The man from Mercury is nervous, very nervous. You can see it easily enough as he paces around Steve Cropper's TMI Studios in Memphis. Up and down the hall, a few laps around the studio itself, up the stairs and into the control room. With judicious use of the elbows, he's even able to pace among the 30 or so people packed in here. Where's the Killer? Sessions were supposed to start 45 minutes ago; where is he?

It's a big album after all, the Killer's latest assault on the new rock audience. It's going to be called Southern Roots, and will be all Southern songs played by all Southern musicians. Carl Perkins will be here, and Charlie Rich... and Tommy Cogbill and Chips Moman and some of the old MGs. Huey Meaux, the Crazy Cajun, is producing. He was responsible for all kinds of hits in the primal days of rock "n" roll, as well as the early careers of Johnny Winter and Doug Sahm and carloads of great music you've probably never heard unless you've spent time in the TexasLouisiana border area. Meaux is prorftising Doug Sahm, who in turn is promising Dr. John, for these sessions, and who knows who else might show? There's a lot riding on this album. So where's the Killer?

Actually, the man from Mercury knows better. The Killer operates on his own sense of time just as surely as he operates on his own sense of everything else. Last week he was out in California taping a Sonny and Cher Show spot and a dramatic role in Police Story. He got back in Memphis three days ago, and from all reports hasn't been near a bed or away from a bottle since coming home. He did rush the sessions a few days by cutting some stuff with his own band on impulse first thing when he got home. As for tonight, let's just keep our fingers crossed and hope for small miracles.

The musicians below are setting up and checking levels with the engineer, and it sure looks like the right band for the job. With Duck Dunn on bass, A1 Jackson on drums, and Steve Cropper on guitar, there's all the MG's except Booker T. The second guitarist is Perkins, and on organ is James Brown. No, not that James Brown, though just hearing the name is enough to provoke some amusing speculation as to what might happen if it were. This James Brown is from A1 Green's band, and is about the only one among all these thin white Memphis musicians and studio technicians who'se not wearing a flower print shirt with the tails hanging out. They're working on Gene Simmons" "Haunted House," which Meaux wants to cut first tonight because the Killer's so ambivalent about cutting it at all. It was the favorite song of his mother, who died a couple years ago.

For now, the real show is up in the control room. Papa (Elmo) Lewis is here with a styrofoam cup that stays full until he nods off. He's with the son of his current girlfriend. "Shay, were am I? Is thish a recording shtudio?" Papa is shouting as the band runs through the tune. "Shay, is thish that Memphish shound?" He is also carrying on a debate with his companion as to who's in the most suitable condition to call home.

7 can cut something I never heard before. . . and it's always a hit. "

Then we have a youngish woman in a white wig who's convinced the Killer wants his son to marry her daughter. When she is not flashing the V sign and blowing a kiss to whatever musician's eye she can catch, she is frenetically speaking in tongues well beyond anybody's comprehension. There is a Goodyear blimp of an old lady; when she finds out that the guy casually picking those stinging blues runs is Carl Perkins, she calls out for "Blue Suede Shoes" every time she can be heard over the din. The big round Southern belle in the sundress is Bettye Burger, who books acts like Carla and Rufus Thomas, and is a Memphis institution in her own right. The tow-headed drummer from Bobby and the Spot Lites, house band at Hernando's Hideaway in Memphis, is there to pick up some chops from Jackson. ("That spook can play!")

There's a guy with a haircut that out-Haldemans Haldeman who claims to be here covering for TV Guide. "I wrote a book about Jack Greene and Jeannie Seeley," he's mumbling. "And next I'm gonna do one about Jerry Lewis. It'll be called The Life and Times of Jerry Lee Lewis. I may not be Mark Twain, but I can sure write a book about an ol" country boy like Jerry Lewis. Then I'll do Country Charlie Pride and then Freddie Hart... Say, are you from Playboy? How do you get to take pictures for Playboy, the naked girls? I'm a photographer... got an El Dorado. . . drove it out here from LA to Atlanta, Georgia, then up for the Sessions. .. be drivin" it back next week, too!"

