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Hellfire
The life of Jerry Lee Lewis is one of the most dramatic and tormented in rock 'n' roll history. Hellfire is a wild, riveting, and beautifully written biography that received universal acclaim on its original publication and remains one of the most remarkable biographies ever written.
Born in Louisiana to a family legacy of great courage and greater wildness, Jerry Lee was torn throughout his life between a demanding Pentecostal God and the Devil of alcohol, drugs, and the boogie-woogie piano. At fourteen he began performing publicly, and at twenty-two he recorded "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On", which propelled him to stardom. But almost immediately, news of his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin nearly destroyed his career. Over the next twenty years, Jerry Lee would rise again as a country star, and lose it all to his addictions to alcohol, drugs, and his own fame. Hellfire is an audacious, artful look directly into the soul of a rock 'n' roll legend.
Born in Louisiana to a family legacy of great courage and greater wildness, Jerry Lee was torn throughout his life between a demanding Pentecostal God and the Devil of alcohol, drugs, and the boogie-woogie piano. At fourteen he began performing publicly, and at twenty-two he recorded "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On", which propelled him to stardom. But almost immediately, news of his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin nearly destroyed his career. Over the next twenty years, Jerry Lee would rise again as a country star, and lose it all to his addictions to alcohol, drugs, and his own fame. Hellfire is an audacious, artful look directly into the soul of a rock 'n' roll legend.
276 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
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2282 people want to read
About the author
Nick Tosches
53 books240 followersNick Tosches was an American journalist, novelist, biographer, and poet. His 1982 biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, Hellfire, was praised by Rolling Stone magazine as "the best rock and roll biography ever written."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 141 reviews
June 6, 2016
Why the hell aren’t these guys dead? Look at this :
Fats Domino – hits 1955-59 – 87 years old, still goin strong
Chuck Berry – hits 1955-61- 88 years old, still goin strong
Little Richard – hits 1955-58 - 82 years old, still goin strong
Jerry Lee Lewis – hits 1956-7 - 79 years old, still goin strong
Four of the original wild rockers. They took it all, drank it all, shagged it all, tore it all down and lived to a remarkable old age! Now surely that wasn’t in the script? It just ain’t rock and roll. Having read the story of Jerry Lee Lewis I have a new respect for the durability of the human body. The shit you can do to yourself and live! Keith Richards didn’t invent it. But, er… don’t try this at home kids.
Oh, and they all had similar very brief and pretty unremarkable chart success, in spite of how their names ring out down the years.
Fats : 9 top ten US hits, only one in the UK
Chuck : 5 top ten US hits, 3 in the UK
Little Richard : 4 top ten US hits, 5 in the UK
Jerry Lee : 3 top ten hits, same in the UK
Compare that pitiful record with any successful act from today – lets pluck Rihanna from the many we could name – and we find that so far she has had 19 top ten hits. Soon she’ll have racked up more by herself than Chuck, Fats, Little Richard & Jerry Lee combined.
Well, sometimes success is influence, and that can’t be measured.
**
Nick Tosches gives us a propulsive story of the usual sorrowful mess that uneducated people make out of the blowtorch success and consequent clifftop plunges intrinsic to the life of the popular musician. A couple of features impinge themselves over the hubbub of whiskey drowning, spousal abuse and near-perpetual derangement.
As is well known, Jerry Lee scored two big hits in a row – Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On and Great Balls of Fire – then just as he could have been the white rocker to take over from Elvis as Elvis was schlepped off to the army in Germany, scandal wrecked his career & he was stopped dead in his tracks.
Turns out that this was an interesting case of culture clash. What was normal in Louisiana, what good Christian folk thought was just ordinary high-spirited living of life, gave first Britain and then the rest of America a screaming morality fit. It went like this. Jerry was invited to Britain in 1958 for a wild rockin’ tour. First question from the journalists was : Who’s the girl? This is my wife, says Jerry. How old are you?? was the next question. She said “I’m 15”. After a couple of transatlantic phone calls the journalists found out that little Myra wasn’t 15, she was 13. And she was Jerry Lee’s third wife. Another couple of calls discovered that he may have married this’n when he wasn’t quite un-married from t’other’n. So the tabloid press went to town on Jerry Lee and the audiences couldn’t take it either. It was too much like great balls of paedophilia, but down in Louisiana, shoot, most gals got married pretty young. Nobody thought nothing about it. What they making such a fuss about? Lotsa guys get divorced. And lotsa guys marry 13 year olds, don’t they?
Well, Jerry Lee had to wait 7 or 8 years after that to get back into any kind of success, which was as a country singer. That lasted a few years before he upended everything a second time.
