Rock career catching new fire

Sometimes the ones who stick around the longest are those who didn't get their due in the first place.

A case in point would be Wanda Jackson, the 73-year-old rockabilly queen who played to a packed house at the World Cafe Live on Tuesday.

The still-frisky and full-of-chutzpah pint-sized fireball is currently undergoing a career renaissance, thanks to Jack White, the former White Stripes guitarist who produced her new, stylistically varied, wildly inconsistent comeback album, The Party Ain't Over.

White contacted Jackson, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009, because he was a fan of the incendiary songs such as "Hard Headed Woman" and "Mean, Mean Man" that Jackson cut when she was a teenager dating Elvis Presley and arguably the first full-fledged female rock-and-roller.

(So much a fan was White, according to Jackson, that he had a poster of her from the 1950s on his bedroom wall when he was 15. "So next time you see him," Jackson told the multigenerational, dressed-to-the-nines crowd at the World Cafe, "tell him you know who his pinup girl is.")

But as Jackson pointed out, this isn't the first time she's been rediscovered. It's been an ongoing thing since the early '90s.

Jackson was backed up Tuesday by the Lustre Kings, a sprightly rockabilly quartet out of Albany, N.Y., led by Mark Gamsjager. The vibrant show stretched to an hour and a half, thanks to several spoken autobiographical interludes. In one, Jackson talked about having a ring that Presley gave her checked out to make sure the diamonds were real - a ring that her husband of 50 years "still lets me wear, sometimes." She also recalled how her early rock-and-roll sides, recorded with Presley's encouragement, didn't find a wide audience at the time.

She did have some early success, particularly with "Fujiyama Mama," in 1959, which went to No. 1 in Japan despite Jackson's convincingly comparing her sexual power to the impact of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There was more than a faint echo of that gale-force attack in the version Jackson delivered on Tuesday, and she also impressed with the fervor she put into shouting out "Ow!" on the growling cover of Johnny Kidd & the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over," one of three songs she included from The Party Ain't Over.

But for the most part, Jackson's accomplishments as a rock-and-roll pioneer were largely forgotten in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

In that period, the showbiz lifer from Maud, Okla., returned to singing country tunes like the 1961 self-penned hit "Right or Wrong." She sang that Tuesday in a clear, strong, heartbroken voice, as she also offered a sample of the gospel phase of her career with a joyful take on Hank Williams' "I Saw the Light," which she did after telling the crowd about becoming a born-again Christian in 1971.

It was only in the early 1990s, Jackson said, that a new generation of fans began to unearth obscure classics like the swirling funhouse romp "Funnel of Love," a 1961 B-side that she later rerecorded with the Cramps.

That renewed appreciation for Jackson's pioneering accomplishments laid the foundation for her collaboration with White, which sometimes misfires, as with the misguided cover of Amy Winehouse's "You Know I'm No Good" that Jackson gamely play-acted at the WCL. Better fits were the ribald cover of Gene Vincent's "Rip It Up," Jackson's women-in-prison version of Leiber and Stoller's "Riot in Cell Block #9" and the closing take of Jerry Lee Lewis' "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," during which there was plenty of just that, on stage and off.