He poses for photographs, polite and patient. When we shake hands, I hear my knuckles crack. Cross Marlon Brando’s mumbling Don Corleone in The Godfather with Daniel Day-Lewis’s roaring prospector in There Will Be Blood and you have something approaching Jerry Lee Lewis. His hair is thick and silver, with boyish curls. His eyes are red, and look as if they have seen too much. At 79, his face is waxy and thunderous – whiter than any I’ve ever seen. Lewis emerges, black suit, red shirt, white leather shoes and cane. She even lets you step on her.” A number of wives said he was violent. But those wives were much younger than him, most of them, and past is past.” Judith, 65, looks down at Jane. Did Lewis’s track record with wives make Judith worry about marrying him? “No, no, I love these women who loved him. His second marriage to Jane Mitchum had been combustible – he has said she threw claw-hammers and Father Christmas figurines through his car windscreen, and that he deserved it. “Jerry called her Jane!” Judith says, now laughing. “She’s been skinned,” says Greg Ericson, his manager, who has joined us. “Oh, don’t you worry about her,” Judith says, smiling. “He was very sick, so in taking care of him and talking about the way we grew up, we fell in love with each other.”Īhead of me, by the grand piano, is a mountain lion, eyes sharply focused, teeth still gnashing, now reduced to a tawny rug. She started nursing him when he was in bad health six years ago, then things grew from there. They had much in common – they both grew up in the south, with the snakes and swamps, the sweltering heat, the Pentecostal Christianity and fear of sin. She and Lewis have known each other for a quarter of a century, and are now into their fourth year of marriage. Meanwhile, Judith returns to play the hostess. Lewis is accompanied by his road manager of 40 years, JW Whitten. As I am shooed into the den, I peek out of the window and see the Killer climbing out of the Corniche, walking with a stick and smoking an e-cigarette. “Don’t let Jerry see you.” She explains that he won’t want anybody to see him before he is fit for presentation before he becomes the great Jerry Lee Lewis. Eventually a white Rolls-Royce Corniche carrying Jerry Lee Lewis rolls up to the mansion. From the kitchen, we hear a car humming up the huge drive, past the private lake, the barking guard dogs and the Jeep parked outside (registration Killer8). Above it, in 18in-high capital letters, are the words THE LEWIS RANCH. As I discover, it’s almost impossible to separate fact from fiction when it comes to Jerry Lee.Ī black piano is sculpted into the huge iron gates outside Lewis’s home in Nesbit, near Memphis. Why, depends on who you listen to and when. Lewis has been known as the Killer since school. He rarely wrote his own songs, but few interpreted them like the Killer. Lewis could play anything brilliantly on that piano – blues, jazz, country, you name it. Photograph: David McClister for the Guardian Lewis playing his piano at home at his ranch in Nesbit, near Memphis.
John Lennon kissed his feet when they met. I can’t really describe how much it meant to me to have your music on board when we were 240,000 miles from home and the Earth had shrunk to a tiny ball.” Lewis was in the first group of artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “Dear Mr Lewis, Our most heartfelt thank you for the tremendous tape you cut for me to take on Apollo 14. On the wall is a letter from astronaut Stuart Roosa, dated. His music has been played around the world, and further. And Lewis, growling and yelping, beating seven bells of hell out of that piano with his hands, feet and elbows, snakes of hair falling over his forehead, is one of its most memorable performers. Sixty years on from the birth of rock’n’roll, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On and Great Balls Of Fire remain two defining songs of the 20th century. Jerry Lee Lewis is preparing for his final tour to the UK next month, to coincide with his 80th birthday. “You can ask about me, but as far as all his wives and stuff goes, he doesn’t like to talk about personal stuff,” Judith says. Myra was the most controversial, because she was only 13 years old when Lewis wed her. And don’t mention any bad words, and nothing negative,” says the formidable Judith, a former basketball player, and ex-wife of the brother of wife number three, Myra. “OK, you have to talk loud and slowly to Jerry.
0 kommentar(er)
