Now let's go, SHAKE!: reading Nick Tosches' Jerry Lee Lewis book

A firebrand hillbilly boogie-woogie rock 'n' roller from Louisiana who was a bigamist at the age of 17, a serious superstar contender to Elvis Presley for a year or two, a self-proclaimed threat to public safety and morals ("the Killer"), and a tearing-himself-apart hard-drinking, speed-freak "sinner" who'd been brought up among the fanatical testifying and tongue-speaking of the Pentacostal sects: how do you ever tell the way-larger-than-life tale of Jerry Lee Lewis? In Nick Tosches' case, in his pretty amazing 1982 book Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story, it goes like this. You fully immerse yourself in the world of dirt-poor cotton farmers and illicit whisky brewers who populated the small towns of the pre- and post-war US South. You situate JLL in this incestuous world of inter-marriage, of farming and hustling in precarious Depression-era times, of habitual law-breaking smoothed over among local fiefdoms (rich landowners, corruptible small-town sheriffs), and of deep-grained insularity and social conservatism. And you chart the hard-scrabble rise of "white-folk rock 'n' roll" through crafty operators like Sun Records' Sam Phillips. And then you throw the whole thing together like some latter-day William Faulkner drunk on the power of the-dial-turned-up-to-max rock and roll writing. It is, to say the least, a ... heady mix. Anyway, yes, I've been reading Hellfire, supposedly the greatest ever music book (!), and while I'm not wholly convinced that Tosches' book isn't just a little over the top and maybe even somewhat untrustworthy, I have to confess that it is - like Lewis's music itself - a wild and thoroughly enjoyable ride. 

Whole lot of Faulknerian writing goin' on: Tosches' book

So hang onto your seats, here are some of the things that most struck me about the Hellfire book and Jerry Lee Lewis's life and music: 

*Number one, Lewis owed a lot to the church. He almost certainly wouldn't have hit the piano keys so hard and screamed out his lascivious lyrics so loud had it not been for the hyped-up gospel music and screaming-and-crying testifying he'd experienced as a boy in his home town of Ferriday in Louisiana. 

*Musically, Lewis (at least in his early pre-C&W incarnation) married fast boogie-woogie piano playing to country and R&B music in a way that apparently no-one else quite did. In Tosches' words, Lewis "took a whip" to old Tin Pan Alley and country songs and "shook them down to boogie-woogie". 

*Predictably, and just like Elvis's, Lewis's brand of "white folk rock 'n' roll" owed an enormous amount to black music being pumped out in places like Hanley's Big House, a rough-and-ready juke-joint-cum-nightclub in the black area of Ferriday in the late 1940s. By the age of 13, JLL was apparently sneaking into this place with his cousin Jimmy Lee. 

*Naturally, like all the obnoxious egos/talented people that have ever haunted the benighted land of rock (think Mark E Smith or John Lydon), Lewis eventually became a shameless self-glorifier who refused to acknowledge any antecedents. Here he is batting off a question in the mid-70s about his musical influences:

"No way. You'll never find anyone that Jerry Lee Lewis has taken anything from, brother. I'm a stylist. Jes' like Jimmie Rodgers - the late, great Jimmie Rodgers - jes' like Hank Williams - the late, great Hank Williams - jes' like Al Jolson, the late great Al Jolson. There's only four stylists, and that's Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Williams, Al Jolson, and Jimmie Rodgers. Rest of 'em are jes' ... imitators."

Referring to himself in the third-person and offering an Hanley's Big House-denying all-white micro-list of other "greats", you could be forgiven for thinking that by his late-thirties Lewis had become yet another musician who believed his own hype and had largely lost touch with reality.  

*Lewis was energetic, ambitious and hard working. At least in his early, hungrier days. Having developed a taste for wowing crowds with his piano pyrotechnics at the age of 14 (first "show": an open-air event to promote a new Ford dealership in Ferriday in June 1949), by 1954 he was in Nashville touting round the clubs looking for piano work. One job he got was at a club called the Musician's Hideaway. It was apparently 15 dollars a night (1-5am), "poundin' that damn piano till daylight". By 1957, with Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On hitting the charts, he was doing gruelling multi-artist tours alongside Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Wanda Jackson, "often", says Tosches, "travelling more than five hundred miles from one night's show to the next". 

*Though Tosches' book positively revels in the Faulknerian blood, dirt and damnation elements in Lewis's story (complete with whole chunks written somewhat dubiously in a Deep South religion-soaked vernacular), there's still plenty on the music itself. We get to hear about Lewis pushily barging into the Sun Records studio in Memphis in November 1956 virtually demanding that the engineer Jack Clement give him a try-out (Clement evidently said, "Where's your gittar?", with Lewis snapping back, "I don't play no gittar, I play a piana"). We get to hear about how his first Sun single Crazy Arms was recorded, pressed-up and distributed in just five days in December 1956. And we get to hear about how - on 4 December 1956 - Lewis famously got into an impromptu Sun jam session with Carl Perkins' band, Johnny Cash and, yep, Elvis Presley. More interestingly - for me, anyway - we also get to hear how, in January 1957, Lewis worked as a session pianist on Billy Lee Riley's Flyin' Saucer Rock 'N' Roll and Red Hot, two great raw rockabilly records.  

