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Closing the door on an era. RIP JLL

I rember him saying he got in a punch up with Chuck over who was the greatst.
R.I.P Killer.

Saw him open for Fats Domino in 1985 or so. Played mostly country, but when he did rock out, it was great.

RIP Jerry Lee

Watching the Vancouver Canucks game vs Pittsburgh, during a stoppage in play in the first period, they played Great Balls of Fire! Nice tribute.

Ferriday, LA probably sighs relief.

Amazing piano player, great rock'n'roll singer.


Nothing beyond that. Horrendous human being.

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GasLightStreet
Ferriday, LA probably sighs relief.

Amazing piano player, great rock'n'roll singer.


Nothing beyond that. Horrendous human being.

Worse than you can imagine, I have a relative who was close friends with him, I heard the real stories.
POS, the planet is better off today.

Two of my musical gods

RIP Killer

As a child, sitting in a mud puddle, happily playing, 1957. My uncle pulled up from his job at the Chrysler plant in his Dodge tank of a car. Right before he got out Great Balls of Fire came on his car radio. He sat back, lit a Chesterfield, and sat through the whole song before going inside. The memory leaves me breathless.

“ While learning the instrument and studying at an evangelical school, he was kicked out for performing a boogie-woogie version of My God is Real that was deemed irreverent.”…

why didn’t I think of that

Nice to see all the tributes roll in, especially from the Legends he influenced.


Dylan even did a song last night in Emgland to honor him.
Great song (bad video) RIP

Just two weeks ago I was watching the remake of the movie Breathless that I hadn't seen since 1983.

Richard Gere's character is a big fan of Jerry Lee, and Lewis' music is key to the whole thing as it propels the movie forward.

It's a nice tribute.

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roryfaninva
Amen- the Nashville Teens were hanging on for dear life. Every rock and roll fan should own this.

video: [www.youtube.com]

YESSS!!! Awesome live album. Absolutely, and authentically awesome. Do yourself a big beautiful favour and listen to it.

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GerardHennessy

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roryfaninva
Amen- the Nashville Teens were hanging on for dear life. Every rock and roll fan should own this.

video: [www.youtube.com]

YESSS!!! Awesome live album. Absolutely, and authentically awesome. Do yourself a big beautiful favour and listen to it.

what year was this, early 60s I'm assuming. Only thing I know about Nashville Teens is that drummer Barry Jenkins joined the Animals after John Steel left in 66.

Heres the lowdown from rock critic Robert Christgau-
"Live" at the Star Club, Hamburg [Rhino, 1992]
Assembled from two shows recorded in one night in 1964, released in Europe shortly thereafter but in the U.S. not till a 1986 Mercury LP that's barely a rumor, this legendary 37-minute performance is our last and clearest glimpse of Jerry Lee as a young world-beater. Not only has he bulled his way past the incest 'n' bigamy tour of 1958 and the drowning death of his son in 1962, he's some kind of hero in a Europe rediscovering '50s rock and roll via Beatlemania. Without cracking the charts or drawing crowds commensurate with his ego on the endless tour that is his life, he believes so profoundly in his pact with the devil that he remains unbowed. Here that faith is both made manifest and recorded for posterity, which otherwise never happened on the same night. Admirers attribute this ungodly miracle to one emotional resource or other, but I find Lewis so impenetrable psychologically that I hesitate to put a name on it. Instead I'll list a few technical attributes. Both performance and recording are very clean. Tempos are speedy, and the backing band--the Nashville Teens of "Tobacco Road" renown--keep up manfully. "Mean Woman Blues" and "Money" are definitive. And the piano kills. A

Great story about Jerry Lee Lewis, John Lennon and Rory Gallagher backstage..What follows is a story which Rory related that afternoon with considerable relish. He was anything but a name-dropper. Indeed one would need a very large crowbar to prise any recollection from him that was not essentially self deprecating. Nevertheless there was something about this specific yarn which seemed to tickle him mightily.

It was 1974, a year or so after Rory had played alongside Albert Lee and Peter Frampton, among others on Jerry Lee Lewis’ legendary London Sessions. Rory and a few friends were invited to a special showcase gig by The Killer in The Roxy club in Los Angeles. The concert began equably enough and the audience were really starting to get into it when who should walk into the auditorium but one John Lennon. We'll let the master himself take up the tale.

“Lennon was going through his L.A. phase at the time and his hair was really short, but everyone still recognised him and they all turned to look at him as he took his seat in the balcony", recalled Rory. “Needless to say, the fact that he was being upstaged drove Jerry Lee wild. He started to do the ‘Jerry Lee Rag’, but everybody was still looking up at Lennon and whispering about him. All of a sudden Jerry Lee stopped and started on about how The Beatles were shit and The Stones were shit and there ain’t nobody could play real rock ‘n’ roll the way Jerry Lee could.

