Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

THE “KILLER" ROCKS ON JERRY LEE LEWIS SMASH

You can tell this one is special from the beginning. The strings come in, but all of a sudden, there’s an insistent, pounding drum driving the schmaltz into the background. And then, out of nowhere, a swoop down the piano scales, as if a signature. Jerry Lee Lewis!

The song is “Don’t Be Cruel” and, aside from the strings, it might as well be ’55. Jerry Lee Lewis could have been Elvis, if anyone else could have been The King, and, for my money, he’s weathered the years a whole lot better.

The Killer Rocks On could be interpreted as a “revival” attempt but that would be a mistake. True, Jerry Lee has been playing hard-core c&w material for the last half-dozen years; true, most of the cuts on this album are up-tempo, and many of them draw from sources outside specifically country fields. Apd, true again, there are a whole batch of times here that are rock and roll standards: “I’m Walkin’ ” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Chantilly Lace,” Jerry Lee’s current hit, “C.C. Rider” and the amazing “Turn On Your Lovelight.” But the other half of the material is straight ’72 country-pop, from a pair of Joe South tunes to “Me and Bobby McGee.”

And anyway, talking about a revival would imply that there was something that had been lost. Jerry Lee Lewis hasn’t been coasting these last few years: a few of those country hits can stand right along the works of rock and roll genius he made in the fifties. None is a “Whole Lotta Shakin’ ” of course, but very few people are fortunate enough to record two songs with that much impact in their lives.

Nonetheless, if you don’t much like country music (which I don’t) this is the kind of country you’re probably a sucker for. The songs are almost all familiar — Charlie Rich’s “Lonely Weekends,” “You Can Have Her,” William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water” - the spirit of each is purely vigorous, and the ambience is just punk enough to make you think you’re listening to rock record even when you know that you aren’t.

In fact, the worst thing you could get out of hearing it is the idea that Jerry Lee somehow needs this record as aesthetic justification. Peter Guralnick sums up the feeling I have in the introduction to his remarkable book Feel Like Goin ’ Home.

“The white artists have had a better time of it, as they have one by one returned to the country field from which they emerged . . . They’re better off there. They’re in touch with a real market that has stayed loyal to the kind of music they’ve played over the years. They’re removed, too, from the scrutiny of critics . .. And they’re playing to an audience of men and women very much like themselves, who grew up on a diet of hillbilly songs mixed in with Negro blues and made of rock ‘n’ roll at one time the truest kind of folk music.

“Rock V roll today, to my mind at least, is a middle-class phenomenon almost exclusively. What for us was a liberating act... has become part and parcel of the times and created a whole new set of definitions of its own. It is admirably eclectic, it offers a dazzling variety of choice within it's own terms and it has become in the process something a great deal more serious and infinitely less important.

“That’s why all attempts at revival are bound to fail. To bring it back you’d have to bring back the Eisenhower Era and the McCarthy Hearings. You’d have to bring back gang wars and the highschool hop and all the crippling inhibitions of that time, for me rock’n’roll was just what the Coasters said: a secret message delivered with a sheer and boundless amusement, and that it can have become camp in our time is only evidence of the terrible attrition of time and the voraciousness with which our culture devours its young.”

Still, with the amount of hip chauvimsim running about, it’s all too easy to make this record or Jerry Lee himself, merely camp. That just isn’t true. “Chantilly Lace” is powerful, and I think that it is probably more powerful than the Big Bopper classic, but most of the tunes here aren’t any better -though they are often more familiar to us -than the country hits Jerry Lee’s been belting out consistently for the last few years. Jerry Lee Lewis is simply too talented a dude to take a back-seat in any field. He is one of the real rock ‘n’ roll geniuses — read the chapter in Guralnick’s book to see why.

