Night Beat (50 page)

jerry lee lewis: the killer

Look, we’ve only got one life to live. We don’t have the promise of the next breath. I know what I am. I’m a rompin’, stompin’, piano-playin’ sonofabitch. A mean sonofabitch. But a great sonofabitch. A good person. Never hurt nobody unless they got in my way. I got a mean streak. . . . I gotta lay it open sometimes.

JERRY LEE LEWIS, 1977

J
erry Lee Lewis—the Louisiana-born, wild-haired piano player—had as much assaultive impact on rock & roll culture as any artist prior to the Sex Pistols: He lived out rock & roll’s sexual and impulsive audacity with such hauteur and flamboyance as to be deemed a perilous talent in the late-1950s. For that distinction—as well as for the startling depth and display of his talent—there are many rock & roll chroniclers who regard Lewis as the exemplary performer of his era: more unrepressed than Elvis Presley, more forcible than Chuck Berry, more insolent than Little Richard.

Of course, it is not only for his musical swagger that Lewis seemed preeminent, but also for the manner in which he has consistently embodied—that is, lived out—the promise of rock & roll’s threat. Rock & roll is mean and corrupting music, he has said many times, and to perform that music, Lewis has forsaken many hopes and a few beliefs. Indeed, he lives and speaks as a man who has lost his soul—and knows exactly what that loss means. For this act, existentialists would have named him a rebel, though his friends and fans simply call him the Killer.

It is a tough moniker, but Lewis has been tempered by the times. In mid-1958—at the peak of a career that looked to overtake Presley’s—he married Myra Gail Brown, his thirteen-year-old third cousin (it was his third marriage), and the resulting scandal reduced him to a career of secondary concert dates and record deals that he never quite overcame. In subsequent years, Lewis would bury two sons, lose Myra and other wives to divorce, hatred, and death, and lose his property and wealth to tax liens filed by the U.S. government. Over the years, it became increasingly difficult to tell where Jerry Lee-the-victim ended and Jerry Lee-the-culprit began. The man who was once a preacher began assaulting his wives and lovers with a fearful savor, and in 1976, in a drunken incident on his forty-first birthday, he shot two bullets into the chest of his bassist, Butch Owens (Lewis was charged with a misdemeanor: firing a gun within city limits). In 1981, he entered a Memphis hospital in enfeebled shape and had most of his stomach removed—the result of years of steady consumption of liquor and drugs.

But the most serious discredit to the Lewis legend was detailed in an article that appeared in the March 1, 1984, issue of
Rolling Stone,
“The Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis.” Written by Richard Ben Cramer (a reporter for
The Philadelphia Inquirer,
and the recipient of a Pulitzer prize for journalism), the article seems a scrupulous account of Lewis’ two-and-a-half-month marriage to twenty-five-year-old Shawn Michelle Stephens and the mystifying events surrounding her August 23, 1983, death: the bruises and blood on her body, the scratchlike wounds on Lewis’ forearm, the permeation of fresh, small bloodstains around Lewis’ Mississippi home, and the superficial police investigations and coroner’s reports that followed. Though it was eventually concluded that Shawn had died as the result of an overdose of methadone and that there was “no indication of foul play,” Cramer uncovers much overlooked (and withheld) evidence, including clear indications that there had been some sort of fight at the Lewis house the night of the young woman’s death. The article raises disturbing questions about Lewis’ accountability in the demise of his fifth wife, and though Cramer doesn’t accuse the rock performer of murder, he certainly indicates that the matter merited a more careful inquiry.

But it isn’t my purpose here to recount the
Rolling Stone
article, and certainly not to draw conclusions about Jerry Lee Lewis’ culpability. From my understanding of Cramer’s reportage, it may no longer be possible to reach any incontestable conclusions on the matter. If I were to be callous about it, I might add that Lewis’ guilt may be beside the point: Jerry Lee clearly has developed a reputation as some kind of archetypal modern American “outside the law” (as one writer put it), living out tragedy, violence, and dissolution as the fruits of a self-willed fall from grace. That’s a fairly romantic conception, and for my interest, it raises another, equally troubling question: Do we (meaning his fans and chroniclers) really care much about whether Lewis has brutalized his wives, or in fact contributed to Shawn Stephens’ death? Or does the possibility somehow further his antiheroic standing? Or as one friend put it, if we thought Lewis
had
killed his wife, would we still buy his music, attend his shows? Would we disown our conviction in the importance of his earlier work?

