Give Me Five Im Alive Give Me Ten Im Born Again
W e're waiting for the Killer to get domicile. Judith, wife number vii, is telling me how best to get on with her husband. Jerry Lee Lewis, one of the founding fathers of stone'northward'roll and reputedly the baddest of the bad boys, is known to have a temperamental side. There was the time he drove up to Graceland, drunk on liquor and high on pills, with a gun on his dashboard, enervating that Elvis come down from the house on the loma to evidence who was the existent king. And the fourth dimension he shot his bass thespian, Butch Owens, in the chest, accidentally, he insists – Owens won $125,000 in damages. There were the 2 wives who died in tragic, some have said suspicious, circumstances. Just this is the past, says Judith in her deep Mississippi drawl, and the past is a faraway land.
"OK, you have to talk loud and slowly to Jerry. And don't mention any bad words, and nothing negative," says the formidable Judith, a sometime basketball player, and ex-wife of the brother of wife number iii, Myra. Myra was the most controversial, because she was only 13 years erstwhile when Lewis wednesday her. "You can enquire near me, merely as far as all his wives and stuff goes, he doesn't like to talk about personal stuff," Judith says.
Jerry Lee Lewis is preparing for his concluding tour to the UK next month, to coincide with his 80th altogether. Sixty years on from the birth of rock'n'roll, Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On and Great Balls Of Fire remain two defining songs of the 20th century. And Lewis, growling and yelping, chirapsia seven bells of hell out of that piano with his easily, anxiety and elbows, snakes of pilus falling over his forehead, is i of its most memorable performers. His music has been played around the earth, and further. On the wall is a letter from astronaut Stuart Roosa, dated 25 May 1971. "Honey Mr Lewis, Our near heartfelt thank you for the tremendous tape you cut for me to have on Apollo 14. I can't really draw how much information technology meant to me to accept your music on board when we were 240,000 miles from habitation and the Earth had shrunk to a tiny ball." Lewis was in the first group of artists inducted into the Rock and Gyre Hall of Fame. John Lennon kissed his feet when they met.
Lewis could play anything brilliantly on that piano – blues, jazz, country, y'all name it. He rarely wrote his own songs, but few interpreted them like the Killer. Lewis has been known every bit the Killer since schoolhouse. Why, depends on who you lot listen to and when. As I discover, it's almost incommunicable to split up fact from fiction when it comes to Jerry Lee.
A black pianoforte is sculpted into the huge atomic number 26 gates exterior Lewis's home in Nesbit, about Memphis. In a higher place information technology, in 18in-high capital messages, are the words THE LEWIS RANCH. From the kitchen, we hear a car humming upward the huge drive, past the private lake, the barking baby-sit dogs and the Jeep parked outside (registration Killer8). Somewhen a white Rolls-Royce Corniche carrying Jerry Lee Lewis rolls upward to the mansion.
Yous can encounter the panic in Judith's confront. "Don't approach him," she whispers. "Don't let Jerry see you." She explains that he won't desire everyone to run into him before he is fit for presentation; earlier he becomes the dandy Jerry Lee Lewis. As I am shooed into the den, I peek out of the window and meet the Killer climbing out of the Corniche, walking with a stick and smoking an e-cigarette. Lewis is accompanied by his road manager of 40 years, JW Whitten. They disappear for his transformation.
Meanwhile, Judith returns to play the hostess. She and Lewis have known each other for a quarter of a century, and are now into their fourth yr of wedlock. They had much in common – they both grew upwardly in the southward, with the snakes and swamps, the sweltering rut, the Pentecostal Christianity and fearfulness of sin. She started nursing him when he was in bad health six years ago, and so things grew from there. "He was very ill, so in taking care of him and talking nearly the fashion we grew upwards, we fell in love with each other."
Alee of me, by the chiliad piano, is a mountain lion, eyes sharply focused, teeth still gnashing, at present reduced to a tawny carpeting. "Oh, don't you worry about her," Judith says, smiling. "That's Jane. Jerry'south second wife!"
"She'south been skinned," says Greg Ericson, his manager, who has joined us.
"Jerry called her Jane!" Judith says, at present laughing.
