Sabotaging Chuck Berry 

Perhaps the single greatest rock’n’roll musician of all time was Chuck Berry, something that irked Lewis. 

Orchestrated by Alan Freed, the show pitted Berry, a man of colour, as the headliner over Jerry Lee with his status as the closing performer part of Berry’s contract. 

It was at Brooklyn, New York’s Paramount Theater that Lewis performed his regular hits before, feeling annoyed at his position on the bill, he lived up to his wildman status. Out of a Coke bottle, Lewis poured gasoline onto his piano before “he doused the keyboard in petrol and played on through the flames,” described The Irish Independent. 

This naturally would ruin any chance for Chuck to follow up with Lee Lewis remarking: “Follow that, n****r!” to “The Father of Rock’n’Roll”. The horribly offensive racial term was the cherry on the cake for a self-aggrandising, egotist.  

Lewis later told GQ, “Yeah, that piano burned like a house on fire. The fire department was there with them as and them rubber suits on, and boy, they got on my case.” 

Weirdly, Lewis has both confirmed and denied the story on multiple occasions. Medium notes that: “The only caution is that there’s an excellent chance the whole thing never happened. While it is usually said to have played out during a May 1958 Freed show at the Brooklyn Paramount, no one in the audience at the well-attended show ever seems to have spoken about it. There are no photos or written references. Members of Lewis’s band have said it never happened. The late Berry never mentioned it.” 

Despite this, Lewis’s own boastful reminiscing should demonstrate the man behind the piano’s true character. 

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