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Lehman Center for the Performing Arts, New York July 3, 2001 By C. Bottomley When Danny & the Juniors declared "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay" in 1958, they didn't think it through. The music might be deathless, but its practitioners aren't. So the question that faced the crowd of rockers, retirees, and curious pop fiends packing this Bronx concrete bunker was simple: Did the show offer music or memories? Jerry Lee Lewis, admittedly, has packed an inordinate amount of living into his lifetime. Only two weeks ago he was in the hospital with a collapsed lung. So his All-Star Band warmed up the audience with an appropriate run-through of "Sick and Tired" before the Killer himself stalked onstage. With Lewis hunched in a black sharkskin suit and flaming red silk shirt, it was easy to see why the producers of the '60s rock musical Catch My Soul cast him as Iago. Even at 66, he still radiates a malevolent energy. Jerry Lee's fingers ran over his piano keys like a necrophiliac caressing a corpse, getting down to business on "Roll Over Beethoven." His piano still pumps, but in his twilight years, Jerry prefers the grim comfort of Gothic country balladry. A funereal "You Win Again" preceded the boogie-woogie romp of "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee," and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" sounded like a postcard from someone who had been there but really wasn't that impressed. Those who remember Lewis as the man with the 14-year-old cousin bride chuckled as the lascivious baritone snuggled with his trademark soprano tinkles on "Sweet Little Sixteen." His fingers danced like a spider for the mandatory "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On" and "Great Balls of Fire." But the line that echoed long after he uncertainly kicked over his piano stool was from the cry of Job of "Trouble in Mind": "The sun's gonna shine on Jerry Lee's doorstep one of these days." How long, one wondered, could a man wait? For Little Richard, every day is blessed with sunshine. In fact, his cup runneth over so much that his band features two of everything - bass, drums, guitars, saxes - and he's confident that if he whips out the hits at some point during his hour-long freak show, people will go home happy. The real Richard Penniman Experience is about basking in the glow of the self-proclaimed "Architect of Rock 'n' Roll" himself. "I'm so real," the gold-clad Richard proclaimed in between ejaculations of "Shut up!" and excursions around the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There" and Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill." "I've been real all my life." To prove it, he climbed up on his piano, invited the heaviest members of the audience onstage to wiggle their cellulite to Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock & Roll," and delivered a soliloquy to a bottle of Gatorade. "I wanna be like Mike," he wearily dreamt. This is showmanship of a sort, but showmanship that teeters between being in the presence of a legend and wondering if you're locked in a room with a madman. I suspect Little Richard appreciates the balance. Helpers distributed photographs of the pianist while he played "Bama Lama Bama Loo," and Richard lit up whenever an audience member announced that they were from Georgia. The former dishwasher at the Macon bus station would excitedly rattle off a list of town names, suddenly lost in reverie. When it came to performing some of the greatest songs of the 20th century, however, Little Richard declared that rock 'n' roll was alive and well and living in the Bronx. The very existence of "Tutti Frutti" could topple totalitarian regimes, even if Richard let his trumpeter sing the first verse before, with that eternal whoop, he claimed the song for himself. "Not Pat Boone, but bam boom," he chided. Unlike his white-bucked bowdlerizer, Richard knows rock 'n' roll is one step away from pure exultation. Stuck in a cycle of self-promotion in a world that threatens to forget his greatness, however, the singer may have found that past glories are the only things worth getting excited about. |
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