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Jerry Lee Lewis at the Playboy Club
THE KILLER ON THE ROCKS "I'm gonna do just what I want to do, no matter what anyone says... People can stare, if they want to, but I'm gonna do it." -Jerry Lee Lewis Southerners are a mythical people created half out of dream and half out of slander, who live in a still legendary land." That is, in a way, a description of the life and hard times of Jerry Lee Lewis. Over his controversial - and that's an understatement-career, Jerry Lee certainly has had his portions of slander and dreams from fans and detractors. His penchant for doing whatever he wants has probably antagonized as many people as it has fascinated. He is, for example, a generous man, playing benefit after benefit in Memphis. He is also a selfish man, demanding that things be done his way; that the world conform to his own ideas. Perhaps the only part of the above quote that doesn't apply is the "mythological," because myth implies imaginary, and there's nothing about Jerry Lee Lewis that could conceivably be called imaginary. A few years back, when Elvis ended his long layoff from live performances, he invited Jerry Lee to come to his opening concert because he knew Jerry Lee would tell him the truth about it, good, bad or indifferent. The Killer don't pull no punches. Jerry Lee lives in a reality that, although true, sometimes gets almost too bizarre to believe. Recently the boy seems to have fallen on hard times. In late September he was charged with shooting inside the city limits after an incident in which his bass player, Butch Owens, was wounded. Jerry said he didn't know the gun was loaded, according to the police, but Owens and his wife said Lewis was trying to shoot a bottle when the bullet glanced off and hit Owens. The shooting took place at Jerry Lee's Collierville home just outside of Memphis. A few weeks later, Lewis faced new charges in Collierville, this time for disorderly conduct after police said he was shouting obscenities at neighbors. Five weeks after that, Jerry Lee again had a visit from Collierville's finest. The charges (driving while intoxicated, reckless driving and failure to carry a driver's license) were lodged after Jerry Lee crashed his $46,000 1976 Rolls Royce into a ditch. The next night, Memphis police found Jerry sitting in his car with a loaded 38-caliber derringer on his knee in front of Elvis' mansion. According to Elvis' guard, Lewis drove up, asked to see Elvis and when told that Elvis didn't see people at 3am, "he started screaming and yelling and waving a derringer in the air." The guard called the police, who charged Jerry Lee with being drunk and carrying a pistol. The next night, Jerry was admitted to a Memphis hospital for treatment of a peptic ulcer. It was, for sure, a busy three-month period for Jerry Lee, and it brought out the same old questions that his conduct had raised almost 20 years before, the central one being: what's wrong with Jerry Lee? What's more, the questioning wasn't restricted just to people who had never been too fond of Jerry Lee. This time, the questions were coming from Lewis fans, and many of them, familiar with Lewis' hell-bent, frenetic style of living, were wondering if perhaps this wasn't the collapse that they had been expecting. After all, how long can a man keep living all out? Perhaps that depends on what the man is made of, and Jerry Lee is pure Southern stock. Historians have isolated the two main traits that distinguish the South's life-style from that of other regions as the strength of family ties and the importance of religious beliefs. The family and church don't mean nearly as much as they used to, but when Jerry was growing up in Ferriday, La., they were prime considerations in the community and the major influences. A few years ago, one of Lewis' friends, discussing the things that were pushing Jerry, said the singer had taken the deaths of his boys hard and after noting that, and Jerry Lee's marital fires, he commented that if a man isn't happy at home, he isn't likely to be happy with anything else. Jerry Lee was brought up in the Assembly of God church, a fundamentalist churchnd his dedication is such that after high school, he attended Bible college in Texas. He wasn't particularly interested in becoming a preacher, he said, and his stay at the college lasted only a few months. But be was active in the church, preaching on several occasions and, of course, contributing his musical skills to the Lord's right. Soon after he started having big success with secular music at Sun Records, Jerry was having doubts about that music and how it was supposed to fit into the Lord's scheme. In an argument one day in the studio with Sam Phillips (part was recorded and is available on a bootleg) Jerry was raving with the fervor of a tent evangelist about "you got to be so pure" and being in the world as opposed to being firmly and irrevocably in God's camp. Several times since then, Jerry Lee has announced (sometimes privately, sometimes publicly) that he was considering leaving rock and roll and country music for the gospel road, something akin to the move made by Little Richard, another Southerner who had conflicts between his soul and his feeling for worldly music. Unlike Little Richard, Jerry Lee hasn't taken up evangelism, but he still seems to be taking glances at the Lord over his shoulder while continuing to make his secular music. The South; for sociological reasons never fully explored, has always been a musical region-perhaps because of the music's capability to take the edge off the pain of what has largely been a hard-life poverty area, although that doesn't explain it all. Like his contemporaries and most Southerners before them, Jerry was raised in a house in which music was simply a part of living. He and his sisters regularly exercised their voices in the church, and by the age of eight, Jerry was picking out chords on the guitar. A year later, his Jerry was raving with the fervor of a tent evangelist