These are questions that each of us can answer only for ourselves and I must admit I’m not sure what my own answers might reveal. Like many other pop writers, I have often celebrated the angry, violent impulses of rock & roll, because, in part, such impulses seem born of a hard-earned moral courage, though also, I should admit, because the angry, violent side of rock can be fun. (If you doubt me, listen to the Who or the Sex Pistols, or see
The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, The Blackboard Jungle, The Harder They Come, Quadrophenia,
or
High School Confidential—
the latter featuring Jerry Lee Lewis on the title song.)

But it is also true that fans and critics have often romanticized rock & roll’s violent side to a distorted degree—until a roughhouse aesthetic and mean-eyed stance seem to take on matchless and inevitable value. By example, the hardened, menacing posture of punk was so widely reported and lionized that violence appeared as a genuine and off-putting trait of the movement, though in fact it was always more stylized than it was necessary or actual. Of course, that didn’t stop some punks from living up to an acquired style: When Sid Vicious was arrested for the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in 1978, and then died by heroin overdose later, to many punk followers those deaths had the ring of idyllic, inescapable pop history about them. And yet the critics and fans who venerated “punk violence,” and who memorialized Vicious’ pathetic end, didn’t have to live with the consequences of his life. It was as if the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols, Spungen’s murder, and Vicious’ death were all part of a merciless pageant lived out for our dark enjoyment.

But then that’s the immutable allure of violence: It makes for great entertainment, great mystique, and as a fan of hard-boiled crime novels (the best of which inquire after the impulse to murder), I am hardly one to moralize. The problem develops when an art form’s stylized violence becomes so idealized to its critics and audience that its real-life performances seem some sort of enactment of bravado. Or worse, when we begin regarding real-life victims as less consequential than the music or mystique of their victimizers.

How all this relates to the troubles of Jerry Lee Lewis is a tricky question. Certainly, to read Nick Tosches’ fine biography of Lewis,
Hellfire,
or Myra Lewis’ equally adept account of her marriage to the pianist,
Great Balls of Fire,
is to come face-to-face with the heart-affecting story of a wild, mean, and unequaled pop star—a man robbed of his shot at rock glory and so irrecoverably confounded in spirit that his ambition, intelligence, wit and pride prompted him to turn his back on redemption. “I’m draggin’ the audience to hell with me,” Jerry Lee is famous for saying, and while that may seem a darkly alluring statement, it implies awful possibilities: A man who is no longer fearful of death, but feels certain only of damnation, may no longer fear the consequence nor the conceit of any deeds. If that is so, Jerry Lee Lewis may be telling us enough about himself to inspire our distance.

miles davis: the lion in winter

F
ace-to-face, Miles Davis seems much like the Miles Davis one might expect him to be: That is, he has the manners and bearing of the legendary Dark Prince of post-bop, one of the last great icons and agitators of jazz. He greets me at the door of his multilevel Malibu guest house, leads me into the lower den strewn with his many-colored erotic-expressionist ink paintings, and graciously offers me some of the homemade gumbo simmering on the stove. But quick as a blink (and it is startling how fast this abiding fifty-nine-year-old man can will moods and wits), the amiability can disappear. At one point he asks me what I think of a particular track on his soon-to-be-released
You’re Under Arrest,
and I tell him I haven’t heard the track because it isn’t on the advance copy of the album that I received. Davis’ eyes flicker behind his tinted, thick glasses and his notorious wrath flares. “Shit, you’re trying to talk to me about my
music
and you don’t even give a
listen
to my music?” I go out to my car, fetch the advance tape that Columbia Records had sent me, and hand it over to Davis. He studies the tape and sees that, indeed, the track under discussion had been omitted—which only makes him angrier.

“Man, they fucked up the way you’re supposed to hear this transition,” he says in his raw, irascible voice, then pulls out his own master cassette of the album, slaps it into the Nakamichi mounted into the wall, and keeps the music rolling throughout the visit. Occasionally he will call attention to specific passages—pointing out the album’s constant counterplay between the forcible rhythms and hot textures of the band arrangements and the cool, playful, mellifluent, often introspective tone of his trumpet lines. As he talks, the man himself seems much like his music—fiery, then lulling, then impossibly complex, indefinable. His dark, dignified features may seem drawn these days, but they also ripple with the creases of experience, and the wear of myth.

