A legend in country and rock, Lewis endures

PROVIDED

Jerry Lee Lewis will play a Charleston show Saturday night.

He was nicknamed The Killer, and with good reason.

By the time Jerry Lee Lewis walked into a Memphis recording studio, he had been expelled from Southwestern Assemblies of God University for, as legend has it, playing the devil's music. He also married his second wife 23 days before the divorce from his first wife was finalized (so with little surprise he was twice divorced).

He was spurned by the Grand Ol' Opry and the Louisiana Hayride and turned down by every record company in Nashville, yet the 'Ferriday Fireballer' burned with the passion for being the next big thing.

And there's the fact that, at the time, he played the piano unlike anyone before him (and some would argue unlike anyone since).

'I can't think of a single person like that right now,' said Cowboy Jack Clement, the record producer credited with discovering Lewis.

He was aggressive. He was brash. He had flare. He had an ego. He displayed all those characteristics the September day in 1956 when he walked into Sun Studios and proclaimed that he could play the piano like Chet Atkins.

'I said, ‘Chet Atkins don't play the piano,' ' Clement recalls. 'He came back, sat down at this piano we had and played ‘Wildwood Flower.'

'Well, it sounded like Chet Atkins playing the piano. I thought, oh, this is cute, but what can you do with it?'

By that point Sun Records was, as Clement put it, 'in the rock-'n'-roll business.'

They were working with artists such as Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison, as well as Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash, so he sent the 21-year-old Lewis on his way and told him that, as good as he played, to come back when he had something more up-tempo.

A month later Lewis returned with a few more songs, which they cut two days later, when Clement asked Lewis if he knew how to play 'Crazy Arms,' a song that had already been a proven hit for several artists, including Ray Price.

'He didn't know all the words exactly, but it sounded like he did,' Clement said. 'So I played it for Sam (Phillips), and before it ever got to the singing he reached over and stopped the machine and said, ‘I can sell that.' '

And sell it they did.

That night, a Monday in the fall of '56, Dewy Phillips, a radio disc jockey who was the first to play Elvis Presley on the radio, gave 'Crazy Arms' a spin and, by Thursday afternoon, the record was available in select cities throughout the Southeast.

While 'Crazy Arms' was a modest hit, what followed was a succession of singles — 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On' and 'Great Balls of Fire' — that proved groundbreaking and simultaneously established Lewis as both a rock-'n'-roll pioneer and a maverick.

Few other artists since have combined his talent and ego.

A dynamic performer, to say the least, Lewis would often kick the piano bench out from under him and play standing up, raking his hands up and down on the keys with a dramatic flare, which prompted Orbison to declare Lewis as the best raw performer in the history of rock 'n' roll.

'You give him an audience of one or two, and he'd sit at that piano and give you the whole show,' Clement said. 'He was on all the time. He was a lot of fun, especially at first, and then he got a little nutty after awhile.

'He was a little big-headed, I guess, you know, all that adulation he got, and he got a fair amount of it. But Jerry Lee, of course, was always wanting to be beat Elvis out, compete with him, but Elvis was an admirer.'

Elvis wasn't his only admirer.

Lewis' natural style, raw talent and unbridled sense of performance resonated with fans, disc jockeys, promoters and fellow artists, along with just about everyone else.

Lewis believed he was indestructible, which led to his undoing when his raucous ways and manic demeanor eventually derailed his career.

Lewis' wild side

One story claims that Lewis, whose goal was to outdo everyone else on the bill, once set his piano on fire at the end of his set to prevent Chuck Berry from being able to follow him on stage.

'There (are) a lot of rumors,' said Clement, before later admitting, 'he's always been kind of a wild guy. He's been known to get into fisticuffs with people on the road.'

A biography of Lewis posted on allmusic.com states: 'He was every parent's worst nightmare perfectly realized: a long, blond-haired Southerner who played the piano and sang with uncontrolled fury and abandon, while simultaneously reveling in his own sexuality.'

Indeed.

The first sign of his undoing came during a British tour in 1958 when he decided to bring along his third wife, 13-year-old Myra Gale Brown, who also happened to be his second cousin.

The tabloids crucified Lewis, the tour was immediately canceled, and he returned to the States where he was almost as quickly shunned. He retreated for a period of time into exile before reinventing himself as a country singer.

'He just cooled off as far as sales,' said Clement, who by that point had left Sun and was working for RCA. 'It was that English adventure. He didn't really come back until he came to Nashville and got into all that country stuff. So he really had two careers.

'It wasn't as twangy as what he did at Sun, but it was good. He had a lot of hits. … It wasn't that raw bangin' country like he did at Sun.

'So you can say where's his place in rock 'n' roll, and you can say where's his place in country,' Clement added. 'The fact is he did both, and he can go from one to the other and nothing really changed. He's still one of my favorite country singers.'

Heavy drinking led to erratic behavior during much of the '70s, which had a lot to do with his divorce from Myra and a series of other failed marriages that followed. All of which led to his increasing dependency on drugs and alcohol.

After nearly dying from a bleeding stomach ulcer in 1981, Lewis finally checked himself into the Betty Ford Clinic.

During the ensuing years he's never really stopped touring, and the 1986 inductee into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame is still known to deliver inspiring performances as equally unpredictable and exciting as they are personal.

In 2005, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Recording Academy and, later that same year, 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On' was selected for permanent preservation in the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress.

'He had a charm about his voice and piano playing,' said Clement. 'He's endured.'

Keith Ryan Cartwright is a Nashville-based freelance entertainment journalist.