Jerry Lee Lewis 1935 -- 2022

October 28, 2022 2:32 PM

Jerry Lee Lewis - Whole Lot of Shakin' Goin' On

Guardian: Jerry Lee Lewis, notorious US rock’n’roll star, dies aged 87

Saving Country Music: Country & Rock and Roll Legend Jerry Lee Lewis Has Died

Once again,.the Million Dollar Quartet is complete.

posted by y2karl (54 comments total)

ok - NOW the king of rock and roll is dead

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posted by pyramid termite at 2:41 PM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

and this is why i say he's the king - mean woman blues, 1964, star club, hamburg
posted by pyramid termite at 2:44 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Jerry Lee Lewis -- No Headstone on my Grave [Live at Gilley's July 4th 1982]
posted by y2karl at 2:44 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

[playing piano with foot] Breathlesssss-uh

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posted by not_on_display at 2:48 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

A true legend as a performer. Live at the Star Club is the one I heard that made me true believer; here's another I just saw today: his 1973 debut at the Grand Ole Opry.

For the uninitiated, Jerry Lee Lewis sort of ruined his career by getting engaged to his 13 year old cousin. In '68 he transitioned to country music and had a comeback, which sets up this 1973 performance, wherein (according to legend) he showed up for an 8 minute live radio set, and ended up blowing the doors off for 40 minutes.

You've got to be a real dickhead to do 40min for an 8 minute set.... but what a set
posted by billjings at 2:50 PM on October 28, 2022 [6 favorites]

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posted by billjings at 2:50 PM on October 28, 2022

Jerry Lee was outlived by his cousin Jimmy Swaggart, but not his fourth and fifth ex-wives.

The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis
posted by box at 2:51 PM on October 28, 2022 [15 favorites]

Jerry Lee Lewis -- Live At Gilley's.July 4th 1982
posted by y2karl at 2:52 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

There's a great Russ Tamblyn film from the 1950s called High School Confidential! which opens with Jerry Lee performing with his piano from the back of a truck driving through town.
Full movie with trailer at beginning (recommended, especially for stoners)
posted by Rash at 2:55 PM on October 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

“A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs” episodes about Jerry Lee Lewis:

Episode 59: “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”

Episode 66: “Great Balls of Fire”

posted by chrchr at 3:10 PM on October 28, 2022 [7 favorites]

He was something.

Also a milkshake duck. Still

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posted by Windopaene at 3:25 PM on October 28, 2022 [12 favorites]

Jerry Lee’s passing is a reminder that our pop culture has always been populated by high-functioning sociopaths; we’re just slowly and belatedly getting better at seeing the signs. He was a great act to listen to, but by most accounts a very, very bad man to know.

As he reportedly said to his late fifth wife’s sister, “Why do you think they (called him) ‘The Killer?’”
posted by MarchHare at 3:29 PM on October 28, 2022 [12 favorites]

Putting Ferriday, Louisiana on the map.
posted by tafetta, darling! at 3:37 PM on October 28, 2022

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Glad to have had his music but sorry for those he harmed (which is true of a lot of folks).
posted by gentlyepigrams at 3:40 PM on October 28, 2022 [6 favorites]

Crushing live versions of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "Great Balls of Fire" from American Hot Wax (1978). (Scene from movie with cutaways to other scenes.)
The movie's set in the late 1950s but he's in his 40s.
posted by kirkaracha at 3:46 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Jerry Lee was outlived by his cousin Jimmy Swaggart, but not his fourth and fifth ex-wives.

Nor his other cousin, Mickey Gilley.
posted by kirkaracha at 3:55 PM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Double whoa: Jerry Lee Lewis was still alive, and he was a year younger than my father.
posted by mollweide at 3:59 PM on October 28, 2022 [5 favorites]

For the uninitiated, Jerry Lee Lewis sort of ruined his career by getting engaged to his 13 year old cousin.

...who he married before he was legally divorced from his second wife, so they had to remarry a year later. This was his second bigamous marriage. Dude was a great musician but a monstrous piece of shit to every woman in his life.
posted by star gentle uterus at 4:00 PM on October 28, 2022 [29 favorites]

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posted by vibrotronica at 4:02 PM on October 28, 2022

goodness gracious
posted by clavdivs at 4:06 PM on October 28, 2022 [6 favorites]

A towering figure in the history of 20th Century culture, and an absolute piece of shit. I hope he’s found peace.

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posted by Etrigan at 4:27 PM on October 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

With Bruce
posted by MtDewd at 5:16 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also a milkshake duck.