His second marriage to Jane Mitchum had been combustible – he has said she threw claw-hammers and Male parent Christmas figurines through his car windscreen, and that he deserved information technology. Did Lewis'southward runway record with wives make Judith worry about marrying him? "No, no, I honey these women who loved him. Only those wives were much younger than him, near of them, and by is past." Judith, 65, looks downward at Jane. "Nosotros like her. She's no trouble at all. She doesn't talk or anything. She even lets you stride on her." A number of wives said he was vehement.
Lewis emerges, blackness accommodate, red shirt, white leather shoes and pikestaff. At 79, his confront is waxy and thunderous – whiter than whatsoever I've ever seen. His eyes are red, and look equally if they have seen too much. His hair is thick and silver, with boyish curls. Cantankerous Marlon Brando's mumbling Don Corleone in The Godfather with Daniel Twenty-four hour period-Lewis's roaring prospector in In that location Will Be Claret and you have something approaching Jerry Lee Lewis. When nosotros milkshake hands, I hear my knuckles cleft. He poses for photographs, polite and patient. Until he is unhappy. Then he cracks his pikestaff in anger.
We retire to the den. Lewis is propped up by cushions, i leg lying on his zebra skin stool, Judith at his side. I ask him if he's reflective as he approaches his 80th birthday. Well, he says, he always thinks nigh his parents. "I would say 90% of my ability to do what I do is from my mother and father," he says in his southern slur. "They were the greatest parents anyone in the world could ever think about having. I loved my mom and daddy. They did everything they could in the world to see me successful, and my music." In the background, a phone rings. Lewis looks upwards, sharply. "Cut that telephone off please," he bellows.
His father, Elmo Lewis, was a farmer, carpenter and convicted bootlegger; his mother Mamie adored music and sang with Elmo. When Jerry was three, his seven-twelvemonth-one-time brother, Elmo Jr, was hit by a motorcar and killed. Information technology was the first of many tragic deaths in Lewis'due south life. Elmo Jr had shown great promise as a musician.
When Lewis was seven, his father mortgaged the house to buy him a piano for $250. The story goes that he took i expect at information technology and began playing. Before long, father and son realised their fortune lay in that piano (which however resides at the Lewis ranch). Elmo would hoist it on to the back of a wagon and they would travel from boondocks to boondocks, looking for any space to play in. At night, Jerry Lee would sneak into the local blues club, the only white kid in the building, where he would hide under tables and listen to the music.
The immature Lewis was tough, passionate, God-fearing and precocious. By 14, 15 or sixteen (depending on his mood), he was married to Dorothy, whose preacher father had brought his Travelling Conservancy show to Lewis's home town of Ferriday, Louisiana. Lewis almost became a preacher himself, enrolling at the Southwestern Bible Found in Texas. Merely stone'due north'roll got the better of him. When he turned from hymns to boogie-woogie, he was expelled. E'er since, this has been the dichotomy in Lewis's life: a man raised on the threat of hell, fire, damnation, who could not resist the lure of the devil'southward own music.
When I mention this today, he's not having whatsoever of it. Say something'due south white to Lewis, and he'll swear it's black. "How tin can it be the devil's music? Satan didn't give me the talent. God gave me the talent, and I've always told people that."
Notwithstanding listen to an early recording made at Lord's day Studios, and he's railing at boss Sam Phillips, half crazed with the notion that he has the devil inside him. There is also a famous story that he asked Presley if he believed a rock'n'roller could go to sky.
Lewis smiles when I mention this. "I said, 'Elvis, I'grand going to enquire you one thing before we part visitor here. If y'all dice, do you remember you'd go to heaven or hell?' And he got existent red in the face, and then he got real white in the face, and he said, 'Jerry Lee, don't you e'er say that to me adverse.' I said, 'Well, I won't fifty-fifty say information technology to you again.' Hahahaha!" He laughs, mockingly, at Elvis's state accent. "He was very frightened."
Simply Elvis wasn't the only 1 who thought about hell? Lewis nods. "I was always worried whether I was going to heaven or hell," he concedes. "I still am. I worry almost it before I go to bed; it's a very serious situation. I mean y'all worry, when y'all breathe your terminal jiff, where are you lot going to go?"
Perhaps information technology wasn't the music itself simply the lifestyle he thought was ungodly. "Well, I don't know, I done the best I could," Lewis says.
"That's all forgiven," Judith says. "He's going to heaven. We're going to change the subject."
