Greatest Hits – CHUCK BERRY*****

Roll Over Beethoven/School Days/Rock & Roll Music/Too Much Monkey Business/Johnny B Goode/O Baby Doll/Nadine/Maybellene/Memphis/Sweet Little Sixteen/Thirty Days/Brown Eyed Handsome Man

The first US hit compendium of rock & roll pioneer Chuck Berry. The song choice is a good one but his importance in the history of popular music warrants a wider selection. (US:34)

"1964's Chuck Berry's Greatest Hits is his first official Greatest Hits LP, inaugurating a long, long line of repackaging Berry's biggest hits. It's a very good overview of his hits up to 1964, containing twelve songs, almost all of them blockbusters. Of course, these tunes would be repackaged on other sets later, but it's both a good listen and a nice little piece of history."

"Where Elvis stands as the definite symbol of rock 'n' roll music for the casual listener, us 'experts' know better, and we proudly shake the hand of Chuck and bob our heads up and down to the frenzied beats of Roll Over Beethoven and Johnny B. Goode. And there's a good reason for that, Chuck Berry sure wasn't the first rock' n' roller on earth, but he was arguably the most significant one for the younger generation. And why? Because Chuck, as we know him, is the first rock 'n' roller who truly realized the potentials of that instrument we casually call the electric guitar." ,p> "He did come up with half a dozen, maybe a dozen, bona fide classics, most of them represented here. Who can deny the greatness of these archetypal rock songs. The problem is, Chuck was repeating himself all the time: his pot of creative ideas was exhausted rather quickly, and by the end of the fifties the standard process was to take an old hit and rewrite it as a new one."

"Anyone with the slightest interest in rock 'n' roll needs some Chuck in their collection. It sounds like a cliché, coming with an argument like that, but it's a fact. There were other rock 'n' rollers in the 50s, of course, but I doubt the British beat bands in the early 60s would have sounded like they did without him, and that again would of course have affected the whole history of rock. However, he was rather limited as a composer, as his many re-writings of his own songs bears witness."

"Berry was a terrific songwriter and guitarist. He gave birth to literally hundreds of (mostly white) guitar soloists, thus his legacy is huge, perhaps incalculable."