"Lennon loved this. He had his boot up on he balcony end started egging Jerry Lee on, shouting (convincing Lennon voice) ‘Yeah, you're right there man. The Beatles are shit." People started laughing, but Jerry Lee thought that Lennon was shouting abuse at him, so he freaked out altogether. He just pushed the piano across the stage and stomped off.” The atmosphere in The Roxy was now understandably tense. Most people left the building fearing that Jerry Lee might go on the rampage with one of the firearms that the notoriously volatile hothead was known to carry with him. Others stuck around hoping to witness just such an eventuality. As it happened, Rory had a backstage pass and was keen to go into The Killer's dressing room to try to cheer him up and maybe calm him down. Rory's brother and manager, Donal, warned against this course of action, however, arguing that he would be risking his life to enter such a fearsome lion's den at a time like this. Enter Tom O'Driscoll. O'Driscoll is a mountain of a man from Scull, Co. Cork. A fisherman by trade, he was Rory's roadie and bodyguard for well over two decades. Donal Gallagher agreed that Rory could go backstage provided that O'Driscoll went with him. "I wasn't too afraid of Jerry Lee because I had worked on the sessions with him," explained Rory. "But everybody else was obviously very scared because there was nobody else in the dressing room when Tom and I went in."

It took considerable diplomacy on Gallagher's part, but gradually he managed to coax Jerry Lee out of his sulk.

“We actually got to the point where we were just chatting away reminiscing about the sessions and that kind of thing," recounted Rory. “Then, all of a sudden, the door opened and in walked Lennon. There was dead silence for a couple of seconds. I just stared at Jerry Lee to see how he was going to react. But Tom O'Driscoll couldn't resist the opportunity. He was a huge Beatles fan and he just went over to Lennon, dropped down on his knees, kissed his hand and said. ‘I've been waiting twenty years to get the autograph of the king of rock ‘n roll."

Of course, this drove Jerry Lee completely wild. He went for his sock, thinking that he had a gun in it and then he started looking around for something to throw or break. Lennon could see all this so he quickly signed Tom's piece of paper and then, to diffuse the situation, he took the pen and another piece of paper from Tom and went across the room to Jerry Lee. He did exactly what Tom had done to him. He went down on his knees, kissed Jerry Lee's hand and said, " I've been waiting twenty years to get the autograph of the king of real rock ‘n 'roll!"
Jerry Lee. was delighted. He signed the scrap of paper and they started talking then and everything was fine. It was a wonderful moment."

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roryfaninva
Heres the lowdown from rock critic Robert Christgau-
"Live" at the Star Club, Hamburg [Rhino, 1992]
Tempos are speedy

OT comment but that's why Keith never liked speed? He likes things to move smoothly onstage.

RE the Killer check out the outtakes from the "Great Balls Of Fire" Ost (1987?). There's some brilliant playing there by JLL.

I attended his performances several times in Paris, included at Le Bataclan.
He is the greatest pianist for ever.
R I P

Good read :

[www.telegraph.co.uk]

(EDIT : I read it for free without any hassle)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-10-30 14:21 by dcba.

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dcba
Good read :

[www.telegraph.co.uk]

not available without subscription

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MartinB

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dcba
Good read :

[www.telegraph.co.uk]

not available without subscription

ways around that

Jerry Lee Lewis was no killer – but he was the most dangerous man in rock’n’roll

The self-confessed 'mean sonofabitch' was a gun-toting, fire-starting ball of trouble. He was also the most authentic rocker who ever lived
Neil McCormick
Music Critic
28 October 2022 • 6:50pm
Neil McCormick


The Killer is dead. Jerry Lee Lewis has left the stage at the age of 87, the last of the rock’n’roll originals, slamming a piano lid down on an explosive era or popular music history with a final resounding thump. There will be no shakin’ in the barn tonight. No eruptions of balls of fire. Time to raise a glass of whiskey and mourn the passing of one of the wildest, most fearless, most inspiring characters in the rock pantheon.

Lewis was there at the very beginning, stirring up the same melting pot of black Rhythm and Blues and white country music as his southern states near-neighbour Elvis Presley. Along with the sleek songcraft of Chuck Berry and screaming showmanship of Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis should rightfully be acclaimed as one of the founding fathers of a rock’n’roll cultural revolution that changed the world.

No one played piano like Lewis, who took it up at an early age and found his own unique twist on a boogie-woogie stride piano style. He could play it standing up, he could play it with his feet, he flowed with it, singing and talking and roaring and howling over the top with a bravura sense of extemporisation. He would play for hours, pull songs apart and put them back together, so that no two Jerry Lee Lewis sets were ever the same.

