“I am right. I’m always right. One time I thought I was wrong, I found out I was right.”
— Jerry Lee Lewis
For years, completely convinced that Jerry Lee Lewis had long since sold his immortal you-know-what to You-Know-Who, it really seemed Lewis would outlive us all. When the news came Friday morning, frankly, it was a relief. Cat had laid down one of the heaviest burdens our Creator ever piled on anybody and, coming shortly after formal induction to the Country Music Hall of Fame, it was a perfectly timed transition.
For Jerry Lee there was never anywhere to go but berserk, and he kept it up for the better part of 70 years, besting and reshaping two of American music’s elemental forces with reckless, star-spangled glee. The Killer modus operandi, a rich, sticky amalgam of his primordial influences (Jolie, Jimmie, Hank, a hint of Bing and a heap of the blues he soaked up hanging around Haney’s Big House) were effortlessly forged into a distinctively dynamic and wildly appealing whole, one which remained as remarkably consistent as it was far-reaching and free-thinking.
As these crackling 1952 demos make assuredly clear, Jerry Lee at 17 was a fully formed powerhouse, firing on all cylinders and operating in perpetual overdrive (compare those recordings to 18 year old Elvis’ timorous “My Happiness” acetate). By age 23, “Whole Lotta Shakin’” not only delivered on the ‘rock & roll is an existential threat to the entirety of Western Civilization’ choo-choo train of thought, it demanded an entirely elevated level of cultural threat assessment. Jerry Lee was a one-man holocaust, an apocalyptic host of the most hazardous plague Grey Flannel America had confronted to date, a bearer of miscegenetic, lascivious abandon and attendant downfall. He made Elvis and Gene Vincent look like kindergartners sharing milk and cookies.
And he knew it. He knew that was true, as the fabled confrontation with Sam Phillips at the “Great Balls of Fire” recording session shows us (“I have the Devil in me!”). And then there’s Myra Gale, a criminal sin for which Jerry Lee paid with not only front-page humiliation but also complete financial and professional ruin. Yet even before rig mo set in on Friday, the post-#Metoo clan (those paragons of situational rectitude) began yowling for some deep dish post-mortem condemnation.
Jerry Lee and Myra were married for 12 years, but your favorite serial child molester Rodney Bingenheimer—whose morning-after ritual was to literally drop his victims into a trash receptacle—gets a breezy free pass for decades of vile sexual assaults (care to re-calibrate those accountability demands? No? Suit yourself).
Jerry Lee’s rich, wholly unpredictable spectrum, going from the incandescent ferocity of “Great Balls of Fire” to the sublime, forlorn tenderness of “Over the Rainbow,” is graphically illustrative of Killer’s aesthetic pathology—a condition predicated upon and fed by his own insatiable hunger for truth and self-expression, up to and including his portrayal of Iago in the Othello rock opera adaptation Touch My Soul.
There’s not a scintilla of the phony in anything Jerry Lee recorded or performed. His altar was the towering, naked cenotaph of verisimilitude, a pursuit executed at an almost psychedelic level of commitment to raw communication which could be gorgeously rendered yet also twist, in a shocking instant, to something (as Carl Perkins once described Lewis) “frightening and pathetic.”
It was always a shadowy, double-edged proposition. Drunk, he could stink out loud (an infrequent occurrence) and when we discovered he’d sold that damn DC-3 to Ricky it was a decidedly ugly wrinkle in the rock & roll continuum. And there was that whole dead wives period with Jaren Pate and Shawn Stephens.
But that was Killer, all or nothing, take it or leave it. He was after all, “the toughest son of a bitch that ever shat out of a meat ass” and if you didn’t like it you could always “kiss my ass, bark my hole and use my dick for a walking pole.”
As the decades passed—and no knock on his heart-stoppingly phenomenable rockers—I just wanted to hear the ballads, weepers and gospel he excelled at when he was most relaxed. That's why seeing him at the Palomino was always the best, it was like his living room. "Mexicali Rose, stop cryiiiiiiing..." Far too little has been written about his prowess as a vocalist; he possessed a wildly expressive set of pipes, capable of such intimate warmth and subtlety as to evoke joy tears, and no one else could touch his elevated gift for delivering the bruised irony so central to modern country. This is what returned him to prominence with Jerry Kennedy at Mercury, all those untouchable hits, each performance inarguably on par with Jones, Haggard, Frizzell, Price.
He was without peer, yet always approached every aspect of his career with a confrontational, full-bore, head-on attitude—he never did it the easy way, quite the contrary. It was attack mode, all the time. His infamous late-50s piano-burning racist challenge to Chuck Berry (which earned him a rare ass kicking), his 1973 Opry debut, where he announced, “Let me tell ya something about Jerry Lee Lewis, ladies and gentlemen, I am a rock and rollin’, country and Western, rhythm and blues-singin’ motherfucker!” then did forty riotous minutes instead of the customary ten.
Witnessing him opening for Fats Domino on the New Orleans kingpin’s first West Coast tour in decades, Jerry Lee went completely ape, tore the piano to pieces, kicked, stomped, shouted like a rabid beast, using every trick in his bottomless bag of rafter-raising wiles to steal the show (he failed—Fats and the Dave Bartholomew Orchestra’s intoxicatingly understated elegant NOLA funk ruled the night). Killer didn’t take shit from anyone. Right or wrong, kill or be killed, that was Jerry Lee.
Here on Earth, he’s achieved a hard-earned, well-deserved immortality. Elsewhere, he faces the truth of the Hereafter or, possibly, the Thereafter.
Additionally, there’s the forthcoming Ethan Coen documentary to look forward to (comprised entirely of archival commentary from Jerry Lee himself) but the truly great, good news is that Killer cut an all gospel set in 2020 that should provide a welcome, heartfelt, ultimate coda to his remarkable career. And the music is, solely, what it’s about.