That’s stretching the concept a bit, isn’t it? I don’t know that I’ve ever heard his music discussed without reference to his misdeeds.
posted by atoxyl at 5:22 PM on October 28, 2022 [11 favorites]

From Bill Wyman's "All 221 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Artists, Ranked from Best to Worst":

31. Jerry Lee Lewis (1986)

Hellfire was the title of Nick Tosches’s Lewis biography, and hellfire seemed always to be burning at his feet. Demonic piano boogie and declaimed words (“whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on” etc. etc.) created a carnal maelstrom. Lewis was precocious even by the standards of rock’s early geniuses. Consider that he was thrown out of church as a teen for turning spirituals into boogie woogie — and that, when it came out that, at the age of 21, he’d married his 13-year-old cousin, he was on his third wife.

posted by Caxton1476 at 5:23 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Oh, Wyman wrote a whole thing, too: Jerry Lee Lewis was an SOB Right to the End
posted by Caxton1476 at 6:29 PM on October 28, 2022 [10 favorites]

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posted by evilDoug at 7:21 PM on October 28, 2022

I love his music, but I have never, ever been able to stomach what this man has done to the people in his life. Music would have been better without him.
posted by q*ben at 8:26 PM on October 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

Oh, Wyman wrote a whole thing, too: Jerry Lee Lewis was an SOB Right to the End

He's got a lot of nerve writing an article like that with his name!

Jerry Lee Lewis: the original bad influence (don't @ me, Rasputin fans)

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posted by rhizome at 8:30 PM on October 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Hard to improve on this summing-up by Michael Gray in the Guardian:

Lewis embodied pinched obduracy, brooding, malevolent ignorance, violent unreliability and borderline madness. He abused women, played with guns and shot at men; he drove the highways of the south blind drunk with his loaded pistol on the dashboard. Yet in the vivid contrast between the meanness of the man and the grandeur of the artist, the common denominators were his phenomenal energy and admirable, all-conquering self-belief.
posted by verstegan at 9:35 PM on October 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

Truth be told I never liked his music nor him. I'll take Little Richard any day day of the week.
posted by DJZouke at 5:28 AM on October 29, 2022 [7 favorites]

I love his music, but I have never, ever been able to stomach what this man has done to the people in his life. Music would have been better without him.

Can bad people create good art? If that question pops up on an exam or at a dinner party, you might want to be wary. The obvious answer — so obvious that it practically goes without saying, and ought to make the examinee suspicious — is that bad people, or at least people who think and behave in ways most of us find abhorrent, make good art all the time. Probably the most frequently cited example is Wagner, whose anti-Semitism was such that he once wrote that Jews were by definition incapable of art. Degas, a painter often praised for his warmth and humanity, was also an anti-Semite and a staunch defender of the French court that falsely convicted Alfred Dreyfus. Ezra Pound was both anti-Semitic and proto-fascist, and if you want to let him off the hook because he was probably crazy as well, the same excuse cannot be made for his friend and protégé T. S. Eliot, whose anti-Semitism, it now seems pretty clear, was more than just casual or what passed for commonplace in those days.

Anti-Semitism turns up so often in the résumés of 20th-century artists, in fact, that it almost seems part of the job description, and critics and commentators have sometimes tried to mitigate if not excuse it. Wagner, they point out, had Jewish friends. Eliot was a devout, churchgoing Anglican — surely not a “bad” person in any extreme way. So for now, let’s leave anti-Semitism off the list. How about misogyny, or generally creepy behavior toward women? Picasso probably takes the prize here: of the seven main women in his life, two went mad and two killed themselves. His standing could be in jeopardy, though, if the crime novelist Patricia Cornwell ever succeeds in proving her conviction — argued at length and at great expense in her book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper— Case Closed — that the British painter Walter Sickert was in fact the famous serial killer.

Speaking of killing, Norman Mailer in a rage once tried to kill one of his wives. The painter Caravaggio and the poet and playwright Ben Jonson both killed men in duels or brawls. Genet was a thief, Rimbaud was a smuggler, Byron committed incest, Flaubert paid for sex with boys. So case closed, one is tempted to say, invoking Ms. Cornwell’s phrase: anti-Semitism, misogyny, racism (I left that out, but there are too many examples to cite), murderousness, theft, sex crimes. That’s not to mention the drunkenness, drug-taking, backstabbing, casual adultery and chronic indebtedness that we know attended (or attends) the lives of so many people who make unquestionably good art. Why should we be surprised or think otherwise? Why should artists be any better than the rest of us?

Good Art, Bad People
posted by y2karl at 6:26 AM on October 29, 2022 [5 favorites]

MFHAJW*

*Motherfuck him and John Wayne
posted by badbobbycase at 7:53 AM on October 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

Jerry Lee Lewis most likely murdered his fifth wife, Shawn Michelle Lewis.