Of all the early rock’n’rollers, Lewis was the most musical, the most audacious and the most utterly free, performing with a fierce and joyous abandon, a visceral physical expression of the thrilling liberation the music represented to its audience.

While some might say that Lewis was a force of nature, Lewis himself preferred to hint his talent was supernatural, the gift of the Holy Ghost. He was born in 1935 and raised in rural poverty in Feridday, Louisiana on the borders of the Mississippi river, where his family attended the Assembly of God church, and spoke in tongues. Lewis had a gift for florid, extemporising speech and thought about becoming a preacher. His cousin Jimmy Swaggart played and sang with Lewis during their childhoods and would go on to become one of America’s most famous Television evangelists.

Aged 16, Lewis briefly studied at the Southwest Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, but was tossed out after he played a boogie-woogie rendition of God Is Real during church assembly. Lewis struggled all his life with a profound conflict between Old Testament notions of faith and temptation, fretting that he would be damned to a fire and brimstone hell for his love of the devil’s music. “I find myself falling short of the glory of God,” he sorrowfully admitted during a revealing interview for 1990 documentary The Jerry Lee Lewis Story. But if that deep psychic tension brought him a great deal of unhappiness over the years, it was an absolute gift for music lovers. Lewis played like a man possessed.

They called him the Killer from an early age. “I hated the name ever since I was a kid,” he once said. “But I’ve been stuck with it. I don’t think they meant it like I’d kill people. I think they meant it musically speaking.” Although he did add, as an afterthought, “But I am one mean sonofabitch.”

Controversy dogged Lewis most of his life, a reputation for drunkenness, drug addiction, womanising and worse. Aged 21, in 1956 he signed to Sun Records, the Memphis label that had launched Elvis Presley. The two stars even jammed together, along with Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins, playing gospel and country songs on tapes later released as The Million Dollar Quartet. Record boss Sam Phillips believed Jerry Lee had the talent to be bigger than Elvis, and at first it seemed like he was on track to do just that, tearing into the charts in 1957 with all time classic rock’n’roll records Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On and Great Balls of Fire.

But his career crashed and burned in 1958 during a British tour, when it was revealed that Lewis’s was adulterously married to his first cousin, Myra Brown, who was just 13 years old. The relationship had not been considered particularly remarkable in Lewis’s backwater community, but it was scandalous for a rock idol, who was pilloried for corrupting the youth.

For the next decade, Lewis survived on the live circuit, playing clubs too small for his giant talent, but always smashing out reliably incredible sets, rocking on even after being dropped by his record company in 1963. Bloodied but unbowed, Lewis eventually clawed his way back to the top by pouring all his sense of grievance, bitterness and righteous sorrow into his music, rising up again in the 1970s as a king of Country & Western with a string of hits including Would You Take Another Chance on Me? and Sometimes a Memory Ain’t Enough.

Lewis left considerable damage in his wake. He was married seven times, his relationship with Myra Brown lasting 13 years, before she divorced him citing adultery and “every type of physical and mental abuse imaginable.” Of his six children, two died tragically young (one drowning in a swimming pool aged 3, one in a car crash aged 19). His fifth wife, Shawn Stephens, also drowned in a swimming pool in 1983, inspiring a notorious and subsequently discredited Rolling Stone magazine article that heavily implied “the Killer” himself may have been involved, adding to his reputation as the most dangerous man in rock’n’roll.

He was often in trouble with the law, clocking up multiple drunk driving and assault charges. He once shot his bass player, Norman “Butch” Owens, in the chest. Legend has it that it was because Owens played a bum note, but the more prosaic truth was a drunken incident at Lewis’s 41st birthday celebrations, with Lewis claiming the .357 magnum went off in his hand whilst he was aiming at a Coca-Cola bottle. (“I been shot!” screamed Owens. “It appears to be that way, Butch,” said Lewis, too drunk to be unduly concerned. “Why?” wailed Owens. “Cause you appear to be sittin’ in the wrong spot,” said Lewis.”)

Lewis carried a sense of grievance about his standing in the rock’n’roll pantheon, often proclaiming a conviction that he should be acknowledged as the greatest of all time. In 1958, during a package tour with Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, Lewis became intensely competitive about swapping headline spots on alternative nights with Berry, a man whose music he greatly admired and often covered. So one night in Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn, he filled a coke bottle full of gasoline and at the climax of an especially rambunctious performance, he doused his piano lid and set it ablaze during Great Balls of Fire, continuing to pound out notes and how the vocals as smoke rose around his hair and the Fire Department rushed onstage with extinguishers.

