(Chess)
RECOMMENDED
The definitive introduction to Chuck Berry -- and indeed, the best way to listen to Chuck Berry, even for hardcore fans -- is the tirelessly wonderful, expertly paced 1982 compilation The Great Twenty-Eight. Disregarding compilation prejudices, it's potentially the best long-playing record in rock & roll (my controversial opinion is if you open the floodgates of Top Albums lists to comps, you won't have any actual studio albums in the top twenty -- Endless Summer trumps Pet Sounds, Discography trumps any Pet Shop Boys record, and the Frankensteinian U.S. version of The Clash destroys the real thing). Not that it's flawless -- I'd have swapped out "Sweet Little Rock 'n' Roller" and "Bye Bye Johnny" in favor of "You Never Can Tell" and "Promised Land" -- so much as it makes its considerable breadth play out as a single moment. That's automatically something no boxed set is capable of. But this Grammy-winning three-discer isn't even the definitive Berry archival release. It served a purpose at the time of release, but now feels like an arbitrary intermediate collection between the various hit packages and the exhaustive nine-disc Chess Years set. All the same, no one who buys this set is likely to find it disappointing; from a consumer perspective, though, you're just as well picking up the albums up through 1964 to get the gems Twenty-Eight misses. You'll inevitably end up with some filler, but hey -- this box has filler too.
The first disc, covering Berry's absolute peak from 1956 to 1958, mostly escapes this problem. Indeed, it functions as a seamless if incomplete greatest hits package. The only dud is previously unreleased collector bait, the treacly "Time Was," while even the inevitable Berry indulgences, the blues numbers and instrumentals, retain some charm here. "No Money Down" and "Downbound Train" are early b-sides that go down easy, and "Wee Wee Hours" could qualify as a minor classic, though it seems much more pianist Johnnie Johnson's triumph than Chuck Berry's. As recounted in Robert Christgau's brilliant essay about Chuck Berry from The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, Berry's entrance to the Chess Records stage reveals an intriguing dichotomy between the raw, undoctored blues music he saw as his birthright and the swelteringly inventive hybrid of country and R&B that would quickly become his legacy, and would indeed quickly come to define rock & roll.
Berry was a musically precocious child who began performing in high school. By the time his first single, "Maybellene," caught fire, he'd already entered his thirties, a working man tirelessly supporting a wife and family. But Berry's poetic mind bore the labors of his life elegantly, enough to produce lyrics with an astounding understanding of, and solidarity with, teenagers. Hence the youth music tag; even if early classics like the absolutely banging fast-tempo "Thirty Days" used their humor to tackle largely adult problems, it was in the same vernacular (replete with the ubiquitious reference to presenting relationship difficulties to the UN) that would quickly produce Eddie Cochran's snide youth anthem "Summertime Blues." And as driven and intelligent as his words were from the beginning, and indeed nearly always would remain, the method by which it reached its far-flung acolytes was, of course, Berry's guitar. The Berry structure, the knifing riffage and compulsive six-string giddiness, shows up on "You Can't Catch Me," the complex dragrace saga that launched a million imitations, and never departs. It's still with us.
Berry's biggest, most celebrated hits -- "Roll Over Beethoven," "School Days," "Rock and Roll Music" -- exist within the basic framework established by "Catch." These are songs chiefly defined, even as the guitar remains the chief impulsive attraction, by Berry's words and music. In those three cases, he celebrates the growing influx of youth music with increasing fervor, from a swaggering tribute in "Beethoven" to a proclamation of life-saving grace on "School Days" ("Hail, hail rock & roll / Deliver me from the days of old") to a full-blown dismissal of all other musical possibilities in "Rock and Roll Music," a song that lives up to its wide-eyed, glamorous self-promotion with unceasing insistence. Inevitably, "Johnny B. Goode" is the cut that encapsulates and smooths out these ideas into a new and perfectly realized American mythology, absent of any trite fakery. Its magical sweep is beyond breathtaking.
