Wednesday, October 29. 2014Bear Family's 16-CD Box Set is out now
Here's a message to those of you anxiously waiting for the new 16-CD box made by Bear Family promising to contain all of Berry's CHESS, Mercury, and ATCO recordings plus more.
Chuck Berry: Rock And Roll Music had been planned to be released no later than Berry's 88th birthday on October 18th. However, problems with some suppliers caused a small delay. Bear Family just told me that the boxes are shipping now. First copies to dealers went out on Monday, first copies to end users were shipped today. So expect your copy to arrive soon. Those who ordered the more expensive Guitar Case Edition will have to be patient, though. Even though Bear Family ordered the guitar cases months ago, they are still waiting to get them. As of today, Bear Family expects the limited Guitar Case Edition to be shipped by the end of November.
Posted by Dietmar Rudolph
in Chuck Berry Recordings
at
11:56
| Comment (1)
| Add Comment
| Contact Webmaster
Sunday, October 26. 2014Chuck Berry live from 1967 now on CD
In early 2008 I wrote a blog article on the various recordings of Chuck Berry concerts in San Francisco in 1967. Three of these shows had been only available for listening online at Wolfgang's Vault, now Concert Vault, a commercial site which runs on the archives of promoter Bill Graham and concert recordings from many other sources.
These recordings have now been made available as a 2-CD set called Check Me Out! (Crying Steel CSR02). It includes all three concerts available at the Concert Vault:
Anyway the 2-CD set is a nice professionally made item. And it even contains a recommendation for this site in its liner notes. Thanks!
Posted by Dietmar Rudolph
in Chuck Berry Recordings
at
11:31
| Comments (0)
| Add Comment
| Contact Webmaster
Sunday, September 7. 2014The Bear Family Definition of 'COMPLETE'
Two weeks ago, I wrote a first report on the upcoming 16-CD boxset by Bear Family. At that time all I had was a press release and some early photos.
In the meantime Bear Family added the boxset to their online catalog. You can now pre-order the set at the Bear Family Store. They also included a complete, though little detailed track listing. This now gives us a first look at what is included in the box, and what is not. The contents is interesting, though a bit different from what I wrote earlier. Bear Family has promised the COMPLETE studio recordings of Chuck Berry. However I find that my definition of "complete" differs a bit from theirs. Their definition of "complete" means that you will get EVERY song Berry ever recorded, but you will get just ONE version of every song. This is in contrast to e.g. what Hip-O-Select had in mind with their three 4-CD boxes. If you look at Hip-O's first box, you'll find five different versions of Sweet Little Sixteen. As these variants often differ only slightly, listening to such a CD is boring for most. And if you have followed this blog closely, you know that even Hip-O missed to include some previously published tracks. On the new Bear Family boxset there will be only ONE version of Sweet Little Sixteen plus the demo version. Thus you will not be bored by listening to eight variants of the same song. This is good. But you will need to buy additional CDs to complete your collection. From the track listing it is a bit unclear which version we will hear. There is only one version of Sweet Little Sixteen, so it's probably the sped up hit single version. But there is also only one version of Merry Christmas Baby, which can either be the version used for the CHESS single, or the one used for the CHESS album. We will see. It seems that all the alternate or early takes are missing - at least unless they have been published under a different name before. So there's only one version of Betty Jean on the set, but there are three takes of Vacation Time: the single version plus the two alt. takes from America's Hottest Wax, known as 21 and 21 Blues. We will have to do some research once the boxset is available. The sequence of the tracks on the 16 CDs is also a bit unclear. Basically it follows the recording dates, but the Joe Alexander takes are after How High The Moon. And between the Chuck Berry '75 album tracks and the ATCO tracks there are 18 CHESS tracks which were recorded in the 1960s. I expect the books to explain more about these recordings. Bear Family's press release and order form also promise that with the Mercury and ATCO recordings "all surviving alternate takes" are included. From the track listing it seems that there is only one additional Mercury track and not a single alt. take from the ATCO sessions. CDs 1 to 11 contain studio recordings, CDs 12 to 16 contain live recordings. Most of these are well-known such as the 1956 Alan Freed Show recordings. Included are some which were difficult to get before, such as the Newport recordings from 1958, the two songs from the American Hot Wax movie, or the BBC sessions with King Size Taylor & the Dominoes. Unheard before are two more shows from Detroit 1963 and a couple of additional recordings from Coventry 1972. From the Fillmore and from Toronto there seems to be just the well-known recordings. Almost at the end of CD 16 you will find the 1977 Dr. Pepper promotion song. I did not see any other of the rare recordings from our Radio Show and Promotional Records section. In total, the CD set seems to fulfill a bit less than what the PR promised. It will, however, contain several previously unreleased tracks and a lot of what has been very difficult to find up to now. Stay tuned: more when I learn more about this box ... Thursday, September 4. 2014The Polar Prize Ceremony celebrating Chuck Berry
[Update: The videos are now available from the Polar Prize website at http://www.polarmusicprize.org/home/prize-ceremonies/2014-2/. And they included another very nice cover version which was not shown in the original broadcast: Sabina Ddumba and Melinda De Lange singing Havana Moon!]
