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Friday, March 28, 2008
MEAN WOMAN BLUES
Jerry Lee Lewis
1964
Available on : Live at the Star Club, Hamburg
Bear Family : 1989
[Buy It]
MEAT MAN
Jerry Lee Lewis
Southern Roots
Mercury : 1974
[Buy It]
ROCK AND ROLL (WITH JIMMY PAGE)
Jerry Lee Lewis
Last Man Standing
Artist First : 2006
[Buy It]
Last night, I saw Jerry Lee Lewis play at Town Hall in New York. Lewis is seventy-two, but he has seemed at least that old for decades -- I remember watching him on Michael Nesmith's "Elephant Parts" in 1981, and he looked ancient even then, stiff behind the piano and vaguely sepulchral until he opened his mouth. At Town Hall, he was in decent spirits and in decent voice, and his piano playing was entertaining, but to use words like "decent" and "entertaining" to describe Jerry Lee Lewis is like saying that Jesse Owens moved okay in old age: depressing. I'm not sure he was depressed, and I'm sure most of the crowd wasn't depressed, but the universe might have been. For starters, there's the obvious problem of playing songs about teenage rebellion and lickerishness when you're within sight of death. People were screaming for "High School Confidential." Why? The songs that as a younger man drew on a not-yet-earned world-weariness, which include many of his country hits, worked better, and the earliest case of this, "End of the Road," which also happens to be his first record ever, worked best of all. His singing took control of the melody rather than the other way around, and the crowd withdrew slightly from appreciating him as a nostalgia act. Which was, of course, most of the trouble. The man a few rows ahead of me who waved his arm above his head for an hour solid knew all the songs, but to him they were all the same: they were Jerry Lee live, and that was enough. And the girl a few rows behind me who came with her parents kept running to the front of the house to try to take a picture of the Killer with her cell phone. She was eleven or twelve; forty years ago, you wouldn't have sent a girl that age toward Jerry Lee without great reservations.
The most conspicuous absence of the night wasn't youth or vigor or even libido--Jerry Lee seemed to get it up fine for "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On." What was missing, above all, was competition. On "Live at the Star Club, Hamburg," from 1964, Jerry Lee made a point of systematically destroying each of his rivals for rock and roll primacy: leading (and often humiliating) the Nashville Teens, the Killer declared lightning war on Elvis ("Hound Dog"), Ray Charles ("What'd I Say"), Carl Perkins ("Matchbox"), Little Richard ("Good Golly Miss Molly"), and others. The album's opener, "Mean Woman Blues," took the Roy Orbison hit and beat what can only be described as the living shit out of it. That fire burned inside Jerry Lee from the beginning of his career, and never went out. Jealousy drove him to such a great degree that he was the only real choice to play Iago in Jack Good's visionary, if unhinged, rock production of Othello, Catch My Soul. Alex has posted about the show before; all I'll add is that Jerry Lee hardly heeded these lines, either straightforwardly or ironically:
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock The meat it feeds on Catch My Soul wouldn't be the last time that meat was served. "Meat Man," from 1974, has been read as a dirty song about oral sex, and it most likely is:
I got jaws like a bear trap
Teeth like a razor
Got a Maytag tongue
With a sensitive taste But it's also a song about oral sex in some very specific places:
I been down to Macon, Georgia
I ate the fur off a Georgia peach
Plucked me a chicken in Memphis
Mama, I still got feathers in my teeth Mack Vickery wrote the song, and maybe in his version, the visits to Macon and Memphis are ways of tracing the paths of unattainable idols--and, while he's there, notching some conquests. But Jerry Lee's version has to be read, in part, as an explicit domination of Little Richard and Elvis. Two years after that, in fact, Jerry Lee showed up at Graceland, drunk and packing, demanding to see the King. The Jerry Lee that came to Town Hall last night was still pumping the piano, but the context has changed greatly. Most of those contemporaries who stoked his fire are dead, and the ones who aren't dead aren't stoking his fire anymore. If there was a competition, he has won simply by surviving. His most recent studio album was a festschrift of sorts on which he collaborated, without animus, with several other aging rockers. It was called Last Man Standing, and even though he was seated for the entirety of last night's performance, the point is taken.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
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