about 'you got to be so pure... father, who played a bit of piano in church, bought one for the family, and (so the story goes) Jerry taught himself to play within six months, playing a mixture of country and white gospel and the black barrelhouse style he heard at Haney's Big House, a black club that Lewis used to sneak into to catch some of the biggest names in post-war blues. In the '50's, segregation was engrained and because of the '54 school integration furor, feelings were inflamed. Rock n' roll, just wasn't the cool thing to do, especially in the South and especially in Memphis, a city with deep conservative roots and one almost as rural in its attitudes as the surrounding areas from which it has drawn its populace. In 1954, the city found itself saddled with a group of barbarians. A man named Sam Phillips was running a record company down on Union, and he had white boys singing like blacks. It was despicable, it was unheard of, and it was sure to be a blight on the city's good name. Why he and that weird-named fellow, Elvis somebody, were doing what was beyond anyone's comprehension. It wasn't Christian, crazy, an affront to good people. It took guts to make records like Phillips was making, and it wasn't until Elvis started making it as a national hero that the city fathers of Memphis even were willing to acknowledge Phillips' presence in the city. It would be some time before they saw Sun as an asset to the city. In a sense, the city's good people were right about one thing: Sam Phillips and the Sun gang were insane. Insane in the sense that the word relates to a state outside of the normal human condition. Just about everyone connected with Sun at that time has admitted that the unordinary reigned supreme in that little studio. That, of, course, is exactly why the small group of people was able to make such a great body of important music. The most different of all the Sun renegades was the blonde-headed kid that drove up to the studio from Louisiana, walked in and demanded an audition, telling them that he'd just sit on the doorstep and wait if they didn't let him play. The meeting of Jerry and the Sun gang was a natural. At Sun he found people who had been raised on the same musical diet he had been and they were as crazy as he seemed to be, although it took a couple of sessions for that to become clear. He saw himself at the time as a country singer, and his first Sun release was a remake of Crazy Arms which did fairly well throughout the South. On the next session, Jerry played a little song he'd been performing down in Louisiana-a piece called Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On. It revealed the "pumping piano" style of Jerry in full regalia and it established his future as a rock and roller. The record sold over 6m copies, and success after success piled up behind it: Great Balls of Fire, Breathless, High School Confidential Jerry cut his own path in rock and roll. He was a demon. His records had a sexuality that Presley's only hinted at, on stage (and off) he was the personification of the liberation that rock and roll was supposed to be for the teenage soul during the play-it-safe '50s. |
Jerry at Playboy Club in 1976
Scotland's No 1 boogie-woogie singer pianist entertainer - the great ball of fire - Kyle Esplin!THE KILLER ON THE ROCKS 1976 article by Walter Dawson printed in full Jud Phillips takes Jerry to New York and gets him booked on National TV on the Steve Allen show - without a hit record He embodied the very spirit of rock and roll. Elvis was first and set the tone. He was hot item, but Jerry Lee was just as hot in a different way. Elvis tried to appeal to an audience, but Jerry Lee didn't care if you liked him or not. He was anarchistic and cocksure. Elvis went on the Steve Allen TV show and let them put him in a tux and make him sing Hound Dog to a statue of a dog; Jerry went on and in a frenzied moment kicked the piano stool across the stage. How Jerry Lee got on the Allen show in the first place is a story by itself. Jud Phillips, the promotion man for Sun and Sam Phillips brother, saw Jerry Lee for the first time when he was on a tour with Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Webb Pierce, and decided to put him on national TV. The thought that a big-time TV show wasn't likely to be interested in someone who only had released one record apparently didn't concern Jud. He took Jerry to New York, where they walked in to see Jules Green, Allen's manager. "What does he do"? Green asked. Plays piano and sings, Jud answered. Got any hit records, Green inquired. Well, Crazy Arms did pretty well, sold about 30,000 copies. Green was upset. Why'd these people come in wasting his time? Judd was adamant. Just give my boy an audition. All right, Green figured to listen and get rid of them. A piano was located, Jerry Lee sat down, and for the next few minutes Green was mesmerized by the whirlwind before him. He gave Phillips some money and said to keep Jerry Lee under wraps until Allen could see him. When they got to Allen the next Monday, he listened to one song and booked Jerry Lee for three shows. To understand the Sun era and Jerry, it is necessary to have a bit of background on Memphis: The city grew up in the 1800s as a rough river town, and its reputation as a rolling-and-tumbling town increased until 1878, when a yellow fever epidemic wiped out a large portion of the city's people and caused thousands more to flee. The ones who could afford to leave were generally the ones with the strongest ties to Old World culture, and as Memphis rebuilt over the next 20 years, it was peopled mainly with rural folk from the farmlands around the city. As historian Gerald Capers noted, the city "formerly cosmopolitan... became hopelessly provincial. Gone were the minority groups so necessary to a healthy intellectual atmosphere; and in their place.., came farmers from Mississippi and Tennessee, a simple and virtuous country folk, but stubborn and often unlettered." These folk brought with them not