Music: A Few Rounds with the Killer

Twelve new records celebrate Jerry Lee Lewis 'glory days

He knows what he is. "I'm a rompin', stompin', piano-playin' son of a bitch. A mean son of a bitch. But a great son of a bitch." Here's to you, then, Jerry Lee Lewis, unreconstructed rocker and mean-mouthed, sweet-souled Louisiana country singer. A new twelve-album set, Jerry Lee Lewis: The Sun Years, covers the glory years from 1956 to 1963 and is assembled with the kind of reverence and archival zeal usually reserved for the cantatas of a J.S. Bach. The collection, sold in this country for under $100, is marketed by Charly Records Ltd. of London.

Not even Elvis, whose long and mighty shadow so often shaded Jerry Lee, has ever been so honored. Presley records have become fairly random collections of ill-assorted tracks. Albert Goldman's 1981 biographical pillaging gut-shot the King on the first page and left him to bleed for 590 more. Jerry Lee, still touring, still recording, still hellacious, has lucked into a much better deal. Two years ago, Nick Tosches wrote a definitive rock biography, Hellfire, that plunged right to the glowing white heart of Lewis' Pentecostal furies and set down forever all of Jerry Lee's unassuaged demons. Now come these records, 209 cuts in all, and each a great ball of fire.

Rock has produced a few top piano thumpers — Fats Domino, Huey Smith — but none burned with the passion of Jerry Lewis. Sam Phillips, who had started Sun Records in Memphis, sold the contract of his major star, Elvis Presley, to RCA in 1955 for the then unheard-of sum, for a new singer, of $35,000, and he was shopping around for a replacement. Jerry Lee, 21, looked like just the boy. Nicknamed the Killer, to his perpetual displeasure, Lewis sang country, which was not then considered commercially lot. But he also played mean boogie-woogie. He would sit down on the edge of the bench, right leg stuck out stiff, a habit acquired from practicing when he had a Broken hip. He would whip up a heavy rhythm with his left hand and play such a furious melody with his right that the tune would beg for mercy. The sound was backwoods, roadhouse. Phillips listened to all of ten seconds of Lewis' audition tape of Crazy Arms. "I can sell that," he said.

That tape instantly became Lewis' first single. Crazy Arms kicks off The Sun Years, along with End of the Road, which contains the spooky, defiant and haunting lines "Well, the way is dark,/ Night is long,/ I don't care if I never get home!/ I'm waitin' at the end of the road!" The new albums contain 57 songs originally issued on Sun, as well as seven others, initially slicked up with overdubbing, heard here "raw"; 77 more tracks, released pretty much at random after the Sun catalogue was sold in 1969, are presented in original mono sound; there are also 60 never-issued alternate takes of songs like Great Balls of Fire and Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On, and eight cuts never released before, including a lubricious version of the Pat Boone groaner, Love Letters in the Sand.