Friday, April 11. 2014
CBID is the Chuck Berry International Directory, a 2.200 page pile of Chuck Berry records information published in four volumes between 2008 and 2013. For details see the bibliography section of this site.CBID is never complete as new records and CDs appear and some old rarities are discovered. This section presents interesting additions and corrections to CBID. Today: Two 2013 CDs. which you can easily do without:
Netherlands LET IT ROCK – Just About As Good As It Gets [2 CD] Smith & Co. SCCD-2492 ? 2013 CD 1: Let It Rock / Johnny B. Goode / Thirty Days / Maybellene / Sweet Little Rock And Roller / Rock And Roll Music / Carol / Sweet Little Sixteen (original speed) /You Can’t Catch Me /Little Queenie /Back In The USA / Rock At The Philarmonic (instr) / Almost Grown / Roll Over Beethoven / I Got To Find My Baby+ / Around And Around /No Money Down / House Of Blue Lights+ / Do You Love Me / Mad Lad (instr) / Too Much Monkey Business / Don’t You Lie To Me+ / Come On / Childhood Sweetheart / Too Pooped To Pop+ / Oh Baby Doll / Rock And Roll Music (demo) /County Line / Wee Wee Hours / Rip It Up+.
CD 2: Down The Road A Piece+ (faded) / Reelin’ And Rockin’ / School Day / Go Go Go / 21 Blues (Vacation Time) / I’m Talking About You / Memphis, Tennessee / Bye Bye Johnny (stereo) / Guitar Boogie (instr) / Jaguar And The Thunderbird / Run Rudolph Run+ / Confessin’ My Blues+ / Betty Jean / Johnny B. Goode (alt. take) / In-Go (instr) / Brown Eyed Handsoime Man / Run Around / Come On (alt. take stereo) / Route 66+ (alt. take stereo) / Beautiful Delilah / Say You’ll Be Mine+ -The Equadors / Worried Life Blues+ / One O’Clock Jump+ (instr) / Let Me Sleep Woman+ -The Equadors / Merry Christmas Baby+ / Sweet Little Sixteen (alt. take) / Reelin’ And Rockin’ (alt, take) / Down Bound Train / Sweet Sixteen+ / Down The Road A Piece (stereo).
Don’t know what it is, but I don’t approve of this CD release. The sound is not good enough as of todays standard. And why include both ‘County Line’ and ‘Jaguar And The Thunderbird’ as they are almost the same songs. And both versions of ‘Come On’? And ‘Down The Road A Piece’ twice? ‘Rip It Up’? Give me a break. The text says ‘Vacation Time’ but it is ’21 Blues’. There is enough material to choose from his ‘50s and early ‘60s stuff so this 2 CD set is a waste of money. The liner notes in the booklet written by Dave Travis are straight forward and quite okay. Available at amazon.com: Click here CD plus free MP3s available from amazon.de: Click here
USA SAN FRANCISCO DUES Geffen [Chess] GET-54058-CD ? 2013 This digipack is the same as original US album Chess (GRT) CH-50008 from 1971. No extra tracks, BUT they (who?) have used the slow version of ‘Lonely Schooldays’ instead of the rockin version that’s on the original album. Always something! Available at amazon.com including free MP3s: Click here
Wednesday, March 26. 2014
CBID is the Chuck Berry International Directory, a 2.200 page pile of Chuck Berry records information published in four volumes between 2008 and 2013. For details see the bibliography section of this site.CBID is never complete as new records and CDs appear and some old rarities are discovered. This section presents interesting additions and corrections to CBID. Today: The missing Dutch - For some reason, this 45 from 1975 missed to make it into Volume 1. So here it is:
NETHERLANDS Shake Rattle And Roll / Baby What You Want Me To Do Chess CH-2169 ? 1975 (picture sleeve)
Tuesday, March 11. 2014
Here's a question to all the Stones fans out there:
Do you know anything about the record shown?
