Jerry Lee Lewis rocks on!
"The London Session" is just some terrific stuff
Chet Atkins, my ass.
The story goes that the first time Jerry Lee Lewis walked into Sun Studios in Memphis in September of 1956 - his Dad supposedly selling a full farm load of eggs to finance their trip - he told producer Cowboy Jack Clement that “he played piano like Chet Atkins played guitar.”
If you’ve ever heard Jerry Lee Lewis play the piano and if it makes you think of Chet Atkins, you NEED TO TURN THE VOLUME UP!
Now, Chet Atkins is a snappy, tasty, guitar player as well as a crackerjack record producer who you’ll never catch with his shirt untucked. There’s a place for that in Nashville, sure.
But comparing himself to Chet Atkins just to get his bony ass in the Sun Studios door where Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash started was as much of a stretch as, say, marrying your 13-year-old cousin at the absolute pinnacle of your early career and think it’s not that big a deal.
As you know - or you should if you know anything about rock and roll history - the guy who Sun Records’ boss Sam Phillips figured just might surpass that swiveling guy whose contract he sold to RCA for a then-unheard of $35 grand, had a couple undeniable, untamed, blow-the-speakers-off-the-jukebox hits in early 1958, then once the scandal hit, concerts were cancelled, record sales plummeted and it was hands off of Jerry Lee.
He was stubborn or un-self-aware enough to keep on recording, he didn’t make a splash on the charts until 1961 with a cover of Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say.” From there, he wandered into recording lots of country music, some of it really good, but was often still was rockin’ away in his live shows, even if the audiences that followed him all over the country were nowhere near they might have been.
His albums were spotty, for the most part. There was the occasional song you’d hear on the radio and oddly enough, in England, at the height of Beatlemania, Granada filmed a show in black and white called “Don’t Knock The Rock” which included rock and roll founders Gene Vincent, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis and let me tell you, folks, if you wondered about the credentials any of those founding fathers of rock, go ahead and try to watch that show while sitting down. It’s as if every one of them were saying, “OK, you can have The Beatles. They’re good, sure. But aren’t rockin’ any harder than we are.” And they weren’t, certainly not in 1964.
For some reason, it was eight long years later - 1972 - that Steve Rowland at Mercury Records had the grand idea to invite Jerry Lee Lewis to London’s Advision Studios, accompanied by some of the most prominent British musicians at the moment - Peter Frampton, Rory Gallagher, Alvin Lee, Albert Lee, Gary Wright and Kenney Jones. The idea was for him to rock his way through four sides of music as only he could. And just to get the hell out of his way.
Like Elvis, Jerry Lee didn’t write songs but instead offered his own distinctive stamp on a delightful assortment of rock and roll classic tunes - “Johnny B. Goode,” “Sea Cruise,” “Memphis,” ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee O Dee” (a minor radio hit) and geez, so many more, you’ll find yourself going from Side One to Side Four and wish he kept on going. Nobody takes on a song like Jerry Lee and if some won’t walk again, well, them’s the breaks.
When the album came out in 1973, it was his highest charting record since 1964 (#37) and “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee O Dee” made it to No. 41 on the charts on April 7. It was the one sign of life in a difficult time in America. Wanna guess what the top three songs were as the Nixon Administration wound down?
No. 1 was the one-hit wonder from the Carol Burnett-look alike Vicki Lawrence, which was, sorry to say, a crappy, sappy song, “The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia.” “Neither One Of Us,” by Gladys Knight and the Pips was No. 2, a few months before Georgia was in the news again with her “Midnight Train to Georgia,” and No. 3 was Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song” which, again, wasn’t the kind of song that made you turn up the radio unless you needed a nap.
Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t killing anybody softly, ever! He was just “The Killer.” And you won’t hear him any better than on “The Session.” Unless, of course, it was on “Don’t Knock The Rock.”
Author John Nogowski, now in his third year of Substack, writes often about music and has published books about Bob Dylan (“Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography”) Neil Young (“Neil Young: A Descriptive, Critical Discography and Filmography”) due later this year or early next, two books on baseball “Diamond Duels” and “Last Time Out” - his son is a former major-leaguer, and is a regular contributor to the Hartford Courant. He’s at work on a book about Bruce Springsteen.
This is about what I looked like in 1973 when Jerry Lee Lewis’s “The Session” came out.