Where do they all come from? Ask the young girl wearing the steady ring on a chain around her neck. She and her sister, who has a MIA—POW sticker on her school notebook, were just walking by the studio with their parents when they heard music inside and decided to come in and see what they could see.

Finally the word comes, an hour Killer's on his way. You could tell by the scene in front of his business office out by the airpprt, where he's been going over songs all day. A fl6et of Cadillacs, with the Killer's own new half-block-long white Lincoln Continental in the lead, has just left.

You can tell when they arrive, too, as the tiny control room suddenly seems twice as small. Audrey Winters, country music gossip columnist and Nashville woman about town, said later that at one point she counted 37 people in the room.

But still no Killer. Meaux, who's the only guy in the room that seems to have any idea of what's going on, isn't worried, but Charlie Fach, Mercury's East Coast A & R head and the album's executive producer, is. He talks it over with the Killer's right-hgnd man, Judd Phillips, who arrived in the Caddy procession. "He shinks I shkrewed it up wish all theesh people," Judd admits. "I don't know what I'm doing. I couldn't find my ash wish bosh hands on the flashlight."

Everyone presses against the glass window across the front of the control room as the Killer emerges from the office where he's been fuming. His eyes, normally slit, seem ready to pop right out of their sockets as he strides stoneyfaced to the piano. He unscrews the plastic sombrero lid from his bottle of Ei Toro tequila, pours a drink which he places on the piano, and puts the bottle on the spare piano behind him. His face breaks out in a big smile as he stalks around the room greeting each of the musicians, but when the obligatory salutations are over, his expression returns to a steady smolder. The piano is directly below the control room window, so only those in the front row can see him work. Every vein in his arms is bluging as he and the band punch out a tough take of "Haunted House;" his music is as good as his mood is foul.

. When the Killer walks upstairs to hear the playback, everyone vies for his attention. (Hey, Killer!" "Over here, Killer!" "Damn, Killer, how ya bin") It's an amazing spectacle, this man being pulled 40 different ways without showing a stretch mark. That fabled temper never flares; he simply acknowledges those he cares to and ignores the rest. It's as if he made a pact with himself that since he demands this much attention most of the time, he will accept it even whfen he doesn't want it.

Next comes "Honey Hush," which also requires one take. Everyone in the studio knows this Big Joe Turner song, it Paving been one of the most popular in the South in the early 50s. Perkins, shaking his head and grinning like a schoolkid after his first kiss, picks out the solo.

"Wow can we hear "Blue Suede Shoes"?" askes the blimp woman when it's over.

"Sorry, ma'am, can't do it right now," sighs TMI engineer Ronnie Capone, whose patience is matched only by that of Meaux.

Undaunted, she turns her attention to Papa Lewis, who has fallen asleep with his mouth open. So she hones in on the drummer from Bobby and the Spot Lites, who is in no condition to resist. Linda Gail Lewis, the Killer's sister and an unbeatable country singer herself, has arrived. She surveys the room with dismay and remains standoffish all night. A Qnearmed man named Paul is waging a running battle with his wife that Will continue throughout the week. And can it be? The TV Guide writer has found me again. I thought I could lose him in a crowd that big, but it's a small room...

"I am a Playboy photographer," he claims this time, "took pictures of all the naked girls down in Atlanta, Georgia. I need the money. My wife's a model and I pay a private eye $3000 a month to watch her... Say, how could I get my wife a job as a Playboy model... you'd know... she makes $150,000 a year, y'know... I gotta go outside, check my El Dorado, make sure no one touched it... cuz I'm getting married next month — Spooky Teeth an" Jerry Butler gonna play at my wedding, you can come if you want — and I don't want nothin" to happen to it. .."

Oh no, now it's the "Blue Suede Shoes" blimp. When she wishes to address you, she reaches under your chin, grabs your opposite cheek, and yanks you "towards her mouth. When she's finished, she releases her vise grip and leaves you to rub your cheek and wipe out your ear.