Still, as impressive or disarming as Davis’ bearing and temper may seem, for some reason there’s nothing that inspires awe so much as when, during an idle point in our conversation, he picks up the trumpet that has been resting nearby, places it in his lap, and begins stroking it, in an offhand way. This particular horn is princely looking—black, with curled, gold gilt that spells Miles around its edge, and a weatherworn mute nuzzled into its flared bell. It just may be the single most famous, best played instrument in all America. And at that moment when he raises it to his lips, breathes gently into its looped tube as he fingers its valves, filling his corner of the room with a tone so subdued it seems almost private—well, the distinctions between Davis and his instrument blur. It is, in fact, a powerful but unconscious gesture that fuses the man’s legend with his art. It is also an instant that drives home the fact that one is in the presence of perhaps the most important living musical hero in America—the essential (and solitary) link between the music of Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane and Michael Jackson.

Indeed, since his first recordings with Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Max Roach in the late 1940s, Miles Davis has been involved in and has nurtured more diverse jazz forms (from be-bop to cool to neo-bop, from modal reveries to electric atonalism) than any other figure in the music’s history—and has also connected those traditions to rock and funk style and pop aspiration with bold, controversial, and liberating effect. Of course, in many fans’ and critics’ eyes, it was Davis’ plunge into electronic texture, his mix of open-ended melodic improvisation and hard-edged, R & B-derived tempos, that spawned the dread specter of fusion jazz in the 1970s. In the end, the movement itself proved merely crass and formulaic, and perhaps also broke jazz history in two, inspiring a generation of technique-obsessed instrumentalists who proved unable to advance Davis’ original vision. The style even seemed to enclose the trumpeter himself: Whereas early, groundbreaking excursions like
In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew,
and
Jack Johnson
had been seen as imaginative and unforgettable tone poems, later flurries like
Agharta, Pangaea,
and
Dark Magus
were seen as furious, pain-ridden, self-destroying exercises—work so forbidding, chaotic, and frustrating, some critics charged that they had been designed to keep an audience at bay (though for me, their fitful, disturbed brilliance places them among my favorite Miles Davis recordings).

Those records were also his final spurt of recording for years. Beset with crippling health problems (including leg injuries and a bone erosion in his hip that has left him slightly stooped), Davis retired into a six-year period of reclusion rumored to be so dark and narcotic, many insiders were convinced that he would never reemerge. When he did—in 1981 with
Man with the Horn
—several ungracious critics bemoaned his seeming unwillingness to once again move jazz in new directions, and even proclaimed that he had lost much of his tone and phrasing. Yet every subsequent work (the live and good-humored
We Want Miles,
the blues-steeped
Star People,
and the protean
Decoy
) has drawn the intriguing portrait of a resourceful artist who is making his way through resurgent and autumnal periods in the same motion—a man who, for the moment, is more a musician than a harbinger; who has discovered that he can unite and reconcile classical repertoire, blues sensibility, and modern texture with a naked and deep-felt expressiveness. True, Davis may not be speaking in the intriguing harmonic and melodic parlance that James Blood Ulmer or Ronald Shannon Jackson have coined, nor playing in the inspiring blend of traditionalism and avant-gardism that Julius Hemphill, David Murray, Henry Threadgill, and Hamiet Bluiett pursue, but he can still set loose with a straight-ahead yet visionary brand of musical oratory that is simply matchless and, as well, delightfully sly.

But if much of what Davis has recorded since his return has sounded like a man looking to regain his voice—plus looking to find a fulfilling context in which to apply his regained strength—the 1985
You’re Under Arrest
is the place where this artist again makes a stand, one as vital to his own aesthetic as the stands he took with
Kind of Blue
and
Bitches Brew.
It’s likely, of course, that with its lovingly straightforward and exacting covers of pop material by Michael Jackson (“Human Nature”), Cyndi Lauper (“Time After Time”), and D-Train (“Something on Your Mind”), the album will strike many jazz diehards as a disheartening commercial surrender. But that would be a depthless reading of what is actually a stirring and complicated work: perhaps Davis’ most cohesive comment in twenty years on the balance between song form and improvisation, between tone and melodic statement, between cool and hot style, as well as his most exhaustingly worked-over music since his landmark orchestral sessions with Gil Evans in the 1950s. It is also simply a beautifully played album: Davis wrings the heart out of “Time After Time” with consummate grace, then turns around and blares into “You’re Under Arrest” (the opening version of which features Sting in a cameo vocal) with the same cutting force that he once brought to
Jack Johnson.

