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