*Lewis's music as pure, dangerous energy is a big thing on the book. Tosches says that in the late summer of '57 the omnipresent success of Whole Lotta Shakin' meant its "wicked rhythm" was "blasting forth like thunder without rain from the cars and bars and all the open windows of the unsaved" (check out that bloodthirsty ole relijun register again). Later, with R&R and wildman Lewis in particular being linked to outbreaks of teen-gang violence in the USA, one newspaper columist said JLL's music possessed "the contagious, almost frightening beat of a tribal drummer". Some distinct scarifying racial undertones there, I reckon. 

*Surprise, surprise, Lewis was caught up in moral panics about the supposed degeneracy of rock and roll. There was an unofficial early ban on playing Whole Lotta Shakin' among some radio stations - a ban that failed after a rip-roaring, stool-kicking TV appearance greatly boosted JLL's popularity. Most notoriously, Lewis' first visit to the UK (in 1958) saw a media witch-hunt over his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin Myra Gale. Newspaper editorials called on the Home Secretary to deport him, and Lewis only played the first three (Edmonton, Kilburn and Tooting) of 30 scheduled shows before the remainder were pulled, venue owners the Rank Organisation panicking like any proper god-fearing business would. Scroll forward 18 years and you'd have council officials sermonising about the "depravity" of punk rock and the Sex Pistols. No wonder Malcolm McLaren liked rock and roll. 

Lewis, with his sister Frankie Jean and wife Myra Gale,

showing what he thought of the British press at the end of his curtailed 1958 UK tour

*Lewis was the showman par excellence, his famed stool-kicking, standing-upright piano-bashing, head-shaking antics being just part of it. Whether, as Hellfire maintains (page 145), Lewis once set fire to his piano during a concert so as to upstage Chuck Berry, is apparently disputed, but you get the impression that Lewis definitely knew how to put on a show. Incidentally, there's not a single mention in Hellfire of that other great rock and roll showman-performer, Little Richard. Why's that, I wonder?

*Depressingly, though Lewis had himself been through the mill of a conservative teen-fearing backlash, by the late-70s he was pretty censorious himself. Towards the end of the book Tosches includes a long section where Lewis browbeats a young music journalist with long hair: "This long hair shit with a man is a bunch of motherfuckin' shit, and any sonofabitchin' man wears his hair like a woman has got a fuckin' weakness he'd better get rid of! Downfall." He was still only 37 but sounding like an ornery old Louisiana redneck (which I guess he was). Compare Frank Sinatra's similarly snappy behaviour with a young beatnik in a bar in the 1960s (snippy with the hippy). 

And that is just about that. Reading between the lines I get the impression that Tosches' book takes more than a few liberties with the truth here and there - and I think it certainly overdoes the down-home Louisiana stuff - but it's still a memorably good read about an undeniably powerful performer who bridged the pre-WW2 world of Jimmie Rodgers country and the scream-tastic world of the Beatles, the Stones and other "teen music" sensations. Self-mythologising like the best of 'em, Lewis called himself a "rompin', stompin', piano-playing sonofabitch. A mean sonofabitch. But a great sonofabitch. A good person". Yeah, he was rock's real wild child trapped between heaven and hell. The man who shot his own bass player (Butch Owens) in the chest apparently out of drunken carelessness, who tried to strictly control his teenage wife (makeup and showy clothes forbidden, certain books off-limits), who defaulted on countless rental payments and breached numerous performance contracts (Tosches has pages and pages on his rackety 1970s finances), was a great sonofabitch. He might have been half-drowning in whisky and speeding like a lunatic on amphetamines (he "customarily" took eight to ten capsules before each show according to George Nichopoulos, aka "Elvis's pharmacist"), but deep down he was a good person. A little out of control, but a god-fearing son of Elmo Lewis who idolised Jimmie Rodgers and came from good ole Ferriday, Louisiana. When father and son made their famous trip to Memphis in November 1956 - the trip where Lewis Jnr and Snr would try their luck in doorstepping Sam Phillips at the Sun Records studio - they apparently paid for the trip with "egg money", the sale of around 400 eggs from Elmo Lewis's chicken farm (never mind egg punk, egg rock and roll anyone?). I say they apparently paid for the trip with egg money because now, having reached the end of Tosches' legend-burnishing book, I'm not quite sure whether any of it is actually er, true. Hey no, it must all be true, right? Because after all, liars are godless sinners. And they'll burn in hell forever.