The greatest rock piano player Elton John ever heard: “He’s too fast”
It’s hard to explain the kind of oddity that people had on their hands when Elton John debuted to the world.
He was already a fantastic songwriter when he joined forces with Bernie Taupin, but the lavish outfits and massive stage show made him look like one of the most glamorous rock and roll stars who had ever lived. But in an era that was defined by hard rock, the fact that John tied himself to the massive instrument with 88 keys was going to be a much harder sell for some people.
Because while the piano wasn’t a bad instrument by any stretch, the guitar was definitely the flavour of the day at the time. Just for a minute, think of the biggest names in 1970s rock. Jimmy Page. Joe Perry. Peter Frampton. What do these people all have in common? Oh yeah, they can move around the stage and not be shackled to sitting down at the keyboard every time they’re singing.
But that doesn’t mean that John didn’t know how to give the people a show. Some of his best moments onstage were when he was channelling the greatest wild men that came before him and threw caution to the wind when working off the rest of his band. No one in their right mind plays the song ‘Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting’ standing completely still, and a lot of that fury came from the stone age of rock and roll, where Little Richard was just as much of a force as Chuck Berry was.
In fact, Richard had a much more difficult job in many respects. He couldn’t do the duck walk like Berry did, but he could throw his leg up on top of the piano and give the kids the kind of show that they wouldn’t forget. But if Richard was the first real shock rocker to get that kind of attention, Jerry Lee Lewis was practically the first incarnation of punk rock that people ever got to see when he debuted.
If you go through a lot of Lewis’s early performances, he was doing everything he could to punish the instrument he was playing. After all, the piano is technically a rhythm instrument, and while John could do okay when performing some of the greatest pieces that he heard when studying classical music, Lewis sounded like he was trying to make the keys fall off when working on ‘A Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’.
This was the sound of someone throwing caution to the wind, and Lewis felt that some of the greatest pianists who have come since still had nothing on what he could do, saying, “Jerry Lee Lewis was always a big influence on me. He’s the best rock ‘n’ roll pianist ever. I couldn’t play like him because he’s too fast.” But that didn’t mean that he couldn’t try to kick out the jams whenever he felt like it as well.
Even if the rest of his material is a lot more tame compared to the likes of Led Zeppelin, John still had his fair share of songs that left the average pianist a little more winded than usual. ‘Grey Seal’ sounds like a pretty standard pop song when you listen to the verses, but when everything kicks up a notch towards the end of the tune, the band is absolutely flying through the rest of the track the same way that Lewis was trying to do on a lot of his best songs.
There wasn’t a whole lot of theory that needed to go into every single Lewis song, but that didn’t really matter to John. He could hear the same kind of wild abandon that he was playing with whenever he played, and was going to do everything in his power to make his audience feel the same way he did when listening to those songs.
