Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found Book

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Hilarious!!!

[peterchecksfield]

YEEEHHH you're a real friend

So is she!

[jayhawks]

OK (warning nudity blah blah blah)...

http://www.nakedinthanet.com/gallery/ma ... ewsIndex=1

...she reads a lot, didn`t she?!

http://www.nakedinthanet.com/gallery/ma ... temId=5886

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http://www.countrystandardtime.com/d/bo ... asp?xid=55

Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found
By By Joe Bonomo
Continuum Books, 208 pages, $19.95 hard cover
Reviewed by Andy Turner, November 2009

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Have you ever left a concert buzzing and beaming, sweaty and soul-fried, awakened, made a true believer - an overwhelming feeling in your gut that you just witnessed musical history? Joe Bonomo certainly has and he's never forgotten. It's with this spirit he skillfully investigates what some call one of the greatest rock-n-roll performances of all time, Jerry Lee Lewis' April 4, 1964 show at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany.
The resulting album, "Live at the Star-Club Hamburg," despite being highly revered by fans and other musicians alike, is currently not in print in the U.S. (it is available from Germany-based Bear Family on compact disc and on a newly released vinyl version). The performance, dubbed the "very essence of rock & roll" by allmusic.com, serves as the centerpiece of Bonomo's book, which follows Lewis mostly from the period after his 1958 wedding scandal to a pre-teen cousin through his success on the country charts in the late 1960s and early '70s.

A professor at Northern Illinois University and author of a wildly entertaining book on The Fleshtones, Bonomo is a capable researcher and engaging writer who often shares his experiences as a music fan to good effect. His introduction to Lewis as a pre-teen in the 1970s came through a budget-line LP compilation with a lifeless, re-recorded version of Breathless that left Bonomo with little appreciation of the Killer, who he decided was "strictly Fifties and strictly out of it." He would later learn, of course, to appreciate Jerry Lee, but the youthful experience helps him consider the theme of "sincerity" and Lewis' "battles" with it, which he explores throughout "Lost and Found."

Bonomo also recalls great live shows he's attended from the Rolling Stones to the New Bomb Turks and the small number of great live albums he's listened to. He writes, "Until a live album ... can replicate tinnitus or a chest full of illicit smoke or the helpless urge to grope the painted-on Jordache ass of the girl standing in front of you, a live album risks failure." The celebrated Star-Club performance is detailed extensively from the seedy section of Hamburg where it occurred to the career of Lewis' backing band that night, the Nashville Teens.

Enlightening interviews abound including producer Jerry Kennedy, the recently departed Shelby Singleton and Jim Dickinson, and contemporary artists such as Dave Alvin, John Doe and Jim (Reverend Horton Heat) Heath. The Killer himself would not agree to be interviewed for "Lost and Found," and while his audacious voice is certainly missed, Bonomo has managed a thoroughly exciting and thoughtful story that should delight both Jerry Lee Lewis fans and anyone who's had their world shook up by a live performance.

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/go ... le1482730/



Real rock and roll makes you do things tonight you can't believe tomorrow morning you actually did. If it's not dangerous, in other words, it's not the real thing. And in spite of 50 years of artistically degenerative dilution, wanton trivializing commercialization and simple overexposure, the best of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis' music remains dangerous. Just like people need to pray in order to remain in contact with what they consider holy, it's just that we need to be reminded occasionally.

Two recent volumes from Continuum Books (publishers of the popular 33 1/3 album studies series) attempt to spread the good news anew, and if neither David Kirby's Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n' Roll nor Joe Bonomo's Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found will make many new converts out of a public conditioned to believe that Tutti Frutti and Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On are at, best, harmless oldies, their authors can't be accused of apostasy or even slackened spirits. To ask any writer to convey the enduring anarchic energy of the Georgia Peach and the Killer's finest music is to request a literary performance of nearly equally savage artistry.
Kirby's subtitle is only slightly hyperbolic. Whichever song was in fact the first rock and roll record (a maddeningly nebulous, impossibly indeterminate title for such an inherently evolutionary form anyway) – whether Rocket 88, That's Alright Mama, Richard's own Tutti Frutti, or some lesser known tune lost to the musical mists of time – the ingredients that came to make up what we call “rock and roll” were there from the beginning of Little Richard's career. Like every song that's a contender for rock and roll's prime-mover status, Tutti Frutti, Richard's first hit from 1955, was basically blues with a beat performed by a young man accustomed to singing gospel music. And like almost every genre-shattering artistic breakthrough, its originators had very little idea what they were doing.

“Tutti Fruitti, Good Booty, “ a paen to anal intercourse that had been a staple of Richard's stage act in low-end black nightclubs and white frat-parties where he'd work in drag for drunken frat boys, was not on the agenda the first day Richard recorded for Specialty Records. After a fruit(i)less morning recording conventional blues with which no one was particularly impressed, however, the crew retired to the nearby Dew Drop Inn where Richard, always the ham, commandeered the piano and proceeded to unleash the most ribald tune he knew on the assembled onlookers.

