From Memphis to Nashville: The Odyssey of Jerry Lee Lewis
2000; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/scu.2000.0016
ISSN1534-1488
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoI first saw Jerry Lee Lewis in the Vanderbilt University football stadium on Labor Day 1973. The opening act that night was Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. Although political incorrectness was not yet in vogue, the irrepressible Kinky managed to insult every conceivable racial and ethnic group. After Kinky, Jerry Lee's kid sister, Linda Gail Lewis, took the stage. By this time the crowd had grown restless. Because of his battles with the three scourges of modern life--booze, drugs, and the IRS--the had begun to get a reputation for not showing up for scheduled gigs. Fearing that this might be a night of disappointment, the crowd began shouting for little sister to get the hell off the stage. After what seemed an interminable wait, Jerry Lee finally did appear, with a big bandage across his nose (broken, as I later learned, in a brawl with some Arkansas rednecks in a barroom in Memphis the previous week), sat down behind the piano, and made us all glad that we had stayed. It had been a good fifteen years since Jerry Lee Lewis had wrecked his career as a rock 'n' roll idol by marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin, Myra Gale Brown. He had consumed enough mindaltering substances, legal and otherwise, to send a dozen hippie rockers to the skull orchard. But for an hour or more that night, you could have sworn that the Killer was possessed by the spirit of his three great show business idols--Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and Al Jolson. By the time he kicked the stool out from underneath the piano and went into his manic rendition of Great Balls of Fire and Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On, Jerry Lee owned that audience--not just nostalgia freaks but also kids who had grown up listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Since that night over twenty-five years ago, Jerry Lee Lewis has continued to live a life designed to make Dionysus look like a pansy. He has buried wives and children and has come back from the jaws of death himself. In 1981, for example, he was given virtually no chance of surviving an operation for a tear in his stomach but managed to cheat death, as legions of his fans--led by ex-wife Myra--held vigil in the lobby of a Memphis hospital. Although it's easy to appreciate his music without knowing anything about his life, the sense of persona is so strong in a Jerry Lee Lewis performance that we believe he has lived what he sings. Elvis, in contrast, for the last ten to fifteen years of his life was like a god who occasionally descended from the Mount Olympus of Graceland to give a carefully scripted performance. Accounts of his life, which have inundated us in the two decades since his death, reveal a private Elvis often very different from his public image. No such distance seems to separate the private from the public Jerry Lee Lewis. The protagonist of Nick Tosches's classic biography Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story could be inferred from the music itself. Although Jerry Lee Lewis closes his shows with Great Balls of Fire and Whole Lotta Shakin', an essential part of his appeal also lies in the country songs he recorded in the late sixties and early seventies. Although artists such as Charlie Rich and Conway Twitty enjoyed greater commercial success than Lewis in making the transition from rock to country, they seem simply to have changed musical styles, as one might change a suit of clothes. Jerry Lee Lewis had to reinvent himself. But it is an entirely plausible reinvention. Rock 'n' roll Jerry once said, I'm draggin' the audience to hell with me. Country Jerry brings them back. Not to the Pentecostal salvation preached by his cousin Jimmy Lee Swaggart and periodically embraced by Jerry himself, but to a stoic acceptance of all the bitter heartaches and woes that flesh is heir to. Yes, life is hell, he seems to be saying, but there is redemption in recognizing that fact and living with it. If Jerry Lee Lewis's persona as a country singer seems mellower and more reflective than that of the fifties rocker, the roots of that persona run surprisingly deep. …
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