Surely upon hearing the news of the death of Jerry Lee Lewis, pianos everywhere shed a sad and tender tear, even as they simultaneously shivered with relief.
Few musicians had ever summoned forth their power and beauty the way Jerry Lee did. But no one ever tormented them more either, right down to setting them on fire, as he was known to have done at least once. Pianos, like the rest of us, always saw him with mixed feelings.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Jerry Lee, who died Friday at the age of 87 in his home in Mississippi, was white trash through and through. If mama and daddy saw him coming up the walk, they had every good reason to lock up their daughters, the liquor cabinet, and the medicine chest and hide the keys to the car.
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Maybe he wasn’t a bad man. Maybe he was no worse than most people and we just expected too much because the talent threw us off. Outsized talent can do that--pervert your judgment, so you come to expect that people who possess unearthly abilities will be unearthly in other ways, too. But he wasn’t. In almost every way, he was ordinary, maybe not even up to ordinary. Because there were times when it seemed he sat around wondering, what’s the one thing I could do that would bother people the most? And then he’d do it. Like marrying his 13-year-old first cousin once removed.
He was unpredictable at best, and at his worst, he was downright scary--when rumors trail after you suggesting that you may have had a hand in the death of one of your wives, that’s scary, right?
Maybe he had to be flawed because the flaws allowed us to believe, just barely, that he was human. Because once he placed his fingers on the piano keys and opened his mouth and began to sing, there was no other reason--none whatsoever--to believe that here before us was a mere human being. All the evidence reaching our eyes and ears told us that this was no ordinary man. Here was nothing less than a force of nature.
One day long ago, when my son was three years old, I put “Great Balls of Fire” on the turntable. I didn’t do this as any sort of trial or experiment. I was just playing a song. I wasn’t at all prepared for what happened next. As soon as the music started, my child--who had never heard this song before and had never shown much interest in whatever music was playing in the house or on the car radio—reacted like someone suddenly plugged him into a generator. I won’t denigrate it by calling it dancing or running or jumping up and down. He was a child possessed, bouncing off the furniture, the walls, anything that got in his way. Smiling, then laughing, he careened around the room with what seemed like pure joy during the song’s duration. I have never before or since seen anyone, child or adult, so consumed by music. And if I had ever harbored any doubts that Jerry Lee Lewis needed no introduction and required no context to get his point across, those doubts were there laid to rest.
So far as technique went, he was not at the head of the class. There were more proficient pianists. Singers? Not so much. But technique, in this instance, is beside the point. Rather, it was the whole package or nothing at all, and when Jerry Lee Lewis took the stage, he commanded the audience with… what? His passion? The intensity of the feeling, the pure abandon he brought to each and every note and lyric? Or was it all welded together somehow by the galvanic control he exerted? Because when Jerry Lee performed a song, he owned that song and the song owned him. He was a vessel, channeling music from another sphere.
Now let’s take some testimonials from the audience. Below are a few of the comments under a YouTube posting of the album Live at the Star Club in its entirety. This 1984 Hamburg concert has been called the greatest rock concert recording of all time, or simply the greatest rock record ever made.
—HOLD ON FOR DEAR FUCKING LIFE.
—Rolling Stone said, "It’s not an album it's a crime scene." IMO This is the greatest Jerry Lee recording & the greatest live rock & roll album ever. Great sound considering it was recorded in a fairly crude manner. I love the LOUD piano that JLL is hammering away on. I've always pictured that piano as being utterly destroyed by the end of this show.
—I played in a club in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the 60s, where JLL played about every 6th weekend, and he LITERALLY tore the piano to pieces.
—my girlfriend came home to me dancing in my underwear to this album. we then had sex thanks jerry!!!!! or maybe it was the underwear..........nope :p
—Dextroamphetamine
—Well, that and the pure power of Satan. Long live the devil's music.
