Jerry Lee Lewis is the greatest live performer the world has seen. That’s why he is the killer. He encapsulated, no, lived the contradictions of a fucked up place like the deep south in the fifties and the sixties. He invented punk rock before it had a name and lived a life that had more ups and downs than the best of Merle Haggard.
I found the “Greatest Live Show On Earth’”-record in a staggeringly overpriced Oxfam record shop in Brighton. These bastards that will charge you thirty quid for an unloved dead mans platter. It wasn‘t my first introduction to Jerry Lee Lewis, but the first one that put his natural contradictions into some kind of context. Jerry Lee, of course, defined for many the way in which Sun Records changed the way white people understood and exploited American music.
He was never as successful as his labelmates Elvis or Johnny Cash in terms of units shifted, but the one day that they found themselves in the studio together (the Million Dollar Quartet recordings) his belief in his “God given” talent was almost overbearing.
Or it would have been, were his faith in himself not so well founded. On that session when Jerry Lee finally sat down at the piano, Elvis (who had been playing first) said
“The wrong man has been sitting here too long”. Jerry Lee shot back immediately
“Well, I was just about to say that”.
The story bares comparison only to the Italian footballer Georgio Chaniglia telling Pele that he should stick to the wings more often and leave the goalscoring to him. He was the only man with the sheer balls to ever say such a thing in the dressing room to the man who is acknowledged by many as the greatest of all time.
I digress. It is instructive that Jerry Lee Lewis is usually compared to Little Richard by others, but often only to Al Jolson by himself. To Jerry Lee, Richard was merely “History…. and a queer!” but about Jolson, on the other hand, he said: “They done him while he was alive, and there’s me… they doin’ me now whilst I’m still alive. So there’s the two of us, yer two bona fide livin’ legends o’ all time”.
Jolson. Richard. Lewis. One white man who made his game wearing a black face, and his name on-stage in music and then the movies. One black man, who wore the pale faced make up and full lip gloss of a cheap white whore. And one, a tough son of a bitch out of Ferriday, Louisiana, a cracker who made his name playing raunchy black grinding music to whites, but who also longed to play the country chops of his youth.
With Jolson and Richard at least you usually knew which mask they would be wearing. With Jerry Lee it was difficult to tell.
This is the reason he is the greatest live performer the world has seen. That’s why he is the killer. He encapsulated, no, lived the contradictions of a fucked up place like the deep south in the fifties and the sixties. He invented punk rock before it had a name and lived a life that had more ups and downs than the best of Merle Haggard- the man that saw Johnny Cash inside San Quentin and went on to have the dubious privilege of being Richard Nixon‘s favourite artist.
And all of this is considering that he barely had a hit record after 1961. He was done. They got to him like they got to Al Jolson. The tragedies of his life were not all self imposed, he lost two sons young, his penitence being made to survive them. The God that he believed in, and who gave his cousin Jimmy Swaggart his lucre, gave him those magic fingers which had also cursed him.
So this brings us to “The Greatest Live Show on Earth”, recorded at the Municipal Auditorium, Birmingham, Alabama in 1964. The sleeve claims it was recorded on July 1st, but it seems more likely that it was actually a WVOK Radio Shower of the Stars gig on the 18th.
He was tossing something, certainly.
The dates, usually might not matter, but in this case they are vital. The landmark Civil Rights Act came into being on the 1st, banning
segregation in the United States. Seventeen days is a long time in those weird, fraught times. This was Birmingham, Alabama. The personal fiefdom of Governor George Wallace- who only one year earlier had to have the national guard push him into letting four black students enter the University of Alabama (right there, in Birmingham) legally for the first time. Wallace, an odious shitbag that barely deserves the name, had been elected governor two years earlier and summed his politics up thus:
“In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”.
Governor George Wallace stands firm against integration at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, 1963
So Jerry Lee strides out to this sold out, 15,000 strong segregated crowd (if not in name, then still in practice) to play his mulatto music to shake your ass to. This is not necessarily the Jerry Lee who wanted to be like the hillbilly piano hero Moon Mullican or Jimmie Rogers, the singing brakeman. Nor the one that idolised the monster gospel of Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
So which mask are you going to be wearing today Jerry Lee?
He hits it with Little Richard’s “Jenny Jenny”, balls out (he’s obviously not so “queer” that his songs can’t be played, and “Long Tall Sally is introduced as being by “one of the greatest Rock and Roll artists, I guess, in the business”). There’s something about some people. Like Jerry Lee, of course, but Keith Richards had it,
Al Jackson had it, Billy Cox had it, Keith Moon had it. When something is hit, it stays hit. When record label bosses in Nashville told him nobody wanted to see piano players, they didn’t envisage THIS.
But he’s tailored the show for his southern crowd. It’s different to the high octane, dynamite explosion of “Live at the Star Club”, a punk record recorded in Hamburg years before Punk. That gig was full of speed fuelled sailors. They might have been as rough as they come, but there was still a European sensibility on the Reeperbahn. In Birmingham there is a space for the country boy to come out, but he does it in his own style.
He name-drops Elvis Presley in Charlie Rich’s “Who will the next fool be?”, but can’t bare to leave himself out, name checking in the first person, and going so far as to say at the end “Who will the next fool be? I think it’ll probably be me”. His repetition of “I know, I know, I know, I know” is Otis-esque, but Jerry lee had been doing it for years. It drips from his lips as the crowd are wound tighter and tighter around the little finger that he toys them with.
This isn’t the mawking, cartoonish sub-Jim Carrey model of Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee. This is the real thing. He confounds by playing two Chuck Berry songs (another great, dismissed as being nothing more than “history” by our, er, hero), alongside a “Hound Dog” that makes Elvis’s sound like “How much is that doggy in the window”. But it is with Buck Owens’ “Together Again” that he hits his stride, happy to be playing “….To some good ole country music people”.
As a record it is by turns rapturous, raucous and sloppy in places. Poor old guitarist Charlie Freeman just has to enjoy the ride, there are so few gaps for him to sidle into he just hops on board and enjoys the show.
As “Memphis Tennessee” surges for the bend like a train, the driver is somewhere else and the band are just passengers, clinging on, knowing they’ll have to hit the emergency brake sometime before they slam into the mountain.
In many ways “The Greatest Live Show on Earth” is a perfect summation of the bipolar Jerry Lee Lewis. The unreconciled parts of his soul that tell him to rock as hard as he can, knowing that it will only lead him to hell after all. He’s a religious man with the devil inside him. A white man with black sensibilities, a shock of blonde curls and a habit of calling people “Boy”, or “Kill-uh”. Hell, it ain’t even the greatest live show on earth, the Hamburg recording beats it for sheer balls, but this is Jerry Lee at home. Here, at his most comfortable, he doesn‘t need a mask. This is just Jerry Lee.