As you see there is nothing mentioned on the label who this is. It sounds like the Rolling Stones, but it’s probably not. Same song on both sides. Morten bought this 45 on eBay from Canada in early 2012.
The Stones did actually play in Toronto 4-5 March 1977 in a small club but according to their set list they didn’t perform ‘Little Queenie’ (though they did ‘Around And Around’).
It’s live all right, and although the singer tries his best to sound like Mick Jagger, towards the end the guitarist plays riffs that are very different from Keith or Ronnie.
So, is this a bootleg of some sort pretending to be the Stones or is it a Stones cover band trying to fool us, or what? Can anyone help out there?
Monday, March 10. 2014
Regular readers of the Chuck Bery Collectors Blog will have noticed that during the last weeks a new signature appeared below some of the posts: Morten Reff's.
Who is this guy, you may ask.
If you are collecting Chuck Berry records, you will not even think to ask this question. But for the one newbie reading these pages, let me briefly introduce Morten.
Morten Reff is a (or probably the) world expert on Chuck Berry records. He's the one who knows everything about when a specific record was released in a specific country, what the cover looked like and what's special about its contents.
Like me, Morten is a second-hand Berry fan. When Berry had his first hits, Morten was only recently born, and I wasn't even that. So we were never touched by the original hype.
Morten started collecting Berry records when his hits were re-released during the early British Beat craze. He bought his first single on PYE Let it Rock b/w Memphis, Tennessee. I encountered Berry during the early 1970s, when his greatest hits were already marketed as "Golden Oldies".
Both of us then started to collect more and more Berry recordings and records, trying to find even less known or more strange songs. While I was happy to get some cheap French reprint of a Chess mono album, Morten ordered the old U.S. albums and got the then modern "enhanced stereo" versions. In any case we tried to get more and more, especially after having noticed that versions differed on some albums or singles.
Though not formally trained as a music historian, in this specific field Morten worked like one. His research became a huge stack of publishing data. Consequently when Howard DeWitt in 1981 published the first English-language book about Chuck Berry, Morten directly wrote to the author about how faulty the included discography was. Due to this the 1985 printing of DeWitt's book came with a much better and much longer discography - written by Morten Reff.
During the last few years, Morten has published the essence of his 40+ year research on Berry recordings and Berry-related recordings in a series of books called The Chuck Berry International Directory (CBID).
Morten and I got into contact 18 years ago when an early print version of this blog was distributed to Berry collectors all over Europe by help of a British record seller, Hugh McCallum. Since then we continue to exchange news and findings on Berry rarities. We share a lot: We both like Berry's music, but don't care for his personal life stories. We're from Europe, and we both hate to accept that My Ding-A-Ling became Berry's greatest hit. And finally we are convinced that a true collector must also be an extensive researcher. We both encourage other collectors to join in and share their knowledge with us.
With the print version of his over 2.000 pages of Berry's musical legacy finished, Morten agreed to post further findings (new records, new covers) in blog articles here. If you own the books, you might therefore bookmark this blog and print out the CBID additions.
If you want Morten (or me) to write about a specific Berry-related subject, feel free to send an email to cbguide@crlf.de. We promise to at least think about it.
Friday, March 7. 2014
CBID is the Chuck Berry International Directory, a 2.200 page pile of Chuck Berry records information published in four volumes between 2008 and 2013. For details see the bibliography section of this site.CBID is never complete as new records and CDs appear and some old rarities are discovered. This section presents interesting additions and corrections to CBID. Today: We found a Spanish album not listed in Volume 1 - and then we didn't:
Spain CHUCK BERRY : ÉXITOS Movie Play S-26.103 ? Spain, 1972 This one (listed on page 451) has a fold-out cover which was not mentioned. The cover also has the following printed on the back: Fabricado distribuido por discos movieplay, S.A. Bajo licencia de GRT – Chess Records, USA. Which differs from the book-club issue below.