Asked whether he is concerned how this record may affect his already precarious standing with jazz purists, Davis appears to ignore the question, preferring instead to concentrate on the bowl of steaming gumbo before him. We are seated on the sofa in his den—the only spot of furniture not occupied with the trumpeter’s paintings or scholarly tomes on modern art. “I don’t put out records just to satisfy jazz buffs,” he rasps after a while. He nods toward the TV set that is mounted above us. “These sounds coming out on television—these commercials and some of the music on MTV: That stuff sounds better than the jazz artists I’m hearing lately. These young guys, too many of them are so unsure of their own sound that somehow pop music scares them. They miss the point that
that’s
where a lot of the real innovation—in both songs and rhythms—is coming from.

“Anyway, why should some jazz fan be upset that I recorded ’Time After Time’? It’s nothing different than what I’ve always done. I mean, they liked it when I did ’Porgy and Bess,’ when I did ’Green Dolphin Street,’ when I did ’Bye-bye Blackbird,’ when I did ’My Funny Valentine’—pop songs, all of them. They also liked it when I did
Bitches Brew
and
Jack Johnson.
Now why can’t they like a record that puts all that together, hmm? The point is, if you keep repeating the old styles, then there’s no advancement—nothing happens. Jazz has always drawn on pop songs; it’s no different with today’s pop, as far as drawing on it for interpretation.”

Still, I note, in the jazz-rock fury of fifteen years earlier, nobody expected to hear Davis ever play a straight-ahead ballad again—particularly with such restrained tone and without melodic variation. What persuaded him to render Lauper’s hit in such a plain-spoken fashion?

Davis’ features soften and his scowl transforms into a faint smile. “Oh man, if I hear a melody I like, I don’t care who plays it. I get that thing up here”—he taps the area between his throat and heart—”that thing you get when you see something you like.” He laughs wickedly. “You know, some art work, a girl, cocaine. . . . Anyway, I got that when I first heard it, because she had the
sound
for the meaning of the ballad.

“But you have to treat the song the way it should be interpreted: your way and hers. I just love how Cyndi Lauper sings it. I mean, that woman is the only person who can sing that song right—the only one who really knows what it means. The song is part of her—it’s written for her heart, for her height, for the way she looks, the way she smells. She has imparted her voice and soul to it, and brought something kind of sanctified and churchly to it. Why distract from its meaning by messing around with a lot of variations and stuff?

“So I don’t do nothing to it: It’s just the sound of my tone and the notes of that song, but they seem to work together in their own right. Still, when I like something, I try to give it to you my own way.” Davis pauses and his eyes grin. “Give it to you with a little
black
on it. Now, when I play it live, everybody seems to like it that way. I also think people know when they like a melody: A song like this gets people in a mass groove, like a tribe.”

Miles says he would talk more but he has a rehearsal to catch. Before we break off, he speaks briefly about his planned next album: a live retrospective of his career, recorded with a twenty-piece orchestra, rhythm section, and guitarist John McLaughlin, at his acceptance of the Soning Award in Copenhagen—an honor bestowed previously only on Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, and Igor Stravinsky. We also discuss that this will be his last album for Columbia on this contract, and he allows that he is thinking about switching labels. “Man, they never know what to do with me. You know, they’d rather lean toward Wynton Marsalis or somebody like that. Well, let ’em. I’ll tell ya,
I’m
not the one who’s afraid of trying something different.”

Which, of course, is an understatement. If Davis no longer seems to prompt jazz styles or sire new dynasties, it is also clear he no longer needs to. Instead, he has learned to move comfortably between jazz and funk, pop and blues, to assert gentle introspection with the same eloquence and savvy with which he expresses his casual melodic fervor—almost as if he were saying that it is the breadth of expression at this late stage in his career that best defines how he cares to be seen. In other words, maybe jazz’s most mutable and enduring legend simply wants to be accepted now as a player and not a leader—a man who can imbue modern styles with a venerable, unadorned technique. True, that may make him too irreverent for jazz and too seasoned for pop, but mostly it marks him as an American original who, at fifty-nine, is still too young to be denied his vision.