All other considerations aside, though, this is one hell of a record. “Chantilly Lace” leads the field, largely because it is such a perfect vehicle for Lewis’ stylized pyrotechnics. He can kick the shit out of the piano on this one, because that’s the way the song was meant to be done. But on tunes like “Turn On Your Lovelights,” a chestnut so overdone of late it’s a wonder one can listen to it at all, “Don’t Be Cruel” and almost all the others, Jerry Lee. is in perfect form. He hasn’t lost any of this voice or his strength as a pianist, and every song here bears his signature, the pumping piano, the lecherous voice, the cocky asides.

The only place he stumbles is on the two Joe South tunes, and then mostly because we don’t particularly want or need to hear new versions of “Walk A Mile” or “Games People Play.” Or maybe they just aren’t as good, as songs, as the oldies or “Me and Bobby McGee,” another overdone tune he pulls off brilliantly.

The Killer Rocks On is an appropriate title mostly because it says that there is a line of continuity from “Whole Lotta Shakin’ ” through “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)” to “Chantilly Lace.” That line is there and it marks the career of one of rock and roll’s few geniuses.

Dave Marsh

A TRIBUTE TO WOODY GUTHRIE

PART ONE DYLAN, SEEGER, GUTHRIE, ETC. COLUMBIA

What do you do when you’re a young, aspiring folkie, son of the biggest legend north of Mark Twain’s bullfrogs, you got maybe a record or two on the charts and a fabulous, friz job and white suit, you got Linda Ronstadt’s band (Swampwater) to back you up and 15 year old girls are going batshit and running away to your commune but you still can t get Bob Dylan to play concerts with you? You ask your old man legend to up and die after only a 15 year wait, get Arthur Penn to film his death on lots of neat angled shots, get a whole bunch of columns written up about how ole Woody walked down the dusty roads and get all the folkio-socialist-new world community bibbity bobbity boos to hold a hoot down at Carnegie Hall and you know fucking well Dylan can’t sit this one out, kids or no kids peeing on his pants.

Well that’s what they did and Columbia and Warner’s just happened to be on hand to record the whole thing. Part One is on Columbia and Part Two is on Warner’s. I gave my copy of Part Two away because Country Joe was on it and so was Joan Baez, but that’s a whole other review, and neither, not one of them appear on this record.

What’s apparent immediately is that Dylan and Arlo are prepared for this, they’ve been rehearsing for weeks and got their bands together and got the competition beat so cold it almost don’t seem fair.

Dylan sings his ass off and is backed and raved behind by the Band, and they even get to sing too, that’s why I kept my copy of this album. “Grand Coulee Dam” is the finest cut, and also one of the best songs recorded here. Also, Dylan messes around with the chords and melody, and he’s entitled to shit like that, especially when he pulls it off like this. “I Ain’t Got No Home” is strangely reminiscent of the version of “Days of 49” from the terrible Self Portrait album, but with the power and raunch that that cut never had, and “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt” is a political pleaser about FDR’s funkiness, and done nice too.

Arlo gets his turn on “Do Re Me” where Swampwater, one of the wimpiest bands you could hope to hear when they record their own records, pulls some fine moves. “Oklahoma Hills” is all right too. And if all those were put on one side you’d have a pretty good album, Arlo trying to outdo Dylan, and Dylan, not needing to, busting ass. But Columbia stuck in lots of narration by Will Geer and Robert Ryan in a kind of Hal Holbrook Meets The Moody Blues grandstand play. And as if that weren’t bad enough, they dug up Odetta, whom we all remember from her debut on the David Frost show, doing the shittiest version of “Rambling Round Your Town” since Captain Sno-flake turned folkie. Pete Seeger pleases all the moms and dads •with his ‘58 version of “Curly Headed Baby,” but gets his cake stolen by bang-bang Richie Havens playing five minutes and couple of seconds of “Vigilante Man.” And, to bring in a little Women’s Lib, Judy Collins does “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” exactly the way she did it with Chad Mitchell and Mitch Greenhill on Hootenanny in 1962. And there’s great liner notes inside about how Woody lives on and the music is blowing in the wind, and if you don’t believe them, you’re right.

Brian Cullman