The Chuck Berry Vinyl Bootlegs, Vol. 3: America's Hottest Wax

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 contain 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!

This is the third part of this series and it covers another typical kind of bootleg record: a record containing studio outtakes.

Chuck Berry - America's Hottest Wax - Reelin' 001

[This blog post appeared here first in September 2015. Due to the 2023 release of Daniel Nooger's book "Belly of the Beast - Chess Records, the All Platinum Years" we have to add some details which also answer some of the questions the original text left open.]

Besides live concert recordings, the most interesting bootlegs are those which contain studio material not to be found on legal releases. Typically these are outtakes or versions of songs not good enough to be officially published by the record companies. You may wonder how bootleggers can get access to such unreleased material. There are many ways. Sometimes the artists themselves give tapes out of hand, sometimes the housekeeper finds some tape in a paper bin. In this case we know when, how and by whom the previously unreleased tracks were found and combined. We don't know, though, how they got into the hands of bootleggers.

Anyway, this record contains ten Chuck Berry recordings from the 1950's and early 1960's which had not been released before. There were two additional recordings which had been released before but only with fake audience noise. And there were two recordings released by the vocal group The Ecuadors on which Berry's contribution hadn't been known before.

During the mid to end 1970s Dan Nooger worked for All Platinum Records who had bought the Chess archives in August 1975. Dan's job was to search through the old tapes to find, combine, and release new records under the Chess name. He created some interesting releases containing known and unknown recordings from the Blues and Jazz masters Chess had stored.

All Platinum went bankrupt in 1979. The same owners, Sylvia and Joe Robinson, immediately formed a new label, Sugar Hill Records, taking over the Chess archives until they got in a legal dispute with their distributor MCA and lost the rights to the Chess catalogue during the mid 1980s.

The only Chuck Berry record which came out of All Platinum/Sugar Hill was The Great Twenty-Eight (CH-8201, 1982), which contained just the well-known hits. But Dan Nooger had found unreleased Chuck Berry material within the archived master and session tapes.

In his book, Dan tells:

In the course of preparing some future releases, I went through the master book and session tapes looking for unissued tracks by Chuck. There weren’t too many, but as an example, on the December 1955 session which produced “You Can’t Catch Me”” and “No Money Down” I found on the master reel a slow blues, “I’ve Changed”, which was recorded between them. It lay forgotten, with no master number assigned and never pulled out as a filler for one of Chuck’s albums, but it was one of his finest blues performances. More good alternate takes surfaced from some of the later sessions. Berry’s first take performance of “Reelin’ & Rockin’’’ (with some different lyrics from the final version) which was on an undated session reel just labeled “C.B”, inspired Leonard to call out, “This is good just the way it is!” Chuck, ever cool, just responded, “Oh, yeah?”. There were a brace of tracks which were original versions of sides eventually released on the fake “live” album “Chuck Berry on Stage” (minus the dubbed audience noise), and even a master tape by a group called the Equadors, whose “Let Me Sleep Woman” / “Say You’ll Be Mine” featured Chuck on guitar (and although credited to “R. Butler” on the original Argo single, the songs were published by “Chuck Berry Music”). Another session tape just labeled “C.B. – 21” yielded a whole session rundown of an unissued song originally slated as “Vacation Time”; after 10 or so takes the arrangement was changed from straight up rock to a blues format. I labeled them “21” and “21 Blues”. Eventually I pulled together an album’s worth of material.

This master tape Dan collected is obviously the origin of the bootleg we talk about here. It was prepared for an All Platinum release, though never produced.

Three variants of this bootleg exist. One of these is not a bootleg at all.

The first variant had a blank white cover onto which the record name America's Hottest Wax as well as the label name and number Reelin' 001 were rubberstamped by hand.



The labels are completely blank and have a light pink color. The master number as etched into the dead wax reads CE 70/1.
My copy didn't have any other information with it. Morten Reff was so kind and sent me a copy of a sheet of paper which came with his record.



The sheet contains nothing more than the track listing and a few details about each song.
The tracks on this record are as follows (spelling as on the sheet):
Side 1

1. ROCK & ROLL MUSIC (unr. demo version)
2. CHILDHOOD SWEETHEART (unr. alt. take)
3. 21 (Vacation Time) (unr.)
4. LET ME SLEEP WOMAN (Ecuadors)
5. DO YOU LOVE ME (unr. alt. take)
6. 21 BLUES (Vacation Time) (unr.)
7. ONE O'CLOCK JUMP (unr.)

