325. Jerry Lee Lewis, "All Killer No Filler!"

 

There's a scene in the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic where young Johnny is playing a show and is up right after Jerry Lee Lewis.  In a brief, memorable moment, Jerry Lee comes offstage and snarls "Nobody follows the Killer" to Johnny.  (It's at the end of this clip, which is worth watching.)

Fun fact: Jerry Lee was played by Waylon Payne, son of Willie Nelson's former guitarist Jody Payne and singer Sammi Smith.  Waylon is a country artist in his own right, and just released an album this year with the Fiona Apple-esque title Blue Eyes, The Harlot, The Queer, The Pusher & Me.  It's actually really good!  (Check out "Sins of the Father," for example.)

But I digress.  We're here to talk about this album, an anthology, really, that appears to roughly trace Lewis's career chronologically from the Sun sessions and early rockabilly like "Crazy Arms" and "It'll Be Me," up through his much longer country career, and his (not great) attempts to recapture that early fire in the 80's.  

Things were going great for Jerry Lee until he really fucked up in 1958 by marrying his 13-year-old cousin.  There is no "it was a different time" gloss on this; everyone in 1958 thought it was gross as hell too.  (That wife, Myra Gale Brown, went on to have what seems to be a happy life and became a real estate agent in Atlanta.)  Lewis had to lie low for a few years and eventually resurrected his career as a country artist.  

All that being said, and putting aside how problematic Lewis' life has been, this is a really enjoyable album!  I was (very) pleasantly surprised.  I happen to like that 70's-sounding country, and there's a bunch of it here.  One absolute gem is "What's Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)," which is absolutely what you think it's about:

It's late and she's waiting
And I know I should go home
But ev'ry time I start to leave
They play another song
Then someone buys another round
And with every drink or three
What Made Milwaukee Famous
Has made a fool out of me.

"I'll Find It Where I Can" sounds so much like a Waylon Jennings song I'm surprised it's not.  And "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone," a countrybilly raveup that seems ahead of its time for 1971 but who knows.

There's some weird shit too.  Check out "It'll Be Me:"

Well, if you hear somebody knocking on your door
If you see something crawling across the floor
Baby, it'll be me and I'll be looking for you
If you see a head a-peeping from a crawdad hole
If you see somebody climbing up a telephone pole
Baby, it'll be me and I'll be looking for you

Yikes, Jerry, you're making me uncomfortable.  And don't get me started on "Meat Man," a dirty country-soul number that for some reason failed to catch on as a single.

NEVERTHELESS, I can and do recommend this collection for those who enjoy the familiar ("Whole Lotta Shakin'") the unfamiliar but great, and the unfamiliar but weird.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? I still haven't sorted out my feelings about whether big collections like this (and that 4-disc or whatever Phil Spector monster we saw earlier) should be on this list at all, but if we're including them, then yes.