Today that first hit still sounds unbelievably fresh and powerful, with Chuck, Johnnie, and the rhythm section romping through the groove at a speed that almost matches the two cars in the lyric, Chuck twisting the language and cramming words and syllables into new patterns to fit the driving rhythm, and his hot, distorted-up lead guitar (he would never sound quite this beautifully crunchy again) spitting out those rapid-fire syncopations and moaning, bluesy double-stop bends with Gatling-gun intensity and perfect control. A new musical era had arrived.

Leonard Chess cannily pinpointed the song's appeal to the new white teen audience that was opening up for the rhythm & blues music Freed had recently renamed rock & roll. "The big beat, cars, and young love," he said later; "it was a trend and we jumped on it." He was right on the money, of course! But today we can hear a little more in the song than just the catchy subject. We can hear Berry springing forth full-blown as the towering writer he is, the great original master songwriter-as-fiction-writer, compressing so much vivid detail into his brief pithy phrases that we feel we're watching the chase on film -- check out the amount of narrative (all focused on the state of his engine) he packs into verse 2, its six brief lines racing by us in a scant 12 seconds. We hear the marvelous control of, and delight in, the English language, which allows him to twist it into playful and powerful new combinations like "motorvatin'" in line 1, and to write (as Roy Orbison would comment much later) to the beat, to weld his words precisely to his driving rhythms while still sounding like natural common speech. (Notice the way he makes this work at the start of verse 2, slurring "to a" into a single sixteenth note: "Cadillac pulled up t'a hundred and four...")

And as we follow his protagonists forward from that climactic chase, through the many other wonderful car songs ("No Money Down," "You Can't Catch Me," "No Particular Place to Go"), through their escapes from the restrictions of the "School Day" into that wonderful corner juke joint, through their release as rock and roll dancers ("Carol," "Roll Over Beethoven," many more) or even musicians ("Johnny B. Goode" and sequels), through their breaks from the "botherations" and restrictions of parents and authorities ("Almost Grown"), and even into the great, pell-mell race across the continent to the "Promised Land" (Hollywood, of course!) -- through all of these scenes and many more, we hear Chuck Berry as a poet of the dream of freedom in modern America. Again and again, his songs celebrate that freedom, that mobility, that sense of release that he must have felt opening up for him in the world of hot new cars, postwar prosperity, and (somewhat) diminishing racial restriction. With their lifelike details and exhilarating, uplifting rhythms, these wonderful songs still help us feel that dream in a personal, palpable way.

And as if his incredible catalog of songs, his lively, sly, utterly believable singing, and the thrilling sound and feel of those great Chess records ("it was something about the total sound," Keith Richards murmurs in wonder, when asked what first drew him to Chuck's music) -- as if all this were not enough, Chuck gives us that amazing, powerful, utterly distinctive lead guitar style, which we musicians have been drawing from and building on ever since. He is rock's great original guitar hero, and the gritty power and the amazing rhythmic subtlety of his soloing is still a fascinating study today, forty years after he and his blazing Gibson first chased Maybellene up that legendary hill.

As a player, Chuck is rooted first and foremost in the swing tradition, in the Southwestern swing and jump band styles of the '40s. Most of the guitarists he names first, when you ask him about his influences, are a part of that tradition -- T-Bone Walker, Charlie Christian, Carl Hogan in Louis Jordan's band -- and the riffs he brings into the rock and roll vocabulary draw extensively, not only on these men's playing as guitarists, but on the sounds of the bands they played in: bands driven by bright, catchy, swinging horn-section riffs. Chuck's guitar ideas are based on those classic big-band or swing-band section riffs, almost as much as on the fleet-fingered style of T-Bone and Christian spiralling their light, swinging, jazzy blues lines around the beat in the same tunes. I've already pointed out, elsewhere on this Website, some examples of T-Bone laying the groundwork for Chuck's style in his early Black & White sides.

But as much as Chuck exploits T-Bone's trademark licks, he also adds a tremendous amount to the vocabulary -- partly because he also draws on another, very different set of blues influences: the growling, grinding, down-home and dirty sounds of the Mississippi-turned-Chicago masters, Muddy Waters and Elmore James, whose playing has a much harder physical drive and a heavier, warmer, more distorted guitar tone. If you think of Chuck as combining the raw guts of the Mississippi/ Chicago sound with light and lively Southwestern swing-riff inflections, you've gone a long way towards understanding the basic elements of his style. Just listen to the second of the two 12-bar choruses he blasts out in the middle of "Johnny B. Goode." The syncopated, slurred-5th-bouncing-off-unslurred-5th, lick which dominates the last 8 bars is one which T-Bone had recorded dozens of times starting with his very first solo on "Got A Break, Baby" back in 1942. But the classic double-stop figure Chuck plays over the "stops" in bars 1-4 -- the fast repeats of the root-and-5th tone, and then the resolve on down the chord -- is simply a rephrasing of the famous theme Elmore had played (using a bottleneck) on "Dust My Broom" and its many variants. (To see this connection even more clearly, listen for Chuck playing the same lick in a shuffle rhythm -- more Elmore-like -- on "School Day.") It seems clear that a lot of Chuck's penchant for phrasing so much of his lead work in double-stop (two-note) voicings comes from the warm, semi-chordal effects which emerge naturally in the work of open-tuning slide players like Elmore and Muddy.