"Well..." says Lewis, unsure.
"I know you lot are, baby," Judith says, brooking no dissent. "If the lifestyle's got annihilation to do with it, that'southward over."
B efore succeeding in music, Lewis worked as a sewing automobile salesman. Only he didn't sell them. He told "customers" that they had won the machines and all they needed to pay was $ten in taxation. He made a fair scrap of money earlier beingness found out. At 20, he hitched up at Sun Records, and said he wouldn't leave until Sam Phillips had heard him play.
Lewis sold 300,000 copies of his first single, Crazy Arms, in 1956, the yr that Elvis had his offset hitting with Heartbreak Hotel. A year afterwards, he became an international star with Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On and Great Balls Of Burn down. Both songs represented the freedoms and desires of newly-named teenagers. The establishment was outraged, some radio stations banned him, but the greater the condemnation, the more than successful he became.
Why does he think his music was controversial? "They said Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On was a really vulgar record. I never thought there was anything vulgar in it. Risqué. They said the same about Great Balls Of Burn. What are they talking about, risqué? All I hear is the beat, the rhythm, the words."
Lewis's reputation was cemented by his feral functioning. He decided that nobody would outperform him, and nobody would follow him on the bill. Yet another story has it that when he was touring with Chuck Berry, and due to shut alternate shows, Lewis saw red. Nobody closes a testify but Jerry Lee Lewis. And then, according to legend, he ready burn to the piano with lighter fuel at the end of his act, walked off and told Berry "Follow that, boy." Nobody followed Lewis after that.
Did he retrieve he was the best? "I knew that, yeah. Rock'due north'gyre, dejection, boogie woogie, you can look at BB King, wait at Elvis Presley, you can look at the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, simply when it comes down to it, information technology's Jerry Lee Lewis. His music is definitely way ahead of its time."
How was his music alee of, say, Elvis? "Elvis was more than rockabilly. Not rock'n'roll. Rockabilly – which is close to hillbilly." He laughs, as does Judith. Poor Presley was just a state bumpkin.
Who were his music heroes when growing up? "Me."
No, I say, before y'all? "Me."
Anybody else? "Nobody," he barks.
Judith knows this isn't truthful. "Hank Williams? Jimmy Rodgers," she cajoles gently.
"Well, I listened to other people, I liked them, simply I could never observe anybody that was better than me. That'southward why I ever come up back to my own sessions, over and over again."
In 1958, at 22, Lewis became one of America's first stone'n'rollers to bout Britain. He had made it his ambition to overtake Elvis, and it looked a possibility – non to the lowest degree because of Presley's fear of flying. He arrived at Heathrow, and gave a now infamous interview aslope married woman Myra.
Lewis claims he didn't know that marrying a 13-twelvemonth-old was taboo in Uk – he always said it was the norm in the southern states of America. So he had no qualms about showing Myra off to the press. A shocked announcer asked how quondam she was and Jerry claimed she was fifteen. The next twenty-four hours'due south newspapers splashed with headlines about Jerry Lee Lewis and his kid helpmate. After further digging, the newspapers revealed that Myra Gale Brown was actually 13, his cousin, and that for the second time, Lewis had failed to get divorced earlier remarrying. Lewis was shunned and concerts were cancelled. On his return to the U.s., information technology was said he had brought shame on the nation. Equally a stone'due north'whorl star, he was destroyed.
Lewis went from earning more than than $ten,000 a dark to $250. But he carried on rocking, harder and wilder than ever before. He would gig in tiny clubs to the backdrop of drunks fighting. Sometimes he would play for nine-60 minutes stretches through the night. If annihilation, failure made him fifty-fifty more unrestrained. Fifty-one years on, his album Alive At The Star Club, Hamburg all the same shocks with its raw, filthy energy.
Then, in the late 1960s, Lewis found commercial conservancy in the country music he had grown up on. He bandage aside the devil'south best tunes for songs about love, loss and religion. Jerry Lee Lewis became 1 of the great country singers with songs like What'south Fabricated Milwaukee Famous and Another Place, Another Time.
