The Best of Chuck Berry [CD]

For anyone who doesn't have any Chuck "Crazylegs" Berry this is an excellent place to start. Why? Well have a think about some of the arguments below.

1. To produce a best-of single disc on Berry is fiendishly difficult given the volume of great work he's produced but I'd say that the compiler(s) have done as good a job as possible. OK they have included "My Ding-a-ling" which I hate perhaps even more than other correspondents. But they would have been criticised if they didn't - Chuck didn't actually get very many hits but this one actually made the number one position. I would add that the man did have a penchant for the occasional novelty number - think "Too pooped to pop" or "Anthony Boy".

2. Sheer value has to come into this as well. Nineteen Berry Classics (and that's what they are) well presented in musical terms is superb value at the current price.

3. And now we get on to the real nitty gritty , the actual music. Well the first thing to say that it was so completely different to absolutely anything that was happening elsewhere. It was blues based but guitar dominated like no one else had ever been. You could call it guitar boogie for want of a better descriptive phrase but that doesn't help much. The combination of the guitar and that individualistic voice were highly distinctive.

4. And those toons. Such a lot of them and I don`t understand comments about "samishness". In fact Chuck only very rarely repeated tunes and arrangements although it`s worth commenting it was something that was quite frequently done in the blues field which was Berry`s background. The compilers' don't help themselves here by putting "No particular place to go" and "School Day" right at the start, this being one of the few exceptions. However "School Day" was such a great tune I don't think Berry could resist using it again. But heck we've ended up with two great numbers instead of one. And I can't think of two better opening lines than "Cruising around in my automobile" and "Up in the morning and off to school". I should add that the only other place where Berry did-re-use tunes was in his sequels, like "Little Marie " following "Memphis , Tennessee" and "Bye Bye Johnny" after "Johnny B Goode". Maybe he saw this was as a kind of sequel or linked song.

5. Just to continue the point about Chuck's variety of tunes, take a listen to, say the next ten tracks on the album (ignore "Ding-a-Ling" if you want!). They are all very different. For someone who operated in a very constrained medium melody-wise I'd say that Chuck did a near miraculous job in producing so many variants on what was basically a simple (in melodic terms) blues theme because in reality that's what it was. This point is illustrated even more strongly on the three volume "Ultimate Chuck Berry".

6. I've already alluded to those extremely clever and apposite lyrics. While he might have been using basic blues as his backdrop, on top of that his wordsmithing was worlds apart from anything in rock'n'roll or blues. His lyrics related directly to the world that he and most record buyers, be they black or white, actually lived in. No one else was doing this. The older generation of songwriters were out of touch with the world of the teens and twenties. Carl Perkins may have got close but he didn't have anything like the range of Berry. Eddie Cochran was also getting there but unfortunately wasn't with us long enough to build such a body of work - it's also significant that he came after Berry. Within this album we have a neat vignette of a lad thinking of approaches to an attractive young lady on "Little Queenie", there's the sorry tale of a man communicating with his six year old daughter post divorce in "Memphis Tennessee", and we have the aforementioned cruising theme of "No particular place to go" - there have been movies based on this aspect of American popular culture - Berry said it all in one song. And could anyone in rock'n'roll land have produced a song which had as its punch line, "C'est la vie say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell"?

7. And does he repeat his guitar chops at times? Well, yes he does but if I'd produced anything half as good as THAT break in Johnny B Goode well I'm absolutely certain I'd use it again. His guitar work has been more influential than anyone else's in the big world of rock. And it was influential because it was really, really good - people liked it and still do. In the first Brit blues boom in the early 60's every band out there from the Stones on down was copping Berry riffs. Read some of Keef's book to see what he still thinks of them. Also look back to some of the blues giants like Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker (one of Berry's influences); it was absolutely the norm for them to recycle riffs; it was even expected of them. "He could play a guitar like ringing a bell" - by God he could!

8. Picking up on the influence point it's debateable whether the Beach Boys would have existed without Chuck. All their early records were plagiarised Berry. Chuck Berry is also the most popular rock'n'roll artist to cover. The official site lists over 160 cover versions but I suspect that's an understatement.

About the only negative I can see in relation to this album is that "The Ultimate Chuck Berry" with 56 tracks is even better and only cost a few pennies more. C'mon, just buy it!

If you are to young to remember Berry the first time around, and want to experience the work of a true rock and roll great, this is the album for you. The greats are all there, opening with the sublime "No particular place to go" to the glorious ending of "Rock 'n' roll music". Just buy it and bask in it's glory.

Chuck Berry is of course the grandaddy of rock'n'roll, feted by any pop musician worth their salt. Tracks like 'Rock & Roll Music' and 'Johnny B. Goode' have been covered by dozens of artists - so much so that many music fans may be unaware of the originals. This Best Of is a straightfoward introduction to where these famous songs came from, and includes all the regular suspects plus some the casual fan might not know.

Worth getting? Sound quality's good [I suspect, although the liner notes don't say, that it's all been digitally remastered] and any one of these tracks is a two and a half minute slice of classic pop perfection. The problem came, for me, when I played all twenty of them on this album back to back - I was very surprised to hear how similar many of them sounded. Three or four songs have exactly the same opening riff, and melody lines and chord sequences are repeated all over the place. I can only suppose that this was standard for early rock'n'roll music, but to my modern sensibilities it does sound repetitive and, after a while, even a little dull. Chuck Berry's vocal delivery is so stylish that it lifts the songs, but not quite enough to make them really engaging.

The album remains fun, but one to dip into rather than to play frequently - although as party music that everyone'll like, if that's what you're buying, it's definitely a great album.