"Dont Knock the Rock" 1964: Little Richard and Jerry Lee gave us the greatest rock music programme of all time

There’s a tale, possibly apocryphal, that Jerry Lee Lewis was appearing on the same bill as Chuck Berry in one of DJ Alan Freed’s Rock ‘n’ Roll reviews, when there was a dispute over who would close the show. Much to his chagrin, Jerry Lee lost. Taking his revenge, he whipped the audience into an absolute frenzy, and finished his act by pouring lighter fluid on the piano and setting it alight. As he left the stage, with the audience howling for more, he’s reported to have turned to Chuck Berry, waiting in the wings, and snarled, “Follow that, nigger!”

Well, it has the tang of truth about it.

I wonder if he tried something similar with Little Richard when they both appeared in the greatest live popular music programme ever broadcast on television -  Granada TV’s 1964 special, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On. If there was any sort of rivalry involved, it spurred both of them to give the most electric performances I’ve ever seen: if anyone ever asks me why Rock ‘n’ Roll had such an extraordinary impact, I’ll tell them to watch this show (subsequently retitled Don’t Knock the Rock).

I was eleven at the time it aired. I’d seen the Stones and the Beatles on TV, and I think I’d caught one or two performances by Gene Vincent on Oh Boy (ITV’s answer to the BBC’s Six-Five Special – both created by producer Jack Good, who ended life as a monk) – but I’d never seen Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis perform. However, I was a fan of both - my brother had a single EP by each artist, which were probably the records I’d played the most to date, barring Elvis’s Golden Records LP. 

The programme opened with a bunch of bikers roaring into an enormous TV studio and taking up their positions on the sort of scaffolding superstructure which would become a regular feature of Yoof TV in the 1980s. Backed by the rather lumpy but vigorous British group Sounds Incorporated, Gene Vincent – his face puffy with booze, his crippled leg trailing behind him – did decent versions of two of his hits (including a particularly nice version of “You Are My Sunshine”, in which his “sweet Virginia whisper” is much in evidence):

Then (if I remember right) it was the turn of an unknown Geordie beat combo called The Animals, featuring an acne-scarred monkey-boy with a fantastic voice, a pig-faced giant on bass, and a floppy-haired young chap trying to demolish a weird, skinny little organ-thing, and making a superb  noise while he was about it.

They were astonishingly good.

Then came Jerry Lee Lewis, who appeared to have aged 30 years since the photo on our EP had been taken, with clothes to match (although only seven years had lapsed – drink, pills, a fondness for guns and marrying your 13-year old cousin can do that to a man, I guess).

          

By the end of his split set, the audience was seething around The Killer’s piano. He closed, inevitably, with “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going’ On”. To this day, the sequence remains an object lesson in how to capture the sheer howling bravado of a raw rock ‘n’ roll performance at its Dionysian best. Not, of course, that rock’s greatest-ever performer – the piano-pumping wild man from Ferriday, Louisiana – hadn’t ripped TV studios apart before (this 1957 performance is particularly memorable –Eisenhower-era Americans had been stirred up by Elvis, but God alone knows how they reacted to this leering, lascivious, long-haired crazy-man acting as if he had electrodes attached to his private parts).

Brought up on an almost unrelieved TV musical diet of sad old lamos crooning cack, or fresh-faced young chaps not much older than me doing sub-standard imitations of their American heroes, Jerry Lee Lewis was a revelation. This very grown-up grown up gave every impression of having freshly emerged from the depths of hell with a mandate to deprave a nation. This was like nothing I had ever experienced: I think I knew from that moment that this would be what I’d be measuring all future music against. And that’s exactly what I’ve done.

But the show wasn’t over until the fat man sang. Okay, that’s a little unfair – but Little Richard, who was a skinny little boy wearing huge clothes on the cover of our old EP, now had a completely spherical face, and had evidently chubbed up a bit (although substituting clothes several sizes too small for clothes five sizes too large might have had something to do with it.)

I experienced another epiphany as I watched this perspiring holy-roller strut his stuff: here was another great Rock ‘n’ Roll originator, another piano-pumping legend, showing what true, God-Given talent looks, sounds and feels like.  (Though both men questioned the supernatural origins of their gifts: their southern religious roots regularly caused them to question the morality of what they were doing – Little Richard abandoned rock for gospel for many years, and Jerry Lee Lewis’s doubts led to this 1957 exchange with Sun Records owner, Sam Phillips).

Oddly, Little Richard also included a version of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” in his equally mesmerizing Granada set (why the producers allowed both performers to do the same song is a mystery). Good Lord, what a voice! (He sounds uncannily like Otis Redding – unsurprising, given that his fellow-Georgian started as a Little Richard clone: just listen to Redding’s early single, “Shout Bamalama”, which sounds like flattery taken to extremes.)

The only performance I’ve seen to surpass either Jerry Lee’s or Little Richard’s was the live segment of Elvis’s 1968 Comeback Special, in which the King shows how he earned his  title.

For obsessives (like me) here’s Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’s running order:

Gene Vincent - 'Be-Bop-A-Lula'

The Animals - 'Talking About You' + “Shout”

Jerry Lee Lewis - 'Great Balls Of Fire'

Sounds Incorporated - 'William Tell Overture'

Little Richard - “Rip It Up”

Gene Vincent - 'You're My Sunshine'

Jerry Lee Lewis - 'High School Confidential' / 'I'm On Fire' / 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On'

Little Richard - 'Lucille' / 'Long Tall Sally' / 'Send Me Some Lovin' / 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On' / 'Hound Dog' / 'Good Golly Miss Molly'