Non-RS link.
posted by jordantwodelta at 8:01 AM on October 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

"He said that he was ready, and had no fear of the hereafter."

Well, of course not. He'd already completed at least two full internships with Hell, and had a guaranteed slot in middle management lined up on arrival.
posted by delfin at 9:52 AM on October 29, 2022 [5 favorites]

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posted by kitten kaboodle at 11:07 AM on October 29, 2022

So nice to give space on the blue to remember a pedophile.
posted by brookeb at 11:11 AM on October 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Genet was a thief

As a poor, gay sex worker during WWII occupied France, you did what you had to do. I believe this is somewhat touched upon in his play The Balcony, where the world around them is crumbling in death and violence of unspeakable amounts, yet is it really the perversions going on inside the true insanity? Morality is a huge huge huge part of his writing, where he even has to grapple with the legality of his love to another.

I do think there's a difference between someone being outward and honest about their past (and being pardoned for their crimes by their government) and someone like Jerry Lee Lewis, who got away with all these sociopathic acts because of privilege, never admitting to the most heinous of his actions.
posted by alex_skazat at 11:23 AM on October 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

because of privilege,never admitting to the most heinous of his actions.
posted by alex_skazat at 1:23 PM on October 29
Because of privilege he admitted to the most heinous of his actions and was protected.
posted by dancestoblue at 11:51 AM on October 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oh jeez, how'd I miss this:

The Real Million Dollar Quartet
posted by y2karl at 12:14 PM on October 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

With Bruce

... and Keith.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:33 PM on October 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

The headline on this should read “Notorious Child Rapist Dies” and the “more inside” should read “Also suspected of killing one of his wives. He made some music, too.” Or maybe not mention the music at all, because he deserves to be remembered as a pedophile and abuser, period.

And before you start going on about yes, he was awful, but it doesn’t erase his music, spare a thought for what the girls he raped (and the women he abused and murdered and probably also raped), and what they might have created had they not had that trauma in their lives. You do NOT just get over that and get on with your normal life; it changes people’s lives forever.

Really disgusted with most mefites for glorifying this POS even a little bit. I was hoping that with all the changes around here lately, things would have gotten better, but here we are. This kind of sickening discourse is why so many of us left.

To those of you who pointed out what a heinous animal this guy was, thank you.
posted by MexicanYenta at 1:39 PM on October 29, 2022 [11 favorites]

I’m with MexicanYenta on this one. Good riddance to a pretty awful human. I don’t think his music mitigates a damn thing.
posted by Devils Rancher at 2:19 PM on October 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

Much Madness is divinest Sense- 620

To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness -
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail -
Assent - and you are sane -
Demur - you’re straightway dangerous -
And handled with a Chain -

-Emily Dickenson.
posted by clavdivs at 3:22 PM on October 29, 2022

I don’t think his music mitigates a damn thing.

Nobody said it did. It was an intentionally minimal obituary post. I presented a soundie of his first hit and two obituaries of which the Guardian's obit hit all the details of his historical self as a known quantity of known quality. Which should go without saying is common knowledge. I figured people would fill in the blanks. And so they did, so mission accomplished. All the same, who Jerry Lee Lewis was as historical figure and person and who he was as a musician are two mints -- but not two mints in one. I can never agree that our shared music can be better without anyone's music because said person was a bad person. Simply saying that is glorifying no one. And for another thing, who gets to be appointed God to make the call? Not me -- let that cup pass from my hands.
posted by y2karl at 4:02 PM on October 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

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posted by riruro at 4:28 PM on October 29, 2022

In five years, at most, this narcissistic monster’s lasting cultural contribution will be limited to a scene in Top Gun. Name three of his songs. I can’t. Kill yr idols, especially when they deserve it.
posted by badbobbycase at 4:37 PM on October 29, 2022

a) His second career as a country singer is significant and often heart rending--but it marked a splitting apart of genre that didn't exist in the 1950s and 1960s--or to put it another way, he was always a country singer, but for a while in the 1970s he was only a country singer, which says alot about taste and market in the era. I think it is also his best work (Killer Country from 1979,, his gospel album from 1977, 1-40 Country from 1975 too)
b) That even if he came in and out of fashion, he worked endlessly, towards the end there were a lot of live albums, reissues, and comps, but for most of his life, he recorded an album or two a year--even in the last years of his life, when he was ill, he recorded the masterful Last Man Standing from 2009, includling what might be my favourite performance of Whiskey River.
c) That his skills as a musiican might be overlapped by his skills as a showman, and some of the writers abuot him---esp Tosches, printed the legend at the expsense of everything else.
d) That he was a monster--perhaps the most unforgivable of his cohort---esp when it came to violence agaisnt women. We have to continually be aware of the misogyny that orginates in our culture.
e) This is harder to defend, but remember that 13 was close to marrying age in his social mileau, Loretta got married at 14, his first marriage happened at 16...
posted by PinkMoose at 6:39 PM on October 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

