Chuck Berry’s Golden Hits by Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry's Golden Hits landed in 1967 as his tenth studio album and his first for Mercury Records, and it's a peculiar beast: not a compilation of the old Chess sides but Berry cutting those songs all over again, plus one new number, "Club Nitty Gritty". Here was one of the men who invented rock and roll, remaking his own classics for a new label.

He takes them faster than the originals, and in stereo, so the riffs of songs like "Back In The USA" come at you in a rush, with a loose, hurried charge all their own. Unlike the rest of his Mercury albums, which have sunk into obscurity, this one has stayed in print, and the 1989 CD reissue tacked on several tracks the original album had left out.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.