Chuck Berry - The Great Twenty-Eight (MCA)

In the annals of Greek myth, it’s said that Helen of Troy’s face launched a thousand ships. In the chronicles of rock & roll, Chuck Berry’s guitar could lay claim to launching a thousand bands. Actually, that figure should probably be recalculated by several orders of magnitude to reflect any sort of accuracy. Berry’s influence on popular music is at once indelible, and in today’s American Idol-narcotized culture, largely taken for granted. His seminal Chess sides still work as a perfect memory tonic and while I don’t revisit them often, when I do this single-disc collection is the only time-traveling apparatus I need. With a simple, marquee-ready title that says it all, The Great Twenty-Eight assembles nearly all of Berry’s early jukebox hits onto a 70-minute silver platter. Back in the spring of ’56 Berry hit like a Space Age T-Bone Walker, sped-up and amped-up with a metallic tonality on par with the orneriest juke joint bluesman. Together with Willie Dixon’s tall timber slap bass and a succession of skinsmen laying down the signature-perambulating beat he brought a planet of teenagers to their knees in giddy supplication. In addition to the indispensable presence of Dixon, Berry’s payroll reads like a roll call of Chicago Blues royalty including Fred Below, Otis Spann and Lafayette Leake. On the first couple of cuts, there’s even an appearance by forgotten maracas maestro Jerome Green, on loan from label mate Bo Diddley. Berry’s epochal tune-smithing relied heavily on locomotive rhythmic momentum coupled to cutting lead guitar riffs, but his talents as a lyricist frequently occupied the same crackerjack league. The 1984 remastering is undeniably long-in-the-tooth, especially when indexed against the near pristine-fidelity of subsequent comps like Anthology from 2000. Nevertheless, it’s good enough for my Plebian ears and the specific sequencing has long since become a familiar security blanket. Cranking cuts like the high-octane hotrod anthem “You Can’t Catch Me,” and the reverb-drenched “Too Much Monkey Business” in my jalopy, speeding tickets become a very real possibility.