Not too long ago, even just 10 years ago, Jerry Lee Lewis treated songs as if they didn’t matter. In concerts at times he sped them up, slowed them down, abandoned them in the middle, acted disdainful of them.
Jerry Lee Lewis at B. B. King’s on Saturday night.
Mr. Lewis, now 72, comes from the age of venal managers, rotten publishing deals and payola, when any copyrighted song was an opportunity to rob an artist. It’s appropriate for him to feel that he’s bigger than a song. But more than that, the best part of him is broader and deeper than any copyrightable details of songcraft and performance.
The songs he’s famous for — “Great Balls of Fire,” “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” “Breathless,” “High School Confidential” — contain adequate boogie-woogie piano and nonsense lyrics about nerves and desires gone crazy, sung in a weirdly steady and droning voice, like an animal trainer’s. He is a virtuoso of the upper hand, practicing rock ’n’ roll as a system of commands. To wind up listeners, he has pointed them this way and then that way, calmly dominating the songs, letting them complete a hearing only when he wanted them to.
So it was disappointing to hear him finish every single song at B. B. King’s Blues Club & Grill on Saturday. It was almost as if he had given up the game, although sound problems weren’t helping. Mr. Lewis was at sea: He couldn’t hear his voice or his piano.
The situation was brought to the attention of someone offstage but never fixed. At one point Kenneth Lovelace, Mr. Lewis’s rhythm guitarist for 41 years, relayed an answer from the sound technician to his boss. “Well, if that’s all he can do, that’s all he can do,” Mr. Lewis responded, mellow and accommodating, un-Killer-like.
This was a typical touch-the-hem-of-his-garment show. Mr. Lewis’s band ran through four songs before the main attraction slowly took the stage in an untucked dress shirt, black jeans and shiny black cowboy boots. His hands shook a bit; his face has become full and wattled. His hair, gray now, remains wavy and striking.
He fished from his pool of old honky-tonk and rock ’n’ roll songs: Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” Hank Williams’s “You Win Again,” Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms.” From his new repertory he played “Before the Night Is Over,” which he recorded in a duet with B. B. King on his recent album, “Last Man Standing.” It was all too functional.
Then, at last, there were a few flashes of incompletion or disjunction. He spent a while in Charlie Rich’s “Don’t Put No Headstone on My Grave” and changed tempo twice, from a slow shuffle to a fast boogie-woogie and back again. He played “Hadacol Boogie” from the album, starting it up with the words of “Johnny B. Goode” but changing his mind; then he turned to “Johnny B. Goode” in earnest, lunging into it without warning and cranking the tempo up a little bit after he began, making the band catch up with him. (As he did, he didn’t blink, move his head or look at his piano.) This was good: He was determining things, disciplining the songs a little.
But it was soon over. He sang “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” weakly kicked over his piano bench, flashed a thin-lipped smile and made his gingerly exit.
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