Word: pianos
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...change your act to a gittar and you might could make it.' I said, 'You can take your gittar and ram it up your ass.'" What an affront! Jerry Lee was, after all, the consummate keyboard man, with the best left hand in the business. Pumpin' that piano was his religion and his most consummate vice. But even commercially, his retort seemed to make commercial sense in 1956, when some of the best rockers were singer-pianists: Little Richard, Ray Charles and JLL's fellow Louisianans Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint and Huey "Piano" Smith. If '50s record producers thought they...
...happened, history was with the guitar; Elvis and Buddy Holly, B.B. King and Bo Diddley, The Beatles and the Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck, ad infinitum ad gloriam, closed that case. And Jerry Lee would be the definitive piano rocker in part because he was, in the music's infancy, one of its last. (The saxophone, primal ax of early rock, also went nearly extinct.) He worked under another disadvantage: A pianist, unlike a guitarist, couldn't take his instrument to a gig; at least back then he didn't. Janes ascribes some of Lewis' extreme behavior...
...born Joseph Levitch) that Jerry Lee had stolen his name! He also refuted the skeptics by proving that a man could still make concert-stage mayhem from a sitting position. Jerry Lee's one condition for business and pleasure: "Just give me my money and show me where the piano...
...Jerry Lee did as he was bid that night; he went on before Chuck Berry. He had the crowd screaming and rushing the stage, and when it seemed that the screams had grown loudest and the rushing most chaotic, he stood, kicked the piano stool away with violence, and broke into 'Great Balls of Fire.' As the screaming chaos grew suddenly and sublimely greater, he drew from his jacket a Coke bottle full of gasoline, and he doused the piano with one hand as the other hand banged out the song; and he struck a wooden match...
...cent remainder bins. That's where I found "Lewis Boogie," a tune that, in its rollicking rockin' propulsion, fully merits a place next to his two signature hits. It begins as abrupt as wartime reveille: four four-note phrases, each an octave lower than the preceding, on a piano that sounds a little flat in the upper registers. Then JLL races into his vocal. This is a 12-bar blues with a difference: the breaks come not in the first two lines (as in, say, Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally") but in the fourth and sixth, giving the lyric...