Jerry Lee Lewis, the untamable rock and roll pioneer whose outrageous talent, energy, and ego collided on such definitive records as “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and sustained a career otherwise upended by personal scandal, died Friday morning at 87. The last survivor of a generation of groundbreaking performers that included Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard, Lewis died at home in Memphis, Tennessee, said representative Zach Farnum, per the AP. Of all the rock rebels to emerge in the 1950s, few captured the new genre's attraction and danger as unforgettably as the Louisiana-born piano player who called himself “The Killer."
Tender ballads were best left to the old folks. Lewis was all about lust and gratification, with his leering tenor and demanding asides, violent tempos and brash glissandi, cocky sneer and crazy blond hair. He was a one-man stampede who made the fans scream and the keyboards swear, his live act so combustible that during a 1957 performance of “Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin’ On” on The Steve Allen Show, chairs were thrown at him like buckets of water on an inferno. “There was rockabilly. There was Elvis. But there was no pure rock and roll before Jerry Lee Lewis kicked in the door,” a Lewis admirer once observed. That admirer was Jerry Lee Lewis.
But in his private life, he raged in ways that might have ended his career today—and nearly did back then. For a brief time, in 1958, he was a contender to replace Presley as rock’s prime hit maker after Elvis was drafted into the Army. But while Lewis toured in England, the press learned three damaging things: He was married to 13-year-old (possibly even 12-year-old) Myra Gale Brown, she was his cousin, and he was still married to his previous wife. His tour was canceled, he was blacklisted from the radio, and his earnings dropped overnight to virtually nothing.
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Over the following decades, Lewis struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, legal disputes, and physical illness. Two of his many marriages ended in his wife’s early death. Brown herself divorced him in the early 1970s and would later allege physical and mental cruelty that nearly drove her to suicide. Lewis reinvented himself as a country performer in the 1960s, and the music industry eventually forgave him, long after he stopped having hits. He won three Grammys and recorded with some of the industry's greatest stars. In 2006, Lewis came out with Last Man Standing, featuring Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, B.B. King, and George Jones. In 2010, Lewis brought in Jagger, Keith Richards, Sheryl Crow, Tim McGraw, and others for the album Mean Old Man. (More Jerry Lee Lewis stories.)
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