25 All-Time Greatest Sun Recordingsby Anonymous

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May 16, 2007: This is a terrific collection. Some JLL compilations focus on only his rock and roll and R&B wild side, and some on his country side, which was not always tame either. This CD focuses on both. Jerry Lee Lewis was not just a rocker and not just a country artist. He recorded an impressively varied body of work for Sun, showing he was a master in many styles, with country and Rock and Roll/R&B being only the most obvious categories, and he could remake other people's songs into his own style--which is great since his sound in some ways IS the sound of rock and roll defined. However, to treat him only as wild man or a country singer is to make him two-dimensional. This collection avoids this limiting arppoach and gives us a more 3-D picture of the man's talents. The only people who I can imagine disliking this collection are those who cannot expand their palette to include some country or some R&B, and do not want to know what they are missing. Someone having approached JLL only from the rock and roll perspective will be shocked to hear a song like "One Minute Past Eternity" where Jerry sings in the more traditional sense, and does a sensitive job of it. That song, like some of the more R&B oriented fare such as the covers of songs associated with the Drifters, Little Richard, and Ray Charles, has a chorus. It also has strings. Whether these were added to "One Minute..." after Jerry left Sun and Sun started to release country-oriented sides from all the tape in their vaults to cash in on Jerry's period of country hits for another label, I do not know, but it was not unheard of for such additions to be made to a few songs while Jerry was still there, and while I would not mind a version without strings and additional voices, I have to admit it could not have been done with more of a light and tasteful touch, matching Jerry's surprisingly refined performance. This brings us to the only possible criticism of the disc, and it is very slight if it is even a drawback. That is that, overall, the songs here are fairly polished, a relative term, usually, for Jerry Lee Lewis, and so there are some collections that show a rougher finished product at times. JLL apparently recorded whatever came to mind, or played songs to warm up at the start of sessions, and Sam Philips would just leave tape rolling all the time, giving us tons of Jerry Lee's essentially spontaneous art--JLL once said he never knew what he was going to record more than 15 minutes before recording it. Similarly, Jerry's more outrageously crude side, as in "Big Legged Woman," "Keep Your Hands Off My Birthday Cake," and "The Return of Jerry Lee,"--the latter featuring Jerry defiantly and proudly rubbing it, whatever "it" might be, in the face of those who tried to bring him down for marrying his 13 year-old cousin while still legally married to someone else, using the premise of a reporter's interview asking about the marriage, with suggestive snippets from Jerry's songs for the hilarious "take that" replies.--are not represented. Nor, not surprisingly, is the legendary and bizarre exchange before and alternative take of "Great Balls of Fire," in which Jerry at first balks at recording a song that turns a Biblical image into a sexually suggestive one. I kind of wish they had included that and the alternative take at the end of the CD, though perhaps it would not be great...