also released as (Pickwick SPC-3224)

Side 1
High Heel Sneakers
Crying Time
Hound Dog
Sticks and Stones
Too Young

Side 2
Flip Flop & Fly
Hallelujah, I love her
Baby hold me close
You went back on your word
Got you on my mind

“Rock is the voice of the young, the pulse of the kids who are with it…the kids who are no longer satisfied to look at the stars, but who are devising ways and means of reaching those stars; and to do that it means learning faster….trimming superfluous edges from every facet of life including music.” Liner notes Jerry Lee Lewis ‘High Heel Sneakers’

‘High Heel Sneakers’ is the scuzzy raw sound of Jerry Lee banging at his piano shaking his head around so much that the microphone misses some of the words to the songs but it doesn’t make much difference anyway because the audience is so noisy that you can’t really figure out what he’s singing about. 

This record is probably the closest you can possibly get to an understanding of how it would have struck people in the 50s to see a musician get on stage completely ignoring any idea of making comprehensible music and instead using the power of the volume to make a statement and in the process invent an artform that will steal the imagination of the world’s teenagers forever more.

You can imagine the thought processes of the folks seeing Jerry on stage in his rock and roll frenzy for the first time. You can’t hear the words but you know all the songs are about sex. What else could inspire a sound like that? And the kids like it cause they sometimes feel like how the music sounds – everyone does. And here it is on stage for the first time, so simple and powerful it’s unbelievable no one has done it before. One man with a microphone kicking away the chair with his feet so he can hit his piano harder and louder and at the same time kick away all the constraints and social manners all these kids have grown up with. You don’t have to play the piano sitting down any more. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do anymore. 

And volume is pretty much all he is. There’s no attempt to be reasonable or accurate or put over a nice friendly sound or anything that could be described as traditionally artistic. He’s behaving like an animal but it’s good cause the kids in the audience feel like animals sometimes and there is a particular kind of adrenalin that only comes by feeling like an animal, losing your head for a while and freaking out.

“In an age of the machine the rhythms of life are beaten down by hammer blows and driven into the unconscious where they dwindle and die … unless you re-awaken them.”
Roger Scruton

When a microphone picks up a pure sound it’s harsh and ugly and there’s other noise and interference around it and srcecording studios there are people actually employed to take away the hardness of the sound all the background interference until there’s just the sound rounded off and taken out of context like a sound in a vacuum. ‘High Heel Sneakers’ is the opposite impulse – it is noise out of the vacuum. It’s a live sound — one hundred per cent and is less friendly on the ears for sure but it brings all the excitement of the girl and boy stuff right back. JLL knows un-mastered sound still has the anything can happen’ vibe. The likes of‘High Heel Sneakers’ and ‘You Went Back on Your Word’ benefit massively from the seemingly spontaneous burst of emotion of the live set-up. It’s a much better medium for these types of song than a recording studio.

It’s a great record of violent noise and a blasphemous assault on the piano which builds from slow blues boogie into an all out assault with accompanying shrieks of the crowd. It’s a different scale but is essentially exactly the same kind of primitive howl thing the blues guys like Howlin Wolf and John Lee Hooker had been doing for years. Taking listeners back to their pre-modern days where they have no social constraints and they’re free to roam the jungle looking for others with the right looking genitalia. It’s a metaphor that makes you see the 9 to 5 isn’t the end of the story and make you think you can actually achieve a kind of freedom on a different level to anything your parent or teachers or any of the squares are obsessed with. 

It’s no wonder everyone wanted a bit of it. It’s frickin cool (and easy) for nerdy white guys like the Stones and the Yardbirds to do it as well as the thousands of ugly teens across America — every one has the raw material and anyone can do it – even the untalented folks can do it. But you still got to acquaint yourself with the originals cause there are some ‘talented’ & ‘innovative’ motherfuckers who will always be playing around with the formula. And that’s why we’re in a mess so far away from the Killer and the Wolf that it’s hard to see how it happened.

“The dedication (the blues) demands lies beyond technique; it makes being a blues player something like being a priest. Virtuosity in playing blues licks is like virtuosity in celebrating the mass, it is empty, it means nothing…a true blues player’s virtue lies in the acceptance of his life” Stanley Booth ‘Even the birds were blue’

The only innovation to the formula should be the personnel. That’s why this record should be handed out by the authorities to every band in the charts and in the NME cause they would shit themselves all over again on realisation of the power of rock and roll music and maybe they’d treat it with a bit more respect.