She sits on a large white piano and wears a short-sleeved top with large black and white stripes. There is something crazy in his gaze, something that you are afraid of. Tall, imposing, with blond hair slicked back in a brigantine and a perfect face, he starts and plays a piece that is simultaneously steeped in southern blues and Europe. A frenetic 12-meter blues with boogie-woogie elements, played on a typical instrument of the European classical musical tradition.

July 28, 1957, we are in the TV studio. The host of this Sunday show, Steve Allen, just prefaced what was to come as if it were some amazing traveling circus attraction. Indeed, this pianist-singer is a wild beast that growls in front of all of America. The notes he plays return to his body, as if the hammers inside the piano are not only beating the strings, but also hitting him. Feet drift, pursued, dancing back and forth as if struck by the rhythm. When the musical trio – piano, drums and bass – slows down, entering a small “bridge”, time expands, two minutes of musical dynamite is like a theatrical performance, a weather phenomenon, a storm that will strike from moment to moment. moment. And when that happens, when the chorus “returns” to the final crescendo, the star of the show gets up and hits the piano so hard that you wonder how it doesn’t light up. The stool is thrown a few meters away, and the storm of applause at the end is carried as if the whole studio is on fire of rock and roll. And what else is rock and roll, if not the one that makes you want to stomp your foot to the beat, get carried away with an electrified dance and want to look – at least for two and a half minutes – into the void, into danger, without fear;

Elvis Presley evoked similar emotions in his first television appearance a year and a half later. It’s exactly the same kind of magic that Chuck Berry did on that amazing live broadcast on Belgian TV in 1965 when he came out and was fucking playing the guitar and shaking his legs like an African magician under the influence of ancient spirits in front of a slightly shocked audience. .

This great rock and roll flame was ignited by their music and by the presence of many others on the scene in the future. He shone on the Sonics drums, the stage presence of MC5’s Wayne Kramer and Jimi Hendrix, the guitar and screams of Wipers’ “shaman” Greg Sage – the list goes on. But what is certain is that a tall, electrifying white man from Louisiana, Jerry Lee Lewis – “The Killer”, as he was called – was one of the first to open this road. He “passed away” on Friday, October 28, at the age of 87.

He was born in 1935 near Mississippi, in the small town of Ferriday, Louisiana, one of those small towns in America that resonated with the blues. With the sounds of gospel, blues and country in his ears, he began playing the piano at a young age. In a poignant 2014 biography by Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and writer Rick Bragg, we learn of the moment he saw his father’s pickup truck taking a piano home. “My eyes almost popped out of their sockets. I later learned that they had mortgaged our entire farmhouse to buy it. I had the best parents in the world,” he tells his biographer. This god-sent gift from the parents became the baby’s obsession. He played almost all day. His parents begged him late at night to stop playing so they could go to bed. At the age of 14, he made his first public appearance, demonstrating his skills to the public in his hometown. His academic musical education was minimal. He left school to devote himself to playing the piano.

At the age of 21, in 1956, he signed with the legendary Sun Records. “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” became his first big hit. In the same year, his other big hit came out – “Great Fireballs”. Two minutes of dynamite, which forever secured his place in the world’s musical pantheon. But it was his energy, his fiery temper that made him a legend. This penchant for extreme, provocative, heresy, which soon “burned” him, after he married his 13-year-old cousin, which was enough to derail his first European tour and tarnish his reputation and, ultimately, and his career. Of course, the big moments didn’t stop coming, for example. in 1964, when he gave the Hamburg club Star a legendary concert that left behind a record that is considered a milestone in the history of rock.

We saw him twice in Athens. In 1988 at Kallimarmaro, he wowed the audience and, of course, his many die-hard local rockabilly fans, who had an unforgettably warm presence (the same one that cost them Chuck Berry’s premature departure from the stage a year earlier). his theater Lycabettus). “Killer” was played again for the Athenian audience in 1990 at the SEF. in yet another explosive concert, this time with a mixed audience, which unfortunately only lasted 45 minutes.

In any case, from that explosive girlish appearance on the planet, on the Steve Allen show in ’57, to the end, it seems that what American writer Jimmy Gutterman wrote has always been true: “People get so drunk on the myth of Jerry Lee, who often forget that this guy also sang and played the piano.”