With scenes of mayhem and hysteria breaking out in the theatre, Lewis strode off to where Berry was watching from the wings. Legend has it, he muttered, “Follow that, n_____”, but Lewis always hotly denied there had been any racial animosity. He often insisted the he had loved black music and black performers ever since he was a child. “I want to see you follow that, Chuck,” was his own account of what was said, although he told his biographer, Rick Bragg it was the “first time I ever saw a black man turn white.”

He had a love/hate relationship with Elvis Presley too, admiring his contemporary’s talent but resentful of his wealth, fame and carefully groomed image whilst Lewis was deemed mad, bad and dangerous to know. On the 23rd November 1976, after a hard drinking night on the town in Memphis, Lewis drove his white Lincoln Continental down Elvis Presley Boulevard and crashed it into the gates of Graceland, got out and waved a pistol around, demanding Presley come and speak to him. “You tell him the Killer’s here!” he roared.

Lewis was arrested and charged with drunk driving and possessing a weapon. In later years he would claim it was all a misunderstanding, but when a country music magazine asked how he felt about Presley’s death in August 1977, he did not exactly strike a sympathetic note. “I was glad,” he sneered. “Just another one outta the way. What the shit did Elvis ever do except take dope that I couldn’t get ahold of?”

Lewis was famously uncompromising with the press. In the same interview he declared: “We only got one life to live. We don’t have the promise of the next breath. I know what I am. I’m a rompin’, stompin’, piano playing sonofabitch. A mean sonofabitch. But a great sonofabitch.”

The reporter asked if Lewis had a message for his fans. “Yeah,” said Lewis. “Kiss my ass.”

Well, the Killer has been silenced at last. He has been close to death many times before, crashing cars, sinking into crippling drug addiction in the 1960s and hospitalised with a near fatal stomach rupture in 1981 caused by rampant alcohol consumption. He was often in and out of rehab and suffered a stroke in 2019 that brought his performing days to an end. But he remained defiantly unrepentant about his character and controversies to the end, when all his contemporaries had shuffled off the stage, and Jerry Lee was the last original rock’n’roll legend still standing.

“I want to be remembered as a rock’n’roll idol, in suit and tie or blue jeans and a ragged shirt, it don’t matter, as long as people get that show,” he told biographer Ricky Bragg in 2014. “The show, that’s what counts. It covers up everything. Any bad thought anyone ever had about you goes away. Is that the one that married that girl? Well, forget about it, let me hear that song.”

Oh yeah. Jerry Lee Lewis has gone to meet his maker – or so he at least believed, gone to settle his soul’s account one way or another, once and for all facing a long-delayed day of judgement. But let's hear that song, because that is where his spirit lives on: “You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain / Too much love drives a man insane / You broke my will, but what a thrill / Goodness gracious great balls of fire!”

That's a great piece. Thanks!

That was an excellent piece. Here's hoping lem and Gaslight expand on their remarks.

Keith sings Jerry Lee Lewis hit, She Still Comes Around... From the Toronto 1977 sessions...

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Rocky Dijon
That was an excellent piece. Here's hoping lem and Gaslight expand on their remarks.

This is enough of an expansion.

I grew up as being a fan of him but the more I learned about his choices in his personal life the brilliance of his performances dwindled for me. I get the times were different then than now and people just looked beyond it all but holy crap the guy was a monster.

[www.latimes.com]

The funeral for late rock and roll, rockabilly pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis will take place in his hometown of Ferriday, Louisiana on Nov. 5, in addition to another public memorial in Mississippi and a private celebration of life in Louisiana, scheduled this week.

On Nov. 3 a public visitation will take place at the Hernando Funeral Home in Hernando, Mississippi from 5 to 8 p.m., and on Nov. 5, a second visitation will be open, 10 to 11 a.m., at Young’s Funeral Home in Ferriday. Though the public is welcome to attend, both will have very limited availability.

The funeral, which will be officiated by Lewis’ cousin Reverend Jimmy Swaggart and Clyde Ray Webber, will be live-streamed immediately after it concludes, followed by a celebration of life at 1 p.m. at the Arcade Theater in Ferriday.

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ukcal

The funeral, which will be officiated by Lewis’ cousin Reverend Jimmy Swaggart.

Jimmy Swaggart!!! Is Jerry Lee going to get hell warmed up for him too?

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bye bye johnny






[twitter.com]

Apologize for the senior moment, who is in front of Paul and Ronnie and who is driving the car wearing the red shirt?

#1: L-R: Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Paul Shaffer, Fats Domino, Ronnie Wood

#2: Carl Perkins (in red)

I would like to read some of those stories. Any links to some JLL stories…