T here have been films made most Lewis'due south fabled bad behaviour (Great Balls Of Fire, with Dennis Quaid as Lewis) and books written about it (Nick Tosches' Hellfire was named by the Observer as the best music book of all time in 2006). Even so today he tells me he was misunderstood. "I never washed anything I'm ashamed of." He pauses. "I wasn't the kind of guy who'd accept a girl and put her up on a colina, and live with her for eight years, and so just marry her when I got her pregnant." And a lot of men would do that? "That was a fact. I'yard not mentioning any names."
Judith gives me a helping hand. "The initials are EP," she says.
I wait at Lewis and enquire if he'due south talking near Elvis Presley.
He stares me dorsum in the face. "I wouldn't be talkin' well-nigh Elvis Presley unless I was talking about Elvis Presley."
"He did that?" I ask.
"Sure he did information technology. It's well known. I married my girls."
Elvis is said to take moved his so girlfriend Priscilla into Graceland when she was 14 and he was 24. Lewis has never understood why he was singled out for marrying Myra.
I look at Judith and ask how he's doing with his seventh married woman. "She's the ane I've been lookin' for all the fourth dimension," he purrs.
Has he plant dearest with Judith? "Yes, I definitely think so."
Had he constitute honey before? "That'south a skilful question."
Was information technology love with Jane?
"No," Judith replies.
Had he been in dear before Judith? All of a sudden, Lewis decides this isn't such a good line of questioning after all. "That's none of your business concern," he roars.
Expert answer, I stammer.
"I wouldn't tread as well much on thin ice." He throws me a common cold stare, then shuts his eyes. We modify the discipline.
Whitten asks me how Cliff Richard is. "He was a big friend of Jerry's. Is he OK? He been sick or what? It's been years since we've seen him. He used to come around… in the 70s. A lot of them used to come up around who don't come no more than."
The truth is many of them are dead, and astonishingly Lewis has outlived them. In 1956, Sam Phillips recorded a jamming session with Lewis, Elvis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins that became known every bit the Million Dollar Quartet. All four were hard-drinking pill-poppers, and Lewis is the merely survivor.
How does he explicate information technology? "I never drank that much," he protests. You took plenty of pills? "Well, I have took a few pills in my life, but who hasn't?" That was how stone'n'rollers kept going: amphetamines to speed them upwardly, opiates to irksome them down. In 1984, doctors cut away a 3rd of his stomach, after he was diagnosed with perforated ulcers. He was given a fifty% hazard of survival. Of form he survived.
But many of those closest to him didn't. In 1962, his son, Steve Allen, drowned in a swimming puddle, aged three. In 1973, his eldest son, Jerry Lee Jr, aged xix, overturned his Jeep and died. In 1982, his fourth wife, Jaren Gunn, drowned in a pool, shortly earlier their divorce settlement was finalised. A year later, afterward 77 days of marriage, his fifth married woman, Shawn Stephens, was establish expressionless at their domicile afterwards overdosing.
Rolling Stone published an article that more or less accused Lewis of killing Stephens, intentionally or otherwise, pointing out that the bed she was plant in hadn't been slept in, she was hobbling and bleeding, had taken 10 times the prophylactic amount of his methadone, and that Lewis had paid for a private autopsy. A grand jury cleared Lewis of any criminal offence. He did admit that they had been fighting that night – and that they fought most nights. What seems clear is that, back and so, he was so incapacitated by his addiction to prescription drugs, he became an unreliable witness to his own history.
The expiry of his two sons caused the virtually hurting (Jerry Lee Jr had played drums in his band). Does he think his losses take fabricated him stronger? "Well, I don't know if it made me stronger or not, sir, simply it got my attention real good, I know. That was a very hard time, a very sad fourth dimension for me. But I pulled through it. I buried my own. I took intendance of everything."
"I think God gave him the ability to not exist angry at him," Judith says.
He gives her a expect as if to say, how could I ever be angry with God?
Judith says when her brother, who had raised her, died, it was Lewis who provided comfort. "He said to me, 'Babe, you've got to come out of this grief, or you will grieve yourself to death. He was right."
I ask Lewis if he ever felt he would grieve himself to death. "No," he says. "I become down sometimes. A little bit down. I pull myself out of it. I pray, and I think about the things I have now."
How many times a day does he pray? "Just about as many hours every bit there are in the twenty-four hour period, I pray. I pray all the time."
"He talks to God like he'south merely talking to you, it's amazing," Judith says.
