Song of the Day 10/27: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”
Jerry Lee Lewis has become Schrödinger’s Rock Star — TMZ didn’t know if he was alive or dead until somebody checked. The tabloid-on-a-computer site apologized yesterday for taking the word of somebody claiming to be Lewis’ representative and reporting that Lewis had expired at age 87.
You can’t kill the Killer that easily — he’s survived everything from the IRS to six marriages, including the one to his 13-year-old cousin that wrecked his career, to a stroke in 2019. But he had to beg out of his induction ceremony at the Country Music Hall of Fame in October because of what was called the flu. He’s alive and living in Memphis, though he doesn’t look all that well in the photos that prove it.
Jerry Lee Lewis was one of the 10 performers in the initial class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This 1957 appearance on the Steve Allen Show — the setting made him more restrained than usual — might give you some idea of why.
Two things. Steve Allen’s audience is clapping on the 1 & 3 like a bunch of fucking dummies.
Also, this makes me wonder why Allen made Elvis wear a tux and sing hound dog to an actual hound dog to desexualize it.
And Steve Allen cluelessly snapping his fingers, which has nothing to do with rock and roll, as some kind of snickering invocation of hipness: “Yeah Jerry Lee I can dig it, but…”
It always seemed weird that Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart are cousins, since Jerry Lee played the devil’s music while Swaggart performed for the Lord (hah!) and told people how to avoid great balls of fire. Or maybe not so weird, since they were both good old boys who went wild on stage. At least Jimmy’s not the cousin Jerry Lee wanted to marry.
He’s also a cousin to Mickey Gilley.
I guess TMZ can now withdraw the withdrawal of his death announcement. He died today.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/arts/music/jerry-lee-lewis-dead.html
I have to read more about this man. From the NYT obit:
His deeply worried mother, a Pentecostal Christian, enrolled him in the Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas.
“I didn’t graduate,” he told The New York Times in 2006. “I was kind of quit-uated. I was asked to leave for playing ‘My God Is Real’ boogie-woogie style, rock ’n’ roll style. I figured that’s the way it needed to be played.”
…
In desperation, he and his father sold 33 dozen eggs and, with the proceeds, headed for the studios of Sun Records.