A Session With Gary Lewis & the Playboys (1965)

Around the time I was 11 I got a paper route and joined the Columbia Record Club for the usual deal: a dozen or so albums upfront for almost nothing and then an expensive commitment that never seemed to end (I had a round 2 in the CD era). The club did not have much to offer by way of the Beatles, my main interest, but I got the US version of the Hard Day’s Night soundtrack and an Alvin & the Chipmunks album of all Beatles covers. I also got albums by Cher, Jay & the Americans, Gene Pitney, Johnny Rivers, and more. Sometimes it wasn’t easy even picking out enough freebies. I would say now that the prize of the pack was Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence, an album I voluntarily return to that still holds up and then some. But in 1966 I might have pointed to Gary Lewis & the Playboys. I got all three of their first albums (all released in 1965, all clocking in under 30 minutes each) and I listened to them quite a bit. The formula, hardly unique to this band, tended to be two or three hits and/or original songs otherwise matched, to get to the mandatory dozen, with rock ‘n’ roll covers of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s: Chuck Berry, the Coasters, Bobby Darin, the Kinks, Bobby Rydell, the Searchers, Bobby Vee, so on so forth, giving me an oldies education foundation. And the originals, many of which became top 10 hits, were good: “This Diamond Ring” (cowritten by Al Kooper and intended originally for the Drifters), ”Count Me In,” “Everybody Loves a Clown” (written by Lewis, Leon Russell, and producer Snuff Garrett), “She’s Just My Style” (also written by Lewis, Russell, and Garrett, with Al Capps), and “Sure Gonna Miss Her.”

The one exception now, the one big hit I have the hardest time calling good, is “Save Your Heart for Me,” a knockoff of the much better “See You in September.” “Save Your Heart” seems ultra-dippy to the max to me now, but the fact is it was one of the first three singles I ever bought (as I think I’ve noted elsewhere the other two on that momentous occasion were Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” and the Beatles’ “Help!” b/w “I’m Down”). Yes, liking “Save Your Heart for Me” that much embarrasses me now, though I also admit I don’t really mind hearing the song. And of course it also embarrasses me that I was so nutty for Gary Lewis & the Playboys in the first place, but honesty is the best policy around here. Here we have an example of the original “guilty pleasure” problem, though now the pleasure is chiefly nostalgic I suppose. My esteem did not have anything to do consciously with Gary’s famous father (which probably did have something to do with their big showbiz success). Jerry Lewis has never appealed to me much. In fairness, however, I should note I was also into superstar kid group Dino, Desi & Billy at the time (respectively, son of Dean Martin, son of Desi Arnaz, and neighbor kid), who had top 30 hits in 1965 with “I’m a Fool” and “Not the Lovin’ Kind.” It’s possible I was starstruck and don’t remember it that way. By all rights, I should have been embarrassed about any enterprise using the word “playboy” in 1965 but it’s perfectly possible that it was an appeal for me anyway and I have suppressed that memory.

In the ‘90s I picked up a Gary Lewis & the Playboys greatest-hits anthology on CD. They had more and better hits than I remembered, but still only maybe a third of that collection is worth revisiting. I haven’t been near the original albums in decades, an opportunity streaming has afforded me. So, right, I would not remotely call A Session With Gary Lewis & the Playboys—their second LP and the most successful by chart standards—a great album or even a particularly good one. But it’s not terrible. “Count Me In” is one of their best singles, “Without a Word of Warning” is a pretty good original (written by Lewis, Russell, and Garrett). “Little Miss Go-Go” is another original (written by Russell, Garrett, and Louis Yule Brown) but more of a blatant Beach Boys ripoff. “Voodoo Woman,” written by Bobby Goldsboro (!), is very silly but maybe, because it is so silly, the best example of a very silly theme that runs through whole swaths of rock. The covers include Ricky Nelson (“Travelin’ Man”), Everly Brothers (“Walk Right Back”), the Yardbirds (“For Your Love”), Freddy Cannon (“Palisades Park”), and Del Shannon (“Runaway”), five solid lessons in rock ‘n’ roll. They are nowhere near the originals, but if Gary Lewis & the Playboys were only a gateway to the greater glories, well, that will just have to do.

Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (2022)

Ethan Coen’s documentary about Jerry Lee Lewis does not add a lot to what we already know about the iconic rock ‘n’ roller, but it has the advantage of being posthumous. It was released shortly after Lewis’s death in October 2022, offering the most panoramic view yet of his entire career (much like the essential I Am Everything did for Little Richard). As the picture notes toward the end, Lewis outlived a good many of his peers, including Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. This documentary overall leans more toward hagiography, never really addressing the many scandals that swirled around and dogged Lewis. The good news here is that means more time for the music. Who cares whether he murdered anyone or if there really was a hound dog no one ever saw before or since howling outside the window the night he was born? The music ranges across his rock ‘n’ roll hits, then his country music chapter, and chases all the way down to his pentecostal gospel music roots in Ferriday, Louisiana. His cousins Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart get their time here too, as does his sister, briefly, Linda Gail. They all agree Jerry Lee was the most talented of them all, and Lewis of course modestly allows they’re right. When the music and performances are all stacked up in such proximity his whole deal does have a certain sameness—but what sameness! He gets the rumbling boogie-woogie undertow going and layers practically anything he likes on top, his own stuff and covers of songs, rock ‘n’ roll, country, gospel, anything. There’s some great footage of Lewis with Tom Jones on an exuberant cover of “Tutti Frutti.” Lewis goes out of his way to bearhug Chuck Berry in an extended sequence and pays his respects to Little Richard too. But on the matter of Elvis Presley, he remained dubious to the end. He never exalts Elvis for anything and credits Colonel Tom Parker for all the success, which made him basically consistent to the end. Little Richard had a similar problem and I have to say I’m inclined to agree with them more than not. Jerry Lee Lewis was as original and dynamic a rock ‘n’ roll performer as anyone else and there’s approximately 70 minutes of proof in this tidy documentary, worth seeing for the musical performances alone.

The Devil, Me, and Jerry Lee (1998)

I’ve been toting this little memoir around with me for years, thinking it was written by Myra Gale Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis’s controversial cousin, 13-year-old bride, and third wife. But it’s actually by Linda Gail Lewis, Jerry Lee’s youngest sister, 12 years his junior. Linda Gail—this book temporarily put me in the habit of calling everyone by two names—sang with Jerry Lee for many years and eventually tried to make it on her own. Her stuff can be found on youtube. She actually had more marriages than Jerry Lee—eight to his seven—and she’s perfectly candid about the Lewis clan being “over-sexed.” She doesn’t go into any more detail than that, for which I was grateful. It’s a short book, well under 200 pages, and mostly a lot of anecdotes and funny and interesting stories about their adventures. She gives the devil his due right up-front but never goes deep into that. The devil makes them drink or take drugs a lot and accounts for their being over-sexed and that’s about it. I would have been interested in some thoughts about hellfire. She doesn’t deny a lot of Jerry Lee’s behavior, but she does deny he ever killed anyone. Mostly she explains all his famous bad behavior by the drugs and some personal problems (“demons”), about which she says nothing can be done. I think she’s right when she says they do things differently in the deep South—Ferriday, Louisiana, in this case, and the Assembly of God church. Jerry Lee, like Little Richard, was more or less sincere about his pentecostal beliefs, though Little Richard might have been a little better about staying on the straight and narrow once he got there—relatively speaking. Linda Gail’s memoir is not particularly essential, but it’s quick and fun to read and offers another view into one of the great early rock ‘n’ roll stars. Linda Gail does argue that Jerry Lee and Elvis Presley were great friends and that reports of Jerry Lee’s envy for Elvis’s greater success are exaggerated. Well, maybe. She’s certainly doing what a loving sister can do for his reputation, but I’m disinclined to believe her on that point. Otherwise I mostly take her at her word. Some great anecdotes here.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

It Can’t Happen Here (1935)