only their country attitudes and ways but their own culture. It was during this time that Beale Street started taking oh its cloak of notoriety, and the city as a whole reverted back to the lawlessness that it had known in its early days. Vice in all its forms was commonplace as the swelling numbers of rural types made easy marks for the gamblers, prostitutes, saloonkeepers and petty criminals. Soon after the turn of the century, Memphis because the. home of a young man from Mississippi who was, over the next half century, to turn the city into one of the cleanest cities in the country. Not politically clean, because Boss Crump ruled his machine in typical machine style, but at least Clean in appearance under Crump's rule, the city went from outlaw to parson, and today Memphis often claims to have more churches than gas stations. Iin 1954, the city found itself saddled with a group of barbarians. A man named Sam Phillips was running a record company down oh Union, and he had white boys singing like blacks. It was despicable, it was unheard of, and it was sure to be a blight on the city's good name. Why he and that weird-named fellow, Elvis somebody, were doing it was beyond anyone's comprehension. It wasn't Christian, crazy, an affront to good people. It took a lot of guts to make records like Phillips was making, and it wasn't until Elvis started making it as a national hero that the city fathers of Memphis even were willing to acknowledge Phillips' presence in the city. It would be some time before they saw Sun Records as an asset to the city. In a sense, the city's good people were right about one thing: Sam Phillips and the Sun gang were insane. Insane in the sense that the word relates to a state outside of the normal human condition. Just about everyone connected with Sun at that time has admitted that the unordinary reigned supreme in that little studio. That, of, course, is exactly why the small group of people was able to rake such a great body of important music. Perhaps the most different of all the Sun renegades was the blonde-headed kid that drove up to the studio one day from Louisiana, walked in and demanded an audition, telling them that he'd just sit on the doorstep and wait if they didn't let him play immediately. The meeting of Jerry Lee arid the Sun gang was a natural. In 1958, in an old and familiar story, Jerry Lee's rock and roll world came down. He married his 13 year old cousin and adult society crucified him. England kicked him out, and America unofficially but effectively blackballed him. A lesser man, one with out Jerry Lee's strong sense of "I'm right, they must be wrong," would have packed it in, but he kept playing. The clubs were smaller, the record sales fewer, but he was still putting on what more than one critic has called the best live show in rock and roll. After about a decade, Jerry Lee found a new audience in country music, and he did so without losing his grip on rock and roll. Actually, his music had always been almost as much country as rock. Early in his career, he had emphasized the rock, and now he is stressing the country. His country hits still have underneath them that same old rock and roll sneer. Even when he's doing a sad country number about being left alone and heartbroken, he surrounds it with an unspoken air of "maybe the Killer's upset now, but you better believe, darling, he'll sure get over it fast enough." Today at the end of '76 Jerry Lee stands in a strange position in country music. The hottest things going are the outlaw-Texas axis and rockabilly-influenced artists, both of which owe much to Jerry Lee and the type of music he helped pioneer in the '50s. It's as though modern country has suddenly discovered a lost branch of the family. But the surprising thing is, the patriarch of that branch isn't coming to the reunion. In fact, he seems to be going the other way, if his recent single, Let's Put It Back Together, is any indication. That is an inexplicable country-schmaltz record, one of the worst Jerry Lee has ever cut. But it also was his biggest hit in some time, and it makes you wonder, If after all these years of being his own man, the Killer is going for the easy money. That record, coupled with Jerry Lee's recent escapades, brought forth a lot of talk around Memphis about whether 20 years of Whole Lotta S hain' hadn't finally caught up with him, and the talk intensified after his road manager told a local paper that Lewis' health may have been a factor in his feats of derring-do. "He's been exhausted before, but it's been nothing bad like this," the road manager said. "Your body can only take so much, and he's getting old (41)." Still, considering Jerry Lee's past, it is difficult not to view Let's Put It Back Together as just a slight aberration and his string of incidents as just the latest in a long line of "I'm gonna do just what I want to." That picture of Jerry Lee at Elvis' gates is one of the best rock and roll has ever produced. It says a lot about rock's past, and the different approaches Jerry Lee and Elvis have taken. Jerry Lee the barbarian at the door to the King's castle. The wild man who never, compromised versus the man who compromised his way (look at all those movies and soundtracks) into a nice mansion on the hill. Elvis (and a lot of other rock and rollers) went for the money and acceptance; Jerry Lee never went for anything but his own way. And his own way is deeply stained with the influences and traditions of his upbringing. Even when his way takes on a violent air, he is reacting in the grand tradition of the Southern male that requires a man to stand ready to defend anything that needs defending, from his sister's virtue to the make of car he drives. Whatever the influences that have made Jerry Lee the way he is (and despite all that's been said here, it may be more honest to explain Jerry Lee as simply a foremost case of congenital rock and roll, in all that that implies), he has remained a traditional Southerner, and Southern traditions die hard. |