Next to his induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, the Polar Music Prize is probably the most important award given to Chuck Berry for his lifetime role in creating most of modern rock music. On Tuesday (August 26th, 2014), the prize ceremony took place in Stockholm, Sweden. Chuck Berry did not attend, neither on stage in Stockholm, nor by use of a video message. The official reason is that due to illness Berry is not able to travel. But not only Berry missed this important event. None of his family did attend either. We would have expected Charles Jr. or Ingrid to at least accept the prize on behalf of their dad. Instead someone choose British singer and producer Dave Edmunds to stand on stage, shake hands with the King of Sweden, and read a three-sentence letter from Berry. Even though Edmunds covered several Berry numbers such as Promised Land (1972) and Run Rudolph Run (1982), Edmunds is not necessarily my first choice for a Berry stand-in. The video of the ceremony is not yet available at the Polar Music Prize website (www.polarmusicprize.org). However, in case you missed to watch it live, you can view the full ceremony as broadcast by Swedish TV4 from the TV station's website today and until Friday. So if you accept watching (too much) Swedish advertising, go ahead and have yourself an interesting hour. The link to the broadcast is http://www.tv4play.se/program/polar-music-prize?video_id=2950197. Do not be confused that the first segment containing interviews on the red carpet and a small film about the manufacturing of the prize statuette are in Swedish language. The full ceremony afterwards is in English! You will be confused, though, at how easy the Swedish manage to mix Rock 'n' Roll music and classical music into a single program. It's kind of easy this year because the other winner, opera director Peter Sellars, is more of a "modern" classical artist, while Berry is more a "classical" modern artist. In mixing both styles, during the concert you'll see the full orchestra perform a number called "The Guitar Battle of Wartburg" which includes steel and electrical guitars. There is not a single recent image or video snippet from Berry shown during the whole show. His biography and such is underlaid with segments from the "Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll!" movie. Thus the most recent Chuck Berry is from 1986! While film makers from the committee were in St. Louis during a Berry show at Blueberry Hill, all they show is the announcement outside the doors plus a few sentences by Joe Edwards of Blueberry Hill and by Chuck's son Charles Jr. To me this looks as if there was some other problem besides Berry being ill. Another video message shown during the ceremony is - as usual - by Keith Richards. During the one-hour show several Berry numbers are performed, each by well-known Swedish artists from the 1960's 'til today. Some cover version are quite nice, others ... well ... judge yourself. You'll hear:
Monday, August 25. 2014The very first Chuck Berry LP album
So here's for our question of the week:
What was the very first 33rpm LP album containing Chuck Berry? Now write down your answer, then scroll down ... If your answer was "After School Session", you know your Berry quite well. Indeed, this album from May 1957 was the very first 33rpm LP containing just Chuck Berry recordings. Released by CHESS under the catalog number LP-1426 this album contains most of Berry's first seven CHESS singles (except four tracks) plus two previously unissued instrumentals. However, this was not the first 33rpm LP album containing Chuck Berry. If your answer was the CHESS sampler "Rock Rock Rock", you know your Berry very well. Yes, as the number LP-1425 indicates, this album was released before LP-1426 "After School Session" und it was the very first 12" LP album published under the CHESS label name. In case you wonder why the first CHESS album was already numbered at 1425, you'll find the answer in Nadine Cohodas's great book "Spinning Blues into Gold": The Chess brothers' first home in the U.S. after immigrating from Poland was at 1425 South Karlov Avenue, Chicago. The number 1425 was also used for the first 45rpm single issued under the CHESS label name: Bless You b/w My foolish heart by the Gene Ammons Sextet in June 1950. "Rock Rock Rock" is the title of a music film starring Alan Freed. The film was released December 7th, 1956 to the movie theaters in the U.S. (though some sources say December, 5th). On the very first days, Alan Freed, Chuck Berry, and Connie Francis were on stage in a couple of New York theaters for a few minutes each to promote the film. Record labels such as CHESS, whose artists performed in the film, were allowed to promote their records at the cinemas showing the movie. CHESS took this opportunity to concurrently (i.e. December 1957) create an album of same title which looks like a soundtrack album but instead contained only those artists under contract by CHESS: the Moonglows, the Flamingoes, and Berry. CHESS LP-1425 contains the four songs performed by CHESS artists in the movie:
