Rockin’ At The Hops – CHUCK BERRY****

Bye Bye Johnny/Worried Life Blues/Down The Road A Piece/Confessin’ The Blues/Too Pooped To Pop/Mad Lad/I Got To Find My Baby/Betty Jean/Childhood Sweetheart/Broken Arrow/Drifting Blues/Let It Rock

Rockin’ At The Hops was rock & roll pioneer Chuck Berry’s last album of new material before serving two years in prison. Fans would have to wait until 1964 before he recorded again.

“Berry stays true to his sound here, which means that it is undeniable wonderful rock music. His lyrics as always are rhythmically stunning, clever and smooth and his guitar skips and struts.”

“He does a continuation of the Johnny B Goode story with Bye Bye Johnny, throws in some of the music that he cut his teeth on with Worried Life Blues and Confessin’ The Blues. He celebrates the juke joint possibilities with Down The Road A Piece and the wonderful horn parts of I Got To Find My Baby make this song swing along with Berry's smooth diction and voice. But the best song is the last: the short, strange, slightly dark, Let It Rock.”

“Overall there is some filler here, but this is a nice set of Berry tunes. This is a good way to capture the Berry sound and feel and it comes before he lost his prominent role in the commercial mainstream, so his songs still crackle with good spirit and bounce.”

“This is below par, with the 27 min play time, most of the arrangements, songwriting and performance and even the vocals. This is an album of Berry’s weakest, badly engineered filler, sandwiched between two rockers. Bye Bye Johnny is one of the best examples of CB’s super effective rhythm guitar. Let it Rock is a rewrite of Johnny B Goode. The only other decent track is the instrumental Mad Lad with Hawaiian guitar sounds and nice studio ambience. Many tracks are far too short, faded perfunctorily. In short - the worst of Chuck’s pre-prison albums.”

“There are some great songs here that are hard to find elsewhere. I find that its more fun to hear the Berry songs that have not been beaten to death.”

“The two classic cuts that bookend this album should be enough to attract the uninitiated. Berry at his best wrote danceable little screenplays dealing with teen life, of which Bye Bye Johnny and Let It Rock were two of his best.”