Downstairs, it's not going much better. "Blueberry Hill" requires five takes, and the Killer changes his part so much each time that the band has trouble following. Finally the Killer declares the last take was a "rockin" mutha-humpa"

his favorite phrase of late — and that's all for tonight.

"My generation was the strong one. We made it. "

Boy, is that all. The session was scheduled to go until morning, but this was the first slow song of the night and the Killer had to decompress so much to get it out right that when he's finished, you can almost see the energy gushing but of him. When that goes, everything goes, including the will to continue, and he looks like death warmed over as he comes up to hear the playback.

"Papa Thibodeaux, where's Papa Thibodeaux," he is moaning in reference to Meaux, the last person here the Killer still addresses as an acquaintance rather than as a faceless audience.

"Boudreaux, over here," Meaux replies with the honorary Cajun name he has bestowed upon the Killer for this occasion. "Boudreaux, you gotta go home and get yourself some rest, man."

Downstairs, Perkins is quietly packing his guitar and slipping out the side door. He never returns. Tony Joe White drops in a couple nights later, but none of the other promised heavies ever do show. As it turns out, they aren't needed anyhow.

But the next afternoon, up in his hotel room, Meaux will shake his head and say, "I been knowin" Jerry for 15-20 years; we ain't never worked together before, but we from the same part of the bayou and we jacked with each other a lot before. And you know what? Last night was the first time I ever seen Jerry Lee Lewis gettin" upset by the number people hangin" ontg him. It drug him down bad"

That's Jerry Lee Lewis for you — a bundle of contradictions, but the reality bears a striking resemblance to the image, and it's all right out there in the open for anyone to see. You can take it or leave it, for it matters little to Jerry Lee. He's laughing all the way to the bank, and from the bank to the liquor store, and from the liquor store to most anyplace in the world where there's people who want to see him.

It's been that way since Jerry Lee and his pumping piano came roaring out of tiny Feriday, Louisiana, in 1956 via Sun Records. "Crazy Arms," his first record, did well, but next came "Whole Lotta Shakin" Goin" On," and Jerry Lee hasn't looked back since. He's been derailed often enough, but barriers that would stop a lesser artist cold just aren't enough to keep him down for the count.

"Whole Lotta Shakin" " topped the pop, rhythm and blues and country charts simultaneously. (So did "Blue Suede Shoes" and nothing before or since.) And there was Jerry Lee playing from on top of his piano on the Steve Allen Show, trashing it at the Brooklyn Paramount, cutting hits like "Great Balls of Fire," "High School Confidential," "Breathless," matching Elvis song for song and Little Richard ego for ego.

The boom came, of course, when he married his 13-year-old distant cousin Myra prior to a 1958 English tour. Now to a poor rural Southerner there's nothing unusual about such a marriapfi but in the rest of the Western world it's right up there near the top of the Taboo Hit Parade. The genteel English reacted with such indignation that the tour was cut short. Back home it was the same. Sun owner Sam Phillips, a notorious pennyrpincher, refused to invest any more in Jerry Lee's career to help bail him out. It was cannon fodder for the anti-rock "n" roll backlash so strong in the early days; like Chuck Berry would later, Jerry Lee took the fall for all his fellow rockers. The affair attracted attention all around the globe, and it must have sometimes seemed to Jerry Lee like it was him against the whole muthahumpin> world. In a matter of months, he went from unstoppable to unheard from; he got one record ("What'd I Say" in 1961) on the airwaves in a period about twice as long as it took him to rack up half a dozen monster hits prior to the marriage. And it wasn't until he went straight country with "Another Place, Another Time" in 1968 that he was once again on the airwaves. He had switched labels by then, but more likely the reason for his new success was a compromise with bullheaded country program directors. Record country, they said, and we'll play it; what you do in your live shows is your own business. So while he never really quit rocking, he was becoming known as a country star anyhow.

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 47.

What was he doing all that time between? Jerry Lee says it never changed, that he was out there on the road the whole time giving the people what they wanted, and that he was never fazed by the blackballing. At figures he'd say that, unlikely as it is; if his own militant brand of positive thinking has, shall we say, run amuck as he has become more secure again on the record charts, no observer who has stuck with him through the years would dare suggest that there is not method in his madness.