Sinclair Lewis turns his hand to the literature of dystopia and makes a creditable job of it. His fascist takeover of the US (much like the one we are mired in and resisting?) is modeled closely on Nazi Germany. In fact, I was surprised by how much seemed to be common knowledge in 1934 and 1935 when Lewis was working on the novel. It turns out Lewis’s wife at the time, Dorothy Thompson, was the first US journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, in 1934, which probably accounts for it. He had a front-row seat. There are lots of familiar Lewis notes here: extravagantly ridiculous names (Doremus Jessup and Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip are basically the principals, plus a Unitarian “radical” named Lorinda Pike), dreary extramarital affairs, and an implicit and almost corny faith in the so-called American experiment in democracy. I think a lot of readers would complain about the surplus of “telling” and the relative lack of “showing.” It gets sloggy in patches. But in the 2020s It Can’t Happen Here has all kinds of markers of prescience. It goes to some extremes that are hard to believe, but much of it is actually all too believable. Lewis knows exactly, for example, that US fascist shock troops would look and talk and act like the goons we saw attacking the Capitol two years ago. The main point of this novel is by way of warning, which the title dryly emphasizes. It’s ultimately not that hard-hitting—though we see terrible things—because it softens the blows with broad streaks of US sentimentalism. It takes heart, for example, in the Underground Railroad to free slaves and the North’s win in the Civil War, and chooses, like many of us, to ignore the ways in which the South won and continues to win that conflict—which isn’t over yet, by the way. Lewis certainly knew that much in 1935. Black Americans get the worst of it as usual, though antisemitism in many ways is the face of this fascism, as in Germany. So altogether a mixed bag—it’s not always believable, but when it is it can be shocking just for its familiarities. The story is illustrative and the characters more allegorical. But there is a gnawing sense that this is what it would look like. I know this novel went into lots of lists of books we were supposed to read after Trump was elevated to power in 2016. So I’m late to the party again as usual. It Can’t Happen Here is a good Sinclair Lewis novel, or not bad, and it speaks eloquently to our current predicament.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Dodsworth (1929)

I was reading Sinclair Lewis anyway, and I liked the 1936 movie directed by William Wyler based on Dodsworth, so I decided to give the novel a try. The Wikipedia article sees it as a novel of Europe and the US, Old World and New, in the Henry James tradition. Yes, it’s that, but I think more centrally it is about middle-class—really, upper-class—marriage in the US. Samuel Dodsworth is an auto manufacturer tycoon who has made his nut and retired at age 50. He built his auto company up from the ground and has now sold out—not to General Motors by name, but it’s GM. The elder of his two kids, a daughter, is getting married, and his son is a junior at Yale or something. His wife now wants to go to Europe and roam for a long time, like months and years. She feels they deserve it. Particularly she deserves it. So a fair amount of traipsing around goes on here, along with the people they meet—in London, Paris, Berlin, Italy. Written in 1927 and 1928, published in 1929—the year before Lewis won his Nobel (which specifically cited Babbitt)—Dodsworth is curiously silent about the rise of fascism, which might have still had a relatively low profile in the late ‘20s. But there’s also no mention in the Berlin scenes of any calamitous economic conditions. Fascism comes up as a background item in Italy, but it’s all quite anodyne. I chalk it up to the difficulty of reading the sweep of history in any present moment, at which few are actually very good. The comparisons of European and US customs and manners seems more accurate to me than those of Henry James, who could be more soft-headed and romantic about the Old World. Lewis had already demonstrated his keen eye for Midwestern white man business ways and how the good ol’ boy stuff works here—still works here. So there are lots of interesting scenes with Dodsworth trying to find himself somewhere in between. He’s a creative spirit, even as a tycoon, which is not 100% believable, but the suspension of disbelief was worth the price here for me. Lots of things creak along the way, but the dissolving marriage is handled particularly well, as affairs of the heart (chaste as they may be in terms of actual sex) begin to happen on their travels and the future of the marriage seesaws precariously. Dodsworth is made a little too much the hero for my taste, and his wife a little too hateful, but I think the novel makes its points candidly and well about the difficulties of marriage. I would compare it favorably to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, which travels similar paths. Lewis is your basic 20th-century workaday social realist. He may not have the best eye for US class distinctions—in fact, he doesn’t as a general rule—but he gets lots of details right about humdrum rituals we still know.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Main Street (1920)

