Goodness Gracious! Great Balls of Fire!!!

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Time to brag: I got to rub elbows with rock and roll royalty last night. That’s a nice payoff for my first concert since June. Robbie Fulks is out on tour to promote his critically-acclaimed new album Wild! Wild! Wild!, a duet album with Linda Gail Lewis. As in, Jerry Lee Lewis’ kid sister. And let me tell you, that show last night lived up to everything you might expect from pairing the sister of “The Killer” and alt-country’s bad boy. And then some. Fulks started the show, doing half a dozen of his songs (focusing on the early things, with nothing from the past two acoustic masterpieces Gone Away Backward and Upland Stories). Then he introduced Linda Gail. And down came the rafters. Linda Gail learned to play the piano from Jerry Lee, so you can guess how she plays it: with the same reckless abandon that made Jerry Lee a legend. She’s proud of her heritage and delighted the crowd with songs like “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” and “Great Balls of Fire” in addition to the songs from her own career and the duet album. One of the highlights for any Robbie Fulks fan was when he said he was un-retiring that “notorious song” of his (the title of which I cannot mention here while maintaining a myLot account). He based that on not letting “Linda outdo me in the rebellion department.” He altered the last two verses (which was funny: when he stopped after “this ain’t country and western, it’s just....” the entire audience sang “soft rock feminist crap!” back at him) to update things a little, replacing Tim Carroll’s name with Jason Isbell’s. He concluded by bragging, “Only one of us was walkin’ the walk back in 1993!” It’s lewd, it’s rude, it’s juvenile (Fulks has admitted that on a number of occasions), and it was a joy to see him do it again after 20 years. And just how does one follow a song that has the “F word” in the title and in the lyrics (repeated, he once said, 22 times)? With A GOSPEL SONG!!! Robbie and Linda Gail took to the center of the stage (“not the smoothest of segue ways,” Fulks admitted) to sing “I Am a Pilgrim” and “On the Jericho Road.” That was one of the most enthusiastic, energetic crowds I have seen at a Robbie Fulks show outside of Chicago.