The 25 Best Live Rock Recordings - No. 1: Jerry Lee Lewis - Live At The Star Club Hamburg
No. 1 - Jerry Lee Lewis - Live At The Star Club Hamburg (German Phillips, 1964)
“Music should never be harmless.”
—Robbie Robertson
It sometimes requires the passage of time and a broadening of parameters.
Where did rock & roll music come from?
Many people have written extensively trying to answer this question, and with whatever authority I may possess, I will contribute my opinion. My suspicions are much simpler than those scholarly types who have proposed dissertations on the subject.
Rock & roll is a commercial affectation, like the blues and country music. Shortly before the turn of the last century, German-American inventor Emile Berliner developed the 78 rpm flat disc record, the first practical answer to Thomas Edison’s wax cylinders. This provided an affordable medium for the rural classes to listen to music. It also offered a less expensive means of listening to the music, the players being more affordable. Before this time, only the upper-middle class and above living in metropolitan areas could afford players and medium. Now this population has increased dramatically, creating the industry of sound recordings.
Companies originally developed sound recordings for selling more phonographs to play them. Once one moved beyond the spoken word and classical and popular recordings, little else was available. This drove an entrepreneurial exegesis to discover new sound products for release. Music offered a great sound commodity for recording. This led to the development of a market among the rural classes. This market bifurcated in the 1920s into “Race Records” directed toward rural Blacks in the South and “Hillbilly Records” directed at rural Whites in the Southeast, codifying the institutional racism of the Jim Crow era.
The prototypes of producers and artist and repertoire personnel at the fledgling records companies coined these pejoratives. Race records were mainly recordings of early jazz and blues, while Hillbilly Records were country music’s antecedent. In broad strokes, the music captured on Race Records developed into rhythm & blues and soul while Hillbilly records morphed into rockabilly, all the while the two cross pollinating the other, creating the fertile soil from which rock & roll emerged.
For our purposes, Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats (actually Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm) released “Rocket 88” on Chess Records in 1951. This song is considered by many the first rock & roll recording (though Ike Turner called it the rhythm & blues that gave rise to rock & roll), with Elvis Presley detonating the genre with his recording of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s 1946 “That’s Alright” (Sun Records, 1954). With these events, rock & roll was born commercially. I say commercially, because classifications like “blues,” “country,” “rhythm & blues,” “soul,” “rockabilly,” and “rock & roll” were all marketing terms used by recording personnel to target different segments of the population in order to sell more records.
While these economic concerns dampen the Romantic zeal of other explanations of the music’s origin, they change nothing regarding the fresh and exciting music that was made. After all, “…a rose by any other name….” All the while, Sam Philips of Sun Records began building a stable of artists to develop the new genre of music. Among these artists was the singular Jerry Lee Lewis. Lewis was born in Ferriday, Louisiana, on September 29, 1935, into humble means. Regardless of those means, Lewis’ parent mortgaged the house to purchase a piano for the already precocious pianist. Lewis would take a circuitous route through the Southwest Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, at the behest of his mother, so that he could devote his time to singing evangelical songs. When Lewis daringly played a boogie-woogie rendition of "My God Is Real" at a church assembly, ending his efforts to become an Assembly of God minister as his double first cousin, Jimmy Swaggart, did.
Once expelled, Lewis returned home to gig around Ferriday and Natchez, Mississippi. Lewis first recorded for Cosimo Matassa at this famous J&M Recording Studios in New Orleans in 1950, when he made a demo recording covering Lefty Frizzell's "Don't Stay Away (Till Love Grows Cold)." In November 1956, the gravitational pull of Sam Phillips’ Sun Records where he recorded a cover of Ray Price's "Crazy Arms" in December 1956. On December 4, 1956, Elvis Presley dropped by Sun Studios to tell Phillips hello while Carl Perkins recording with Lewis providing the piano. Johnny Cash was also watching the recording. The four then started an impromptu jam session recorded by Phillips. This meeting earned the name “Million Dollar Quartet” thereafter.
In April 1957, Lewis released “A Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” what music historian Charles L. Ponce de Leon said was "perhaps the quintessential rockabilly anthem."1 Lewis quickly followed “Shakin’” with “Great Balls of Fire,” “Breathless,” and “High School Confidential,” the latter two in 1958.
By 1958, Lewis had married and divorced Dorothy Barton and Sally Jane Mitcham, the latter with whom he bigamously married his 13-year-old first cousin once removed, Myra Gail Brown, before his divorce from Mitcham was final. In that simpler time, Lewis’ stormy private life was not public knowledge. That ended when Lewis began a tour of Great Britain where Ray Berry, the only reporter present at London's Heathrow Airport for Lewis’ arrival, learned about Lewis's controversial marriage to Brown. The reportage of Lewis’ private life led to the British tour being cancelled after three appearances and Lewis becoming an early victim of that pernicious social genocide, “Cancel Culture.”