However, this was not the first 33rpm LP album containing Chuck Berry. The very first Chuck Berry album has no title and no catalog number. All it says is "These are the new record hits from the motion picture Rock, Rock, Rock". And here's its story: The movie "Rock, Rock, Rock" was a project by well-known New York disk jockey Alan Freed. And he wanted to get as much money from it as he could. First he owned 10 per cent of the film outright. Second he played a leading role. And third he planned to cash on the music presented therein. So Freed talked the executives of the six record companies whose artists perform their songs in the movie to pass over the publishing rights for the songs to his own Snappner Music Inc. company. He succeeded with 15 of the 20 songs. Next, in return for allowing the record companies to display their disks in all theaters where the film plays, Freed got himself permission to use the songs on a DJ long-playing album. This was a brand-new idea! There was a growing market for 12" albums, so-called "packaged records", but only in the areas of classical music, Broadway shows, or jazz. There was no LP album from CHESS or any other rock-related company. Freed sampled the 20 songs onto a single 33rmp record and had the film producing company DCA send this "Disc Jockey Sample - Not For Sale" LP out to more than 600 disk jockeys around the country. Here's a quote from DCA's marketing material: Something completely new by way of exploitation is being tried on ROCK, ROCK, ROCK; an L.P. record containing all twenty-one songs from the picture has been pressed.We don't know how many DJs followed this advice. Alan Freed himself "world-premiered" this compilation on October 20th, 1956 on WINS. So it's safe to assume that the album was sent out by the end of October or early November 1956. Even though more than 600 copies of this very first Chuck Berry album have been pressed and distributed, very few seem to have survived. Most recipients probably either threw it away or played it to death. The original album is extremely rare. Even the most detailed discography of Berry, Morten Reff's "The Chuck Berry International Directory" fails to show an image as does all of the Internet. So here, for the first time on the net, images of cover and label of Chuck Berry's very first 33rpm LP album: As you can see, there is an image of Berry as well as the line "SEE the inimitable Chuck Berry - HEAR him sing You Can't Catch Me". There is no back cover. That side is blank. There is no label nor any kind of catalog number. My best guess for a label name is the film company DCA. Morten Reff lists it under Roost, because the name of that record company is etched into the wax, as you can see on the high-resolution images. My guess is that Roost produced the album for DCA. And there's even more: It seems that DCA included an 8 page, double letter-sized booklet with the promotional album. At least the copy I was lucky to get had this insert. The complete contents of this booklet is available as a PDF file here: http://www.alanfreed.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/063-King-Of-RockRoll-1956.pdf [If this link doesn't work, try http://www.alanfreed.com/wp/archives/archives-rocknroll-1951-1959/mp-rock-rock-rock/]. What the PDF misses is the original color of the title page as shown here: If you want to know more about Freed and DCA marketing the movie, check out the other documents at alanfreed.com: http://www.alanfreed.com/wp/archives/archives-rocknroll-1951-1959/mp-rock-rock-rock/ The complete contents of this DJ sampler is as follows - with original label, composer, and publisher according to the film's music cue sheet. Some spellings differ from the album labels. Interestingly there are only 20 songs while the cover talks about 21.
On a final note, there is a 1980s bootleg copy of this album on the Reel'n'Rock label (JN 5703) from Australia. In contrast to the original album, the bootleg comes in a gatefold cover. It has a back cover with liner notes and a track listing, both of which are missing on Chuck Berry's very first LP album. [Edit 17-07-2018: Links to alanfreed.com updated]
Posted by Dietmar Rudolph
in Chuck Berry Rarities
at
21:48
| Comment (1)
| Add Comment
| Contact Webmaster
Sunday, August 24. 2014Chuck Berry complete - the Bear Family way
[Updated, now with prices and images!]
Bear Family, the famous German record company, informs me - and you - about their newest Chuck Berry product: Rock And Roll Music - Any Old Way You Choose It - The COMPLETE Studio Recordings ... Plus! To be issued in a few weeks, this new Berry box contains sixteen CDs plus almost four hundred printed pages. As we know it from Bear Family, this is to be the definitive Berry collection. There is no better and there never will be. Here's a first view according to Bear Family's Detlev Hoegen. Be sure I'm going to report details as soon as I have them.
