Chuck Berry - 'The Chess Years'

From signature guitar licks to easy-rolling rhythm to preoccupation with cars and girls to serving time, nobody's more rock 'n' roll than Chuck Berry.  His series of catchy, clever youth anthems inspired generations of rockers.

We all know the story of how he arrived at Chess Records as a blues guitarist, achieved a novelty hit with "Maybellene", and never looked back.  In fact, blues legend Willie Dixon was the primary bass player on his early recordings, and Berry incorporated a few blues songs and guitar instrumentals into each of his early LPs.

There has been some dispute about how much of his classic songbook was actually written by pianist Johnnie Johnson (left), who sued him in the 1980s.  Chuck has said, that if Johnnie Johnson really thought he'd been ripped off, he wouldn't have waited that long to do something about it, which seems reasonable.  That said, it does seem odd that most of his tunes are written in piano keys like F, C and B♭ rather than guitar keys like E, A or D…just sayin'.  Meanwhile, Chuck has sued John Lennon, The Beach Boys and three karaoke music distributors over copyright infringement.

Chuck hung around for forty years after his last significant composition, and often his admirers have performed his songs better than he did: both factors make it harder to appreciate how important he is.  His voice was decent enough, with remarkably crisp pronunciation though not too expressive, and he did have a tendency to repeat his guitar riffs.  But I don't judge him harshly for that, as pioneering artists tend to create their own clichés as they replace the clichés of the past.

Whenever rock and roll gets too pompous and serious for its own good, new bands return to Chuck's approach, like garage bands in the 60s, punk in the 70s, grunge in the 90s, but never do it with the same panache.

All that said, he wouldn't be anywhere without his cousin Marvin.  Right?

Today's freeload is a rare, long out of print, 9CD collection, that was released in 1991 on the Charly Records label as part of their RED BOX series.  I've previously done posts from the Charly Records RED BOX series, on Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Elmore James, and John Lee Hooker.  If you freeloaded any of them, you know how much effort Charly Records put into the sound on their RED BOX series.  In fact, when I was ripping these CDs, I accidentally ripped them at 320 kbps/44100 Hz, instead of my usual FLAC.  When I listened to them, they sounded just fine (Charly remastered them hot and in your face), so I kept them at "320".

This set is all the Chuck Berry, you'll ever need [probably more than you'll ever need — Ed], it's all here.

For the freeload, what are your top 5 Chuck berry songs?