CHUCK BERRY : ÉXITOS Movie Play S-26.103 ? Spain, 1972 (Book-club issue) Same as US LP Chess 1485 ‘Greatest Hits’. Different cover. However, the album title, label and cat no are exactly the same as the one mentioned on page 451 in Vol.1 (see above) but different cover, front and back. And it’s a single cover, and not fold-out as the one on page 451. Has the following printed on the back cover: Produccion especial para Discolibro 7525. Which points to that this issue is an album released by a book club ('Discolibro') and therefore pressed for their members with a new cover. Both albums have the same liner notes in Spanish.
Monday, February 24. 2014
CBID is the Chuck Berry International Directory, a 2.200 page pile of Chuck Berry records information published in four volumes between 2008 and 2013. For details see the bibliography section of this site.CBID is never complete as new records and CDs appear and some old rarities are discovered. This section presents interesting additions and corrections to CBID. Today: Two additional entries to the country-specific discographies published in Volume 1:
USA Johnny B. Goode / Rock And Roll Music Mercury ‘Celebrity Series’ C-30146 ? 1972 This has a special yellow and red color cardboard cover (one-sided). It has the number 3260 which should indicate more issues, however, I have never seen any others. Dark blue label color.
BELGIUM ROCK REVIVAL (VOLUME 4) Roll Over Beethoven / School Day Chess BE-169515 ? 1969 Picture sleeve. This sleeve is green compared to the French one on page 293 (in CBID Vol. 1) which is red.
Friday, February 21. 2014
CBID is the Chuck Berry International Directory, a 2.200 page pile of Chuck Berry records information published in four volumes between 2008 and 2013. For details see the bibliography section of this site.CBID is never complete as new records and CDs appear and some old rarities are discovered. This section presents interesting additions and corrections to CBID. Today: Two additional cover versions, one new and one not so new, to be added to the chapter on Chuck Berry covers in Volume 3.
LA FEMME (FRANCE) Sextet (one girl, five guys), classified as a smooth, tropical, surf, cold wave band from Paris. They first recorded in 2010. Oh Baby Doll [‘Baby Doll’] (3:06) 2013 CD single: Disque Pointu, (no cat.no) ? France, 2013 Techno (as I would call it) version by a young modern popular French group. Interesting to notice the wish to cover an obscure Berry song, in 2013! This was also used as a TV ad for the Yves Saint Laurent Babydoll Mascara. Check it out on YouTube.
BRUCE CHANNEL (USA) Born in 1940 in Jacksonville, Texas. Famous for the hit version of ‘Hey Baby’ in 1962, featuring Delbert McClinton on harmonica. Maybellene [Mabellene] (2:15) 1968 45: Charay C-33-A ? USA, 1968 Record label out of Fort Worth, Texas. This is in stereo and very white soul. Unusual. The B-side ‘One Letter At A Time’ is more country oriented. The Charay label had 2 other 45 issues using the cat.no. 33 but this one has the letter A to separate it from the others. Strange policy though.
Friday, January 31. 2014
The main reason why this part of the Chuck Bery Collectors website is a weblog (or blog) is to open it for your responses.
Several articles here have had great input by readers, sometimes even resulting in heated discussions.
For a good research, discussions and input are essential. This is why you'll find some options to add your personal comment to an article.
Unfortunately I had to stop allowing comments to December's article on Berry's Christmas song. This entry was abused by a huge group of blog spammers. To reduce my work in reading and deleting their garbage, I had to disable the comments function. Right now comments are still open for the 140 other articles here. If you want to add a note to the Christmas song article, please send me an email and I'll post it as a comment here.
It's sad that once again spammers destructed a useful Internet function. But it's interesting to see how the bloggers vs. blog spammers fight escalates more and more.
In the beginning we had no blog spammers. So bloggers wrote articles and readers used the comments form to add their thoughts. Comments were printed right below the main article for everyone to see - and to further comment.
Spammers recognized this as a nice opportunity to post their own texts on other people's websites. Why do they do this? One reason is to display advertising for a product all over the web. Another reason is to display links to their own offers - good for two purposes: readers of the blog might click on a link, and search engines will find lots of links to the spammer's site which in turn rises their position in result lists.