Thanks to designer Mychael Gerstenberger of Malbuch/Berlin, I can show you early photos of the contents. As with all images on this site, click for a better view. Bear Family claims that this is everything by Berry you ever wanted to have - and for most collectors they are definitely right. There is some additional studio material and tons of live recordings, but only a completionist like myself will want to have that. The price for the box will be 299 Euros (appr. $400), thus it's save to say that you better start saving money immediately. Those who want even more might try to get one of only 88 limited Deluxe Editions of this box. To celebrate Berry's 88th birthday on October 18th, Bear Family packs the contents of the box (16 CDs, 2 hardcover books) into an original-size Gibson ES series guitar case. Price will be 499 Euros (appr. $660). Friday, August 8. 2014Sweet Little Eight Variants of Sweet Little Sixteen
[This is a minor correction to the October 2011 rewrite of a blog article originally posted on September 7th, 2011. Additional research revealed more facts and corrected some factual errors in the original post.]
In July [2011] I had to correct some common knowledge about Johnny B. Goode. Based on findings by Josep RullĂł of Barcelona/Spain we learned that there were some errors with the so-called "complete" release of Berry's 1950s Chess recordings on HIP-O-Select's 4-CD-set Johnny B. Goode (HIP-O-Select B0009473-02). Josep had another comment: Sweet Little Sixteen â There's a lot of takes of this song in the Hip-O-Select set, but I think the one first released on the âAmerica's Hottest Waxâ LP is not there. I haven't heard that album for ages, but I seem to recall it had a false start (guitar intro only) and a complete take, wherein Chuck mixes the lyrics of the last verse with the lyrics from the first verse, and ends with âback in school againâ. This line is not heard on any of the five (well, really four) takes used on the Hip-O CD set.Josep's email started a long discussion about the various versions of Sweet Little Sixteen which can be found on the 4-CD set. And more importantly with the help of Morten Reff and Fred Rothwell we discussed in detail which versions can NOT be found on the 4-CD set. The first part of Josep's comment was quite easy to solve. Just like with Johnny B. Goode take 2 the engineers at Universal clipped off the false starts when mastering the 2008 CD set. This happened to both the demo version (track 5 on CD2) and the previously unknown alternate take 11 (track 7 on CD 2). To listen to these false starts (and some studio chatter with the demo) you need to go back to records and CDs published in the 1980s. The second part of Josep's comment lead into some more detailed discussions about the lyrics Berry sings because musically the multiple takes are very similar. Here's Josep again: There are several lyrical differences between the available takes, but the most prominent one is in verses 1, 4, 5 and 7. On the master, Chuck sings âBoston, Pittsburgh, PAâ in verses 1 and 7, and âBandstand, Philadelphia, PAâ in verses 4 and 5. Taking this as a starting point, you can find several variations. On the demo, take 3 and take 11, he even sings âBandstand, Pittsburgh, PAâ on verse 5, which is wrong not only lyrically, but also geographically !!. Of course, I think Chuck knew the lyrics perfectly, and in most of those takes he was merely trying to get the band together without paying much attention to the words, but this is useful to us today in order to tell one from the other.By "master" Josep refers to the variant which finally made it to Chess single 1683 released January 1958. Given these lyrical variations one can differentiate between the four variants on the HIP-O-Select box easily:
Indeed there is a recording of Sweet Little Sixteen which is very similar to the final take except for the piano solo and Berry singing "school" instead of "class". This was the next-to-final take 13 of the recording session. Josep found it on Chess RCD034-2 titled "Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll", released in Spain in 1991. The take first surfaced on the two-LP set "Rock 'n' Roll Rarities" (Chess LP 92521) in March 1986, though in edited form. On that double album there is a so-called unreleased version of Sweet Little Sixteen, which is take 13 preceded by a false start. However that false start does not belong to that take! Those who have access to the session tapes tell that the false start actually opens take 11, while take 13 never had a false start. Thus like we have found out with Johnny B. Goode, we must learn that the CHESS/MCA engineers in 1986 created unreleased versions by clipping and pasting parts from multiple takes into what they found to be a reasonable sequence. This also explains why the HIP-O set contains take 11 and claims that this was a known take: The engineers at HIP-O found the take with the previously known false start (take 11) and included it in the set, without noticing that the take did not continue as known - and in addition they clipped off the false start, which was the only segment of the take known before. Thus for now we have to add the following variants to our list:
