The fall and rise of a heavy metal icon

The Killer Rocks On

Jerry Lee Lewis, recently back from touring Europe, has just put out his first single in twenty-three years—exclusively on the Internet. It’s the latest unlikely act in a six-decade career that amounts to a kind of master class in the perils of tempting fame and fate, even though Lewis’s moments of celebrity have been fleeting and died mostly at his own hand.

Like Elvis Presley, Lewis was a poor white Southerner who jump-started the music of other poor Southerners, black and white, and got famous doing it. Like Henry VIII, he married six times. Like Edgar Allan Poe, he chose his 13-year-old cousin as one of those wives. Like Johnny Cash, he began a battle with addiction in the 1960s that gave a halting, harrowing rhythm to much of his career. Like Jimmy Swaggart, his cousin, he paid public and private costs for following his temptations. Like Madonna, he projected a constantly shifting parade of faces: rockabilly wild man in the 1950s, smooth honky-tonker in the 1960s, incorrigible hellraiser in the 1970s, scandal-scarred near-casualty in the 1980s, tax exile in the 1990s. After Cash’s death he became the Last Man Standing, improbably surviving all of his major Sun stablemates; as he approaches his seventy-fourth birthday, he has only two peers,  Chuck Berry, now eighty-two, and Little Richard, seventy-six.

Fifty years later, Lewis’s records “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire” are still common touchstones, name- and hook-checked in TV commercials, headlines, and such. Yet the rest of his career has somehow failed to linger in the American mind. In the late 1960s he was one of country’s biggest stars, yet few seem to remember even his best songs, like “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye” and “Another Place, Another Time.” Fewer still know that Lewis once won rave reviews as Iago in a rock version of Othello, a role made for his brand of slyly sexual menace. And the 1989 biopic Great Balls of Fire reduced his persona to a goofy caricature—redeemed only by a soundtrack Lewis recorded himself “as if decades were minutes” (in Greil Marcus’s phrase).

That was twenty years ago, and since then Lewis has recorded only sporadically: a cut on the Dick Tracy soundtrack, an overlooked 1995 album called Young Blood, and in 2006 the “comeback” duets album Last Man Standing. But he has toured constantly, at some cost to his voice—which has sounded a bit strained in recent years—if not to his piano playing, which is the unappreciated glory of his career.

Among the first-generation rock and roll singers, most were amateur musicians; only Chuck Berry really revolutionized his instrument, and Elvis, Cash, and others mostly strummed rhythm. Lewis, in contrast, made the piano the centerpiece of his music. His hammered eighth-notes and glissandos are all part of the permanent lexicon, but his style grew only more complex, idiosyncratic, and inventive with time. Despite his reputation for showmanship, he never seemed desperate to please a crowd—he often slipped onstage almost unnoticed—and by the 1980s he seemed less interested in the audience than in entertaining himself with his hands. Toward the end of a frenzied, wired performance in Paris in 1981—shortly before a medical emergency nearly killed him—Lewis knelt before the keyboard, beatifically, and said, “This old piano’s my darling—I love her. My God, ain’t nothing like her. If I get married again, it’ll be to that right there.”

Which brings us to this new single, “Mean Old Man,” one of several songs by longtime friend Kris Kristofferson that Lewis has recorded for an upcoming album. It’s a fine production, clearly inspired by Rick Rubin’s work with Johnny Cash. And Lewis’s voice seems to be coming back, a little deeper and surer than on the duets album. Yet one thing is missing: that unmistakable piano background. In his entire career, Lewis has rarely sung without the piano beneath his fingers; it is hard to imagine him without it, any more than we can imagine B.B. King’s voice without Lucille’s tart counterpoint.

Kristofferson’s song, which echoes the shape and mood of Cash’s great late cut “Sam Hall,” begins in a comparably surly tone: “If I look like a mean old man,” Jerry scowls, “that’s what I am.” But then each new verse challenges the listener to look again: Do I look like a good old friend? Do I look like your Uncle Bob? Then, hauntingly:

If I look like a voodoo doll, that’s what I am

If I look like a voodoo doll, that’s what I am

If I look like a voodoo doll—take his lickin’ standing tall,

Rather fight you back than crawl—that’s what I am

And all of a sudden it makes sense: Piano or not, Jerry Lee Lewis is the old American trickster—testing, taunting, defying us to pin him down. Here he is, peacock and pariah, voodoo doll, the one who out-sang, out-played, out-drank, out-pilled, out-lived them all: the Singing Brakeman, the Steady Rollin’ Man, the Drifting Cowboy, the Hillbilly Cat,  the Electric Gypsy, the Lizard King, the Man in Black—even, if you like, the Somehow King of Pop. There he is, the Killer, standing in his haze, chuckling in soft wonder.

Did he make a record with no piano? Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t feel like playing piano that day. Or maybe his producer hinted that they might try doing without it—you know, something different—and Jerry stared through him and said: “Son, if you think I’m a goddam crooner, that’s what I am.” And then stepped up, cut a mean mother of a record, and slipped out the back door before you saw him leave.

Aug 27, 2009 | Categories: Celebrity, Music, Pop Culture, Stuff We Like | Tags: American music, drugs, Elvis, Jerry Lee, raising hell, rock, rock and roll, sex | 5 Comments »