Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock N’ Roll, Part 1

Ultimate Collectors Edition of Hail! Hail! Rock N’ Roll is even better than the theatrical release

By Stephen Pate – John Lennon said that if rock and roll had another name it would be called Chuck Berry.

Taylor Hackford’s Chuck Berry – Hail! Hail! Rock N’ Roll (2 Disc) is an excellent combination of Chuck Berry music, biography and rock and roll musicology.

Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones produced this 1987 film when Berry was 60 years old. Along with excellent performances from Chuck Berry, the video features Keith Richards, Etta James, Robert Cray, Johnnie Johnson Berry’s original pianist, Little Richard, and Linda Ronstadt.

Hail Hail Rock and Roll DVD Contents

Disc 1 contains the 2-hour movie Hail Hail Rock and Roll  remastered in HD with both DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. The movie is totally awesome to watch over and over and the sound is finally worthy of the music.

If you search with Google you can find excerpts to preview. The longest one I could find is 1 hour and 24 minutes. The full movie is 2 hours long and totally awesome to watch.

Disc 2 has 54 minutes of rehearsals with Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Etta James plus a documentary “The Reluctant Movie Star.” The rehearsals show Chuck as a perfectionist and sometimes difficult person.

I had seen the movie Hail Hail Rock and Roll about Berry’s life on VHS. I wasn’t prepared for the power of the release as a 4 DVD special set.  Amazon.ca has the 4-DVD set at a lower price than the US.

If you are lucky enough to find the 4-disc version there are more rock and roll documentaries. “Witness to Rock and Roll #1” it includes three more documentaries with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley. Robbie Roberston and others.

Disc 4 is another 3 1/2 hour “Witness to Rock and Roll #2” including the onscreen interviews with Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, The Everly Brothers, Willie Dixon, Roy Orbison, Sam Phillips and Ahmet Ertegun.

Chuck Berry

Born in 1926, Berry was one of the Rock and Roll pioneers who created the amalgam of jazz, blues and popular music that became Rock and Roll.   At 83 years old he is still performing live.

His early hits during the 1950s like Roll over Beethoven, Johnnie B. Goode, and Maybelline were big hits for a black artist. Less than a decade later, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones invaded America with the same music revisited by white musicians.

I remember taking my allowance down to Phinney’s Music on Barrington Street in Halifax to buy Johnnie B. Goode on a 45 single. It was one of the first songs I tried to learn on guitar, about a boy who “used to sit beneath the trees by the railroad track…stumming to the rhythm the drivers made.”

The song has been covered my hundreds of artists including the famous scene in Back to the Future when Marty McFly reprises the song in the past for Chuck’s cousin.

The problem with appreciating Chuck Berry has been the erratic quality of the Chess recordings on the market. Keith Richards knew that Chuck was under-appreciated. He made the first class musical production his goal and he succeeded.

Richards put together a band that included Eric Clapton, himself, Johnnie Johnston (Berry’s original pianist and collaborator), and Robert Cray. Guest artists include Etta James, Linda Ronstadt, Julian Lennon.

With the new wide-screen DVD and 5.1 sound, I can safely store my worn out VHS tape in the basement.

The sound is excellent, capturing the excitement of Berry’s music and the band’s vibe. Wide screen on a Blu-ray player is awesome and the up scaling works. The VHS tape was so disappointing since VHS had no bandwidth and would distort from the intensity of the rock band.

I’m not going to spoil the movie on Disk One by telling you what it reveals about Chuck Berry. The scenes director Taylor Hackford has put together strike an entertaining balance between Berry’s biography, his music and musical influences and straight ahead rock and roll performance.

There are enough full song performances to keep toes tapping. The last half of the movie has the concert at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis that is flat-out exciting to watch. This is the real benefit of the DVD production in sound and video.

You can watch many of the music cuts on YouTube but it’s a shame to squeeze this big music into a little box on the screen and tinny computer speakers.

Taylor Hackford is a veteran Hollywood producer and director who has won the Academy Award for Ray , his bio pic of Ray Charles. He has a guarded affection for Chuck Berry who made production difficult by insisting on re-writing his contract every day of the shoot and getting paid in cash. Other Hackford films include An Officer and A Gentleman and The Devil’s Advocate.

Listen to this clip from YouTube with Etta James pumping out Rock and Roll Music. Etta is a rhythm and blues artist from the Chicago Chess label who gets little credit for having some of the best phrasing in blues.

Next is John Lennon doing what many would call a great version of the same song. By the time the Beatles arrived rock and roll had pretty much slipped into a hole with Bobby Vinton and Elvis Presley schmaltz.

The Beatles and Rolling Stones revived rock and roll and interest in Chuck Berry. There is substitute for the real thing and Lennon knew it.

Next – 4 DVD Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock N’ Roll part 2