Today it was confirmed that rock music great Jerry Lee Lewis, 87, had passed away. He was one of the first inductees to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. I believe he was the last survivor of the initial inductees.
Lewis was also the last surviving "member" of the fabled "Million Dollar Quartet." This jam session occurred at the famous Sun Studios in Memphis on December 4, 1956. Elvis Presley, by then a musical sensation all over the world, decided to pay a visit to his hometown and to the record studio and the record producer, Sam Phillips, who made Elvis' fame possible. Jerry Lee Lewis was there, Carl Perkins and some of his bandmates were there, and Johnny Cash was also there. Elvis, Jerry Lee, and Carl were captured on tape by Sam Phillips doing an impromptu jam session of mostly gospel or gospel-oriented songs and parts of songs, but the recordings were and are pure joy to listen to over 65 years later.
This is not in order of the original release, but I would guess the YouTuber didn't want to get a copyright strike or something:
Lewis was almost as dynamic as Elvis, and he was immensely talented on the piano. He was born in Faraday, Louisiana, in 1935. His cousins included the late country star Mickey Gilley and the not-late disgraced televangelist Jimmy Swaggart. Lewis' personal life was messy and controversial, to say the least. He had two marriages in his teens, and of course those marriages went kaput. His first marriage was when he was 16. It lasted 20 months. Then at 18, Lewis tied the knot again, but this marriage happened before the divorce from the first marriage was finalized, so it was bigamous. Lewis was getting bigger and bigger in the music scene, with a huge following in the UK, and then disaster hit for his career, from which he never totally recovered. Around 1958, when Lewis was about 23, he married a cousin (once removed) of his, Myra Brown, who was a mere 13, and oh, my God. Like the second marriage, this third marriage was also bigamous, so Jerry and Myra married again after the second divorce got finalized. This marriage lasted until 1970, when Myra filed for divorce citing mental cruelty and abuse. Various allegations of abuse of his various wives were a recurrent theme in his life.
This marriage to Myra Brown nearly destroyed Lewis' career. As it was, scandal damaged though not destroyed his career, and despite having a great deal of success years later in country music, Lewis never fully recovered from it. He was radioactive in countries like the UK.
After Brown dumped him, Lewis was married a fourth time from 1971 to 1982, but this wife, Jaren Elizabeth Gunn Page, drowned in a swimming pool at a friend's house before the divorce could be finalized.
His fifth marriage, to one Shawn Stephens, lasted just 77 days, but she died of a drug overdose. Lots of nasty rumors surrounded the deaths of both Page and Stephens, but nothing was ever proven to be true. Myra Brown, for her part, didn't think Lewis was responsible for either death.
Lewis' marriage to his sixth wife, Kerrie McCarver, was his longest, and for a number of years he moved out of the country, supposedly for tax reasons. However, this marriage eventually ended in divorce (in 2005).
His last wife was the former wife of his former brother-in-law of the wife who was his cousin (Myra Brown's brother). Her name was Judith Brown. The pair lived in Mississippi during his remaining years.
Lewis had six children, two of them having died. He also had a daughter who had been his manager, but they had a big falling out resulting in going to court.
In other words, Lewis had a very dysfunctional family life. However, none of this damaged his enormous talent.
In my view, the best album of the rock era, and certainly its best live album, was Jerry Lee Lewis: Live at the Star-Club. It was a recording of a show he gave in Germany in 1964, when his rock career tanked, and let me tell you, it is one hell of a record. There is not another album like it anywhere before or since. Only Elvis Presley's recordings at Burbank, California, in 1968 for his "comeback" special, come close to this kind of energy. It exhausts the listener and surely the band, the Nashville Teens, had to have been worn out after this performance.
This album can be found in parts on YouTube, and it used to be there in its entirety, but the reader will have to look up each song individually, again because of copyright strikes and the like.
From Variety:
Lewis remained with Sun until 1963, the year after his son Steve Allen Lewis drowned in the family pool. That year, he was signed to Mercury Records. His rockabilly-styled singles for the Smash subsidiary found little favor.
His best records of the period were live shots, the finest of which was a manic 1964 set (originally only issued overseas) backed by England’s Nashville Teens and recorded before an amped-up, chanting crowd at Hamburg’s raucous Star-Club, the notorious Reeperbahn venue that had hosted the Beatles in their salad days.
In “Lost and Found,” his 2009 book about the album, Joe Bonomo called it “one of the most honest and shockingly rocking albums ever made, by a man who many in his own homeland considered a stained and wicked has-been during a brutal passage in his career where he had to dig deep to find what moved him.”
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