Review: Jerry Lee Lewis - Jerry Lee Lewis (1958)
Tracks: 1) Don’t Be Cruel; 2) Goodnight Irene; 3) Put Me Down; 4) It All Depends; 5) Ubangi Stomp; 6) Crazy Arms; 7) Jambalaya; 8) Fools Like Me; 9) High School Confidential; 10) When The Saints Go Marching In; 11) Matchbox; 12) It’ll Be Me; 13*) Mean Woman Blues; 14*) I’m Feelin’ Sorry; 15*) Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On; 16*) Turn Around; 17*) Breathless; 18*) Down The Line.
REVIEW
There are many obvious (and obviously correct) answers to the question of why it was the guitar, rather than the piano, that became the definitive instrument of rock’n’roll music. Logistic reasons — rock’n’roll comes from the blues, and a rambling Delta bluesman couldn’t exactly lug around an entire piano. Economic reasons — rock’n’roll is teenage music, and the average teenager could hardly afford a piano. Technical reasons: you couldn’t exactly amplify a piano the same way you could amplify an electric guitar (and even if you could, the results would not be nearly as satisfying). Tonal reasons: the piano has a naturally «softer» sound, making it difficult to convey the atmosphere of rebellious aggression, so essential for rock music. And so on.
One reason that gets quoted less frequently than others, however, is what I’d call class reason. Compared to the guitar, the piano is commonly seen as an «elitist» or, at least, «classy» object of art — after all, it is the key instrument in «academic» classical music, and the number one instrument for one’s kids to master in music schools. Many an early rock’n’roller took piano lessons when he was little, only to eagerly swap the instrument with a guitar at home, and not just because the family could not afford a piano — but also out of conscious or subconscious protest. Sure, «lowbrow» music had already long since learned how to appropriate the instrument for its own purposes — from ragtime to boogie-woogie — and a few of the most important figures in the early development of rock’n’roll, like Fats Domino and Little Richard, who grew out of the R&B tradition, already used it as their chief instrument. The white kids, however, clearly regarded the piano as a conformist type of beast, suitable for the bowtie snobs at Carnegie Hall or for parent-pleasing vaudeville. How many young white rockers in the 1950s even tried rocking the piano?
To the best of my knowledge, only one. I don’t think anybody, including even the man himself, could correctly answer the question why Jerry Lee Lewis, upon falling in love with the «devil’s music», did not make the switch from piano to guitar, but stubbornly continued to convert God’s own instrument for his own Hellish purposes. (For the record, Jerry did learn to play the guitar a little but never got too good at it, as this live performance of ‘Mystery Train’ amply demonstrates). All of us are internally wired for something, and it just turned out that Jerry Lee Lewis was internally wired to play the piano — not just play it, but almost literally rape it, force it to behave like a rock’n’roll instrument, in what amounts to arguably the single most disturbing case of sexual harassment against a musical device in history. When somebody like Keith Emerson stuck knives in his Hammond organ, it was a brief symbolic moment of art performance — essentially, Keith Emerson was just a regular classical piano player with an exuberant temper and a desire to be loved and revered by the public assembled at the Isle of Wight, rather than the Royal Albert Hall (though he wouldn’t mind both). But Jerry Lee Lewis really did the impossible — his achievement on the piano is pretty much the equivalent of, say, a videogamer beating Mario Brothers by plugging his guitar into the console and thus inventing a whole new style of playing.