But no medium's true purpose is its own aggrandizement. If anything, Berry's parallel story of an individual man's triumphs and failures against the tide of love and life, things only a thirtysomething who'd lived plenty could finally know so well, are more fascinating yet. His characters are ceaselessly compelling, his melodies and riffs even more adventurous: "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" presents a verbose black man's manifesto, "Drifting Heart" is major melancholy atmospherically projected, the hip hop-creating "Too Much Monkey Business" as brilliant a document of angst as any age group has produced, the concise storytelling and romantic thrust of "Havana Moon" worlds more intense and exciting than it immediately lets on. By the close of this peak era, Berry can do more or less anything; the love songs ("Oh Baby Doll," "Beautiful Delilah," "Carol") seduce and bite simultaneously, the rockers ("Reeln' and Rockin'," "Around and Around") so vividly illustrative of their respective settings, the rockin' joints and the ticking watches, as to seem genuinely lived in, descriptions of the very things that may be happening around them as they are played. But "Sweet Little Sixteen," a return to the grandiose mythmaking in the context of a valentine to Big Beat fandom, is Berry's masterpiece -- who knows whether its sensuality is as innocent as it comes off, and who knows if Berry is even sincere about its vaulting of his profession to the league of the great pilot or, hell, movie star. The point is that Berry's illustration of the larger world Dickens once suggested in Great Expectations is as potent and vital an image as popular culture has left us -- that great and worldly force, rock & roll or art or what have you, as an ever-moving cavalcade of promise that travels the world while its devotionals are read silently by the alienated high school girl, her life immeasurably enriched by its brief stopover in her orbit. Lou Reed wishes he could've put it so concisely, so selflessly.
The only drawback to hearing these powerful tales gradually unfold in this context is a consequence of the time in which this box was compiled. Back then, the music industry, at least the sector of it involved in the creation of compact discs, was agog over a process called No Noise which supposedly cleaned up and deleted hiss from the many luminous master tapes then being carefully preserved. Problem is, Berry loved distortion -- he invented it -- and robbing "Thirty Days" of fuzziness misses the point entirely. The strong separation that is revealed in these songs' instrumentation makes that somewhat excusable, but other tamperings are even more dubious. Most troubling is a slight but incomprehensible slowing down of "Sweet Little Sixteen," draining it of at least a bit of its vitality. But it's a corker of a song, so it survives.
Disc Two is rougher going. It still only includes a few absolute misfires -- the novelty drag "Too Pooped to Pop" and the incomprehensible standards "I'm Just a Lucky So and So" and "Crazy Arms," none of which belong here -- but the split between classics and pleasantries is more even. After School Session and One Dozen Berrys, for all their reputation as glorified compilations, actually contain material I wouldn't mind having on this disc in place of anonymities like "Crying Steel," "Confessin' the Blues," "Childhood Sweetheart," "Betty Jean," and the lily-fingered, cynical "Little Queenie" variation "Run Run Rudolph," most famous today for its inclusion in a film about an eight year-old child who foils burglars with paint cans suspended from the ceiling. At least the generic arrangement of "Merry Christmas Baby" allows us to spend time with Berry's considerable and underrated vocal chops; he's typically too busy telling his stories and kicking out his jams to really sing his way into and out of a moment. But disregarding the instrumentals and indulgences, good songs like "Anthony Boy," "13 Question Method," "Sweet Little Rock N Roller" (bald "Sixteen" rehash), and "Bye Bye Johnny" (bald "Goode" rehash) simply can't stand up with even the second tier of material up through 1958.
