Jerry Lee Lewis and the Art of Setting the Piano on Fire. Figuratively. Maybe.
If you want to tell an early rock ’n’ roll story guaranteed to score wide grins and knowing nods, go for the one about how Chuck Berry and Jerry Lewis were booked on an Alan Freed package show and Freed gave Berry the closing spot.
As the oft-told story goes, Lewis was so outraged that as he finished his set, he took out a Coke bottle full of gasoline and set his piano on fire. He then is said to have strutted offstage and declared something along the lines of “I’d like to see any sumbitch follow that!” Alternatively, he is said to have directed that sentiment at Berry, with a wide range of imagined terminology.
The story is a surefire winner because in the most basic mythology of early rock ’n’ roll, Berry and Lewis were both known for an abundance of ego and a hint of menace. Lewis, in addition, had an open streak of crazy.
The only caution is that there’s an excellent chance the whole thing never happened. While it is usually said to have played out during a May 1958 Freed show at the Brooklyn Paramount, no one in the audience at the well-attended show ever seems to have spoken about it. There are no photos or written references. Members of Lewis’s band have said it never happened. The late Berry never mentioned it.
The story also presupposes that Lewis had the expertise to set such a controlled blaze that a stage fire at the Brooklyn Paramount didn’t summon the Fire Department and didn’t delay Berry’s subsequent performance. Since Freed productions typically included multiple sequential shows, it would also be instructive to know if this happened at the first or last performance.
Lewis himself played rope-a-dope with the story, frequently denying it and then sometimes embellishing it. As he explained to GQ in 1981 with a figurative shrug, he did that because “that’s what people want to hear.”
In any case, Lewis won’t be addressing that story any more, since he died Friday at the age of 87, the last man standing from the pantheon of pioneer rockers.
Now yes, colorful characters back to the gods of Ancient Greece have lent themselves to stories that may or may not be rooted in actual events. It’s part of their mystique. It’s occasionally instructive.
It can, however, send plumes of smoke over the real reason we care about those characters in the first place, which with Lewis, or Berry, is that they created great music.
If Lewis sometimes played the artful dodger about his life, he was fiercely serious about his music. He wanted it appreciated, and it deserved to be, because it was that good.
His rock ’n’ roll career was a fireworks display, filling the sky with the incandescent “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” and “Great Balls of Fire” plus a few supporting flashes like “Breathless” and “High School Confidential.”
But like the fireworks, Lewis’s rock ’n’ roll career quickly plunged from spectacle to silence. In 1958, just a year after he exploded onto the radio, the news that he had married his 13-year-old second cousin Myra Gale turned him into a rock ’n’ roll ghost. Among other things, his timing was terrible, since the rock ’n’ roll biz at the time was under merciless fire for allegedly promoting immoral behavior. Ignoring Lewis’s child bride would have been a bad look.
The accolades of history notwithstanding, it’s worth remembering that neither “Whole Lotta Shakin’ “ nor “Great Balls Of Fire” reached №1 on the national charts. “Great Balls of Fire” almost got there, but was blocked by Danny and the Juniors’s “At The Hop.” A sheaf of other really good rockers that Lewis cut for Sun, including “Crazy Arms,” “End of the Road” and “Down the Line,” barely made the charts at all.
That is to say, despite creating two signature records within a year, Lewis was expendable. After the marriage he never had another hit on Sun and he didn’t have another hit at all for a decade, until he cut “Another Place Another Time” for Smash in 1968. The success of “Another Place” relocated him into the country market, where the marriage was an amusing factoid from ancient history. Over the next 13 years he placed 47 records on the country charts, including four №1s.
Perhaps reflecting the fact that even his rock ’n’ roll hits had country DNA, he sounded like he was born to sing it. When he tackled the fundamentals of country songs, like drinking, cheating, loving, yearning and cutting loose on Saturday night, listeners believed them as readily as rock ’n’ roll fans bought the Chuck Berry story.
Lewis turned regret into an art form with his delivery of lyrics like “One has my love, the other only me / But what good is love to a heart that can’t be free.”
Or “I look across my lonely room and see your picture / Your loving smiling face I know I miss / And I remember to another you’re still married / And I know there must be more to love than this.”
It’s not insignificant that Lewis, like Frank Sinatra, sprinkled lyrics with interjections (“Yes, I am, darling”) and sometimes turned the word “I” into some variation on the words “Jerry Lee.” (“Who’s gonna play this old piano / After The Killer’s gone?”)
Emphasizing the first person was appropriate and in fact pretty much necessary, he explained in a 1989 interview, because Jerry Lee could do musical things almost no contemporary — not Berry, not Elvis — could do.
“I never met Hank Williams or Jimmie Rodgers,” he said. “But I listened to their records and they were real song stylists. I figure I’m a stylist, too.
