NICK
TOSCHES - hellfire
(book,
penguin)
The basics of the life of Jerry Lee Lewis are, I guess,
known to everyone randomly interested in music. At least no one should be
able to withdraw themselves from the powerful energy that “Great Balls Of
Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin On” still radiate, even in this
days. Usually, next to this people know about Jerry Lee Lewis that he
carries the moniker “The Killer”, that he has perused drugs to an extent
that would have killed other people (or to go with the words of the famous
song: “I took enough pills for a whole damn town / Jerry Lee was
drinking enough whiskey to lift a ship off from the ground”) and from
the privates of his life people also regularly know that the tv evangelist
Jimmy Lee Swaggart was his cousin and that he married his 15 year old cousin
Myra Gaile. And that’s usually as far as it goes. Me, I have often retold
how at age of ten or so I got my first tape player by my father and to go
along with it a tape that contained country songs by Johnny Cash, Kris
Kristofferson and Jerry Lee Lewis. Therefore I have a more than two decade
long relationship with the country music of Jerry Lee Lewis as well, and
damn, he is a fine country singer.
But if this were all, then there would be no reason to
mention this book at all. Any old biography of The Killer would suffice, or
even that movie with Dennis Quaid in the title role. But “Hellfire”
offers some more than this, even if the sentence that drew me to picking
this book up was print on the backside reading: “They said ‘Well, now
you change your act to a guitar and you might could make it.’ I said
‘You can take your guitar and ram it up your ass.’” For this
little sentence really sums up the personality of Jerry Lee Lewis in a way.
His bold and preposterous Louisiana dirt farmer upbringing, the endless
self-confidence of being the one and only Jerry Lee Lewis, the man who can
stand any pain, any kind of (self-)abuse and any kind of bad fate that life
has in store for him. But there is another side of him as well and this one
is recounted in great detail in “Hellfire”, reading almost like a
shortened version of a damn fine William Faulkner nove. Starting with Jerry
Lee’s great great grandfather, a man so strong he could knock a horse down
with a punch of his fist. And he would, too. It is his southern ancestry and
the fumes of fanatic religiousness and the code of honor and conduct as well
as its constant breaking, that is being spread in great language in the
first third of the book. Long before there is any mention of the “final
wild son”.
Especially, the religion, the bible-thumping, the
illiterate exegese of the words of God and their direct interpretation and
puzzlement, like many a southern sect would have it. Just think of those
snake handlers and all those talking in tongues ceremonies. Jerry Lee Lewis
himself was drawn to be a preacher himself, and he was throughout his life
torn between these two extremes: of the god-abiding, good in then word of
the bible citizen, and the whore-mongering, hell-awaiting boogie-woogie man,
who was out to sing his devilish music to draw crowds of sinful girls and
boys with him to hell. By his own standards, Jerry Lee – it seems – must
be sure he is going to hell, and rightfully so. And it is this drive and
desperation you can hear in every howl, every whail and every pounding he
takes to his piano.
