Sold Date: May 30, 2024
Start Date: May 29, 2024
Final Price: $89.00 (USD)
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CHESS High Fidelity MONO

LP-1426 Original 1957 copy.

Unbreakable no Skips, very clean.   EX inner Sleeve white inner sleeve

I try my best to grade each record correctly....but as you know grading

varies with everyone.   I am an honest seller.  Check my other auctions for more LPs

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."