I like a lot of things about the social realism of Sinclair Lewis and enjoyed rereading what is probably his single most famous novel. He wrote quite a bit, nearly two dozen novels, and there are a few others that may or may not be worth chasing down—Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth. I’ve had different reactions. Lewis is also from Minnesota and very good on Upper Midwestern ways. I like the characters and situations of Main Street but a lot of it is dated, potentially boring, and even just weirdly improbable. The main character, Carol Kennicott (nee Milford), is from Minneapolis, the daughter of a judge. She marries a small-town doctor, moves to the town (Gopher Prairie aka Sauk Centre), and confronts its narrow, constricted ways. Of course she is a bit of a snob but she comes by it honestly, in pursuit of her city-bred ideals of art and bohemianism. At heart, though she barely comes to realize it even at the end, she is merely a privileged upper-middle-class woman of her times. She hates class distinctions and claims to despise them, but for the most part she conforms. But she is always testing the limits, often with an amazing amount of naivete. There are relevant points all through the novel: hostility toward immigrants (here mostly Swedes, now accepted as white), blind fealty to capitalism, and refreshingly candid views of marriage and wives and husbands. More often it is strangely irrelevant, silent on the influenza pandemic, which was still ongoing at the time of publication (and one main character is a doctor!), with little to say about suffrage or prohibition, and completely blind to LGBTQ issues. There’s a significant character here who is likely gay, but I’m not sure even Lewis knows it. That’s quite a taboo. But Lewis was always good on at least a couple of things, which are seen here. He has a good ear for American salesman chatter. That’s practically all Babbitt is (and worth looking into) and it’s here too. And then I also think he’s really good—and underrated—on domestic scenes, marriage and particularly women. Carol Kennicott is at the center of Main Street. She is complex and done well. It’s true that much of it is dated and has not aged well. But a good deal of it is easily recognized as merely the ins and outs of any relationship. Lewis would get better at this too, but even putting Carol Kennicott front and center and establishing her as realistic works for me on the most basic terms. Lewis has spent nearly a century now falling out of favor after his unlikely Nobel award in 1930. But I like his open-hearted easygoing style quite a bit, a kind of Dreiser-lite that is a pleasure to read. Or maybe that’s a Minnesota connection.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Sports (1983)

Some years ago I was reading along in the 2006 installment of the Da Capo Best Music Writing series, with selections in that volume by guest editor Mary Gaitskill, when I first encountered Katy St. Clair's remarkable story for SF Weekly, "A Very Special Concert." As the deck on the original piece suggests, it's about "the enduring bond between Huey Lewis [& the News] and the developmentally disabled," a sensitive consideration of an unusual, somewhat surprising, and cheering phenomenon. St. Clair writes, "Whatever the reason—the catchy tunes, the goofball charisma, or maybe those slapstick videos—developmentally disabled people see something significant and tender in Huey Lewis. He makes them happy." The piece goes on to detail how they have made him their own rock star, with the same kind of uncanny abilities to charm and weave spells that Tom Jones, Morrissey, Bruce Springsteen and many other superstars have for others.

It reminded me of a dilemma I faced early in my so-called career as a rock critic, perhaps for the first time, which is the matter of trusting your gut. We know now how overrated it is as a quality for the US Commander in Chief, but it comes in pretty handy for critics. In fact, it's one of their most important qualities, if they have it—an ability to step back and judge, not exactly impartially but with clarity or honesty and a willingness to stand by their responses. I never got the hang of it and, in fairness to me, it's not an uncommon problem. Revisiting most newspaper and other reviews from years gone by, distinguished by being written in the heat of the moment, often uncovers views of conventional wisdom that no longer make sense, viz., Led Zeppelin is terrible commercial hokum, Yoko Ono wrecked the Beatles, David Bowie is poncy, disco sucks, punk-rock is anti-life. Those are just from the '70s and incomplete. There's much more. Most people are convinced that critics are terrible idiots and in many ways they are right.

Cass Timberlane (1945)

