Jerry Lee Lewis

"All Killer - No Filler"
Of the five books about rock’n’roll I published in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the only one I still like
even a little is Rockin’ My Life Away: Listening to Jerry Lee Lewis, which Nashville’s Rutledge
Hill Press published in 1991.  The Jerry Lee book is my favorite of the five.
--guterman

The summer of 1971 was treacherous for Jerry Lee. The divorce from Myra had become final in May, and Junior's behavior was becoming increasingly dependent on what happened to be flowing in his veins. However, Jerry Lee was able to gain enough strength for a handful of remarkable recordings to add to the still-growing list. Off the wagon, he was not yet teetering. Jimmy Hodges's Someday You'll Want Me to Want You was a concentrated love-revenge ballad most notable for being one of the first Jerry Lee recordings that included his "Think about it" warning/suggestion. "BigBlon' Baby", the Cajun thumper from his Sun days, kept the rocker in Jerry Lee happy, while Thirteen at the Table satisfied the man newly returned to secular music who still wanted to feel saved. Thirteen at the Table was a midtempo retelling of the Last Supper, built around clumsy lines like "He was a carpenter who mended broken bodies." That summer Jerry Lee tried to mend his ways by buying the film rights to The Carpenter, a life of Jesus; he intended to play the title role. As with Jerry Lee's other moves toward sacred-minded work, the deal fell through.
Jerry Kennedy's production formula was now stifling, but sometimes its familiarity allowed Jerry Lee to soar. A few days before a session, the Killer was able to hear most of the tunes that he did not himself suggest recording.
 Mercury's Roy Dea, who had recorded the Las Vegas shows, went to Jerry Lee's house.
"I played acetates for him," Dea said.  "I got there about three in the afternoon, just when he was waking up.  Usually it was a title or a line that caught his attention.  A lot of it had to do with what
he was going through personally.  'Would You Take Another Chance on Me,' for example, fit what was going on in his personal life at the time."

Indeed, it was a concept and a composition with which Jerry Lee immediately connected. Strings and backing singers aside, Would You Take Another Chance on Me was a marvelous hard-country ballad sung with tremendous intensity, and it was yet another song that ended with the ominous "Think about it, darlin'." It shot to Number One on the country-and-western singles chart; its flip side, a spirited "Me and Bobby McGee," became Jerry Lee's first Top 40 pop hit since High School Confidential, way back in 1958.

As far as recordings were concerned, 1972 began wonderfully for Jerry Lee. He was loose in the studio, and for a change Jerry Kennedy did not immediately call for a leash. "Think About It, Darlin'." -this title had to come - moved well, although with each year it seemed that more and more people were stuffed in the studio with Jerry Lee, inching him further and further into the background of his own records.
The Killer sang as if he knew that he was close to self-parody, but he was too amused to care. Also recorded in this session was a dripping cover of the Big Bopper's, Chantilly Lace, a fine reconstructed general rock-and-roll take with a very strong vocal, in spite of there being what seemed like fifty too many people on the cut.

Roy Dea, who was at the session, tells the story best:

I didn't like the heavy production. I didn't think it was Jerry Lee Lewis. I had been to Memphis, and we had pickedfour songs and  were going to add strings.  There were fifteen string players and
an arranger.  We cut a couple tracks when out of nowhere Jerry said, "Let's do Chantilly Lace." The arranger said he didn't have charts, and Jerry said, "We're just running it down. Don't worry about the mules. Just load the wagon."
The string arranger just about had a heart attack.  Jerry Lee cut it once, played it back, took off his turtleneck sweater, and then went thru it again.  He  said, "That turtleneck was chokin' me."
It was Jerry Lee's biggest record [Number One country] for three weeks.  It proved Sam Phillips was right in the first place. Everything with Jerry Lee Lewis that works is spontaneous. It's not in the lyrics or the melody written by the writer. It's how Jerry Lee does it."
The remarkable success of a frank rock-and-roll song like "Chantilly Lace" set the stage for The "Killer Rocks On,"an album intended to draw in both the rock-and-roll fans who attended his shows and the loyal country fans, many of them aging along with Jerry Lee, who did not mind being reminded what this Killer did in a previous incarnation. It seemed like a great idea, excect Jerry Kennedy was even less helping in creating rock-and-roll settings than Shelby Singleton had been during the Golden Rock Hits sessions of nearly a decade earlier.

Virtually all the rock oldies Jerry Lee recorded for the new album were conveyed with gusto and attitude, but Kennedy's insufferable string and chorus overdubs all but ruined everything they touched. Kennedy's method of cutting country made no sense in a rock-and-roll context. Few classic rockers were able to withstand such treatment. However, the Charlie Rich number, "Lonely Weekends," jumped out of the speakers with an unshackled piano solo, and William Bell's soul-driving "You Don't Miss Your Water" was one of Jerry Lee's saddest cuts. These two triumphs must have been enough for many listeners. The "Killer Rocks On" became its namesake's highest-charting pop LP since The Greatest Live Show on Earth.

The rest of 1972 flew by in a blur. Five more sessions did not yield a single stellar track. Everyone was distracted. Marriage number four was beginning to crumble, Mercury seemed more interested in renewing Jerry Lee's contract than in securing him top-rank songs, and the big-production numbers that were Jerry Kennedy's specialty had become so successful commercially that no one thought to return Jerry Lee to more lanky settings in which he could excel.


The following is excerpted from
"All Killer - No Filler" Rhino 1993 Liner notes by L. Guterman

In Jerry Lee’s version of "Over The Rainbow" the narrator seems an old man. His voice showed its cracks,
hinted at its long-ago triumphs, sounded bitter, and searched for a reason to hope. Jerry Lee was only 45
years old when he recorded this song, but he looked and sang at least a decade beyond that.   If Jerry Lee
had retired after “Over the Rainbow,” one could have stated that his mission had been complete. He started
at the end of the road, traveled places no one had ever seen before, and was now wise enough to accept that
the rainbow was unattainable.
Alas, real life does not provide the closure of great art.  Jerry Lee didn’t retire then; he probably never will. Jerry Lee is still rockin’, sometimes strongly, sometimes erratically. He appears every now and then in the tabloids for the usual reasons.  Some of his ‘80s albums were quickie paydays; others, like his re-recordings
for the soundtrack of the otherwise-useless Great Balls of Fire, scorched.   Some nights  he’s the greatest performer you’ve ever seen or heard; other nights he doesn’t even try. Jerry Lee Lewis endures into the
‘90s on his own terms. And as the music on this collection demonstrates, there’s never been anyone like him.