Of course, hearing any great artist in terms of his influences is only part of the point. Chuck is a great combiner, great synthesist, great thief if you like, as true artists are, pulling ideas not only from T-Bone and Elmore but from anything and everything he's ever heard -- Caribbean rhythms, Mexican parallel-thirds harmonies, Johnny Moore-style sliding 6th-and-9th chords, sound effects suggested by the lyrics, much more -- grabbing anything he can find to tell his story as excitingly as he can, and of course, in the process, changing everything he touches to the point where it all sounds exactly like him. Thus that same slurred-and-unslurred-5th lick of T-Bone's I just mentioned becomes unmistakably Chuck's when he plays it in "Johnny" -- it's got an extra harmony note in it, is accented differently to match the new straight-eighths rock & roll rhythm he was helping to define in the mid-'50s, and it's got the distinctive drive and edge he brought to the instrument.

The catalog of great songs, burning solos, and brilliant, unique guitar moments continued to grow as Chuck returned again and again to Chess' Chicago studios. With a little help from his, er, "collaborator" Alan Freed, who showcased his hits not only on the airwaves but on all-star concert packages and in a series of cheesy (historically fascinating) little movies with titles like Rock Rock Rock, he remained a commercial presence and hitmaker throughout a 10-year tenure at the label -- his "golden decade" as later reissue compilers aptly called it. A few songs were pop-chart smashes -- "Maybellene," "School Days," "Sweet Little Sixteen," "Rock and Roll Music," "Johnny B. Goode," and late on ('64) "No Particular Place to Go." Others landed in the R&B (black) top 10 even when they didn't chart in the white teen market -- easy to understand in the case of a nitty-gritty adult-problems blues romp like "Too Much Monkey Business," with its telling flip side, "Brown Eyed Handsome Man": the black audience was readier to acknowledge, and identify with, both the real-life pressures of bills, grimy jobs, and Army regs, and the exploits of the obviously brown-skinned heroes on side B. And there were songs which saw no real chart action at all, but have since gained the status of much-covered classics: "Memphis," "Let It Rock," and the wonderful, anthemic traveler's tale, "Promised Land" -- the most glaring omission from Great Twenty-Eight, but of course available in all its full-tilt rockin' glory on the boxed set.

What to say, in so little time, of all those great solos and licks? Let me at least point to a few favorite moments: the way Chuck's guitar perfectly mirrors his vocal phrasing in the "answer" fills on "School Day"... Promised Land" and "Thirty Days" with their amazingly precise, smooth tremolo picking over blisteringly fast tempos... "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" and "Around and Around" with their simple but utterly perfect signature phrases... And the astonishing second solo on "No Particular Place" -- the first one was hot enough, Lord knows, but at the end of the record Chuck raves on for two more passionate choruses, the first a non-stop 12-bar burst of rapid-fire staccato licks, and then, as he enters the second chorus, there's that amazing passage in which he seems to turn the beat over against itself, first once, and then a second time, so powerfully syncopated are the upbeat accents in his melody lines... Yet in fact, he never for an instant loses his place in the groove, and a moment later as the band reaches the IV chord he resolves right with them, and launches into yet another hot new theme to drive the performance home. It's breathtaking.

Then there's "Carol," also discussed elsewhere on this Website, with a marvelous set of ringing single-note fills answering the verse phrases; a driving, mostly double-stop, solo climaxing with a beautiful, octave-long, descending line in parallel thirds; a chorus which ingeniously incorporates the "Johnny B. Goode" intro lick into the structure of the song itself; and of course that great bend-and-unbend phrase on strings 2 and 3, which Chuck ragged Keith Richards so hard about when they went to play it together in 1986. There are the other startling uses of clean, ringing, single-note themes, on odd little little high-school gems like "Oh Baby Doll" and "Anthony Boy." There's "Dear Dad" (a great, romping, obscure late-period car song, happily included on the boxed set) with a distinctive fresh twist to its chord progression and blasting hot parallel-fourths figures gunning through its two solos... There are the occasional masterful slow blues performances -- the Charles Brown-like "Wee Wee Hours" from the very first session, on which Chuck sinuously slides his jazzy guitar voicings in and out of Johnnie Johnson's marvelous piano lead (Johnson's fabulous work throughout all of these recordings is a study in itself), the surprisingly powerful later readings of standards like "Merry Christmas Baby" and "The Things I Used to Do" -- all included in the longer set.

