JERRY LEE LEWIS offerd no apologies for his life or for his art. Yet his incendiary rock and bewitching country classics were underscored with fears for his soul, while excess, scandal and tragedy dogged his every step.Intimidating and unknowable and, as fellow musicians relate, perhaps also a genius. He was one of the greatest singers eve, they remind BOB MEHR

All Killer: Jerry Lee Lewis (1935-2022), according to Sun Records’ Sam Phillips, “one of the most talented human beings to walk on God’s earth.”

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SEPTEMBER 2014, JUST SOUTH OF MEMPHIS. The wrought iron gates guarding his kingdom in rural Mississippi bear the family name and the silhouette of a grand piano.

Up the driveway sits a vintage cream-coloured Rolls-Royce. Inside the house, a gleaming white Harley-Davidson is parked in the living room. His seventh wife is in the kitchen making him lunch. And in the master bedroom, spread out on a king-size mattress, Jerry Lee Lewis is nursing a bad back, sipping a grape soda and waiting for Gunsmoke to come on.

The piano-pumping rock’n’roll iconoclast exists like a redneck rajah, amid the spoils and consequences of a life lived well and hard. He has survived through these eight decades without a moment of uncertainty, free from the doubts that plague normal men.

MOJO has come here on assignment – call it a fool’s errand – seeking some thoughtful reflection from Lewis as he embarks on a celebration of his 80th year, which will bring a new album, a new biography, and a world tour.

Though Lewis has been ravaged by time and physically diminished, there is still a malevolence that can flash in an instant. “Son,” he says with a penetrating stare, following a query he deems unworthy. “There ain’t no explaining me that easy.”

Eight years later Jerry Lee Lewis would pass away at the age of 87. While his death was officially recorded in 2022, the end was never far from Lewis. As his most fervent biographer Nick Tosches would observe, it was that inevitability which animated him.

“The truth is that Jerry Lee has always known the end is almost here, must be almost here, and that almost-here end is the heart of it all,” wrote Tosches. “Without it, there is no rock-and-roll, no jukebox epiphany, just pale soft people looking from the window. Without the obsession or the fever of the almost-here end, all is reasonable and mere.”

Nothing – absolutely nothing – about Jerry Lee Lewis was ever reasonable or mere.

AS AWILD-EYED, WILD-HAIRED 22-YEAR-OLD NICKNAMED ‘The Killer’, Lewis first burst into the collective consciousness in 1956. His epochal tracks for Memphis’s Sun Records, Great Balls Of Fire and Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On, were veritable riot acts of rhythm, musical passion plays that revealed a battle between

Lewis’s deep religious convictions and an inexorable pull towards what he believed was “the Devil’s music”.

While his work in the ’50s would forever colour rock’n’roll culture, he would become equally accomplished – and enjoy even more commercial success – as a country artist in the ’60s and ’70s. All throughout his career, Lewis essayed everything from Tin Pan Alley to gospel, blues to showtunes with an unerring grace. Brash, bold and braggadocious, Lewis considered himself among the pantheon of greats who transcended genre. “There’s only ever been four stylists in popular music,” he noted famously and frequently, “Al Jolson, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams… and Jerry Lee Lewis.”

In the wake of Lewis’s passing, his fellow musicians have offered tribute. “He was one of the greatest singers ever,” Van Morrison tells MOJO today. “I rate him up there with Ray Charles and Jackie Wilson, Bobby Bland, those kinds of people. He was a great stylist and piano player and performer. And he was always The Killer. Jerry Lee was never tamed.”