Great Balls of Fire

There is a man at a piano who seems barely in control of himself, and that barely-contained chaos is the entire point. Jerry Lee Lewis pounds the keys with a percussive ferocity that predates punk by two decades — the left hand hammers boogie-woogie patterns like a piston engine while the right hand claws out trebly, almost violent runs up the register. The tempo feels like it's accelerating even when it isn't, as if the song itself is panicking. Lewis's voice tears through the verses with evangelical fervor — he grew up Pentecostal, and you can hear the tent revival in his delivery, that same hysteria that gets people speaking in tongues redirected into rock and roll. The lyric is barely a lyric, more a series of proclamations, desire dressed up as fire and brimstone. This is 1957 and it sounds like something breaking — the clean separation between church music and the devil's music collapsing in real time. You reach for this song when you want to feel the exact moment rock and roll became dangerous, not as a historical artifact but as a physical sensation. Crank it loud and something primal activates. The performance is so reckless it still sounds reckless seventy years later.