Another great inclusion on the box is "You Two," an utter charmer of a light, jazzy pop ballad, on which Chuck demonstrates how perfectly he can make his growly, gritty blues lines work over a structure of more sophisticated chord changes. "Memphis, Tennessee" (1958), an all-time masterpiece of poignant, concise fiction songwriting, is of course on both compilations -- notice how sparse the track is, with only Chuck's own rhythm guitar and some light percussion supporting his lilting (overdubbed) parallel-sixths solo lines and decorating fills. But if you have the boxed set, you get to revisit both the characters and the musical themes, in the very effective but much more hard-rocking sequel, "Little Marie," from '64. Two covers of "Memphis" (a big hit for Johnny Rivers, and a great instrumental reading by guitar hotshot Lonnie Mack) had hit the charts the year before, and as if to show 'em who was really still the boss, Chuck quotes the riffs they had both played in their versions and also pours out some of his most stinging blues lines ever on this potent follow-up.

Contrary to some silly, speculative gossip you'll occasionally read, Chuck's talent was in no way burned out by the unfortunate 19-month prison stretch he pulled in 1962-3 for an incident involving an underage female employee. "Little Marie," "No Particular Place," "You Never Can Tell," and numerous other great performances were recorded in the year or two following his release. The real ending of the "golden decade" came with his unfortunate decision to leave Chess for the quick bucks dangled by a larger label which unfortunately proved to be clueless about how either to record or promote his music. The Mercury years were uneven. The Beatles-Stones-Dylan-Byrds-Motown era of the mid-'60s was just starting to blow the charts apart with an explosive array of new voices and sounds, and once out of his initial relationship with his original label, Chuck would never really recapture either the musical or commercial peaks he had attained in his classic period.

In the early '70s he did return briefly to Chess (itself much changed by that time), and the compilers of the box have also included some material from this later period, with wildly varying results. On the one hand, they very wisely single out the two absolute gems from the 1970 LP Back Home -- the rocking "Tulane" and the aching slow blues "Have Mercy Judge," which are in fact the two parts of one gritty, vivid story of crime and punishment, love and acceptance. These songs are a crucial and deeply revealing portion of Chuck's work as a writer, and provide a powerful climax to the side of his output (present from the beginning) in which he dealt with adult themes and emotions rather than just "cars and young love." It's wonderful to have them made available on this set. On the other hand we are also burdened with quite a few utterly dispensable performances from the 1972-73 period when he scored his last, fluke hit with the huge selling one-joke novelty number "My Ding-A-Ling." (Interestingly, I have never seen anyone point out the fact that "Ding" is not Chuck's own tune -- it's his remake of a much lighter, cuter, more innocent sounding record, written and produced by New Orleans' great Dave Bartholomew in the early '50s, and released as "Toy Bell" by The Bees.)

The producers of this set skipped over several obscure gems they really needed to include to paint the full picture of Chuck's classic work, such as the autobiographical "Go Go Go" and the gorgeous steel-guitar instrumental "Deep Feeling." Still, as I said earlier, there's so much here that's great and necessary, that I have to strongly recommend the box in spite of its occasional wasted minutes. If you love rock & roll or rhythm & blues, this is quintessential, masterpiece music, and ya gotta have it in your life.

Interestingly enough, Chuck's last great recorded performances to date come not on any of his spotty later-period albums (ca. 1966-1980), but in some of the music he performs in Taylor Hackford's incredible documentary film, Chuck Berry: Hail, Hail Rock and Roll. Skip the soundtrack album, though -- it's poorly mixed and edited. What you want is the film itself, and it's available to you on MCA Home Video 80465 for not a lot more than the price of a CD. You may have seen it once on cable, but if you really care about Chuck's music, this gem deserves many repeated viewings, both for the fascinating insight it provides into his personality, and for some amazing musical performances both by the man himself and by some of the guest stars who join him in playing his songs here.

The film is ostensibly the record of a 60th-birthday tribute concert for Chuck in his "hometown of old Saint Lou'," with a great all-star band assembled and whipped into shape for the occasion by Keith Richards. The concert footage is indeed hot, with many star turns and wonderful moments -- Chuck's gritty, bluesy vocals are fabulous, Johnnie Johnson soars through his piano parts like it was still '55, Eric Clapton plays one of the great solos of his life on a soulful "Wee Wee Hours," much more cool stuff. But these performances are balanced by marvelously revealing interview clips with Chuck and with many other rock'n'roll legends who've known him through the years, and also by great rehearsal scenes and intimate, informal, offstage musical numbers. In fact, the tape is absolutely worth owning for just one of these: Chuck's gorgeous, aching, half-whispered rendition, late on the film, of the 1930s jazz standard "A Cottage for Sale" -- one of the most beautifully intimate performances of all time, an utterly haunting moment, absurdly omitted from the soundtrack album but thankfully available on video.

This tune, and the nearly-as-lovely slow steel guitar instrumental which follows it, show that Chuck still has more musical revelations in store for us, if and when he will ever open up his heart as he does in these rare, unguarded moments. For now, the film is the best way to round out and refine the musical profile established by the box set, of one of the century's most definitive, provocative, and delightful musical artists.