Like most of his remarkable and rambunctious peers, Lewis got himself into trouble of his own making. He never backed down, and he viewed the world with a maniacal severity that hid a bleak sense of mischief that itself hid another layer of severity beneath it. He was a thief, a bigamist, an adulterer, a sexual predator, a family abandoner, and a liar, and felt — knew — society’s rules didn’t apply to him to such an extent that he acknowledged the fact flatly. There is one filmed interview with Jerry Lee Lewis that could be mistaken for an outtake from Mindhunter.
At least two of Lewis’s songs — “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On” and “Great Balls of Fire” — stand with Little Richard’s work at the very outer limits of ’50s rock-and-roll extremity. Their titles alone capture Lewis’s character — his unbridledness — and by extension the music he came to personify. His other claim to fame was less elevated: Overnight, he vaporized what could have been a top-tier career with the most consequential sex scandal of rock’s early days.
Lewis could play by ear and re-create any song he had listened to even once from memory. But he also heard something deeply meaningful — something that just made sense — in all the music he’d absorbed as a child and teen: the hillbilly country, rollicking New Orleans piano, southern gospel, and deep blues.
He played with a concussive boogie-woogie beat, but that’s like saying Jackson Pollock painted. He didn’t have a a friendly, ingratiating manner like his fellow Louisianans Fats Domino or Professor Longhair. In the compact three-minute packages that made his name, Lewis sat before his piano and — amid that boogie-woogie foundation — banged out maelstroms of intricate runs and cascading and sometimes dissonant chordage. It was a trip down a treacherous musical mountain road with no guardrails. Over this racket he keened, howled, and caterwauled in a way that gave fairly innocuous lyrics — what’s the big deal about “shakin’,” after all? — a lusty, unmistakable carnality that left very little to the imagination. When he pounded the piano and bounced up and down, the slicked-down hair on his head came loose from its grease and bounced with him, absurdly.
It seemed like chaos — but one of his secrets was, paradoxically, control and dynamics. Lewis in many ways was a slyly deliberate showman; he ratcheted up the intensity and emotion into a crossfire hurricane of sound and then brought it back down again, several times in the space of a single song. However unhinged his delivery, there was always a sense of detachment and control. Lewis knew what he was doing.