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 contained 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

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 find some tape in a paper bin. In this case chances are that this comes from a tape an interviewer claimed to have heard during a Keith Richards interview in 1978. (see below) Until 1977 Marshall Chess, son of Leonard Chess, ran Rolling Stones Records and it might well be that he had access to Marshall father's archives.

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.
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 record as well as 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) to 1980. To me variant 1 looks at least some years older. Label and cover look more like an early 1970's bootleg.

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. This 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.

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