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Real wild child jerry lee lewis6/10/2023 Sam Phillips of Sun Records - who personally tended to Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, among others - called Lewis “the most talented man I ever worked with, black or white - one of the most talented human beings to walk God’s earth.” In his prime, he was the most musically sophisticated of the time’s wildest interpreters. However unhinged his delivery, there was always a sense of detachment and control. Lewis in many ways was a slyly deliberate showman he ratcheted up the intensity and emotion into a crossfire hurricane of sound and then brought it back down again, several times in the space of a single song. It seemed like chaos - but one of his secrets was, paradoxically, control and dynamics. When he pounded the piano and bounced up and down, the slicked-down hair on his head came loose from its grease and bounced with him, absurdly. Over this racket he keened, howled, and caterwauled in a way that gave fairly innocuous lyrics - what’s the big deal about “shakin’,” after all? - a lusty, unmistakable carnality that left very little to the imagination. It was a trip down a treacherous musical mountain road with no guardrails. ![]() In the compact three-minute packages that made his name, Lewis sat before his piano and - amid that boogie-woogie foundation - banged out maelstroms of intricate runs and cascading and sometimes dissonant chordage. He didn’t have a friendly, ingratiating manner like his fellow Louisianans Fats Domino or Professor Longhair. He played with a concussive boogie-woogie beat, but that’s like saying Jackson Pollock painted. Lewis could play by ear and re-create any song he had listened to even once from memory. But he also heard something deeply meaningful - something that just made sense - in all the music he’d absorbed as a child and teen: the hillbilly country, rollicking New Orleans piano, southern gospel, and deep blues. His other claim to fame was less elevated: Overnight, he vaporized what could have been a top-tier career with the most consequential sex scandal of rock’s early days. Their titles alone capture Lewis’s character - his unbridledness - and by extension the music he came to personify. There is one filmed interview with Jerry Lee Lewis that could be mistaken for an outtake from Mindhunter.Īt least two of Lewis’s songs - “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On” and “Great Balls of Fire” - stand with Little Richard’s work at the very outer limits of ’50s rock-and-roll extremity. He was a thief, a bigamist, an adulterer, a sexual predator, a family abandoner, and a liar, and felt - knew - society’s rules didn’t apply to him to such an extent that he acknowledged the fact flatly. He never backed down, and he viewed the world with a maniacal severity that hid a bleak sense of mischief that itself hid another layer of severity beneath it. Like most of his remarkable and rambunctious peers, Lewis got himself into trouble of his own making. He was 87 and, after the death of Little Richard in 2020, the last man standing from the dawn of rock and roll. The pianist, singer, and showman, who was one of the three or four people who decisively ushered in the rock-and-roll era - and utterly personified an unbridled and dangerous part of the music - died today, his family announced. He was the very model of a high-functioning sociopath and somehow defied hard living, drug and alcohol abuse, and serious health problems to make it well into his ninth decade. ![]() He once shot his bass player in the chest just about all of his seven wives, including one who was a child, said he beat them and there’s a lingering suspicion that he murdered wife No. ![]() Jerry Lee Lewis was known as the Killer, and it wasn’t a casual sobriquet - a schoolmate called him that after he tried to strangle a teacher.
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