(Continuum)

www.continuumbooks.com

BY DAVID GREENBERGER

This book started out as a title in the 33 1/3 series that Continuum has been publishing over the course of the decade, each focused on one album. At the heart of Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found is The Killer's "Live" At the Star-Club. Backed by the Nashville Teens and recorded in Hamburg in 1964, it is rightly heralded as one of the great live albums in the rock & roll canon. Author Joe Bonomo's exploration goes further in either direction, braiding together both his own budding musical curiosity as a young teen with Lewis's lifetime of ups and downs.

The book is flush with a passion for music and life, all further enhanced by Bonomo's keen understanding of the human impulse to create, the quest for honesty and commitment, and the unshakable fallibilities that dog us all. One needn't even be conversant in that album in particular or Lewis in general to be captivated the common threads that tie us to music, or anything that we care about deeply.

Between this and his 2007 book on the Fleshtones (Sweat), Bonomo has earned permanent shelf space in any vital music library.

Incidentally, the book cover art is derived from a stylized Lewis portrait (below) created by none other than... Jon Langford!