When I was a really little kid (2-3 years old), my dad met a ‘rack jobber’. His job was to stock jukeboxes with new records, which, by definition, meant discarding the old ones and replacing them with current hits. He’d open a jukebox and see what singles were no longer getting ‘spins’ and replace them with new merchandise.

‘Hit’ music (still) has a shelf life, and the rack jobber’s ‘job’ was to determine what song expended its value and then replace it with new product. He told my dad that the old records were usually tossed out, and in a moment of naïve clarity, my dad asked if he could bring home the obsolete product…for me. I could barely walk and talk, but my dad’s intuition influenced the entirety of my life. He came home with two wooden crates of old 45’s, and I was amazed at what he gave me.

Each of these little plastic disks contained unique songs! I couldn’t read (I barely walked) but I played the records and memorized them by their labels. Meticulously, I played all of them – both sides. If I didn’t like them, I scribbled on them in crayon (I swear it’s true) but those that I liked I cherished. I could pick any song by its label. For example, At the age of 2, I learned that I loved almost everything on Specialty Records (White with yellow and black script), but music with the pink Chancellor label didn’t excite me at all, and most on the deep red Columbia label were dull as dishwater. The Chess label earned top ratings, but my taste was not infallible. I loved “Yellow Bird” by Lawrence Welk, for example (and I owned four copies of it, which may have been relevant to my reasoning back then).

In this absurd mix of random pop music that fell into my lap, my personal #1 favorite 45 had a blue label with nondescript silver writing (the Chess label). “School Day” presented a vision, inasmuch as I could imagine it. I knew what a jukebox was because my parents had an old 78 RPM jukebox in our basement, but school was still an unknown entity. The song depicted a fantasized projection of my own future, and it helped me to love life for what it offered, but the a-side wasn’t the only thing that slayed me. The flip side, “Deep Feeling”, was unlike anything I’d ever heard (okay, so I wasn’t even three. Do you want to debate a three-year old?) Obviously, I had no idea what a slide guitar was, but this song got under my skin and made me shiver.

The album contains Berry’s earliest recorded tracks (“Wee Wee Hours” and “Together”), and all his B-sides to date (which may diminish the collective impact of the album’s greatness), but nevertheless, is his genius deniable? “After School Session” contains only four of the “Great 28” (Berry’s astounding greatest hits album), and yet it plays mostly like a hit collection. Just about every human being on earth would recognize a few of Berry’s greatest hits but the pleasure is hearing deeper cuts that are incredible despite their obscurity, such as “Roly Poly” and “No Money Down”. Looking back, I think it’s cool and prophetic that out of approximately two-hundred 45’s, my favorite was a song about the feeling you get when you play music. “After School Session” simply magnifies its effect.

Featured tracks:

School Days

Deep Feeling

Too Much Monkey Business

Wee Wee Hours

Roly Poly (aka Rolli Polli)

No Money Down

Brown Eyed Handsome Man

Berry Pickin'

Together (We Will Always Be)

Havana Moon

Downbound Train

Drifting Heart

May 1957 – Billboard Did Not Chart