The death of the rock’n’roll pioneer leaves behind a frenetic career filled with professional highs and personal lows
In October 1973, Jerry Lee Lewis was booked to play a showcase gig at the Roxy, a newly opened LA club that immediately attracted a clientele heavy on rock stars: among its co-owners were David Geffen, Neil Young’s manager, Elliot Roberts, and the famed producer Lou Adler. Lewis was, in theory at least, in the throes of another comeback. He had just completed work on an album called The Session, recorded in London with an all-star backing band: Kenney Jones of the Faces, Rory Gallagher and Peter Frampton among them. By all accounts the sessions hadn’t gone terribly well. Propped up by booze and amphetamines, Lewis’s behavior was volatile: Rory Gallagher recalled that whenever something displeased him, Lewis would reach for his sock, where, it was believed, he concealed a gun. Still, the combined contemporary star power of his guests helped the album to Lewis’s highest US chart placing in a decade.
But if Lewis was pleased about the attention paid to him by a younger generation of musicians, he had a funny way of showing it: when John Lennon walked into the Roxy that night, Lewis stopped playing and began berating him from the stage: “[he] started on about how the Beatles were shit and the Stones were shit and there ain’t nobody could play real rock’n’roll the way Jerry Lee could,” recalled Gallagher. For his part, Lennon seemed entirely unbothered. After the show, he walked into Lewis’s dressing room, dropped to his knees and kissed his feet, before asking for an autograph from the man he called “the real king of rock’n’roll”.