The song was subsequently cleaned up lyrically, but untouched musically, and “A-Wop-Bop-A-Lu-Bop-A-Wop-Bam-Boom!” the world of popular music was never the same. (On hearing Tutti Frutti for the first time, Keith Richards claimed “it was as though the world changed suddenly from monochrome to Technicolor.”) Neither was Little Richard Penniman ever the same. The poor, black, homosexual from Macon, Georgia, enjoyed the fruits of his musical revolution – the money, the sex, the drugs, the fame – as much as much as anyone who ever grew up underprivileged, deeply religious and sexually repressed. Even if it wasn't the best book on Little Richard yet published, Charles White's The Life and Times of Little Richard would be necessary reading just for the X-rated story of Little Richard, his 17-year-old girlfriend and Buddy Holly backstage at the Paramount Theatre. Peggy Sue had no idea what she was missing.

Jerry Lee Lewis's musical incubation period included blues and gospel as well, but also country and western, in particular the songs of Hank Williams. The first country-rocker wasn't Gram Parsons, it was the Killer. The flipside of 1957's seminal Great Balls of Fire was Williams's hardcore honky-tonk You Win Again. Lewis's shows were just as riotous as Little Richard's (he didn't wear mascara or eye-liner or perform splits and leaps on stage, but he did use his feet to pound the piano and once set his instrument on fire when Chuck Berry refused to let him close a show, exiting the smoking stage with, “Try and follow that, Chuck”), but there was always something slightly sinister about the Killer even at his happiest, when on-stage.
Watch a YouTube video of each man in his prime, and while Little Richard is wild-eyed and manic, it's a joyous energy that lifts off the screen, not unlike an enraptured Baptist minister at his most beatifically overwhelmed. Lewis, on the other hand, is almost as equally animated, but his movements are aggressive rather than merely hyper-energetic, and there's a not-so-subtle hostility in his eyes, as if the audience is there for his pleasure, and not the other way around.

Opening for the Doors once in the late 1960s (Jim and the boys were all big fans), Lewis told the mostly indifferent audience of nearly 20,000, “I hope ya'll get cancer.” Even his chemical and licentious excesses seem desperate rather than Dionysian: countless arrests for DUI and disorderly conduct; an arrest for shooting a band member in the chest; several divorces and mysteriously dead wives; frequent hospitalization for chronic chemical abuse.

Kirby and Bonomo both hit the majority of the highlights of their respective subjects' creative existence with enthusiasm and accuracy, although most of the fascinating life story of each is ignored. Particularly for artists like Richard and Lewis, whose religious consciences, for example, have frequently clashed with their musical careers – each quit show business more than once to join fundamentalist Christian ministries – such omissions are unfortunate.

The best book on Jerry Lee Lewis is still Nick Tosches' incendiary Hellfire, a case of one talented artist crawling inside the uncomfortable skin of another. And the already mentioned The Life and Times of Little Richard remains the superior Richard volume not because of Charles White's musical observations, but because of the frequent, extended and extremely candid interviews with Little Richard himself. The British novelist Ford Maddox Ford wrote, “For it is your hot love for your art, not your dry delvings in the dry bones of ana and philologies, that will enable you to convey to others your strong passion.” Hot love. Sounds like a song Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis would have sung.

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http://journalstar.com/entertainment/mu ... 03286.html

BY L. KENT WOLGAMOTT / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Wednesday, March 31, 2010 11:25 pm | No Comments Posted
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If I were forced to choose just one record to define rock 'n' roll, I'd most likely pick Jerry Lee Lewis' "Live at the Star-Club," an album drawn from a pair of incendiary sets Lewis and the Nashville Teens raced through on April 5, 1964.
Recorded in the legendary club on Hamburg, Germany's notorious Reeperbahn, "Live at the Star-Club" does the seemingly impossible, capturing what it was like to be inside the packed sweat box while The Killer tore through the show, the Teens struggling to keep up with his pounding piano and wild-man vocals.
"Live at the Star-Club" has been long revered as one of the best live albums ever recorded. Shockingly, it's out of print. That's right, in the digital era when seemingly every album ever made can be snapped up in an instant, you can't get the greatest live rock 'n' roll record.
Well, that's not entirely true. In February, "Live at the Star-Club" got a limited reissue on vinyl, where it goes for a pricey $28. But you can't get it new on CD. Even more criminal, it's not available for download anywhere I looked, including among the 250-plus Jerry Lee Lewis albums in various forms on iTunes.
Somehow, that's fitting for Lewis, whose career has been characterized by flashes of brilliance followed by long periods of public indifference.
But it also makes "Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost And Found," Joe Bonomo's new book about The Killer, even more powerful and necessary.
Unlike almost the entirety of the library of Lewis tomes, Bonomo doesn't concentrate on Lewis' scandalous bigamous marriage to his 13-year-old cousin that derailed him at the peak of his rock 'n' roll career, or on his self-destructive personal life.
Instead, Bonomo writes about the music, using "Live at the Star-Club" as his pivot point.
Chapter one of the 208-page book is titled "Lost" and delineates Lewis' early days at Sun Records. That's where he produced the seminal rock 'n' roll of "Great Balls of Fire" and "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" before seeing his career go off the rails after just two years.
Then comes a chapter called "Found," which is primarily about "Live at the Star-Club." It tells the story of Lewis' European tour preceding the Hamburg show, delving into the Nashville Teens and breaking down the recording itself, which was assembled out of order from two sets into 40 minutes of primal mayhem and heartfelt beauty that has endured for more than four decades.
The next chapter, "Down The Line," offers a look at Lewis' ascension to country stardom in the 1970s, another sadly unappreciated element of Jerry Lee's career, especially by Nashville, where The Killer remains too scary even at 75.
I've been a major Jerry Lee fan since I first encountered him on "Shindig!" and other TV shows in the 1960s, and I've seen The Killer a few times live, including a great late 1980s performance in Grand Island where I sat on the floor about five feet from the piano. I've read most of the books about him and will now put "Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found" on the indispensable list. It's one of the best books about the man and his music.
Reading about and listening to Jerry Lee (I've got "Live at the Star-Club" blasting on my iPod right now) also brings up a show of note that's coming to the Zoo Bar on April 18.
That's when Jason D. Williams will headline Rock 'n' Roll Rumble 5. For decades, pumpin' piano man Williams has been "imitating" Lewis, playing Killer-style rock 'n' roll with all the intensity and flamboyance of the original. I'm generally not a fan of that kind of thing, but Williams is great - the next best thing to seeing Jerry Lee himself.