“You know, any song can go in any direction. You have to make it your own and there are very few people who can do that. I can. I can do it with the whole range of American music. I can be playing a rock ’n’ roll show, really get ’em going and then lay something on ’em like ‘The Old Rugged Cross.’ They pay attention to it, they respect it, then I go into ‘Great Balls of Fire.’ I don’t know of any other artist who can do that.”
Elvis, whom Lewis not infrequently referenced, was often said to be a stylist. Carefully not disrespecting Elvis, Lewis said he begged to differ.
“When Elvis sang ‘Don’t Be Cruel,’ he was standing on the right corner at the right time,” Lewis said. “He could sing his behind off and he was an electrifying entertainer. That’s what [Sun Records owner] Sam Phillips, RCA Records and [Elvis’s manager] Colonel Tom Parker saw in him. He was a phenomenon.”
Elvis, Lewis suggested, was carefully packaged — to the detriment of his music.
“Colonel Parker was a great man, no doubt about that,” said Lewis. “But I couldn’t have done what Elvis did under him. I couldn’t let anyone dominate me, tell me how to live my life. I had to be my own teacher, experience life myself.
“I was successful on Sun where Elvis wasn’t. I’m not the king of rock ’n’ roll. Elvis and Chuck are the kings of rock ’n’ roll. I’m the king of Jerry Lee Lewis music.”
From the beginning, Jerry Lee Lewis music benefited from the “Sun Sound,” the unique acoustics in the Sun studios that gave the best Sun Records their euphoric spark.
“I could cut a song and in one take I’d know it was a hit,” he said. “You couldn’t beat ‘Shaking’ and ‘Great Balls.’ Today’s technology wouldn’t make a difference.”
The problem with Sun, he said, was that after the marriage story, Sam Phillips stopped promoting his records.
“He’d still record me,” said Lewis, “but with no advertising or promotion. I had to beg Sam to let me record ‘What’d I Say.’ And again it was released with no ads or promotion.”
It cracked the top 40. His next release, a remake of Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” in the same year Myra Gale reached that age, briefly brushed the bottom of the charts. That finished his Sun career.
Still, despite having virtually no hits between 1958 and 1968, Lewis insisted that “My career never went downhill.” He remained popular on the road, he said: “We played the Charlotte Coliseum and we had 14,000 people in a venue that holds 12,500. I still played England.”
But a couple of things lined up against him, he said. Like Dick Clark.
“Dick Clark told me early in my career that if I would do his Philadelphia show, it could go national. That’s what happened. Then when he went national, he forgot me. He stabbed me in the back and said he didn’t. He’s lying through his teeth and his shoes don’t match, either.”
And then there was the press.
“I’ve always respected the press,” Lewis said. “Eventually they will write what they want and I have never questioned that. But when they ask me about my life, they only want to hear about a real bad guy, the crazy guy who shot up Elvis and had so many wives.
“You try to explain, but they just want to hear about the rock ’n’ roll legend, the living legend that burned up pianos and shot people — the gunslinger who’s gotten away with all the things they think he’s done. If I’d done all the things they say I’ve done, I’d have to be 3000 years old.
“I’m gonna write a book someday that tells the truth. My fans will know it’s the truth and the truth will prevail.”
[Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story, an autobiography written with Rick Bragg, was published in 2015.]
What has inarguably prevailed is the music, a gloriously free-range mix all stamped Jerry Lee Lewis. He cut the Big Bopper’s “Chantilly Lace” and Jimmie Rodgers’s soapy parlor ballad “Mother, The Queen of My Heart.” He cut Bob Wills’s “San Antonio Rose” and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising.” He cut Woody Guthrie’s “Reuben James” and the Crests’s “Sixteen Candles.”
Nor were these just filler tracks. If every cut wasn’t brilliant, many were and none were less than interesting. His version of “Be-Bop-a-Lula” turns an upbeat girlfriend song into something slower and almost brooding, raising the unsettling question of what’s really going on. When he sings “He Can’t Fill My Shoes,” about his ex’s new flame, he could be singing about, oh, every singer he’s ever met.
Lewis had interesting takes on some of his hits, like this: “I had no idea what ‘Great Balls of Fire’ was about. I just knew it was as hit. I didn’t care much for ‘High School Confidential’ or for ‘Breathless.’ That’s too hard to sing.
“After I left Sun and went to Smash, I had to fight there, too. I was five years without a hit. I recorded ‘Just Dropped In’ first, but they waited and someone else had the hit. When they had me record ‘Another Place Another Time,’ I cracked up during the session. I was laughing. I didn’t want to go in that direction. They had to convince me it would be a hit.”
Not that he ever had any doubt that ultimately The Killer would prevail. After all, he made music that still shakes nerves and rattles brains 65 years after he recorded it.
And Chuck Berry?
“Chuck and I were good friends for many years,” said Lewis. After Berry died in 2017, Lewis posted an affectionate tweet.
Still, in the end, Lewis closed the show.
