“How ya doin’, killer?” Jerry Lee Lewis asks guests backstage at a casino showroom near San Bernardino where the famed “wild man” of rock ‘n’ roll will go onstage in 20 minutes.
Well, maybe it’s time to forget that wild man part.
After nearly a half-century on the road, Lewis looks like a rock ‘n’ roller approaching the end of the trail.
At 69, his face puffy and jowly, Lewis moves so slowly backstage that you wouldn’t want him near a treadmill without paramedics in the building. Watching him slumped in a chair, it’s hard to imagine him being able to do anything more onstage than accept an award.
Then again, people have counted Lewis out for decades – only to see him bounce back, from delicate stomach operations and career-threatening scandals.
And sure enough, this night at the San Manuel Indian Bingo and Casino, Lewis not only makes it to the piano but comes alive once his fingers hit the keys, pumping out that distinctive Lewis groove that is part honky-tonk, part boogie-woogie, part juke joint and all magic.
“You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain!” he shouts at the beginning of “Great Balls of Fire,” one of the lustful tunes that made anxious parents in the ’50s thankful for the less-threatening Elvis Presley.
It’s “oldies” night at San Manuel (Lewis was followed onstage by Little Richard and Chuck Berry), and many of the 2,000 cheering old-timers dance in the aisles the way kids did on “American Bandstand” during rock’s first decade.
No one in the audience is more excited than a silver-haired man in a Rolling Stones “Tumbling Dice” T-shirt and jeans, Steve Bing, who has been going to Lewis shows since he was a teenager in the ’70s.
Bing is the guiding force behind an album that should catapult Lewis back into the national spotlight – much as record producer Rick Rubin revived Johnny Cash’s career in the ’90s and record producer-musician Jack White rekindled interest in Loretta Lynn in 2004.
The difference is that Bing, 40, isn’t a record producer. He’s a film producer and heir to a real estate fortune who helped finance “The Polar Express” and has donated to political, environmental and child-development causes.
The normally media-shy Bing, who attracted considerable attention in a paternity suit involving Elizabeth Hurley, has spent more than $1 million on Lewis’ comeback collection.
Bing’s close friend, guitarist Jimmy Rip, oversaw the production of the album, which is expected to be released by Columbia Records this fall or early next year. It features guest turns by a battery of Lewis fans, including Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, John Fogerty, Neil Young, Don Henley, Eric Clapton, Willie Nelson and Ringo Starr.
As Lewis finishes his set, Bing smiles at the standing ovation.
Not one to hang around after a show, Lewis heads straight for the limo to go back to the hotel, pausing only when asked what the album and the renewed activity mean to him.
“What does it mean? It means everything,” he said firmly. “When you have people like this working with you and Keith Richards and George Jones wanting to record with you, it’s wonderful.
“There was a point when you wondered if anyone cared anymore, you know what I mean? But you see they do, and it makes you feel good. You’d have to be a fool not to.”
Lewis had pretty much disappeared by the time Bing and Rip started looking for him in 2000.
“I was on the Internet, making phone calls, but we couldn’t find a manager or agent,” Rip, 49, said. “What I discovered was he had basically retired to his bed. He couldn’t stand the way his life had turned out.”
Rip and Bing finally caught up with Lewis and booked a session for July 2002 in Memphis to record two tracks.
They called the session for 8 p.m., and Lewis, to Rip’s delight, came shuffling through the door at 8:01, wearing red pajamas and flip-flops and smoking his pipe.
One of the songs they recorded that night was Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll,” the ode to ’50s rock.
When Rip and Bing heard Lewis sing the famous opening line, they got chills. In a way, the line seemed to be Lewis’ own story: “It’s been a long time since I rock and rolled … Been a long lonely … time.”
They decided that night to record an entire album.
Lewis was part of the inaugural, 10-member Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction class, along with the likes of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. And he had an ego to match his talent. His only regret as a performer, he once said, is that he can’t sit in the audience every night and watch himself onstage.
From the same kind of working-class Southern background as Presley, Lewis hit with such impact in 1957 that his single “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On” soared high onto the pop, country and R&B charts. In the next 18 months, the Ferriday, La., native sold 25 million records.
But his career nose-dived after it was learned during a British tour in 1959 that Lewis had married his 13-year-old cousin. Radio stations stopped playing his records, and lucrative club bookings vanished. It took nearly a decade and a switch to country music to re-establish him as a record seller.
Almost a quarter-century later, Lewis is roaring through the hits at San Manuel, reflecting the spirit if not always the vigor of the early days, and Rip can’t help but smile as he plays guitar onstage with his hero.
“The last four years have been great. In the early sessions, he was out of the building as soon as the sessions were over,” Rip said. “Toward the end, though, he would be the last one out of the room, laughing, cracking jokes. He was having such a ball.”
Los Angeles Times photo by Mark Boster
Jerry Lee Lewis lights his favorite pipe in his dressing room backstage at the San Manuel Indian Bingo and Casino in Highland, California.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