[peterchecksfield]

Apparantly the book is now available with corrections.

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http://blog.billkopp.com/?p=663

Joe's book reviewed in this blog

In the 21st century, it’s a bit of a challenge for a writer – even a very good one – to write a book about one of rock’n'roll’s early leaders. Because, of course, it’s all been done before. What could anyone possibly have new to say about such an oft-covered artist as Jerry Lee Lewis?

Quite a bit, if the writer is Joe Bonomo. I first discovered his writing while researching my own Fleshtones interview/feature: I read his book, Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band. I was mightily impressed with that tome, and on several levels. One, it was quite in-depth, not an airport terminal read but rather an exhaustive chronicle of the band. Two, it was revelatory. For an authorized bio, it went into some pretty personal areas. Bonomo handled those deftly, maintaining journalistic ethics while not unduly dishing dirt.

Yet when I learned about Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, I wondered if a similar approach would work, or would even be possible. Lewis isn’t known for giving open access (or any access) to writers, so how could Bonomo get material? A lesser writer would merely rehash and rephrase the work of authors previous: hey, I’ve seen it done, and often. And in this case, there’s good material to work with. Lewis’ so-called “child bride” Myra Lewis wrote Great Balls of Fire in 1982, and the book was developed into a film in ‘89. (As luck would have it, Myra’s co-writer was Murray Silver, who would go on to influence me to no end when I took his college class American Popular Music: Stephen Foster to Present in the mid 80s. Silver went on to serve as technical adviser for the biopic).

There was also Jerry Lee’s own autobiography, as well as the inimitable Nick Tosches‘ work Hellfire. But I never expected Joe Bonomo to simply regurgitate those works. And he did not. Instead he’s crafted a look at the critical rise and fall (and rise, and fall) of Lewis’ career. And he’s nestled this chronology within a personal story of his own discovery of Lewis’ music. To many readers of a certain age (those who were pre-teens at the dawn of the 1970s) Bonomo’s story will likely ring familiar and true.

It’s walking a fine line to write a book that (a) tells the story one wants to tell and (b) uses lovely and descriptive language to do it but (c) writes in a way that doesn’t attract undue attention to the writing style. Bonomo wins on all three counts with this book. Here’s a representative sample of the heartfelt, rhapsodic and colorful writing found in this book’s pages. Describing Lewis’ early trio on the 1958 track “Lewis Boogie,” Bonomo writes:

As is the case with Jerry Lee’s great early Sun recordings, Van Eaton and Janes don’t so much accompany Jerry Lee as they come along for the ride – the rhythm track swings beautifully, and Van Eaton’s and Janes’ participation is crucial to the sound and vibe of the tune, much in the way that the shotgun-rider and backseat clowns are crucial for any drunken joyride.

Damn, I love that imagery: you can almost hear the music while reading the pages.

Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found mostly concerns itself with Lewis’ landmark album Live! At the Star Club Hamburg in 1964, and with Lewis’ eventual turn toward country and western music toward the end of that decade. But those major turning points are placed into the needed context – musically, chronologically, etc. – so that they make sense. Though Bonomo’s story is ultimately a personal one, the reader need not be well-versed in Lewis’ life story to gain a great deal from reading.

In fact, hours spent with Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found (as of late 2011, out in paperback) will almost surely send the reader to his or her choice of media to listen to the Killer’s best work. And ultimately, that’s one of Bonomo’s primary goals with this book.

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From Joe's facebook page-
Via H-D Fischer.