Sam Phillips didn’t record anybody else the way he recorded Jerry Lee Lewis. With other artists, he pushed and prodded, taking his time to discover the qualities that made them uniquely human, but with Jerry Lee, he just turned the tape on and let the Killer rip. There was no need to sculpt because Lewis arrived at Sun Studios fully formed, ready to lean back and play anything that crossed his mind.
Over the course of seven years, that’s more or less how things were run at Sun: Lewis would sit at the piano and play, singing songs that were brought to him and songs that crossed his mind, and Sam never stopped rolling the tape.
Bear Family’s box set At Sun Records: The Collected Works rounds up every scrap of every session the Killer recorded at Sun — all the masters, all…
…the alternate takes, all the mono and stereo mixes, and all the overdubs, too, spreading it out over the course of 18 CDs, which is a whopping ten discs longer than their previous Jerry Lee Sun box, 1989’s Classic.
The Collected Works eclipses Classic in every regard: the original’s flimsy paper book has been supplemented by two hardcover books, the discography has been redone, the music remastered, and the sequencing altered. All these additions and alterations are enough to warrant the interest of fans who already own Classic, but they also help underscore the richness of Jerry Lee Lewis’ Sun Sessions. In his 2015 biography, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock & Roll, Peter Guralnick drew an analogy between Lewis’ Sun sessions and Alan Lomax’s field recordings, where Lomax preserved entire folk songbooks by just letting folk singers play and, in a sense, that’s what Phillips — and his associate Jack Clement — did with Jerry Lee. Often, the crew assembled with the intention of recording a new hit single, but they’d either warm up or cool down with old country, blues, pop, and gospel tunes, or perhaps a current rock & roll or R&B hit, so they wound up with reels of tapes that amounted to a snapshot of the American century at the crossroads. Incapable of existing beyond the moment at hand, Lewis poured everything into these performances, bending the songs to suit his style, and the results are consistently compelling: it’s as if American history is channeled through one wildman from Louisiana. It’s essential, vital music, but listening to The Collected Works isn’t something to be taken lightly: all the successive takes, chatter, and false starts can be wearying if played in the background. Nevertheless, these snippets are also necessary because they help illustrate just how much Jerry Lee played with the songs and his own style, and it also captures his fire. There never was anybody else like the Killer, and there never will be again. This set captures him at his purest and wildest.