Chuck Berry: the most important musician to never have a single good album
It’s all very well being able to create a hit song, but if you can’t follow that up with an entire collection of tracks that further highlight your abilities, then is your work worth taking note of, or did you simply fluke your way to pop stardom?
There’s a case to be made for the argument that it shouldn’t matter whether you’re able to repeat your exploits, seeing as writing one hit is, in itself, no easy feat to reproduce, let alone writing an entire collection of songs that stand up against it.
However, given how much that has managed to snake its way to the top of the singles charts around the world, perhaps it’s considerably easier to write a hit song than one might think, and you can experience being a one-hit wonder without having any of the nous to back that up. In reality, it’s a little more nuanced than this black-and-white illustration would have you think.
Given how people were so frequently asked to produce LPs in quick succession to be able to capitalise on market demands during the early years of music becoming a commercial enterprise, making a classic album hasn’t always been the main prerogative of artists throughout the history of popular music. Therefore, having a slew of hit singles doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to have produced several classic albums, and those who were choosing to focus on creating more expansive albums that were designed to be listened to in full tended to reject the idea of releasing singles, so as not to devalue the overall experience.
Singles were, during the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps seen as the more important representation of an artist’s success, and albums were simply supplementary to that, only ever marketed to those who wanted to digest a little more than an A and B-side that would be over in under five minutes.
That’s perhaps why artists like Chuck Berry, who, despite being one of the most influential artists to have ever graced the world of rock and roll and a man responsible for inspiring an entire generation of musicians to follow suit, experienced a significant disparity between the success of his singles and his albums, because he only ever wanted to write hits.
Such is the gulf between his singles and albums output that a year before his death in 2017, he had released a total of 19 studio albums, and only four of those ever made it into the top 200 entries in the US albums chart.
His highest ever charting finish on the BIllboard Top 200 album chart was his 1972 album, The London Chuck Berry Sessions, which peaked at number eight in the US, and perhaps the most curious thing about it was that it’s frequently seen as being one of his worst albums, with the 12-minute version of novelty song ‘My Ding-A-Ling’ taking up over a quarter of the album’s runtime, and becoming his only number one hit either side of the Atlantic.
It was bemusing that there was little interest in the albums of Berry, because for someone who is held in such high regard as one of the fathers of rock and roll, you’d think that he’d have been much more of a dominant figure regardless of whether the content was any good.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Classic Rock Newsletter
All the latest Classic Rock content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.