So spammers wrote little programs to search for comments forms and fill those with advertising and links automatically.
Website authors found their pages spammed with advertising or unwanted links, so a counterstrike followed.
The solution was called CAPTCHA, short for 'Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'. The idea was to automatically find out whether a comment was written by a human reader or by a machine. There are various types of CAPTCHA. All of them work with something people can easily do and machines can't. Things such as reading a simple question and answering it or recognizing shapes in a distorted image. This is why there is a graphic with my comments form which you have to understand and describe. If you can do so, you're supposed to be human and you are allowed to post a comment.
So we excluded spammers who used computers. Next for the spammers was to change to use humans. Computers looked for comments forms, then humans such as cheaply paid students were hired to fill in the form with the spammers' ads or links. Typically the comment was nice enough to read with the advertising hidden, such as here:
Doe? your blog have a ??nta?t page? I'm having problems locating it but, I'd like to shoot you an e-mail.
Where's the advertising? In the user name and user homepage fields (not shown here). And while such a comment is nice to read, we do not want to publish their ads and links on our pages.
The next solution was algorithms to select useful comments from advertising. Comments were automatically checked against certain words and phrases. If a comment was seen as advertising, it's automatically rejected.
Worked - for some time. Next the spammers learned to mis-spell the keywords so the algorithms would no longer find them. So I received comments that read like this:
I have got you bolk marked too look at neww stuff you post
At some point the algorithms were no longer useful and we had to return to manual approvement. With blogs having few comments such as this one, this is still an option. This is the reason why you cannot post a comment and immediately see it on this site. With every comment posted, first I'll receive a message from the blog software in which I need to approve or reject the comment. Worked for some time.
But even this does not work any more now. For some reason, the Christmas song article was found by spammers to be a valuable target. (I suspect is has to do with a Facebook post about it.) Within a few days I received dozens of spam comments to reject. Sorry, folks, but this is too much work for me!
Another interesting fact is that many spammers nowadays seem to use people who cannot read English at all. Outsourced to China? Have a look at comments like this:
Keep up the {superb|terrific|very good|great|good|awesome|fantastic|excellent|amazing|wonderful} works guys I've {incorporated|added|included} you guys to {|my|our|my personal|my own} blogroll.|{Howdy|Hi there|Hey there|Hi|Hello|Hey} would you mind {stating|sharing} which blog platform you're {working with|using}?
You see? This is a template from which the spammer should have selected alternatives. If he had understood what to do.
Anyway. I have removed the comments function from certain blog posts. If you want to comment on a topic which does not have a comments form beneath, send me an email to (cbguide at crlf dot de) and I'll make sure your input will be seen by other Berry collectors.
Sunday, January 12. 2014
A very rare vinyl record containing a Chuck Berry recording only available there is currently for sale at eBay.
Look at item 230969781717.
This promotional record contains radio spots recorded to support the 1975 NAPRA Get Off anti-drug campaign. There are 51 radio spots on this record, one spoken by Chuck Berry. For more details read the chapter on Radio Show and Promotional Records of this site.
Wednesday, November 20. 2013
In the 1950s everything was simple: Singles had to run two minutes or 2:30 the max. Albums were just a collection of singles plus some tracks too bad for a single release.
In the 1960s albums became an artistic concept on their own. Singles were selected from the album tracks. And because album tracks often became longer and longer, record companies edited album tracks down to a running time reasonable for radio stations to play. That was something in the area of 3 to 4 minutes. By the way: According to The History of the 45 RPM Record, the longest 45 rpm track ever released was Bruce Springsteen's Incident on 57th Street (1987).
When collecting Chuck Berry records, you will find a couple of single edits. The most well-known is of course My Ding-A-Ling which was 11:52 on the original album and cut down to 4:16 for the famous #1 single. Ding-A-Ling has been re-issued on CD multiple times, so getting both the album version and the single edit is easy. However, some single edits are quite rare to find and you need indeed get yourself the original 45 rpm single to listen to the shortened version.
