Chuck Berry didn't invent rock and roll, but he may very well have invented rock'n'roll. His songs fueled and inspired the likes of Buddy Holly, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Who, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, and just about anybody in his wake who picked up an electric guitar. In the invaluable rock doc Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll, we watch in awe has Berry puts Keith Richards in his place with just a single angry glare, and watch in double-awe as Richards takes it. After all, the Stones guitarist, like countless other musicians of his generation, knows he owes virtually everything to Berry, and has admitted as much, so he gives deference where deference is due.
Berry's as worthy of hagiography as any rock legend, but he's not yet ready for a eulogy. In fact, Berry's 50-plus year career has been marked by one constant-- forward motion. Indeed, Berry's far too stubborn a man to ever give inertia the chance to slow him down, and he still spends a considerable amount of time on stage for an octogenarian. As far as the studio goes, however, Berry hasn't released a new album since 1979, and even then his songwriting had been in steady decline since the early 60s. His last (and sole number one!) hit, a live version of the juvenile novelty "My Ding-a-Ling", was released in 1972.
One perverse but still appropriate way to view Berry's erratic (or non-existent) output over the past three or so decades is as further validation of the enduring strength of the first decade of his recording career, especially the productive, world-changing last five years of the 1950s collected on the self-explanatory Johnny B. Goode: His Complete '50s Chess Recordings. It was on Chicago's Chess imprint that Berry would change the blueprint of popular music, and it's on this 4xCD collection that we can revisit the fruits of his labor.
Of course, Berry's singles are such a firm part of the pop lexicon that one may feel they don't need revisiting in 2008. Yet it's still both useful and enjoyable to blast tracks like "Maybellene", "Sweet Little Sixteen", "Johnny B. Goode", "Carol", "Brown Eyed Handsome Man", "Roll Over Beethoven", "Too Much Monkey Business", "School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell)", "Rock and Roll Music", "Memphis Tennessee", "Little Queenie", "Run Rudolph Run", or "Back in the U.S.A." and, if only for each of their two or three minutes, a least pretend that you've never heard them before. Put yourself in the shoes of some kid stumbling across them on the radio before bedtime: How could you not buy a guitar and follow suit?
But while His Complete '50s Chess Recordings contains the bulk of Berry's greatest hits, it's also, well, complete, which means some less than epochal songs are there to for career context (hell, even a couple of the singles, like 1956's hokey pidgin English "Havana Moon", don't show Berry at his most formidable). The collection is also not exactly complete, which is fine, as far the set's listenability. The liners note, for example, 13 existing takes of "Sweet Little Sixteen", but it's probably best to accept the compilers judgment when they only include five of them. In fact, beyond the obvious singles and hits, it's in the alternate versions of several very well known songs-- demos, aborted takes and the like-- that this set may be most fascinating. According to the notes, several reels of unmarked or anonymously dated tapes (with names like "Long Fast Jam, Long Slow Jam 9/58") often disguised hidden treats providing clues to some ongoing puzzles (such as the participation of piano player Johnnie Johnson, whom many cite-- and Johnson attempted to litigate-- as one major source of Berry's sound).
"Reelin' and Rockin'" didn't get it totally right until take 10, but here we can hear take one and tell for ourselves why that one and the other nine takes didn't make the cut. We hear the 2nd take of "Johnny B. Goode" aborted by Berry, who bitches about the piano sounding too much like "Roll Over Beethoven"-- "stay away from that", he snaps, before kicking right into take three (which sounds pretty damned good).
So the question remains: Did he know? Did Berry know not just the difference between the right take and the wrong take, but that the right takes were writing the rules of rock, laying down the template for so many to follow? Considering Berry's ego is part of the public record, one presumes the man himself would say "yes" without blinking. But even if you didn't believe him, or trust his perspective, the music here really does speak for itself. It's an equation proven sound again and again: Quantity plus quality equals immortality.
