Sold Date: October 9, 2016
Start Date: October 4, 2016
Final Price: $18.50 (USD)
Seller Feedback: 1273
Buyer Feedback: 88

Used 1989 Promo Reissue of Classic 1957 Chess Release by Bandleader/Composer/Guitarist/Blues and Rock 'N' Roll Vocalist Chuck Berry Entitled After School Session, Recordings Span the Years from May 21, 1955 to December of 1956, Research and Coordination by Andy McKaie, Mastered by Greg Fulginiti at Artisan in Hollywood, All Compositions Written by Chuck Berry - "Of all the early breakthrough rock & roll artists, none is more important to the development of the music than Chuck Berry. He is its greatest songwriter, the main shaper of its instrumental voice, one of its greatest guitarists, and one of its greatest performers. Quite simply, without him, there would be no Beatles, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, nor a myriad others. There would be no standard "Chuck Berry guitar intro," the instrument's clarion call to get the joint rockin' in any setting. The clippety-clop rhythms of rockabilly would not have been mainstreamed into the now standard 4/4 rock & roll beat. There would be no obsessive wordplay by modern-day tunesmiths; in fact, the whole history (and artistic level) of rock & roll songwriting would have been much poorer without him. Like Brian Wilson said, he wrote "all of the great songs and came up with all the rock'n'roll beats." Those who do not claim him as a seminal influence or profess a liking for his music and showmanship show their ignorance of rock's development as well as his place as the music's first great creator. Elvis may have fueled rock & roll's imagery, but Chuck Berry was its heartbeat and original mindset. He was born Charles Edward Anderson Berry to a large family in St. Louis. A bright pupil, Berry developed a love for poetry and hard blues early on, winning a high school talent contest with a guitar-and-vocal rendition of Jay McShann's big band number, "Confessin' the Blues." With some local tutelage from the neighborhood barber, Berry progressed from a four-string tenor guitar up to an official six-string model and was soon working the local East St. Louis club scene, sitting in everywhere he could. He quickly found out that black audiences liked a wide variety of music and set himself to the task of being able to reproduce as much of it as possible. What he found they really liked — besides the blues and Nat King Cole tunes — was the sight and sound of a black man playing white hillbilly music, and Berry's showmanlike flair, coupled with his seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh verses to old favorites, quickly made him a name on the circuit. In 1954, he ended up taking over pianist Johnny Johnson's small combo and a residency at the Cosmopolitan Club soon made the Chuck Berry Trio the top attraction in the black community, with Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm their only real competition. But Berry had bigger ideas; he yearned to make records, and a trip to Chicago netted a two-minute conversation with his idol Muddy Waters, who encouraged him to approach Chess Records. Upon listening to Berry's homemade demo tape, label president Leonard Chess professed a liking for a hillbilly tune on it named "Ida Red" and quickly scheduled a session for May 21, 1955. During the session the title was changed to "Maybellene" and rock & roll history was born. Although the record only made it to the mid-20s on the Billboard pop chart, its overall influence was massive and groundbreaking in its scope. Here was finally a black rock & roll record with across-the-board appeal, embraced by white teenagers and Southern hillbilly musicians (a young Elvis Presley, still a full year from national stardom, quickly added it to his stage show), that for once couldn't be successfully covered by a pop singer like Snooky Lanson on Your Hit Parade. Part of the secret to its originality was Berry's blazing 24-bar guitar solo in the middle of it, the imaginative rhyme schemes in the lyrics, and the sheer thump of the record, all signaling that rock & roll had arrived and it was no fad. Helping to put the record over to a white teenage audience was the highly influential New York disc jockey Alan Freed, who had been given part of the writers' credit by Chess in return for his spins and plugs. But to his credit, Freed was also the first white DJ/promoter to consistently use Berry on his rock & roll stage show extravaganzas at the Brooklyn Fox and Paramount theaters (playing to predominately white audiences); and when Hollywood came calling a year or so later, also made sure that Chuck appeared with him in Rock! Rock! Rock!, Go, Johnny, Go!, and Mister Rock'n'Roll. Within a years' time, Chuck had gone from a local St. Louis blues picker making 15 dollars a night to an overnight sensation commanding over a hundred times that, arriving at the dawn of a new strain of popular music called rock & roll. The hits started coming thick and fast over the next few years, every one of them about to become a classic of the genre: "Roll Over Beethoven," "Thirty Days," "Too Much Monkey Business," "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," "You Can't Catch Me," "School Day," "Carol," "Back in the U.S.A.," "Little Queenie," "Memphis, Tennessee," "Johnny B. Goode," and the tune that defined the moment perfectly, "Rock and Roll Music." Berry was not only in constant demand, touring the country on mixed package shows and appearing on television and in movies, but smart enough to know exactly what to do with the spoils of a suddenly successful show business career. He started investing heavily in St. Louis area real estate and, ever one to push the envelope, opened up a racially mixed nightspot called the Club Bandstand in 1958 to the consternation of uptight locals. These were not the plans of your average R&B singers who contented themselves with a wardrobe of flashy suits, a new Cadillac, and the nicest house in the black section. Berry was smart with plenty of business savvy and was already making plans to open an amusement park in nearby Wentzville. When the St. Louis hierarchy found out that an underage hat-check girl Berry hired had also set up shop as a prostitute at a nearby hotel, trouble came down on Berry like a sledgehammer on a fly. Charged with transporting a minor over state lines (the Mann Act), Berry endured two trials and was sentenced to federal prison for two years as a result. He emerged from prison a moody, embittered man. But two very important things had happened in his absence. First, British teenagers had discovered his music and were making his old songs hits all over