He's still the bad boy of music, too. He has yet to win a Country Music Associatipn Award, despite the fact that every single since "68 has gone high, if not all the ways to the top, on the charts. The official explanation is that he's not "hard cduntry," though you'd never know it from listening to any of his numerous comeback albums except The Killer Rocks On 'and The London Sessions> Besides, if Roy Clark and the incomparable Charlie Rich, this year's big CMA winners, are hard country, then what you're reading right now is the Dead Sea Scrolls. They won because they crossed over onto the pop charts, and that's what Nashville's all about these days — making the pop charts. Jerry Lee never wins because he shouts down the hallowed Roy Acuff in the middle of a lugubrious speech about mom, apple pie, the flag, and country music. He appears at CMA black-tieonly banquets decked out in a grilly pink shirt, pinstripe suit, and P.F. Keds. He goes through wives as quickly as a case of Jack Daniels and doesn't even feel guilty about it!

Awards or not, Jerry Lee is again cutting classic rock "n" roll as often as country. "I'll cut anything; it don't matter to me," he said one night. "I just love music."

The latter is one of his few understatements. It's why >yhen he's home, you can usually find him downtown at his own Nite Lighters club in the First American Bank Building, playing as though it was his last chance to appear before an audience. And he will cut just about anything, which is both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. His piano style imposes on him all the limits he needs, and within those boundaries no one has ever come close to him in excitement or inventiveness. But a song like "Whole Lotta Shakin" " probably comes along only, once a career, which is his primary musical problem. Jerry Lee could sure use another song that's his equal; as it is now, he is so superior to most of his material that the songs are all the same to him. Still, thanks in no small part to the savvy of Huey P. Meaux, this album is the best thing he's done since the Sun days. It makes the two most recent "rock revival" albums sound like warmups, and it's as good an example as you'll find of why Jerry Lee has lasted this long.

After that horrendous first night, a guard was posted at the studio door to halt intruders, and the sessions went relatively smoothly. Jerry Lee was the first one at the studio the next night; well before sessions were to begin, he was sitting calmly at the piano swigging Calvert and Coke and working out a Jimmy Donley blues called "Born to Be a Loser." According to many, including Dr. John and Jerry Lee, Donley wrote most of Fats Domino's hits, selling them at $25 a shot. Meaux had recorded the tune on Donley years ago, and while it's not exactly the image Jerry Lee likes to project of himself, even he was pleased with his version, saying it sounded real blue and yellow (amphetamine slang). Judd Phillips claimed he's been trying to convince the Killer to cut it ever since Donley committed suicide in 1963.

Judd has to be the biggest character in Jerry Lee's entourage. He was at Sun with brother Sam almost from the beginning, quitting over financial disagreements and rejoining time after time. For every dollar Sam could trim from the budget, Judd could spend 10. He joined Jerry Lee about two years ago, leaving behind a lucrative mortuary and used car business in Florence, Alabama. To most of the people involved in the sessions, Judd is the loser, goodnatured for sure, but still the hopeless drunk who "couldn't find his ash wish bosh hands on the flashlight." Jerry Lee disagrees.

"I don't know how that man does it, but he knows," Jerry says, "He's always right. He can be passed out dead drunk on the floor and he'll snap to and tell you which of five mixes is gonna be a hit. Nobody can pick hits like Judd. When 53 people had done "Bobby McGee," Judd told me I could have a hit on it and I told him he was crazy. We fought about that damn song for three days, so I finally cut the mutha-humpa to get him off my back, and there it was, a hit... 53 people done that tune and it was still a hit and Judd knew it."

The other big song that night was "Meat Man," a single-entendre blues written py Mack Vickery, one of the most rock-oriented of the New Nashville writers. Jerry Lee has taken a real fancy to Vickery lately and cut a couple more of his tunes at this session. One of them, "Bourbon Street Church" has the earmarks of an instant, country classic should anyone care to erase the horns and dub on a steel guitar. But "Meat Man" is the one everybody's excited about; amid much whooping in the control room about X-ratings, Jerry Lee's own enthusiasm for Vickery comes through as he shouts out the lyrics: "I'm a meat man/ You oughta see me eat, man."