Lewis effectively entered exile where the success he experienced before dwindled while that of the British Invasion, spearheaded by the Beatles, flourished. This exile included the end of his contract with Sun Records in 1963 and his move to Smash Records (an imprint of Mercury Records), where he would remain, scuffling around with little success until reinventing himself as a country music artist with the release of Another Place, Another Time (Smash, 1968).
In 1964, Lewis was well into his exile, termed his “Wilderness Years,” where the music industry and a postwar prim and fickle society relegated him professionally to constant touring and performing at smaller, less attractive venues in order to make ends meet. One of these smaller stages was Hamburg's Star Club, which famously hosted the Beatles at the club's opening in 1962, resulting in Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany 1962 (Lingasong/Bellaphon). By the time Lewis made it to the Star Club stage on April 5th, backed by a teenaged British group known as the Nashville Teens (who would soon release their hit recording of John D. Loudermilk’s “Tobacco Road” on June 25th) with whom he had previously toured England, he was fit to be tied. When this recording was re-released in the 2000s, Rolling Stone critic Milo Miles declared2,
“Live At The Star Club, Hamburg is not an album, it's a crime scene: Jerry Lee Lewis slaughters his rivals in a thirteen-song set that feels like one long convulsion…
…Live at the Star Club is not country, boogie, bop or blues but showdown rock & roll, with no survivors but the Killer... Once Lewis launches into "Mean Woman Blues," [he leaves] the audience and his backing band, a vastly overmatched British group called the Nashville Teens, simply toast in the afterburners.”
That, gentle listener, is rock & roll.
On that early spring evening, Lewis cared little about the venue, the audience, his competitors, even his band. A 29-year-old Lewis brought to the Hamburg club that night a radioactive trunkful of grief, anger, and good, old-fashioned self-confident hubris that he was more than happy to share with his appreciative audience. Rather than take his social exile lying down, Lewis flexes his considerable chops, colorfully illustrating what the real meaning of rock music is: an expression of angst repressed by a prissy social order expecting everything to be quaint and polite. The Killer was having none of it. He was angry and wanted everyone to know.
The listener can hear Lewis warm up his voice before issuing one of his signature white-trash arpeggios and launching an ICBM over the bow of the USS Elvis Presley, with a nuclear “Mean Woman Blues,” a song recorded by Presley in 1957 for one of his many shitty movies, Loving You (Paramount Pictures, 1957). Lewis hammers the house piano with prejudice and impunity, leaving his band behind. There is no dramatic build up here. Lewis has no time for niceties or foreplay. He is busy establishing himself as the rightful heir to the rock & roll throne. Next, Lewis detonates his Sun single from 1958, “High School Confidential” fanning the flames of his angst. He veers off into Detroit rhythm & blues with a cover of Barrett Strong’s “Money” (Tamala Records, 1959), doing the same Ray Charles’ Southern R&B, “What’d I Say.” Lewis is proving a priori that he is a song stylist of the same stature as Charles, Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, and Prince would later become.
The Killer continued targeting the King after "Mean Woman Blues." He does the same with and arrogant and salacious “Hound Dog,” the Leiber and Stoller song introduced by Big Mama Thornton in 1952 (Peacock Records) and assimilated into White middle-class America by Elvis Presley in 1956 (RCA Records). Lewis sets a determined velocity, all lethal momentum. Lewis does the same with his good friend, Little Richard. He transforms Richard’s 1956 Specialty Records release “Long Tall Sally” into a sneering, light-speed romp, leaving his boy band wetting their pants.
And once he dealt with his peers, Lewis ended on the only note left…his own. Establishing a steam train tempo, played at just the right speed, Lewis declares his dominion with his signature “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Here, Lewis injects the drama, gradually slowing down to a quiet stroll before opening fire with his Huey mounted 50-caliber attitude. Of performing, James Brown said his policy was, “Kill em’ and leave.” The Killer was way ahead of him.
Ponce de Leon, Charles L. (2007). Fortunate Son: The Life of Elvis Presley. Macmillan Publishers. p. 53. ISBN 978-0809016419.
Miles, Milo (June 6, 2002). Live at the Star Club, Hamburg [Bear Family] by Jerry Lee Lewis | Music Reviews. Rolling Stone.
Excellent choice! Nashville Teens just couldn’t keep pace.