The peaks, however, are even higher, beginning with the still-throttling, heartbreaking "Memphis," the beginning of rock music as empathy machine. Berry's best work from the period just before his infamous Mann Act prison sentence is more eclectic and dangerous than his earlier sides. "Almost Grown" amounts to subversive proto-protest music while bearing little musical resemblance to Berry's signature sound. "Little Queenie" marks Berry's peak as slick rock & roller, "Back in the USA" his peak as slick showman -- his patriotism comes off as no bullshit, as a wistful romanticism that trounces Steinbeck; "How I've yearned for you," he sings to his country, and his voice could not possibly bear to impart less pretension -- the directness of his message is just enough to fail to mask the joyous thrill behind his words. But the real treasure may be the triad of impossibly raw, unfettered Berry cuts that sound like attempts to approach his craft from an ever more no-frills, tauntingly gritty angle. "Let It Rock" tells a harrowing, and harrowingly unfinished, story of men working on a track as a train approaches -- it's vivid and frightening, made more so by its lack of musical tension and resolution, showing Berry capable of actual drama. But what wasn't he capable of? "I'm Talking About You" (copped by the Beatles as "I Saw Her Standing There") and "Come On" channel a snide, reluctant teenage affection and evolved "Monkey Business" aggression into pop glory, fuzzed out and busy.
Upon his release in 1964, Berry recorded the towering electric drill "Nadine," again unlike anything he'd previously offered, and an ideal match for its ambitions in the form of "You Never Can Tell," a fascinating carousel of crazed pop structure and high-minded ideas channelled into a basically uncompromised rock & roll piece. The concurrent album, St. Louis to Liverpool -- its name clearly inspired by the British Invasion debt to his already-towering back catalog -- offered a refinement of his long-struggling blues material with the outstanding Guitar Slim cover "The Things I Used to Do" and, better yet, reclaimed his gift for the eloquent travelogue with "Promised Land." Unfortunately, the album's regressive but wonderful "School Day" rewrite "No Particular Place to Go," an evocative and bounding odyssey of a young man's war with his girlfriend's safety belt -- cheerfully poking holes through Berry's own lofty imagery ("I stole a kiss at the turn of a mile / My curiosity running wild") with its utterly mundane, frustrating climax -- would prove Berry's last undisputed triumph in the studio.
Disc Three, which opens with several St. Louis cuts, reveals a dramatic dropoff that could've been avoided with either one disc fewer (like Bo Diddley's more persuasive Chess Box collection) or a more even distribution of Berry's stronger material. The final disc really encompasses no classics aside from "No Particular," though I think a strong case can be made for the wild proto-punk of "It's My Own Business," the intriguing psych-pop blast of "Tulane," and the deservedly celebrated blues scorcher "Have Mercy Judge," which fulfills the promise of "Wee Wee Hours" at last. Certainly the bulk of the cuts aren't exactly failures -- "Ramona Say Yes" and "A Deuce" have charm if nothing else, and "Dear Dad" might work if not for its idiotic punchline -- but at its worst, the third disc presents material that is in no respect good enough for inclusion in this kind of career retrospective. Reluctantly, I'll allow that "My Ding-a-Ling" had to be here, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it, and that doesn't excuse the rampage of drunken nonsense on the awful live cuts that sandwich it here. The mythology has failed as much as the novelty entertainer; revivalist celebrations "Viva Viva Rock N Roll" and "Bio" couldn't feel more forced if they were remixed to include John Legend guest spots. Most irksome are the seemingly endless spoken-word rich kid diatribe "My Dream" and the actually endless jam-on-and-on-and-on "Chuck's Beat," which features Bo Diddley and Berry prattling on with guitar wank for ten minutes. They might be greater than the performers who usualy release such material, but wank is wank.
If you discard the third disc of The Chess Box, you end up with a better than decent Chuck Berry retrospective. But discard the second disc as well and you're left with a superb greatest hits collection, which you will actually listen to start to finish more than once. So why not buy the actual greatest hits collection instead of this? If you end up wanting more, it's the nine-disc jewel Chess Years you'll want, not this stopgap. Neither an ideal archive nor a perfect repository of classics, The Chess Box is basically obsolete now. There is enough genius in Berry's catalog to fill three, four, even five discs easily digestible for the neophyte. They're called The Great Twenty-Eight, After School Session, One Dozen Berrys, Chuck Berry Is on Top, and St. Louis to Liverpool.
[SEE ALSO:]
The Great Twenty-Eight (1955-65)
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