if every recording worth listening to has been included in the box sets?
Due to this, all collectors I know (including me) ignored this re-issue when it was released in June 2008, even though it says it's in Audiophile quality (i.e. expensive) and remastered from original tapes.

Thus it came as a huge surprise to me when Morten yesterday told me:

Strangely enough, but here's an alt. take of "Anthony Boy" which has never been out before.
ST. LOUIS TO LIVERPOOL + BERRY IS ON TOP Mobile Fidelity UDCD-776 (2008)

I immediately had to check out by myself. And this morning the postman brought me a sealed copy I had to open and compare with the original version within a few minutes. And astonishingly Morten is correct: The version of "Anthony Boy" is not the formerly and only known take. (It's not astonishing that Morten is correct, it's astonishing that they had a tape even Hip-O-Select did not use! So much for "complete".)
Here are some more notes from Morten:

The Mobile Fidelity CD is a pairing of two classic Chess albums, Chess LP-1435 from 1959 and Chess LPS-1488 from 1964. Front cover as on the original ‘St.Louis To Liverpool’ LP. However, they brag about the sound quality (which is quite goode actually) and how superior Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab is to the audiophile entertainment software and significant contributions to the world of high-end audio software using only original master recordings, and on and on they go. And although it is a nice digipak issue looking very professional and the CD (Ultradisc II) coming in 24-karat gold(?) and being a special limited edition (10.000, mine is #01668). BUT, and here's the news folks, how come they got hold of an alternate version of 'Anthony Boy' ??? Anyway it's here and therefore, you all need this issue! It's a little different, the choir is not so loud in its Go's.. and the guitar solo is a little staccato.

How did it come? I'm sure they asked Universal for the original master tapes and by accident got a wrong one. I'm sure no one noticed because if anybody would have known, there would have been at least a minor note somewhere on cover or booklet.
Those who know say that while the hit version of "Anthony Boy" is take 9, this recording here is an earlier take 6 from the same session.
The Mobile Fidelity CD is available from many Internet shops and priced between $30 and $50 plus shipping. Quite expensive for yet another re-issue, but in order to have a complete collection, you need to buy one. Click here for some links to reasonable offers.
Many thanks to Morten!

Reader John Gilmartin asked me to inform you about his recent offer:

Wish to give Berry fans first choice to obtain the following LPs:
Chuck Berry Tokyo Sessions.Jap. East World WTP-90072 includes Jap Text,lyric insert snd title obi-strip.
RockSmuk NQCS-1 Sun/Chess Label.
Offers Please

If interested, please contact John directly at johnnygil{at}hotmail.co.uk

In June 2008, there was heated discussion by commenters of this blog regarding Two Guitars on Johnny B. Goode. One thing not discussed then was the differences between the known recording takes.
Reader Dennis had some more listening and found out:

While listening to the various tracks on the 4CD set I noticed that take 3 of the alt. take JBG 2/3 and the final master on Chess 1691 are the exact same recording. It's just one version without and the other with the overdubs. This can be heard quite clearly by listening to the improvised piano fills which are completely identical. Within the discussion it was not made clear that you were talking about the same recording in two states of finalization.

Fred and I spent some more time listening to the tracks and we can confirm Dennis's findings. Thanks for this additional information.

A short first message about your next purchase:
Hip-O-Select just announced the release of its third CD set covering Chuck Berry' complete recordings for Chess Records from 1955 to 1974.
The brand new box is to be released January 29th, 2010. Called Have Mercy - His Complete Chess Recordings 1969-1974 the set again consists of four CDs with 71 tracks. Promised are 22 previously unreleased recordings! You can read the track listing here.
More details to follow as soon as I have a copy to listen to.

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.