Here's a table of tracks which have been edited to fit on a hit single. Not included are the many album tracks which have varying lengths on CDs or LPs due to different fades or space restrictions. Year | Song | Original album track | Shortened single track |
1964 | Chuck's Beat | 10:36 on Two Great Guitars (Checker LPS-2991) | 2:55 on Checker 1089 |
1964 | Bo's Beat | 14:04 on Two Great Guitars (Checker LPS-2991) | 2:55 on Checker 1089 |
1969 | It's Too Dark in There | 3:53 on Concerto in B. Goode (Mercury SR-61223) | 2:58 on Mercury 72963 (promotional release only) |
1972 | My Ding-A-Ling (live) | 11:52 on The London Chuck Berry Sessions (Chess CH-60020) | 4:16 on Chess CH-2131 |
1972 | Johnny B. Goode (live) | 4:38 on The London Chuck Berry Sessions (Chess CH-60020) | 3:53 on Chess CH-2131 |
1972 | Reelin' and Rockin' (live) | 7:10 on The London Chuck Berry Sessions (Chess CH-60020) | 4:19 on Chess CH-2136 (US version) 4:30 on Chess 6145 020 (UK version) 2:42 on Durium LdA-7811 (Italian Jukebox version) 4:55 on Chess CH-25002 (French version, faded only, not edited) |
1973 | Bio | 4:21 on Bio (Chess CH-50043) | 3:45 on Chess CH-2140 (US version only) full length in all other countries |
Monday, November 18. 2013
A small note first: Sorry for no posts since September - I've been busy.
Most Chuck Berry discographies including Morten Reff's The Chuck Berry International Directory are certain that there were five original singles released during Berry's stay with Mercury Records:
- Mercury 72643 - Club Nitty Gritty / Laugh and Cry
- Mercury 72680 - Back to Memphis / I Do Really Love You
- Mercury 72748 - It Hurts Me Too / Feelin' It
- Mercury 72840 - Louie to Frisco / Ma Dear
- Mercury 72963 - It's Too Dark In There / Good Lookin' Woman
I have to disagree. I know of and have copies of the first four singles. But after collecting Berry records for decades, neither I nor anyone I know has ever seen a regular release of Mercury 72963.
All one can find is a promotional copy of Mercury 72963 having a white promo label and - if you're lucky - having a white sleeve containing a note to reviewers that this is the side [sic] from the Concerto In B. Goode album YOU (the reviewers?) requested.
So yes, there is a 45rpm single containing It's Too Dark In There / Good Lookin' Woman. And yes, the label says Mercury 72963. But no, this was never part of Mercury's sales catalogue. And no, this was never released as a regular release other than this promotional copy.
If you disagree, please prove me wrong by sending a scan of a regular commercial label of this record.
Saturday, September 14. 2013
You'll certainly know that Amazon not only sells lots of Chuck Berry CDs and some vinyl, but also offers almost all Chuck Berry recordings as MP3 downloads. This site's Listen-to-it function makes use of these offers by presenting audio samples of most Berry recordings. Here's for example Amazon's selection for Wee Wee Hours. Amazon has roughly 14.000 MP3 tagged with Chuck Berry one way or the other.
MP3s at Amazon usually cost 99 cents per song. If you get them from other legal sources, prices are roughly the same. If we assume that Chuck Berry and his publishers get a share of this, that's not a bad deal.
The only other and cheaper way to legally get your favorite Berry recordings for use in MP3 players is to buy the corresponding record or CD and to convert the contents into digital MP3 files. This is done by a process called 'Ripping' and despite its name, this is perfectly legal as long as you keep the MP3 files for your private use.
But did you know that Amazon also provides you with all these MP3s for free? I didn't and was astonished to learn about it when I received an email from Amazon a few weeks ago.