I don’t think Jerry himself, or Sam Phillips, for that matter, were fully aware of the importance of this achievement when they agreed to put out ‘Crazy Arms’ as the artist’s debut single for Sun Records at the end of 1956. ‘Crazy Arms’ was a hit country song for Ray Price, which Jerry Lee energized only slightly, giving it a bit of a New Orleanian flavor and playing the piano parts Fats Domino-style: you can, in fact, mentally try to exchange Jerry’s vocals for Fats’ and the song could have easily and unnoticeably slipped into one of Fats’ late Fifties’ albums. Actually, the vocals, rather than the piano, are its main point of attraction — already at this point, even on a relatively slow song like this Jerry Lee Lewis emerges as The Man Who Just Couldn’t Sit Still, running his voice up and down, up and down, up and down the chromatic stairs, in stark and sharp contrast to the «dignified» country stars; even the late Hank Williams would have probably recommended the young rebel to gulp down a couple of tranquilizers before trying another take.
On the other hand, the B-side to the single, a Jerry Lee original called ‘End Of The Road’ which, unfortunately, did not make it onto the LP, already gives us the earliest sample of the man’s rock’n’roll style. There’s the boogie-woogie intro, exactly the same as on ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’, just a teeny bit slower; there are the maniacal repetitive «bashed» chords and crazy gratuitous glissandos; there are the legendary rapid-stuttering drumming patterns of Jimmy Van Eaton and the sharp, precise electric guitar licks of Roland Janes; there are the rebellious, «self-sacrificial», anthemic lyrics ("I don’t care if I never get home") with the requisite sexual innuendos ("you can jump in my Ford and give it some gas"). In short, there is everything except for that one extra kick, one decisive punch, one lit match to send that rocket into space.
We all know the exact moment when that match was flicked — on April 15, 1957, when ‘Whole Lot Of Shakin’ Going On’ was issued as Jerry Lee’s second single. Or, perhaps, more correctly, it was on July 28, 1957, when the man performed the song live on The Steve Allen Show in front of millions of viewers, pulling all the stops and pretty much out-acting Elvis himself — while having to play (slay?) a piano at the same time. I don’t know about you, but whenever I watch this performance I keep thinking to myself that this level of positive rock’n’roll exuberance had never been achieved prior to 1957 — and would never ever be outdone in the future; matched, perhaps, by certain type of performers, but never outdone, because it is pretty much unimaginable how it could be outdone. (Negative rock’n’roll exuberance, one that is all about venting frustration and anger, would, of course, peak to higher and higher levels, but that is a different kind of story — Jerry Lee Lewis would never be about negative vibes, not even in his own moments of career downfall and depression).
Perhaps the most striking thing about ‘Shakin’ and its ilk, whether you take the slightly more restrained studio recordings or the ferocious, literally let-your-hair-down (as well as up, sideways, and in all other imaginable directions) performances in concert, is the unique balance Jerry Lee had in between the «wildman» antics and staying in total musical control. He was never an avantgarde artist, never a public-defying noisemaker: even at his loudest and craziest, he still had to be singing and playing, staying in touch with his rhythm section and not cuasing his loyal fan following to stutter and slip with their accompanying dance moves. He took the «chaos» element of early rock’n’roll as far as it could go, on the technical and the artistic level, in 1957, but he never once let that chaos out of his control — that performance on the Steve Allen show is like a tight battle between Man and Demon, where you are supposed to let Demon take as much hold of Man as possible, then, at the last minute, get «the bull by the horn» and ride it to victory. Many people would take their cues from the Killer in their careers, but few would follow them to perfection — and none would be actually able to perfect them.
Alas, this last statement just as well could be applied to Jerry Lee himself. While he showed himself able to maintain the same level of commitment, madness, and precision all the way up to at least the early 1960s (after which the madness became slightly reduced in energy, though commitment and precision stayed sharp well unto the 21st century), the basic formula more or less remained the same. Sitting through 12 or 20 classic Jerry Lee Lewis hits in a row is no chore — in fact, you barely notice the passage of time while they are playing — but it is safe to say that you should not expect a great deal of diversity. Having fallen upon the gold mine of fast and furious rock’n’roll, Lewis did not abandon his first love — mid-tempo country music — but in between these two «extremes» in his repertoire, you’ll hardly find anything else of interest.