again. Second, and perhaps most important, America had discovered the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, both of whom based their music on Berry's style, with the Stones' early albums looking like a Berry song list. Rather than being resigned to the has-been circuit, Berry found himself in the midst of a worldwide beat boom with his music as the centerpiece. He came back with a clutch of hits ("Nadine," "No Particular Place to Go," "You Never Can Tell"), toured Britain in triumph, and appeared on the big screen with his British disciples in the groundbreaking T.A.M.I. Show in 1964. Berry had moved with the times and found a new audience in the bargain and when the cries of "yeah-yeah-yeah" were replaced with peace signs, Berry altered his live act to include a passel of slow blues and quickly became a fixture on the festival and hippie ballroom circuit. After a disastrous stint with Mercury Records, he returned to Chess in the early '70s and scored his last hit with a live version of the salacious nursery rhyme, "My Ding a Ling," yielding Berry his first official gold record. By decade's end, he was as in demand as ever, working every oldies revival show, TV special, and festival that was thrown his way. But once again, troubles with the law reared their ugly head and 1979 saw Berry headed back to prison, this time for income tax evasion. Upon release this time, the creative days of Chuck Berry seemed to have come to an end. He appeared as himself in the Alan Freed bio-pic, American Hot Wax, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but steadfastly refused to record any new material or even issue a live album. His live performances became increasingly erratic, with Berry working with terrible backup bands and turning in sloppy, out-of-tune performances that did much to tarnish his reputation with younger fans and oldtimers alike. In 1987, he published his first book, Chuck Berry: The Autobiography, and the same year saw the film release of what will likely be his lasting legacy, the rockumentary Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll, which included live footage from a 60th-birthday concert with Keith Richards as musical director and the usual bevy of superstars coming out for guest turns. But for all of his off-stage exploits and seemingly ongoing troubles with the law, Chuck Berry remains the epitome of rock & roll, and his music will endure long after his private escapades have faded from memory. Because when it comes down to his music, perhaps John Lennon said it best, "If you were going to give rock & roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'." - "Chuck Berry's first album boasts a picture of him lifted from his appearance in the 1956-vintage rock & roll movie Rock, Rock, Rock — it's a daring pose if you look closely, the singer/guitarist/songwriter captured at his most animated, in what was a pretty bold pose for a black artist in an interracial movie, strutting and duck-walking across the screen with his guitar at full...exposure. That said, bold as the movie appearance was and the pose that was reflected in its cover, After School Session came out fairly late, given that his first hit, "Maybellene," dated from the summer of 1955. This was partly owing to the sheer novelty of rock & roll LPs — during that period, only a relative handful reached the public, and a significant portion of those were the work of Elvis Presley or Bill Haley, whose associations with the gigantic RCA Victor and Decca labels, respectively, put them in virtually a separate universe from everyone else in the field, especially Berry, recording for the tiny independent Chess label. Chess Records hadn't even issued its first LP until the end of 1956, and that album, the soundtrack LP Rock, Rock, Rock, had included "Maybellene." After School Session was only the label's second-ever long-player, and its timing was predicated on the fact that, after "Maybellene," the rock & roll legend hadn't charted another major pop hit in almost two years (though he had generated some serious R&B hits, which are included here, among them the blues "Wee Wee Hours" — which was what Berry originally purported to represent as his sound — and the more rhythm-oriented "No Money Down" and "Brown Eyed Handsome Man"). It was the release and hit status of "School Day" in the early spring of 1957 that yielded this album, which is a brilliant compendium of the range, depth, and breadth of Berry's music across his first two years as a recording artist. The sounds ranged from the pounding, jargon-laden teen-oriented beat of "School Day" through those R&B and blues classics to the moody instrumental "Deep Feeling"; the Latin-flavored, Calypso-influenced "Havana Moon"; the slow, romantic ballad "Together (We'll Always Be)," which showed Berry working in a '40s R&B-pop mode similar to the music of the Ink Spots, and attempting a Nat King Cole style of soft singing; his more successful effort in that ballad vein, "Drifting Heart"; and the mysterious, ominous, darkly shimmering "Down Bound Train," which could almost have been Berry's (and black music's) answer to "Ghost Riders in the Sky." The 2004 reissue of After School Session includes three bonus tracks that greatly extend the range of the original album — the driving rocker "You Can't Catch Me" (whose lyrics would greatly complicate John Lennon's life when he cribbed them for the opening of "Come Together" late in the Beatles' history); the even more pounding "Thirty Days"; and his debut hit, "Maybellene." All of it (including the rest of the original album's contents) shows off a glorious remastered sound that lets you hear the room ambience at Chess Studios and make out the exact spatial relationship between Berry and his backup singers on "Thirty Days." It puts the original CD to shame sonically, and boasts superior historical notes as well." - Sensational Personnel for the Various Lineups Feature Living Legend Chuck Berry on Guitar and Vocals, the Amazing Johnny Johnson or Otis Spann on Piano, L.C. Davis on Tenor Sax, the Great Willie Dixon on Bass, the Brilliant Fred Below, Jaspar Thomas or Eddie Hardy on Drums & Jerome Green on Maracas! - Selections on Side 1 Are the Classic School Day, Deep Feeling, Too Much Monkey Business, Wee Wee Hours, Roly Poly and no Money Down - Tracks For Side 2 Are Brown Eyed Handsome Man, Berry Pickin', Together(We'll Always Be), Havana Moon, Downbound Train & Drifting Heart - Used Copy, Cover Very Good++, Record Very Good++ - Chess Promotional Album with Stamp on Back, Stereo Recording, Product Code CH-9284 - California Residents Add 9.75% Sales Tax - International S & H Extra -