Word: pianos
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...piano and he looked sideways at the camera, eyeballed it the way he has looked at those girls in the Arkansas beer joint, and then he began to play the piano and howl about the shaking that was going on. He rose, still pounding, and he kicked the piano stool back. It shot across the stage, tumbling, skidding... Steve Allen laughed and threw the stool back, then threw other furniture, and Jerry Lee played some high notes with the heel of his shoe. Then he stopped and looked at the camera sideways again. Neither he nor Steve Allen had ever...
...Those three TV minutes revealed Jerry Lee's electrifying, near-electrocuting showmanship. But the music was what got me. The bass figure on the piano starts rumbling and, two beats later, J.M. Van Eaton's cymbals join in. After the four-bar intro (which he first used in his own composition "End of the Road," recorded November 14, 1956), Jerry Lee makes the vocal invocation: "Come on over, baby, whole lotta shakin' goin' on!" It's a firm but liquid tenor, at times quavering with the infusion of the Spirit (perhaps holy, perhaps profane) that Jerry Lee heard and sang...
...song is a familiar 12-bar blues in boogie-woogie tempo: two verses, a chorus ("Shake, baby, shake"), two verses of instrumental break (one featuring Jerry Lee amok on piano, his pummeling accentuated by an arpeggio as if he were running barefoot over the keys, and one of Roland Janes's less ornate but momentum-sustaining guitar work) followed by a reprise of the second verse with the inspired vocal filler "We got a chicken in the barn/ Whose barn? What barn? My barn!" (the drums whacking the "whose-what-my" to give it extra force and fun), then...
...guitar solo this time; in fact, I don't hear a guitar at all, just the pumping piano and the pulverized drums. The first instrumental verse starts with a sassy, Jelly Roll Morton-style line, then bangs out another four-time, four-note, four-on-the-floor figure with, this time, four arpeggios; it's how a sex-crazed Tex Avery cartoon wolf would express himself if he could play hot piano. Then the right hand pounds the same four high keys while the left hand describes a familiarly stealthy boogie-woogie figure, creeping up and down the lower register...
...From the beginning, Jerry Lee was an apostle, an addict to music: inhaling all kinds, then reproducing and blending it on the family piano, where he would do his little boogie-woogie every day. As Tosches writes: "The child sang in church, and he sang along with his daddy's old records, and he sang along with the children of the black sharecroppers who lived nearby. And sometimes, when he was singing by himself, thinking that no one could hear him, he mixed it all together. ... Whatever he heard, he swallowed it, then he spat it out on that...