It is interesting and amusing how Jerry’s first, self-titled, LP, released by Sun somewhere at the end of 1958, treats this dichotomy: the first side and the first few tracks on the second side strictly follow a «fast rock’n’roll song — slow country song» sequencing, but by the time we get to the ninth track, Fate seems to just have had enough of that, and the last four songs are all rockers, including a hyper-exicted reinterpretation of ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’. Along the way, he shows us what he really thinks of Elvis going soft and poppy, turning ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ into a loud and bragging declaration ("Elvis only plays rockabilly, I play actual rock’n’roll", he used to boast); shows us just how much of a rambunctious rocker Hank Williams could have really been with a sped-up and energized ‘Jambalaya’; and comes up with maybe not the most meaningful, but inarguably the wildest school dance anthem of the decade (‘High School Confidential’, which was used as the title track to a bad, but fun, movie of the same name and pretty much did the same thing for schoolday aesthetics in 1958 as the Ramones’ ‘Rock’n’Roll High School’ would do twenty years later).
Next to the fast, flame-breathing rock’n’rollers on the record the slow country songs could never even hope to be equally impressive — but one should give them their due nevertheless. One is justified to ask the question of whether at this time in his life, the young and boisterous Jerry Lee Lewis could be «sincere» and emotionally convincing to sing something like ‘Goodnight Irene’, considering how jumping in the river and drowning must have been the last thing on the artist’s to-do list at the time (as compared to but a few years later). But while it is probably true that if you want to better appreciate the man as a country performer, you’d do better by peeking at least five-six years into the future, it is also true that his nervous, restless persona of ‘Crazy Arms’ is equally well reflected in those other slow songs, and that at least makes him stand out from the typical country performer of his time. He lacks the essential country talent of making himself feel miserable, like Hank Williams, instead going for a sneery "you’ll be sorry you left me" attitude most of the time, which suits him and his piano playing style much better — and that’s good enough for me.
Jerry’s biggest hit, ‘Great Balls Of Fire’, for some reason did not make it onto his first LP (it would resurface on his second), and neither did his third and last Top 10 entry, ‘Breathless’, which largely followed the stop-and-start formula of ‘Great Balls Of Fire’; soon after that, the Myra marriage scandal hit the world and ‘High School Confidential’ only managed to climb up to #21 before Lewis’ career went down in flames. It is most curious, however, how Sun Records failed to, as they now say, «read the room» when already after the scandal had hit in the UK, they put out the super-confident, arch-cheeky ‘Lewis Boogie’ ("you take my boogie, it keeps you in the groove") as a single in June ’58, with the B-side filled up not by an actual song, but by a (fairly innovative, I might say) collage of interview questions and «soundbite answers» from various Jerry Lee Lewis recordings, called ‘The Return Of Jerry Lee’ — there is even this one bit where the question goes "how did you manage to get your marriage license with your wife being so young?" and the answer is "I told a little lie...", just to give an indication of how strongly they were pulling the moralistic tiger by his whiskers.
Anyway, from a relatively objective point of view Jerry Lee Lewis, as an LP, is perfectly representative of Jerry Lee Lewis as a phenomenal rock’n’roll artist in his prime, but just as obviously flawed if you are looking for the best of the best — at the very least, if you actually want to own it in your CD or digital collection, be sure to grab one of the editions loaded with bonus tracks, such as ‘Whole Lot Of Shakin’ Going On’ and ‘End Of The Road’; better still, just hunt for one of Jerry Lee’s many detailed compilations and boxsets that would include the record in its entirety along with everything else. Truth is, Jerry Lee in his prime was pretty repetitive, but he is one of the very, very few repetitive Fifties’ artists in his prime whom I simply would not dare to penalize or castigate for being repetitive — even lesser known, third-rate rockers like ‘Put Me Down’ get my goat, just because the top spirit of 1957 is so firmly ensconced in them.
Only Solitaire: Jerry Lee Lewis reviews