Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 52

Record label: Phillips

Produced: Siggi Loch

Recorded: The Star Club, Reeperbahn, Hamburg, West Germany; April 5, 1964

Released: April 1965

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Jerry Lee Lewis (v, p); The Nashville Teens: Pete Shannon (g); John Allen (g); Ray Phillips (b); John Hanken (d)

Track listing: Mean Woman Blues; High School Confidential; Money (That’s What I Want); Matchbox; What’d I Say (Part 1); What’d I Say (Part 2); Great Balls Of Fire; Good Golly, Miss Molly; Lewis’ Boogie; Your Cheatin’ Heart; Hound Dog; Long Tall Sally; Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On

Running time: 37.12

Current CD: Bear Family BCD15467PMI adds: Down The Line

Further listening: The Golden Hits Of Jerry Lee Lewis (1964); listen to Jerry Lee’s proper touring band speed through the hits on The Greatest Live Show On Earth (1964); check out his country resurrection on Another Time, Another Place (1968)

Further reading: Killer (Jerry Lee Lewis and Charles White, 1995); Hellfire (Nick Tosches, 1982); www.jerryleelewis.com

Download: Some tracks available on iTunes

When Jerry Lee Lewis crashed into Hamburg in April of 1964 he was a pill-fuelled anachronism, a brilliant ’50s rocker staring out at an audience of bowl-haired boy-girl Beatles kids. At just 28 years old he looked like an old man out of time. The past six years had not been kind. On May 22, 1958, a 21-year-old Lewis had arrived in England for his first tour outside the US, with his 13-year-old wife née cousin Myra Gale in tow. Lewis told the press she was 15. ‘Back home,’ Myra explained, ‘you can marry at 10.’ It put an effective halt on his career for the next 10 years.

From 1958 to 1968 Jerry Lee toured constantly on a strict diet – Biphetamin to take him up, placidyls to bring him down, whiskey to bridge the gap. His regular $10,000 per night fee was knocked down to $250. ‘I couldn’t care less,’ said Lewis. ‘Life is too short to worry your brains over making a buck.’ Then, on Easter Sunday 1962 – while Jerry was coming down from another amphetamine-wild gig in Minneapolis – his three-year-old child, Stevie Allen, wandered out into the garden of his Memphis home and drowned in the mud-filled family swimming pool. God had found him out and punished him and the Jerry Lee who toured Britain and Europe for the next four years, the one you hear on this record, played like a man with the Holy Ghost in his soul and the devil on his tail.

This date had no rehearsals. The Star Club’s house band, The Nashville Teens – a mythic whippet-thin Scouse wrecking crew and no-argument best live band in Britain – spent the gig either struggling to keep up with Lewis or storming ahead – locked into a teeth-grindingly tense race to the end of each song. From the cavernous howl of Mean Woman Blues through to a final ragged Whole Lotta Shakin’ the rhythm section sound like they’ve been remixed by Tom and Ed Chemical while Pete Shannon and John Allen’s screwed-up jags of guitar and Jerry Lee’s demonic growls, wails, yelps and piano stabs are sweat-soaked punk pre-history. He carried on playing like this for the next three years – The Greatest Live Show On Earth. No contest, true, but it nearly killed him. Then, in 1968, recording Another Time, Another Place for Mercury, Jerry Lee Lewis found country, dispensed with the pills and the booze, and a whole other kind of star was born.