For the sake of completeness I do not want to forget to tell that there is another studio recording of Sweet Little Sixteen made 1966 for Mercury. You can easily distinguish that one from the 1958 versions by the prominent tambourine playing. I want to end this long post with another comment from Josep: Man, can you believe the hours we've all spent listening to those takes? It shouldn't be that difficult to sort this out!!! If this isn't love for the music, then I don´t know what it is... Sunday, May 11. 2014Setting the parameters of rock music
I usually don't quote from press releases, but this is good enough to make an exception:
The parameters of rock music were set one day in May 1955, when Chuck Berry recorded his debut single âMaybelleneâ. Chuck Berry was the rockânâroll pioneer who turned the electric guitar into the main instrument of rock music. Every riff and solo played by rock guitarists over the last 60 years contains DNA that can be traced right back to Chuck Berry. The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and a million other groups began to learn their craft by playing Chuck Berry songs. Chuck Berry is also a superb songwriter. In the course of three minutes he conjures up an image of the everyday life and dreams of a teenager, often with the focus on cars. Chuck Berry, born in 1926, was the first to drive up onto the highway and announce that we are born to run.These are the reasons why Chuck berry is going to be honored with the Polar Music Prize 2014 on August 26th by His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden in Stockholm. Besides being honored with a great ceremony and given a prize money of 1,000,000 Swedish Kroner (appr. $150,000), which Berry will appreciate more, this prize puts Berry in one line not only with other renowned popular artists, but with exceptional composers and performers of classical music as well. The Polar Music Prize is a legacy from Stig Anderson (1931-1997), one of the most famous figures in the Swedish music industry. A songwriter himself with an output of around 3,000 published titles, many of them chart hits, Anderson managed some of the biggest Swedish artists of the 1960s and then in the early 1970s became manager, co-writer, and producer of Sweden's most important pop group, ABBA. Anderson's record company Polar Music released all the original ABBA albums. [Since 1992] the Polar Music Prize is an international music prize, which is awarded to individuals, groups or institutions in recognition of exceptional achievements in the creation and advancement of music. The Polar Music Prize awards two Laureates in order to celebrate music in all its various forms and to emphasize the original intention of the Polar Music Prize: To break down musical boundaries by bringing together people from all the different worlds of music.To learn more about the prize, visit their website at polarmusicprize.org. The site also contains videos of the ceremonies, so expect to see Berry there as well. Along with their press release, the Prize Committee published a nice and almost correct brief biography of Berry at http://polarmusicprize.org/announcement/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/PMP_biografi_CB.pdf Tuesday, March 11. 2014Is this a Stones record?
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 itâs 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 didnât perform âLittle Queenieâ (though they did âAround And Aroundâ). Itâs 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. 2014Welcome to Morten Reff writing for the Chuck Berry Collectors Blog
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, January 31. 2014No more comments - how we lost the blogger vs. spammer fight
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.
Posted by Dietmar Rudolph
in Announcements
at
18:41
| Comments (4)
| Add Comment
| Contact Webmaster
Sunday, January 12. 2014Rare Chuck Berry Radio Spot for sale at eBay
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. 2013Single Edits vs. Album Versions
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.
Posted by Dietmar Rudolph
in Chuck Berry Rarities
at
15:16
| Comments (0)
| Add Comment
| Contact Webmaster
Monday, November 18. 2013Was Mercury 72963 a regular release?
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:
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.
Posted by Dietmar Rudolph
in Chuck Berry Rarities
at
10:58
| Comments (0)
| Add Comment
| Contact Webmaster
Saturday, September 14. 2013Amazon Auto-Rips Berry CDs to MP3 - for free
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.
Posted by Dietmar Rudolph
in Buy and Sell Berrys
at
16:15
| Comments (0)
| Add Comment
| Contact Webmaster
« previous page
(Page 6 of 15, totaling 220 entries)
» next page
|
Main PageThis weblog is an addition to my Chuck Berry fansite called "A Collector's Guide to the Music of Chuck Berry" which describes all books and records of interest to everyone enjoying Chuck Berry's music. CategoriesWhat You MissedSome earlier but important entries:
Recent Entries
SearchCopyright and DisclaimerThe complete contents of this weblog is
© Dietmar Rudolph No part of this document may be used or published without written consent by the author. Impressum/Haftungsausschluss/Datenschutz/Disclaimer To contact the authors, email to cbguide@crlf.de. Blog AdministrationPowered by |