Side 2

1. REELIN' AND ROCKIN' (unr. demo version)
2. SWEET LITTLE SIXTEEN (unr. alt. take)
3. BROWN-EYED HANDSOME MAN (without dubbed audience)
4. SAY YOU'LL BE MINE (Ecuadors)
5. I'VE CHANGED (unr.)
6. 13 QUESTION METHOD (unr. alt.take)
7. HOW HIGH THE MOON (without dubbed audience)

Morten Reff dates this bootleg at appr. 1979 and variant 2 (below) at 1980. To me variant 1 looks at least some years older. Label and cover look more like an early 1970's bootleg. However, since Nooger's other Chess releases came out in 1976 onwards, 1977 to 1979 probably is the correct timeframe.

Variant 2 has a fully printed cover, a printed label and liner notes. And it shows more than a dozen previously unreleased photos (also from the Chess archives?).
The front cover tells artist and record name. Also it says "rare and unreleased tracks 1955-1963". The label name is now written as reelin' with a lower-case R.



Next to the photos and track listing the back cover contains a quote from an interview with Keith Richards, printed in the January 1979 issue of Rock&Folk magazine in which the interviewer claims to have listened to a cassette tape containing some of the recordings included.

The cassette tape mentioned originates from Dan Nooger, as he tells in his book:

I copied the material onto a cassette. After I landed at Atlantic Records, I ran off a copy for one of our publicity guys, Art Collins, who was assigned to go out on the road with the Rolling Stones’ 1978 “Some Girls” tour. One day I got a frantic call from Art; he had played the tape for the Stones and he was flying back to New York next day and I was to have maybe seven copies run off for him to bring back for the Stones touring party. He flew in, handed me a “Some Girls” press kit cover autographed by all of the Stones plus Ian Stewart and Ian McLagan (which immediately went straight into a frame and up on my living room wall), and off he went. Art eventually got kicked upstairs as a vice president with Rolling Stones Records. Several months later, I was reading an interview with Keith in Rock & Folk, a French music magazine; the tail end of the story had Keith pulling the cassette from his travel bag and excitedly playing it for the interviewer (“Wait! I want to play you some Chuck Berry, I have unreleased tapes that you’ll love”). What I’d like to know is if Keith ever played it for Chuck during the production of the Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n Roll film, and what Chuck may have thought of it. Keith, if you’re reading this, get in touch…

The January 1979 quote places the publication date of variant 2 to 1979 or later. This is a complete new record from a new master disk. The etching on the dead wax now reads 001-A/B.
It is interesting to note that the printed track listing on the back cover differs in some details from the insert sheet of variant 1. And even more interestingly variant 1 contains the more correct information. Among the errors on variant 2 are the spelling of the Ecuadors and suppressing the previous release of the dubbed tracks.

The same errors were repeated character by character when in 1983 CHESS (UK), at that time a label of PRT Ltd., released CHESS CXMP 2011. Probably due to the huge success of the bootleg, CHESS (UK) decided to release the exact same contents on an official album.
The cover does not tell so. It calls the record just "Chuck Berry" as part of PRT's "CHESS masters" series. However, when you look at the record labels, you'll see the name "America's Hottest Wax" printed.



One has to note that while the official CHESS (UK) release contains the exact same sequence of the tracks, they do not always sound exactly alike. Sometimes the songs on the official release fade later than on the bootleg. This might point to the fact that PRT indeed used the original CHESS tapes for mastering this album. All Platinum/Sugar Hill had good contacts with UK record companies. Phonogram had co-financed the Chess archives purchase, Charly got all their Chuck Berry material from All Platinum, PRT was the new name for Pye Records who originally released Chuck Berry in the UK. Maybe PRT had access to Nooger's original master tape while the two bootlegs result from the cassette copy - we'll never know.

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

• The Chuck Berry Vinyl Bootlegs, Vol. 1: Rare Berries
• The Chuck Berry Vinyl Bootlegs, Vol. 2: Six Two Five
• The Chuck Berry Vinyl Bootlegs, Vol. 4: Telecasts