Jerry Lee Lewis, the last legend of the golden age of Rock And Roll, He died this Friday at the age of 87 at his home in Memphis (Tennessee). Some portals had been rumoring about his death for a couple of days, but the sad news finally came this Friday. Jerry Lee Lewis was eloquently nicknamed The Killer, due to his choleric temperament and interpretative fierceness, he became a pioneer and icon of rock and roll, he rivaled in the fifties with all that glorious advance of the new music of the The devil – Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Carl Perkins – outlasted them all and continued to teach rage well into his eighties. But his already battered health turned his back on him definitively at the age of 87. Leave a movie life (in every way, also the literal: Great Balls of Fire triumphed on the big screen in 1989), tragic and truculent moments and, above all, two of the most important songs of the fifties: Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going on and, of course, those famous “Great Weddings of Fire”.
He was born in Ferriday (Louisiana) in 1935, into a very poor family that knew how to sense his enormous artistic talent and went into debt to buy him a third-hand wall piano that two of his cousins taught him to play from the age of 10. He embodied the most fearsome and sharp profile of that new exciting music that was able to channel the desire for youthful liberation after the trauma of the war. Elvis could also be a sweet and lovable boy, but Lewis – long blond hair, strong southern accent, defiant and libidinous attitude – was the son-in-law that no father would want to find at home. And all this despite having been educated in an evangelical church, an aspect that would always produce internal contradictions, because it sharpened the contrast with his crazy temperament, psychotic and prone to addictions.
He boasted of having made his public debut at the age of 14 with a concert in a car dealership, developed a bombastic and highly theatrical style (always on his feet, always sliding his fingers in virulent glissandos over the keys) and it ended up being inevitable that Sam Phillips, the founding plenipotentiary of Sun Records, knew of his adventures and signed him up for his studios in Memphis, first as an accompanying musician and then as leader. There he coincided in 1956 with Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash, with whom he would join the so-called Million Dollar Quartet. It was just the prelude to his two superlative songs, which he would premiere in 1957 on television The Steve Allen Show and that catapulted him to uncontrollable fame from coast to coast.
Success seemed to know no zenith, but the world would not take long to discover the darkest and most controversial side of our character. In May 1958, immersed in a tour of the United Kingdom that was to establish him as an idol also on the other side of the Atlantic, a reporter discovered that his third wife, his cousin Myra Gale Brown, was only 13 years old when they contracted. marriage. The scandal was huge, Lewis was accused of pederasty and had to suspend the entire schedule of performances when he had only had three concerts on English soil. He would never fully recover from that episode: he was immediately blacked out by US radio, and none of his hundreds of subsequent compositions would reach the Top 20 on the charts.
His recording legacy includes close to 40 LPs, notable even in the last decade: he said goodbye to the recording studios in 2014 with the beautiful rock n roll timebut four years earlier he had given himself the pleasure of manufacturing an album of duets, mean old man, with an invaluable list of admirers and friends, from Mick Jagger to Eric Clapton, Willie Nelson or Sheryl Crow. In spite of everything, he never managed that his name was not more linked to the events pages than to those of shows. He lost his fourth and fifth wives in unclear circumstances (Jaren Pate drowned, Shawn Stephens was always suspected of suffering sexist violence), he also saw two of his children die (Steve Allen Lewis fell into a pool with three years; Jerry Lee Lewis Jr., who stood out as a drummer, died in a traffic accident at 19) and starred in some terrible episodes due to his fondness for firearms. Above all, when he accidentally shot one of his gang members or when in 1976 the police arrested him drunk near Graceland, Presley’s mansion, and discovered that he was hiding a loaded revolver in the glove compartment of his car.
Nor did the famous incident on the shared tour with Chuck Berry, whom the promoters placed as the headliner and, consequently, responsible for the last concert of the night, help alleviate his bad boy aura. Prisoner of jealousy and anger, Lewis would end up dousing the piano with gasoline and setting it on fire while he interpreted the most flamboyant version, undoubtedly, that he had ever known his Great Balls of Fire.
Chastened by the bad fame and incontestable strength of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and other rock aristocracy of the sixties, Jerry Lee reconverted himself at the end of that decade as a country artist and knew how to maintain a much more coherent musical trajectory than the vital one. The version of the classic Chantilly Lace, for example, was highly celebrated. But the succession of extreme incidents in her curriculum was too greedy not to give rise to very relevant works around her figure. In 1982, seven years before the feature film starring Dennis Quaid, Nick Tosches had already put together an overwhelming biography, Eternal Fire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story. The Contra publishing house published the Spanish version relatively recently, in 2016.
That text did not reflect other moments of a life that was never completely peaceful. In 1984, for example, he had to undergo delicate surgery to remove a third of his stomach, ulcerated by severe drug abuse. Much more pleasant was that in 1986 his name appeared, along with Elvis, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, James Browne, Buddy Holly or the Everly Brothers, among the first 16 inductees in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The already battered health of these last few weeks prevented him from attending, on October 16, his inclusion in another Hall of Fame, in this case that of country music. His death finally visited him in Desoto County, Mississippi, where he resided with his seventh wife, Judith Coghlan. He is also survived by four of his children. After the loss of Little Richard, in 2020, rock and roll loses the last of its founding fathers and is orphaned forever.
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