The best show came spontaneously the next night, when he cut Sam and Dave's "Hold On, I'm Cornin" " for Meaux, even though he'd never heard the song before. While the band downstairs riffed away on it — they cut the original, remember — Jerry sat upstairs reading the lyrics to himself.

"Oh, yeah, I remember that one," Junior was exclaiming over his father's shoulder. "When I was a kid, not a kid but just gettin" to worry "bout a car and that stuff, I got a whole lot done to that tune."

" "Hold on, I'm cornin" "; that's all you gotta remember, Boudreaux," Meaux was imploring. "Just them four words, you got it yourself from there."

He did, and it took him about five minutes to get the song down. Then he walked back into the studio, but not to the piano. As his regular organist Marty Morrison slipped onto the piano bench, Jerry Lee boogalooed across the room to the voice mike. He was grinning ear to ear, jerking his arms up and down on the rhythm, and generally flipping out behind two non-stop takes, one fast and another slower one which allowed him to improvise more on the lyrics. When he finished he laughed a long, loud laugh and proclaimed the song the rockinest mutha-humpa ever.

The final day was almost blissful, the most excitement coming when Jerry and Meaux would play the dozens, bayou style, around the theme of Jerry's marriage to Myra and Huey's Mann Act (White Slave Act) bust. Wayne Jackson and his Memphis horns were there to do their final overdubbing, as was the Rust College Quartet, a black vocal group that backs Jerry Lee ' when he plavs Veeas.

A lot of great music gets buried under all that overdubbing, but at least there's \ no strings this time. Mercury and Jerry Lee both wanted the full horn section and extra guitars. Meaux gives the impression he'd prefer the basic band tracks to the final, polished product, > but he's not giving the orders. It's actually a Memphis Sound album rather than Southern Roots, the Memphis Sound having more to do with the full-grown tree than with the roots.

I hadn't planned to attempt an interview because I couldn't think of any questions he'd answer that haven't already been covered 14 zillion times. But somehow, we got to talking about obscure 50s trivia, and the next thing I knew I was being interviewed by him. We wer^ talking about drugs and long hair and all kinds of similar stuff you'd never expect to wind up discussing with Jerry Lee Lewis. It was extremely weird, and most everyone in the studio had one ear cocked in our direction while they pretended they were busy with, something else. Here I was feebly trying to justify all kinds of crap I hadn't tried justifying in years, and here he was rebutting with totally predictable arguments. It wasn't that much different from most booze-tinged debates on such cornball issues but as we kept getting further into it, I kept wonderng again if maybe this wasn't approaching the max, at which point that temper would surface. Nope, it was just a game. Jerry Lee was putting the same distance between us as he does between him and his songs, the distance that allows him to comment on what he's doing as he does it, the comment that says he doesn't really mean it (even when he does).

"My generation was the strong one," he finally said. "We made it. I'm not with that weak generation... jumping out of buildings and like that. If you don't believe me, ask Art Linkletter; you know about his daugher. "Course ol" Art tried to blame it on the Beatles. I don't believe that. I don't believe you can place the blame on any one person. I blame it on the whole mutha-humpin " generation. "

I told him half in jest that "Great Balls of Fire" started me on the road to that, even though he missed the point. Then a few minutes later, as we were all a few minutes later, as we were all walking back to our cars, I tried to slip through one last coy question: "Jerry Lee, do you think a singer tells people much about himself with the songs he records?"

"Well, now, if you're asking about me, I don't know," he replies as he stares out over my shoulder. Then his eyes focus squarely on me and he continues, "Because I can cut something I never heard before and after two or three takes, it's-a hit, Killer, it's always a hit."

And then staring back out over my shoulder, he adds, "But yeah, I spoze you'd haveta say a person tells at least a little bit about himself in any song he cuts... it all depends on how good an actor he is."