Jerry Lee Lewis All Killer No Filler Rar
Lora Ceasor
wow, Live At the Star Club absolutely smokes! The drumming on "Good Golly Miss Molly"! I don't know if this is one of those "fake crowd" live albums but the crowd seems pretty nuts, and who wouldn't be: I imagine JLL was physically all over the place. In fact I think his vocals are the weakest part of the album, but he was such a physical performer that I reckon it was hard to sing. And I gather that part of his appeal is a kind of cool intensity, so that singing too wildly would give too much away.
Huh, I think his singing's great on that album.
BTW Jerry Rocks on the Bear Family label, a single disc covering 1957-1977, is awesome. It's got by far the best-sounding versions of his early Sun stuff.
by the way, there are oodles and oodles of unreleased tapes of JLL (I'm not talkin' Bear Family, neither, Killer) from the mid-seventies on. There's a few hours of Jerry Lee asolo at the piano when he got that Godawful Sire record for Andy Paley which are wildly impromptu, musically exquisite and funny as hell.
Charly's "Sun Essentials" is a fantastic, affordable box set covering that period. 4 Discs, 120+ songs, quality annotation. Biggest quibbles are the omission of "Sail Away" (duet w/Charlie Rich) and the thematic programming (splitting individual discs half Rock/half Country or traditional) is kinda "eh?" at times, an idea better on paper than in execution.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around that photo. Is the band stationed down the hill because the club is too tiny? It's definitely narrow, but who knows how far it goes back? Or is the band just too loud for the diners? (xpost)
i saw him maybe eight years ago; his band played for forty minutes, he came out and did three songs and then left. they were a solid three songs though. he got his foot up on the piano!
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I saw Jerry Lee Lewis at Riot Fest in 2018. My favorite moment as we waited for him was when one fan yelled out "we want JERRY LEWIS!" and someone next to us responded (with a hint of irritation and no humor) "HE DIED TWO YEARS AGO."
Still recall the first time I heard him in the 80s on a cable feature (with Fats Domino, I believe). I was utterly transfixed by how aggressively he played the piano. I can hardly imagine what that must've been like in the 1950's.
I heard "Great Balls of Fire" so many times in so many (usually innocuous) contexts when I was a kid that it seemed like background music for a while. I love it now and I grew to appreciate it immensely when I tried playing it at home. That's when I realized how much was put into it - like you really have to pound the shit out of the piano and at warp speed, to the point where it's almost chaotic. But on top of that, Jerry Lee's singing seems to be in a different gear. There's a lot of passion underneath, but he phrasing is so smooth and completely in control, letting just enough to bubble up to the surface when needed. It's a pretty amazing performance.
Probably my issue too, hearing it too many times before I was 15 (especially as a soundbite on commercials for K-Tel and similar '50s compilations). I kind of group "Great Balls of Fire" with "All Shook Up" and "Chantilly Lace"--goofy novelties. (And if you love them, believe me, I understand; there are goofy novelties I love too, like Nervous Norvus's "Transfusion.") "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," by way of contrast, sounds really sinister to me, like "Who Do You Love."
I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but I wish they'd included that story about Jerry Lee Lewis showing up at Graceland and screaming "I'm the King!" in Elvis. (I can't remember, but I don't think Lewis turned up anywhere in the film.)
For those who haven't already read it, the long 1984 Rolling Stone article about the death of Shawn Stevens Lewis is important for understanding how fucked up and evil JLL was and how his milieu enabled his worst behavior: -features/the-strange-and-mysterious-death-of-mrs-jerry-lee-lewis-179980/
For Spotify users, if you want to hear the complete original Star Club album, go straight to The Killer Live: 1964-1970, which begins with all of Star Club and then continues with all of The Greatest Live Show On Earth and his other period live sets.
xxxp Another Place, Another Time, She Still Comes Around and She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye are great albums. The two CD All Killer No Filler! anthology from Rhino also does a very good job of exploring his career with fine liner notes by Jimmy Guterman. (Guterman originally tried to do a triple CD set, but he was told to cut it down.) FWIW, if you remove the Sun tracks and the live Star Club cuts from the aforementioned LP, what's left of All Killer No Filler! squeezes into one 79 minute CD and makes a fine post-Sun compilation.
_The Greatest Live Show on Earth_ from 1964 is not quite as wild as Star Club but well worth hearing
For those who haven't already read it, the long 1984 Rolling Stone article about the death of Shawn Stevens Lewis is important for understanding how fucked up and evil JLL was and how his milieu enabled his worst behavior: -features/the-strange-and-mysterious-death-of-mrs-jerry-lee-lewis-179980?/?
Full article here not behind paywall: -strange-and-mysterious-death-of-mrs-jerry-lee-lewis/
I think Bob Mehr's remembrance probably nails it - he saw Lewis perform many times but only met him once when Lewis was already about 80 and stuck in bed thanks to a back ailment. From that interview alone, Lewis came off as the "purest artist and most frightening person" Mehr had ever encountered.
I'm not sure if it's the nature of culture or just an instinctive fallacy to engage in an artist's work mostly as a reflection of their character, but I've always been wary of that, whether it ends up in some kind of hero worship or unforgiving demonization. There's a great line by Jimmy Stewart's character in Anatomy of a Murder where he says "I've had to learn that people aren't just good or just bad - people are many things," and that's especially true for artists since they tend to be more complex and interesting than your average person, which is probably why they end up dedicating their lives to creative work.
We mark the life of Lewis, who died Oct. 28, by listening to archival interviews with his sister, pianist/singer Linda Gail Lewis, and with Myra Lewis Williams, who married Jerry Lee when she was 13. Also: Linda Gail w Jerry Lee, from their xpost duet album, singing and playing on a solo track from her album w Robbie Fulks, and a live/impromptu radio studio duet w him (sounding better than I remember their alb as being, maybe should check again). Myra seems v. on point too, will have to check her books.
-air-remembers-rock-n-roll-pioneer-jerry-lee-lewis- Which is followed by this, to bird's point:
How country music allowed Jerry Lee Lewis to vary his wild-man persona
November 8, 20222:06 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air
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KEN TUCKER
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