Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry: The Chess Box (Chess '88)

Starting at age 29 in 1955, Chuck Berry recorded plenty, mostly for Chess in Chicago, a spin in the Caddy from his St. Louis home. Many of these recordings were epochal, others pretty great. But quite a few fell short. In the golden age of Top 40, his albums were afterthought product, filled out with autopilot instrumentals, threadbare covers, wan novelties, and temperate lounge blues. So Chuck Berry's natural longform is the best-of, compelling fans to buy his classics over and over. This 71-track threefer from the innocent days when box sets meant something slackens slightly on the back half of disc two by indulging Berry's blues dreams. But disc three documents the renaissance that followed his release from an 18-month bid on a trumped-up prostitution charge in late 1963. The unsatisfied "No Particular Place to Go" and the pot-dealing action thriller "Tulane" aren't iconic like "Johnny B. Goode," but their artistry, invention, and humor are unsurpassed, and "Tulane" led directly to "Have Mercy Judge," the only important blues he ever wrote. A

Chuck Berry: The Definitive Collection (Geffen/Chess '06)

Greatest Hits. Golden Decade. The Great Twenty-Eight. Fans bought each vinyl comp as its predecessor wore out, but in the uncharted swamp of CD-era Universal reissues they may have missed the best best-of of all. Starting with the motorvating 1955 game-changer "Maybellene" and then fleshing out Berry's double persona‑-sly brown-eyed handsome man, a projection, and happy-go-lucky lil' 16, an invention‑-it adds two of Berry's very greatest songs to the formerly definitive Great Twenty-Eight: the completely grown "You Never Can Tell" and the sub rosa history of the Freedom Rides "Promised Land." Half of its 30-tracks-in-75-minu​tes‑-terse fellow, Chuck Berry‑-are pop songs as monumental as "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The rest are various shades of excellent. Long-suffering Johnnie Johnson on piano and big boss man Willie Dixon on bass provide essential support. Every song here except the worthy "I Wanna Be Your Driver" is on The Chess Box. But this one's so intense. A PLUS