—Just listen to the right channel. His fucking piano. What the hell is he … is he human? I spent years "learning" piano but couldn't do that in a million years (though of course now I want to try). Are we from the same planet? It may be a different idiom but he hammers that piano harder than thrash metal - this is badass headbanging shit.
—Creator of punk rock. CREATOR, not father, but CREATOR.
—Mozart of modern times
—Filing this under 'punk rock.' Scorching...
—Best album by Misfits.
—I am French and I said : PUISSANCE
If we’re talking range, the musical real estate bracketed between the “Mozart of modern times” and the “creator of punk” is quite a spread. The crazy thing is, it’s not just talk—remember, this was a man who, after torpedoing his first career by marrying Myra Lee, came back and reinvented himself as a country star of equal magnitude, a feat matched only by Ray Charles, and if Ray Charles is your only competition, then you’re playing in a league where they don’t even bother keeping score.
The punk idea first, because it’s the most obvious: You always had the sense that anything could happen when Jerry Lee took the stage: he might sing a show tune (Al Jolson was one of his favorite singers), he might do a country song, but the sure money said that sooner than later he’d decide to play the piano with his feet. The sense of violence just barely contained was always as much a part of his performances as it was for the Sex Pistols or the Bad Brains. The idea of transgression was common to all of them.
The Mozart comparison is only slightly more complicated, but it too seems unarguable in the sense that, like Mozart’s, Jerry Lee’s talent was inexplicable and illogical and yet.... He was like the Mozart we see in Amadeus: a fatuous, immature man-child nevertheless capable of producing extraordinary beauty. Only those who, like Salieri, mistakenly assume that there is some logic to genius are baffled by this mystery. The rest of us are just grateful for the music these men made, their flaws notwithstanding.
When Jerry Lee began recording with Sun Records, he was barely 21, but his style was already fully formed. There was no learning curve. Right out of the box, he veers from the country classic “Crazy Arms” to “Whole Lotta Shakin’.” His sense of command—of his voice and the piano—is absolute and eclectic: he could sing “Cotton Fields,” “High School Confidential,” or “Over the Rainbow,” and in each case, he defined the song.
Years ago I caught him at a Sunday matinee in Clearwater, Florida. He came out and, before an increasingly restive crowd, proceeded to spend half his set playing unaccompanied gospel tunes. Clearly this was not what the audience had come for, but he didn’t care. He just kept at it—”Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” Precious Lord,” “The Old Rugged Cross.” And when he was done, there wasn’t a person there who, while they may have preferred “Whole Lotta Shakin’,” could have questioned for one second the depth of his sincerity (and here is as good place as any to testify that I never saw him phone in a performance, not once. His older incarnation may have been a little less wild, but he was never less than present and uncompromisingly committed to an almost frightening degree. If Jerry Lee showed up to play, he was there and he was on).
Listening to him that afternoon in Florida, I kept thinking of that famous recording at Sun Studios when the Killer and producer Sam Phillips get into one of the most absurd theological arguments of all time, regarding rock and roll as the Devil’s music. I dare you to make sense of that exchange, but one thing is clear: Jerry Lee thought he was going to hell for playing rock and roll. For years I’d always been perplexed by that—if he truly believed he was damned, why didn’t he just quit?
But sitting there in Florida that afternoon, listening to him play gospel and rock with the same intensity, it came to me that I was asking the wrong question, and that Jerry Lee was like Huck Finn when he decides to save Jim the slave, even though he’s convinced that doing so also condemns him to perdition. If that’s what it takes to save his friend, Huck says, “then I’ll go to hell.” Jerry Lee, by his lights, was likewise condemned to hell because he played rock and roll. But like Jim, he saw the choice before him as no choice at all. Perhaps in the end that is what gives his music such power: to hear it is to hear a man struggling against himself, his fate, and all eternity. The amazing thing is how often he sounded like he was winning.
“Life is like a vapor,” he once said in a reflective moment. “You breathe it in and then it’s gone.”
That may be true for most of us. But I would rate Jerry Lee Lewis the exception. Until music is erased from the universe, he will live forever.
