Chuck Berry: You Never Can Tell: The Complete Chess Recordings 1960-1966

Yes, Chuck was remarkably potent after his potentially career-ruining jail sentence, and the crowds were right there to welcome him back. But his creative decline actually started before he was arrested... and it wasn't long before it caught up with his comeback.

The accepted mythology is that Chuck Berry was the only one of rock's greats to make it through the supposed drought of 1960-1964 with his career and his creativity intact. Jerry Lee wound up a country act, Elvis became a b-grade movie star, Little Richard never regained his momentum even after he reconciled with rock, and many others were, well, were dead. Chuck himself had spent two years in the jug for carting a 14-year-old across state lines to be a "hat check girl" (she was later caught whoring), so it was impressive that Chuck still made music at all, much less regained the charts with classics like "Nadine," "No Particular Place To Go," and "You Never Can Tell."

Indeed, those singles rank with his best. Yet the truth made clear by this 4-CD set, the sequel to a "complete '50s" collection by Hip-O, is that Berry had already begun to flag in 1960 and 1961, before his troubles; the two albums he made during this time find him alternately rewriting his classic hits ("Sweet Sixteen"), retreating into standard St. Louis blues ("Driftin' Blues"), and searching for that elusive pop hit ("Diploma For Two"). Solid stuff by anyone's standards but Chuck's, in other words.

Upon his release, however, he entered a 18-month period of creativity where most of his later classics were born, and it's this burst that the timeline nature of this set brings out. This set might be only necessary for collectors were it not for a full live album (planned, never issued) that's easily the hottest Chuck-in-concert ever waxed; another entire album of extended guitar jams between Berry and Bo Diddley, and those great singles, which reveal some excellent discoveries (the instrumental b-side "O Rangutang," covers of "Fraulein" and "The Things That I Used To Do"), all of which underscore Chuck's brief yet potent return. A mythbuster, yes, but an entertaining one.