Week 19: 25 Greatest Live Records of All Time

[3-LockBox]

Wow, I've actually heard this album. Someone I knew owned this and I borrowed it for a spell, though that's prolly some ten years ago. I do remember it was a smokin performance, but sound quality wasn't all that great. It is good set-list, if not a little too predictable, but these are nearly definitive performances of those songs and the ever self-referencial Killer is at the top of his game.

Lewis was prolly rock's first badboy of prominence. Sure, Little Richard was flamboyantly way out from left field, but Lewis was just as talented, brash and (unfortunately) self-destructive as any front man that came after. While rock-n-roll's second wave of stars had gone down in an airplane crash, and Elvis Presley was making those awful movies, it was Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis keeping the flame lit, touring constantly overseas. But while Richard's exile was from rock (around 1960) was self-imposed, Lewis was all but banished from radio in his own country in the late '50s, early '60s. It took him years of reclaimation to recover from his scandelous early career.

This concert was done well after his emergence as a rock star (mid '60s), but you could tell he thought he had something to prove, and on this album he plays and sings like he wants to kick you in the ass. His covers of standards like What'd I Say, Your Cheatin Heart, Long Tall Sally and Good Golly Miss Molly are as good as the originals, if not better, with Cheatin Heart hinting at how adept at country music he would become later on...when Jerry wanted to, he could play the piano just as beautifully as he could vapidly. I'll go so far as to say if you have to own one Jerry Lee Lewis album, it should be this one (I have it on tape but might look it up on CD now). It would be just killer if a concert like this had been ever taped.

It is ironic that such a statement of unabashed, old-fashioned rock fury was recorded in Germany at The Star Club, the Beatles' old stomping ground, during a time when the British invasion was in full swing in Amercia, the birth place of rock-n-roll.