Both piano-playing singers who started out singing rock and roll with Sam Phillips in Memphis and who have since moved into country and western, Jerry Lee and Charlie Rich are still as far apart as they always were. Jerry Lee always preferred country music to rock and roll, but could do both well; Charlie didn't much like either of them, and yearned for jazz or rhythm and blues. Their most recent albums are true to the singers' tastes.

For ten years, Jerry Lee Lewis has been fighting the obstinate nostalgia of audiences who are determined to remember him as a rock and roll singer, forcing them to listen to his slow, often maudlin, country ballads about hard booze and harder women. Only one track on Live at the International is a rock and roll tune, Joe Turner's "Flip, Flop, and Fly."

But if a combination of those country songs and a Las Vegas audience seems to promise a phoney performance likely to please nobody but Tom Jones fans, the record itself proves something else. Jerry Lee Lewis really is a great singer, when he puts his mind to it. Not only does he establish an authentic air of spontaneous informality, persuading us that we're all familiar with the small-town ways of the South, but he does things with his voice that place him beyond the reach of all the would-be country boys in Laurel Canyon and Woodstock. One line in "She Still Comes Round (to Love What's Left of Me)" is indelibly imprinted in my mind, because of the way Jerry Lee stretches and turns the words: "pay day nights and painted women do-ooh strange things to me."

On two fast songs, "Jambalaya" and "San Antonio Rose," Jerry Lee lets his voice slide and glide while the band pumps up little storms, fiddle, steel guitar and piano each taking tiny solos that hold back more than they show off, never upstaging the vocal. Several songs start out roughly, and then shift and settle into shape as the band gets together and Jerry Lee involves himself more, creating exactly the feeling of sympathetic improvisation that is missing from so much music today, even from Jerry Lee's own studio recordings, which are all much cooler and drier than this friendly, exuberant album.

Maybe a live recording is what Charlie Rich needs too, to allow him to escape the careful calculations, or despairing guesses, of studio producers. More than half the tracks on Boss Man are the worst kind of devotional ballad that country music keeps throwing up, completely lacking the witty ironies of Jerry Lee's best material ("She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye"). As so often before with Charlie Rich LPs, Boss Man promises much more than it delivers.

The promise is in Charlie's voice, which is in many ways "perfect": well-controlled, tender, pure, warm, edged with a despair that immediately attracts attention to everything he does. The difficulty has always been to find a song that can do justice to the voice, that doesn't seem to waste it. Improbably, the best track here is "Nice 'n' Easy," Sinatra's standard which has Charlie's easy listening voice backed up with his cocktail jazz piano and a Nashville rock bass; maybe it sounds so good because it's close to Charlie's personal taste. On the other tracks, he sounds as if he'd rather not be there; he sings well, technically, because he can't help it, but he's not going to tear his heart out on Conway Twitty's "Hello Darlin'."

One other track comes close to reaching him, and us, "Memphis and Arkansas Bridge." A story song with too many traces of "Ode to Billy Joe" and "Hickory Holler's Tramp," it has a funny narrative that could have come off much better with some other arrangement.

"Boss Man" is not the LP to start off with, if you don't have anything by Charlie Rich—The Many Sides of Charlie Rich, on Smash, is still his best. But, like everything else by him, it does have a strange elusive magic, conveyed just in the tone of his voice, that is too rare to ignore altogether. (RS 76)

CHARLIE GILLETT