Sinclair Lewis's "novel of husbands and wives" is evidently considered minor in Lewis's canon. Wikipedia never discusses it in the article about him, only listing it with his works. I love it more than anything else I know by Lewis, though I can see it has more flaws than some of his celebrated work (Main Street and maybe Babbitt, though not the dreadful Elmer Gantry). The values and much of the detail in Cass Timberlane are dated, as is the case with most books older than 70 years. But the dynamics between lovers in relationships are drawn with clarity and an astute skepticism that comes of experience. Lewis probably started on it in earnest around the time of his second divorce in 1942. It is often bittersweet and melancholy. The main narrative involves Cass Timberlane, a judge in the fictional medium-sized town of Grand Republic, Minnesota, a prairie town that most resembles Duluth (though it is more inland and explicitly distinguished from Duluth). Timberlane is young for a judge, in his early 40s, and a red-blooded Midwestern white man of a certain type—loves to hunt and fish, etc. He falls for a young woman more than 15 years his junior, Ginny. They go around the mulberry bush, marry after about a year, and then the problems start. As a device obviously inspired by John Dos Passos, Cass Timberlane also includes recurring portraits of Grand Republic citizens under the title An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives. They are often great stand-alone pieces, acutely observed scenes of marriage and its give and take within many different couples. The novel is remarkably candid, especially the troubles between Cass and Ginny. They have a stillborn baby. Ginny is flirtatious, and attracted to other men. She is also diabetic, of all things. The sexual politics are mostly the conservative post-/pre-feminism that prevailed in the '40s. In most ways women are understood to have the disadvantage of men, but they have some ways to compensate. Something about this novel also reminds me of James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce, which is similarly focused on one person, but in relationship with a specific other in a domestic context. Interestingly, the marketing copy on my 1974 mass market paperback of Cass Timberlane is at pains to sell it as weirdly brawny and he-manly: "The towering classic of a man's passions," it says. "He was a man's man with a reputation as big and solid as his name." But let's not kid ourselves. This is a classic woman's story, and that's exactly what I like about it so much. Essential, really.

In case it's not at the library.

"Virga Vay & Allan Cedar" (1945)

Read story by Sinclair Lewis online.

I accept this as a short story, because I found it in a book called Short Story Masterpieces. But the fact is, it's an excerpt from a novel, a very good one, Cass Timberlane. "Virga Vay & Allan Cedar" is part of a series in the novel profiling town characters under the recurring title "An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives." These arguably stand-alone pieces alternate with chapters on the main story (compare The Grapes of Wrath, or John Dos Passos). It's a novelistic device that I think loses some of its punch without the novel's context. Even taken objectively it's closer to an anecdote or perhaps a moral tale with lesson. I suppose they're short story forms too. It's very short, less than 10 pages. It's good the way that Sinclair Lewis can be, laying bare the hollow despair beneath the Midwestern hail fellow well met bonhomie. Virga Vay (what a name) and Allan Cedar are both married but not to each other. They are conducting a tawdry and sad affair in a small Minnesota town full of busybodies and narrow people. They hatch a plan to address the impossible situation. It's not divorce and it's not murder. I will issue a spoiler alert here because the story is at some pains to keep the plan a secret from the reader for a later surprise. It is, of course (last chance), a suicide pact. Carbon monoxide via automobile, to be specific. The town is so constricting the couple feels it's their only choice. Allan Cedar is convinced they would be found wherever they tried to go. Cedar has a particularly heinous wife, as we eventually see for ourselves. Cass Timberlane makes a brief cameo. There is very good detail about the affair: they genuinely seem to love one another, but to be together they must sneak away to the outskirts of town and have their trysts in the car or on "mossy pastures." They are weak and pathetic, and reading about them makes you think you might be too. That's one reason the ending seems so unpleasant. This is where you can really feel Lewis's loathing for these small town societies. But I have to say, knowing the source novel, that I think you're better off going there and picking up these scenes along the way. This is good, but the whole novel is better. Also, I can't find much information about its publication history beyond the novel and the story anthology. I think it's possible Robert Penn Warren himself carved it out.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

Cass Timberlane by Sinclair Lewis

Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story (1982)

The basic word on this—as a perusal of practically any edition's blurbs will attest—is "Best Rock Bio Evah." I think the Boston Phoenix may have actually got closer to the heart of the matter: "To call Hellfire the best book written about a rock 'n' roller is to miss the point.... Hellfire is a rock 'n' roll event." I'm not here to argue with anyone about this—no one can deny that this is a remarkable book, a marriage made in ... some place fantastic ... between its subject Jerry Lee Lewis and biographer Nick Tosches. In general, not enough is understood about the religious convictions of some of the key figures in that first wave of rock 'n' roll and their beliefs in the basics of sin and redemption: thinking here specifically of Elvis, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, the subject at hand, who once famously (or maybe not so famously) shut down a recording of "Great Balls of Fire" to argue the metaphysics, epistemology, and orthodoxy of the song with producer Sam Phillips. "How can the Devil save souls?" Lewis cried at one point. Tosches, a painstaking fact chaser, probably doesn't have the problems associated with this conflict, but he understands it. He understands the sources of those beliefs, and most importantly, he understands the language in which they are expressed. His book will make you laugh out loud at them. It will also chill you to your core.

In case it's not at the library.