The feature offered Amazon calls "AutoRip" and this is what they do: They automatically rip CDs into MP3 files. If you buy a CD tagged as "AutoRip" (and many Berry CDs are), they automatically and for free create MP3s of all songs contained. You can then import these MP3s into your Amazon Cloud Player (which every Amazon client has). From here you can listen to the songs or download them for use with your MP3 player Unless your cloud player contains more than 250 songs, this complete process is free of charge for you.
If you recently (i.e. within the last years) bought a CD which has now been AutoRip'ed, you will receive an email from Amazon announcing that these songs have been imported into your cloud player automatically. In my case this was the "In the 50s" 3-CD set I wrote about in March. The price for this set is now 40 cents higher than in March, but it includes MP3s of all 70 songs. No need to rip them any more.
Thursday, August 29. 2013
Reader Brian just posted a note to an eBay offer of the famous "America's Hottest Wax" bootleg (Reelin' 001). For sale is the second version with the blue cover. Bidding starts very cheap at UKP 2.99. Here's the link: Item 261275338851. Thanks, Brian!
Thursday, August 22. 2013
One, two - one, two, three, four ...
If you are following this site, you will have waited just like me to finally see the fourth and final volume of Morten Reff's The Chuck Berry International Directory.
With now over 2.000 pages, this is by far the most comprehensive and the most complete reference work for any serious Chuck Berry collector.
The earlier Volumes 1 and 2 of 2008 have 1,000 pages describing each and every Chuck Berry record issued in the U.S., in the U.K., or in any other country. The combined 19 chapters also covered bootlegs, movies, TV shows, books and much much more. Last year's Volume 3 presenting chapter 20 has 600 pages which list and describe all those records where some other artist recorded their own version of a Chuck Berry song.
Now we can get Volume 4. It completes chapter 20 with an index over song titles so one could look up those who recorded Beautiful Delilah, for instance - which are 27 besides the Kinks.
Seven other chapters discuss cover versions which became hits on their own, recordings which are said to be cover versions, but aren't, and Soundalikes. Plus there are such obscure items as Karaoke CDs and games.
Even if you aren't that much interested in cover versions, you may want to buy Volume 4 as an addition to Volumes 1 and 2 which you surely have. Since the original release in 2008 there have been additional important releases of Berry material (as you've read here). Also some older records have surfaced which did not make it into the first versions. Due to this, 200 extra pages in Volume 4 contain additions and corrections to the earlier volumes. Also included is cross-referencing information which allows you to easily find a certain record or release on these 2.000+ pages.
No need to repeat my recommendation: The whole series is a MUST-HAVE!
Friday, March 1. 2013
As you know, some of the more interesting Chuck Berry record rarities are those produced exclusively for radio stations. This site has a complete section on these records at Radio Show and Promotional Records.
Since Morten Reff's "Chuck Berry International Directory, Vol. 2" (see here) was issued, I had always wondered why on page 523 Morten lists the "Royalty of Rock - Berry/Richard" album as an 1983 release, while my copy clearly states 1982. Now I know why!
There are TWO versions of this radio show record:
#1 (c) 1982 TM Special Projects
has a black and white label with "Royalty of Rock" printed in a gothic font. The two sides are labeled Segment 1/Segment 2 and Segment 3/Segment4.
The cue sheet has the "Royalty of Rock" logo (with king's crown) printed in red. It lists opening and closing narratives to be read by the station's host. These parts of the segments are not on the record. Side 2 therefore directly starts with "Reelin' and Rockin'" and ends with "Johnny B. Goode".
#2 (c) 1983 TM Programming
has the crown logo printed in red as well as name and address of RKO Radio Networks. The two sides are labeled Side A and Side B.
It contains the same music and interviews as #1, but in addition has the opening and closing narratives spoken by some "Billy Juggs" (who was a DJ with KMET of LA). Thus side 2 starts with Juggs saying "You're listening to ..." and ends with "Chuck Berry is one of the true legends in The Royalty of Rock".
If you know more about TM Programming and the RKO radio albums, feel free to comment here.
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