(I do not think that adults should sleep with teenagers)
posted by PinkMoose at 6:40 PM on October 29, 2022

I knew he married his wives way too young even by the standards of the time (which is, yes, child rape in the sense that they're too young to consent) but I seriously had no idea he killed one of his wives. I'm not defending or excusing him but I didn't know some of the details until this thread. Part of that is because his star was already on the fade outside of "country" music even when I was a youngster and part of that is because media often doesn't talk about the terrible behavior of male celebrities.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 6:49 PM on October 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Name three of his songs. I can’t.

Oh, Jesus. I can name four Jerry Lee Lewis songs off the top of my head. Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On, Great Balls of Fire, Breathless and High School Confidential from the 1950s. I was alive then. What a silly question. Hey, Rocky, watch me pull an inanity out of my hat! Name three Nine Inch Nails Songs. I can't. Obviously they count for nothing. I will wave my hand in dismissal.
posted by y2karl at 7:21 PM on October 29, 2022 [3 favorites]

Y2Karl, I’m familiar with the article you quoted. I’ve thought about this topic at length, particularly in regards to music. The best I can come up with is that each of us makes our best subjective judgements on how the artist and the work balance each other out. Distance from the person can sway things, as well as live for the work. The sum total of these opinions might be deemed the official legacy, but assuming there’s always a correct interpretation to whether an artist’s work justifies their behavior is always going to get you in trouble.
JLL is my personal lodestar / test case for this particular thought experiment, because I am extremely familiar both with his biography and with his music, as well as the musical contexts he shaped and was shaped by. I have studied a lot of his piano compositions, alongside his contemporaries, to try to pick apart the bits of jazz, gospel, and boogie woogie that made their way into and through country music. I can sing all of your references above by heart.
But at the end of the day? Fuck that guy. I wish he’d never been given a platform and great music still would have been made if he’d been a car salesmen or grocery clerk. I won’t blame you if you come to a different conclusion- it’s too complicated for straight lines. But rest assured I’ve done my homework when I say I wish I’d never heard of him.
posted by q*ben at 9:24 PM on October 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Jerry Lee Lewis aside, we went through this with Lou Reed awhile back. tldr: Lou Reed hit his first wife. But he changed and ended up married to Laurie Anderson. Yet people were all up about Lou Reed's music. As Miko wrote there:

People can be very very talented or not so much. And they can be very very well-adjusted or very fucked up. But there is no necessary relationship between the two things. So for me, it's not "Lou Reed was talented, but he was a monster," it's "Lou Reed was talented and he was a monster."

John Denver was not. But I can't stand John Denver's music.

As it happens, I grew up the child of such a monster. I know what violence is like. Oh, you have no idea how well I know that -- when I first told friends in college about my childhood, a couple of them burst into tears. So, I gave that up. It's a private matter and apart from this disclosure, none of your business, thank you. I will never have the urge to go on Oprah about it here.

But I know what it's like to grow up with that. Yet that monster died a beloved grandfather. Go figure. I let him off the hook while he lived, especially after hearing what his parents were like. But forget? Never. Forgive? That's a hard one. But it's not like I am ever going to correct my nieces and nephew about him. They met another person.

Jerry Lee Lewis was a monster but like it or not, he is also a figure in history. His music can't be erased. Even how he got his nickname Killer is in dispute. His character is not. No one is glorifying his person or excusing his behavior here. He was a monster and his music is history. There are no straight lines.
posted by y2karl at 12:09 AM on October 30, 2022 [4 favorites]

♪
posted by Gelatin at 4:45 AM on October 31, 2022

On the music beat:

Jerry Lee Lewis-- Listen to 10 songs by a Rock n' Roll Pioneer
Jerry Lee Lewis -- What Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Fool Out of Me)
Jerry Lee Lewis -- 39 and Holding

On the Monster Beat:

Myra Williams talks about marriage at age 13 to Jerry Lee Lewis
The New Yorker: Jerry Lee Lewis’s Life of Rock and Roll and Disrepute
Vulture: Jerry Lee Lewis was an SOB right to the End

On a sidenote, Bob Dylan wrote To Be Alone With You with Jerry Lee in mind. But Lewis acted like he'd never heard of Dylan and wasn’t interested.
posted by y2karl at 4:14 PM on October 31, 2022