Don't be like Jerry Lee. Pick the right words when you have a microphone | Mark Hinson

In 1996, the piano-pounding, pioneering, pill-poppin’ rocker Jerry Lee Lewis was playing a live concert at The Flamingo casino in Las Vegas.

I convinced my wife we should wrap up our vacation out West by going to see The Killer, a nickname about Lewis’s unhinged stage demeanor as well as a fitting sobriquet for a performer suspected of murdering his fifth wife. Even Elvis Presley, a year before The King died in 1977, called the cops on The Killer after an obviously buzzed Lewis crashed his Lincoln into the front gates of Graceland and got out brandishing a firearm.

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“I don’t know how much longer he can last,” I said. “This may be our last chance to see him alive.”

Lewis died last month on Oct. 28, 2022. He was 87. Oops. Called that one wrong.

The Lewis show we attended in Las Vegas commemorated 1956, the year rock ‘n’ roll took over the pop charts and dominated American culture. Granted, Lewis, who had some regional success by 1956, shot to the top of the charts starting in 1957 with a string of classics: “Whole Lotta Shaking Going On,” “Great Balls of Fire,” “Breathless” and “High School Confidential.” Still, we went along with the theme.  Forty years, yeah, we get it.

Lewis, cantankerous as ever, became irked by it.

Ill-humored rant

For the opening, Lewis got driven out in a vintage, drop-top, ’56 Chevy. A bevy of poodle skirt-clad show girls cheered and jumped (it was Vegas after all) as the band played instrumental rock. The air was thick with nostalgia.  

The car reached centerstage. Lewis jumped out and stormed to the mic stand by the piano. He grabbed the microphone and walked to the lip of the stage to directly address the audience.

“I didn’t want to do that,” Lewis blurted and pointed at the Chevy. “They made me do that. They did it.”

Granted, there were a lot of more troubling things about Lewis – marrying his cousin when she was 13 and he was 21, for starters, hurling racial insults at Chuck Berry on tour, being direct kin to hypocritic hooker patron the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart – but the Chevy wasn’t at the top of the list. Cheesy does not beat out sleazy. The rant marred the rest of the very lackluster show.

Clever repartee

Performing artists need to hush up and play for the paying customers unless they have something insightful or witty to say. I have seen it work on occasion.

The brilliant, sardonic musical satirist Randy Newman, who wins Oscars for writing songs for Pixar flicks, was the first big act to play for Opening Nights fest in the newly refurbished Ruby Diamond Concert Hall. The elegant venue had just reopened in February 2011 after an umpteen-million-dollar makeover.

Newman walked onstage, looked around the fancy new digs and said, “What a dump.”

The audience howled and was eating out of his hand the rest of the night.  

Know your audience

Steve Martin was in banjo-plucking mode, not comedian gear, when he came to Opening Nights with the bluegrass band Steep Canyon Rangers. I was assigned to review it.

Too bad I get bored with bluegrass after two songs (the slow one, the fast one). To boot, my father was dying and not going gently into that good night. When Martin and his rack of five, count ‘em, five, banjoes came out on stage, I rolled my eyes.

This was going to be a long, trying night.

“These five banjoes are like my sons,” Martin announced rather smugly. Then he added, “One of them isn’t mine.”

The rest of the night went by with the same droll wit topped off with funny-as-hell tunes (“Atheists Don’t Have No Songs”). Never make up your mind about a show until you’ve seen the show. 

Handling the hecklers

The comedian John Mulaney told a great story about a Southern heckler. Starting out, Mulaney performed his routine at a campground in Murfreesboro, Tenn. The newbie may or may not have been blocking the beer truck.

One guy interrupted Mulaney’s comedy routine and said, “Excuse me, sir. I think I speak for everyone here when I say that we would enjoy silence more than the sound of your voice.”

 Mulaney described the taunt as “insanely mean” yet “eloquent” thanks to its manners and use of formal language. Sometimes the dreaded cancel culture is right.

The Great Britain band The Wedding Present could have learned to choose words carefully when it came across the pond for a concert in a bar off Gaines Street.

The band is huge in its homeland, thanks mainly to lead singer David Gedge who writes such whip-smart songs as “Brassneck” and “I’m from Further North Than You.” I expected a big turn-out for the band’s debut in the city. It didn’t happen. The crowd was thin. 

Don't scold the fans

About halfway through The Wedding Present show, Gedge approached the mic between songs.

“Next time we come through Tallahassee,” Gedge said in sardonic manner, “please tell all your friends.”

There was silence for three beats before a voice from the back of room said, “We ain’t got no friends.”

Even Gedge knew he had lost that round.

After going stir-crazy during the pandemic and the lockdown, my wife and I got our shots and headed north to Atlanta in November of last year to see a live concert. I picked The Magnetic Fields at the intimate stage of The City Winery.

The band, which had no drummer but a cello player, is led by songwriter-singer Stephin Merritt. He looks better suited to serving up Rolling Rock boilermakers at The Down the Hatch Tavern than singing quirky smart pop songs in a low baritone.

Toward the end of The Magnetic Fields concert, Merritt stopped the music in middle of the melancholic “It’s Only Time.” He pointed to a woman in the front row.   

“Stop singing along with me,” Merritt scolded. “Every time you mouth the lyrics, it throws me off. Stop it.” 

Jerry Lee Merritt had spoken.

Mark Hinson is a former senior writer for The Tallahassee Democrat and can be reached at mark.hinson59@gmail.com.

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