In American music, a handful of innovators stand apart from all those who followed. Jazz had Louis Armstrong and then Charlie Parker. Country had Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams. And rock ‘n’ roll had Jerry Lee Lewis.
Lewis, who died on Oct. 28, age 87, was the last living rock ‘n’ roll pioneer. Between 1956 and 1958, a streak of four hits, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” “Great Balls Of Fire,” “Breathless,” and “High School Confidential,” defined the basics and limits of rock ‘n’ roll and suggested much of the future of rock. Like Lewis, those tracks remain thrilling, breathtaking, and menacing, frantically wavering between romance and violence. No Lewis, no Beatles or Stones, no Bruce Springsteen or Elton John, to name just a few.
Lewis was born to an impoverished but musical family in Ferriday, Louisiana. His only formal musical training came from the Southwest Bible School in Waxahachie, Texas. It ended abruptly when he accompanied the hymn “My God Is Real,” boogie-woogie style. His expulsion began a traumatic spiritual journey. God and damnation were real to Lewis. He believed he was going to hell for playing a music of sin and fornication. His life abounded in both, and his music, to him at least, confirmed that the devil really does have the best tunes.
His piano style was unique. Like his manic persona, it arrived naturally and fully formed. Of the other masters of the rock ‘n’ roll 88, Fats Domino was the swinging, joyful son of the New Orleans piano style, and Little Richard a flamboyant mixer of gospel and early R&B. Lewis’s left hand played the eighth-note boogie “straight,” with minimal syncopation. Unlike Fats Domino or Little Richard, the top line of his boogie didn’t swing up from the fifth to the sixth to flattened seventh (the “blue note”) and back. He kept it clamped on the fifth and sixth, building menace and pressure like a machine.
His right hand was no less aggressive and unforgiving. Fats Domino was a jazzy ornamentalist. Little Richard had a loose, triplet-feel panache. Jerry Lee Lewis was consistently brutal. Often, Lewis’s right duplicated his left, hammering out the root and fifth note that would become the rock “power chord.” The repetition was the point. This, and not his history of offstage violence, was why they called him “the Killer.”
By 1958, Elvis was in the Army and the Killer was the king. The exposure of his marriage to his 13-year-old first cousin, Myra Gale Brown, by the British press derailed Lewis’s career. He scraped by as a touring act, often for short money with inferior pick-up bands, and invariably wired on speed. In the late ’60s, he moved into country. A string of country hits followed, but he only played the Grand Ole Opry once, in 1973.
He was always a rocker. The 1964 album Live at the Star Club, Hamburg is one of the great live albums. Lewis opens “Mean Woman Blues” faster than the Ramones open their 1977 live album with “Rockaway Beach.” He whoops, laughs, stutters, and purrs. He bashes out double-handed block chords and glissandi. He never loses the feel.
Offstage, however, Lewis was out of control. He was a mean drunk, a drug addict, and a wife-beater. Myra Gale Brown said she suffered “every type of physical and mental abuse imaginable.” He had seven wives, two of them simultaneously. Two of his six children died young. The circumstances of his fifth wife’s death by overdose remain murky.
In 1992, when I was 20, I joined Lewis’s band. He was then living in Ireland to avoid the IRS. There was no rehearsal. He just walked on, sat down, and started pumping out a frantic 12-bar. He could be just as explosive offstage, but he was often amiable and candid. He admired how Al Jolson, of all people, could deliver a crisp, clear lyric. This was ironic, as I had trouble following Jerry Lee’s slurred diction. Apart from Jolson, and Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, he genuinely believed he was the greatest of all time.
One night in Amsterdam, I asked him about his child marriage. He was still surprised by the reaction: “Where I grew up, it wasn’t uncommon to marry that young.” Yes, he had crashed his Lincoln Continental into the gates of Graceland and threatened to shoot out Elvis’s windows, but that “was what us Southern boys did. Elvis did the same to me. I loved him.” And yes, he had shot his bass player in the chest with a .357 Magnum: “He stood on my new rug.”
One night, he threw a bottle of whiskey at my head, then winked. He showed the same disregard for the law as for other people’s lives, but he rewrote the laws of music. He was the last of the originals.
Leo Green is a British saxophonist and broadcaster. Find him on Twitter @theleogreen.
