A Few Rounds with the Killer

By JAY COCKS

Twelve new records celebrate Jerry Lee Lewis 'glory days

He knows what he is. "I'm a rompin', stompin', piano-playin' son of a bitch. A mean son of a bitch. But a great son of a bitch." Here's to you, then, Jerry Lee Lewis, unreconstructed rocker and mean-mouthed, sweet-souled Louisiana country singer. A new twelve-album set, Jerry Lee Lewis: The Sun Years, covers the glory years from 1956 to 1963 and is assembled with the kind of reverence and archival zeal usually reserved for the cantatas of a J.S. Bach. The collection, sold in this country for under $100, is marketed by Charly Records Ltd. of London.

Not even Elvis, whose long and mighty shadow so often shaded Jerry Lee, has ever been so honored. Presley records have become fairly random collections of ill-assorted tracks. Albert Goldman's 1981 biographical pillaging gut-shot the King on the first page and left him to bleed for 590 more. Jerry Lee, still touring, still recording, still hellacious, has lucked into a much better deal. Two years ago, Nick Tosches wrote a definitive rock biography, Hellfire, that plunged right to the glowing white heart of Lewis' Pentecostal furies and set down forever all of Jerry Lee's unassuaged demons. Now come these records, 209 cuts in all, and each a great ball of fire.

Rock has produced a few top piano thumpers -- Fats Domino, Huey Smith -- but none burned with the passion of Jerry Lewis. Sam Phillips, who had started Sun Records in Memphis, sold the contract of his major star, Elvis Presley, to RCA in 1955 for the then unheard-of sum, for a new singer, of $35,000, and he was shopping around for a replacement. Jerry Lee, 21, looked like just the boy. Nicknamed the Killer, to his perpetual displeasure, Lewis sang country, which was not then considered commercially lot. But he also played mean boogie-woogie. He would sit down on the edge of the bench, right leg stuck out stiff, a habit acquired from practicing when he had a Broken hip. He would whip up a heavy rhythm with his left hand and play such a furious melody with his right that the tune would beg for mercy. The sound was backwoods, roadhouse. Phillips listened to all of ten seconds of Lewis' audition tape of Crazy Arms. "I can sell that," he said.

That tape instantly became Lewis' first single. Crazy Arms kicks off The Sun Years, along with End of the Road, which contains the spooky, defiant and haunting lines "Well, the way is dark,/ Night is long,/ I don't care if I never get home!/ I'm waitin' at the end of the road!" The new albums contain 57 songs originally issued on Sun, as well as seven others, initially slicked up with overdubbing, heard here "raw"; 77 more tracks, released pretty much at random after the Sun catalogue was sold in 1969, are presented in original mono sound; there are also 60 never-issued alternate takes of songs like Great Balls of Fire and Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On, and eight cuts never released before, including a lubricious version of the Pat Boone groaner, Love Letters in the Sand.

If one of Faulkner's Snopeses had ever taken up piano, he might not have played like Lewis, but he could well have acted just like him. Four times married (and not always with the benefit of previous divorce), a few times rich, many times broke, Lewis was briefly, with Presley away in the Army and the youth of America hot-wired by the strains of Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On and Great Balls of Fire and High School Confidential, the Absolute Supreme Being of rock. But scandal brought him low: the British press cooked up a fine frenzy over Jerry Lee's marriage to his 13-year-old cousin Myra Brown. Women married young back in Ferriday, La., but this was no matter to Americans either. They joined in the censure; Jerry Lee's name slid to the bottom of the pop charts, and then below it.

Not until the late '60s, with a new record company and a heavier country inflection, did things brighten again. He became a big country star, but -- as if he were enacting a cycle of celebrity and retribution -- things fell apart again. He had lost Myra, remarried, and lost his new wife too. He was sometimes arrested now, and often suffered from alcoholic and pharmacological excess. He was frequently sued by ex-wives, former employees and miscellaneous creditors, and plagued on several occasions by liens from Internal Revenue. In 1981 he nearly died from a perforated stomach. Jerry Lee Lewis has not only lived out the rock-'n'-roll fantasy but the horror story as well.

At 47 he is still playing oldies shows and medium-size concert dates and bumping around the boonies, and he is still hollering defiance. Last week, at a joint called the Lonesome Armadillo in Roseville, Calif., Jerry Lee got to a part of the Trouble in Mind lyric that goes "Put me six feet in the ground" and interpolated, "I throw the dirt right in your face!"

One of the most impressive aspects of the Tosches biography, and one of the most memorable moments on The Sun Years, is the depth of Lewis' fundamentalist fervor. Before the tapes roll on one take of Great Balls of Fire, Lewis can be heard locked in feverish theological debate with a somewhat astonished Sam Phillips. The intensity is scary and spellbinding, and leaves no doubt about with whom Jerry Lee believes he has cast his lot. "You've got to walk and talk with God to go to heaven... I have the devil in me! If I didn't have, I'd be a Christian!"

Indeed, periodically seized by remorse over a misspent life, Lewis will still ruminate over making a stand for God. But the devil -- the music, and the life that goes with it -- always wins out. Shared or not, that fundamentalist faith gives Jerry Lee's music, even to a heathen, the unique power of sin. No smart talk or sidestepping for him. This is the devil's music, and Jerry Lee Lewis plays it with the aplomb of a peer. He may smell damnation himself, but that unholy gift of his has surely secured him a place in rock-'n'-roll heaven. Right up there in the dark. At the end of the road.

-- By Jay Cocks This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.