The album cover says Brookville; the record labels say Aristocrat. It’s a three-record set. Record 1 has 13 of Berry’s hits, including his only #1 song in the U.S., My Ding-a-Ling, as well as the first Chuck Berry tune I ever heard, Roll Over Beethoven. (Even Wikipedia omits the comma before the name of a person being addressed. My mother would be sad.) A Cleveland radio station had a battle of the bands in late 1963 (as I recall). One of the songs they played by the Beatles was Roll Over Beethoven. The Beatles lost. They were not a good Chuck Berry cover band.
Chuck Berry deeply understood teenage anxiety and driving with no particular place to go. Carol, Maybelline, and Little Queenie, to name a few, are immortal. How could it be that Berry’s biggest hit was a novelty song about masturbation? My modest conspiracy theory is based on Watergate. June 17, 1972, was the night of the bungled break-in at the Democratic National Committee office. The story didn’t go away. And so the cover-up crew in the White House got involved. They wanted to distract the media with an outrageous story that would create controversy. The song was released in July and it made #1 in October. That didn’t seem to help Nixon any, but the news coverage—people wanted it banned!—must have helped sales.
converselyspeaking 