The other thing was that every so often Nick Tosches suddenly drops into this weird, outrageous manner of phraseology which just has to be quoted to be believed :
On marital discord:
She caressed Jerry Lee and soon told him she was pregnant. He told her that it was no seed of his that had rendered her so. They lifted their hands in anger anew.
On Jerry and his fans:
And he shut his mouth and pounded the piano, and as he pounded it he saw that women were pressed against the stage, their ripe, cinctured breasts heaving synchronously with his pounding. He saw that their mouths were more open than closed, and that stray curls were stuck to their foreheads with dripping sweat: and he saw jealousy in the young redneck faces of the Arkansas boys. He pounded faster and harder, his fingers talons of ravishing puissance, and he felt the rush of neon gas shoot from his lungs and he saw those girls, quivering and wet, following him to hell with their painted mouths open.
More:
He paused, let his eyes sweep across the eyes of the girls. He could smell the serpent that slithered among their narrow ankles, and he could smell the odor of their oblation. He howled. He left the stage as a godlike man, and he drank from the weaker vessel and cast it to the ground, and then went south to Dallas.
On rock and roll:
It inspires boys to reinvent themselves as flaming new creatures and to seek detumescence without ruth.
On Myra:
The sight and scent of her drove Jerry Lee wild, and his mind was like a tremulously held knife at the knot of her intact virginity.
**
This book was published in 1982 when Jerry Lee has just recently buried his second son and shot his drummer. All of his possessions had been seized by the IRS and he was again looking at a void of horror. He was 47 years old. He had at least another 33 years to live. As I finished this book I was glad I didn’t have to read about them. A thoroughly unpleasant individual but an excellent bio. 3.5 stars.
ps - unpleasant? A little harsh?
"How did you react to Elvis Presley's death?" the man from the country music magazine asked him.
"I was glad. Just another one outa the way."
Jerry Lee and his new bride Myra, 1958
January 16, 2013
Today, December 13 2005, is the first anniversary of this blogging endeavor and as I awoke, I became tinged with ambition. Unaccustomed to such impulses, I began to read Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis story by Nick Tosches. In almost a single sitting i read the book, enjoying six double espressos, a large cigar, two eggs (w/ bread) and several hours of outstanding music, including Bix, Blind Boys of Alabama, George Jones, James Carter, Charlie Parker and Ryan Adams. I am finished, refreshed, and bewildered by the world in all its pristine torrent.
September 28, 2020
Al inicio me pareció que tenía un ritmo algo lento pero rápidamente empecé a comprender todos los comentarios halagüeños leídos y oídos acerca de esta biografía de Jerry Lee Lewis: es uno de los mejores libros sobre música que he leído jamás. Y esto se debe, por supuesto, a la diestra mano de Nick Tosches, pero también a la extravagante vida y al enorme talento de “The Killer”.
Todos aquellos simpatizantes de eso que llaman gótico sureño tienen aquí un librazo sórdido, endogámico y maldito que hubiera hecho las delicias del mismo Faulkner.
Todos aquellos simpatizantes de eso que llaman gótico sureño tienen aquí un librazo sórdido, endogámico y maldito que hubiera hecho las delicias del mismo Faulkner.
January 15, 2012
Good god, I always heard that this book was great, but I didn't expect it to live up to the hype--which it completely did and more. Part of me wanted it to be 9,000 pages long, but that might've taken away from its sleek, almost singular perfection. Hard to think of a musician more deserving of a Faulkner-esque bio than Jerry Lee. Now if only Tosches would give Hank Williams this treatment too. How mind-blowing would that be?
October 27, 2019
The world saw the passing this week of Nick Tosches, who unfortunately was the very definition of an artist whose career sounded better on paper than how it actually played out in real life. He got his start alongside peers like Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer as part of the first wave of "rock journalists" in the 1970s, with his 1981 biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, Hellfire, called by Rolling Stone "the greatest rock bio of all time" (although granted, that was 38 years ago, and they were his boss at the time); then as he progressed into middle-age and beyond, he started outputting a series of deliberately provocative novels as well, most of them metafictional tales in which the protagonist is a writer remarkably similar to Tosches but who finds himself in a series of dark fantastical ventures (including making a deal with Satan, becoming a vampire to regain his youth, and more), along with such outre nonfiction assignments for Esquire as traveling through the rural wilderness of southeast Asia to see whether any honest-to-God opium dens still exist in the 21st century.
The problem with all this? The finished pieces are all mediocre at best, unreadable at worst, with select titles in that bibliography (such as the aforementioned novel about Tosches becoming a vampire and killing nubile young models during violent sex in order to regain his youth) making many people's dreaded lists of "worst books of all time." Certainly this was the impression I had of him in the early 2000s, when I took on The Last Opium Den, In the Hand of Dante and Me and the Devil and found all of them to be profoundly lacking as quality pieces of literature. But still, I knew that Tosches' death this week would probably mark the last time I ever even thought of him, and I thought he deserved one more read just to see if I could walk away thinking a little better of him; and so I decided to take on Hellfire, which almost everyone unanimously agrees was the best book of his career, and so I figured was my best shot of having a good impression of at least one of his books.