Is death something he fears? "No, I'm non also much on fear. Well, I love God, I honey Jesus Christ, and I worship the precious, precious, precious Holy Ghost. But I honey living, breathing, I thank God for that all the time."
Has he ever loved life? "Always take. Nosotros take made our mistakes through life. Merely nosotros learn through our mistakes. Big-time mistakes."
I inquire about the biggest. He mumbles incoherently nearly beautiful red-headed girls, fooling around, temptation. "And you lot've got to handle it the best way you tin. You can't hurt people'southward feelings."
Lewis has been clean for decades. Is he happy? "Yeah. I got my one-time girl here. She'southward the best of them. Ameliorate than all of 'em put together. I washed pretty well. I got myself a fine place hither. I'one thousand happy now. That's all I know." He talks nearly his surviving children, how Jerry Lee Three is the chef at his society, how his grandson Jerry Lee 4 was born only a couple of weeks ago. "I've got a practiced wife, good friends. I'm a pretty skillful old boy myself."
Through much of the 1990s and early on 2000s, Lewis didn't make records. He was in poor health, unhappily married to his sixth wife, Kerrie McCarver, and he couldn't observe everyone to produce his work. But over the past decade he has made three critically acclaimed and commercially successful albums of duets, mixing rock'north'curlicue and land. Creatively, he's on a loftier. Yes, this will exist his final bout abroad and, yeah, his fingers are a little gnarled, but he says he plays likewise as ever, and there will be at least 1 more album coming. He can't wait to become to Great britain and testify he's however the greatest showman on Earth.
Does he even so like to use his guns? "If somebody breaks into my house to kill me and my married woman, I volition stop 'em, yes." So he never shoots in temper now? "No!" Was that exaggerated? "That's a agglomeration of baloney. Every fleck of it. Aye."
Perhaps yous weren't helped past your nickname? "Ach, that," he says. "I didn't mean nil bad by that." How did it come virtually? "I was leaving high schoolhouse one afternoon with my friend, and he or me said, 'I'k going home now, I'll meet you at the puddle hall.' And he or me said, 'OK, I'll see you at that place, killer.' And that's how it got started."
But in Rick Bragg's authorised memoir, you say you were named Killer subsequently trying to strangle your instructor? "The what?" he shouts.
"Did y'all ever get involved in a fight with a instructor?" Judith asks.
His face lights up. "Yep, I was strangling him by his necktie. I was swinging on it. He was weakening, losing his breath."
Despite a number of run-ins with the police force, Lewis has never received a custodial sentence. Does he think he's lucky? He laughs. "Well, I simply strangled one!"
I ask if he has ever been scared of anybody. Eight, 9, x seconds pass. "Why would you exist scared of somebody?" he eventually replies. "I don't know what you mean."
"Are people scared of you?"
"I wait so, yes," he says quietly.
"Do you like that?"
"No. That's all just a agglomeration of baloney."
"A lot of people are just afraid of celebrities," says Ericson, gently. "You're the biggest glory, so a lot of people are afraid of you just for that."
There is also the name, I say, and all those stories.
"All the rumours," Whitten says, nodding.
Earlier in the 24-hour interval, Whitten told me how Elton John was shaking when he met Lewis in New Orleans recently.
"No wonder," I say, trying to lighten the mood, "he probably thought you were going to pull a gun on him."
Silence.
"No, he was nervous because Jerry's his idol," Judith says.
"He was only nervous because he was meeting me," Lewis says. "He wasn't scared I was going to hurt to him. I don't want people to be scared of me."
I feel as if Lewis and I take gone 15 rounds. He'south won, of class. But as he is helped out of his chair, I see a gentler side; the polite, elderly gentleman from the deep south, doing battle with a bad dorsum. When the photographer asks him if he would sit at the pianoforte, he does then and within seconds his fingers are moving along the keyboard. He can't help himself. Before long he'due south blocked out the earth – mellow jazz, grumbling blues, Somewhere Over The Rainbow, and on and on he plays. It brings a lump to my throat.
He shakes my hand equally he leaves for his summertime hideaway just outside Memphis, and hobbles to the Rolls-Royce Corniche. Lewis bends himself into the driver's seat and reverses downward that endless drive. "See ya afterward, Killer," he says.
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/aug/08/jerry-lee-lewis-interview-heaven-hell
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