But alas, this too was not only as terrible as the rest, but it was outright shocking how terrible it was, given its stellar reputation among a certain set of readers. What I've been forced to conclude is that, with the notion of applying traditional journalistic techniques to the subject of rock-n-roll being so new and novel at the time, and with readers of the countercultural age so obsessed with finding crazy, swear-laden, square-shocking writing that they didn't really care about the quality of said writing (but for more, see Hunter S. Thompson), it was more a case in the 1970s that writers like Tosches just happened to hit the hippie lottery, pumping out the exact kind of excruciatingly purple prose that that exact audience wanted to hear at that exact right moment in history, while if he had tried to start his career at any other time he would've been laughed right out of the editor's room.
I can't by any stretch of the imagination picture how anyone could read Hellfire and walk away thinking it's great; it's barely readable, to tell the truth, its list of problems so long that the mere idea of trying to catalog them just exhausts me before I can even begin. I'm giving it a token one star to acknowledge its historical importance, and out of a grudging respect that Tosches managed to parlay such terrible writing into a lucrative and famous career that stretched for decades and encompassed twenty full-length books; but he's sadly a great example of everything that went wrong during the Postmodernist era, in which shock and irony took the place of actual artistic skills as the criteria by which the general audience judged creative projects in the popular culture. RIP to this influential figure; but Lord, please don't force me to read another one of his books ever again.
The problem with all this? The finished pieces are all mediocre at best, unreadable at worst, with select titles in that bibliography (such as the aforementioned novel about Tosches becoming a vampire and killing nubile young models during violent sex in order to regain his youth) making many people's dreaded lists of "worst books of all time." Certainly this was the impression I had of him in the early 2000s, when I took on The Last Opium Den, In the Hand of Dante and Me and the Devil and found all of them to be profoundly lacking as quality pieces of literature. But still, I knew that Tosches' death this week would probably mark the last time I ever even thought of him, and I thought he deserved one more read just to see if I could walk away thinking a little better of him; and so I decided to take on Hellfire, which almost everyone unanimously agrees was the best book of his career, and so I figured was my best shot of having a good impression of at least one of his books.
But alas, this too was not only as terrible as the rest, but it was outright shocking how terrible it was, given its stellar reputation among a certain set of readers. What I've been forced to conclude is that, with the notion of applying traditional journalistic techniques to the subject of rock-n-roll being so new and novel at the time, and with readers of the countercultural age so obsessed with finding crazy, swear-laden, square-shocking writing that they didn't really care about the quality of said writing (but for more, see Hunter S. Thompson), it was more a case in the 1970s that writers like Tosches just happened to hit the hippie lottery, pumping out the exact kind of excruciatingly purple prose that that exact audience wanted to hear at that exact right moment in history, while if he had tried to start his career at any other time he would've been laughed right out of the editor's room.
I can't by any stretch of the imagination picture how anyone could read Hellfire and walk away thinking it's great; it's barely readable, to tell the truth, its list of problems so long that the mere idea of trying to catalog them just exhausts me before I can even begin. I'm giving it a token one star to acknowledge its historical importance, and out of a grudging respect that Tosches managed to parlay such terrible writing into a lucrative and famous career that stretched for decades and encompassed twenty full-length books; but he's sadly a great example of everything that went wrong during the Postmodernist era, in which shock and irony took the place of actual artistic skills as the criteria by which the general audience judged creative projects in the popular culture. RIP to this influential figure; but Lord, please don't force me to read another one of his books ever again.
Read
February 8, 2022I've been aware of Nick Tosches as a great New York personality for years, and I remember finding him rather fascinating. And upon reading Hellfire, I was absolutely spellbound by his prose and narrative abilities. Not that I really cared about Jerry Lee Lewis -- and I imagine very few under the age of 60 do, he never was fully canonized in the way that more heartfelt contemporaries like Johnny Cash or Merle Haggard were, or even those tired chestnuts of good times and great oldies like Elvis or Little Richard. But his story is a story of a particular American type to emerge from the same mid-South belt as my own Scots-Irish ancestors. But the closer one looks, as Tosches did, the more fascinating the story becomes, and the more the story says about the infinite contradictions that can make up one individual's life, as fucked up and weird as he is. Compared to the pablum that makes up the typical rock biopic, this is solid gold.
May 29, 2016
The finest book ever written about a rock ’n’ roll performer.
December 2, 2019
A tale of godly gifts, unbridled talent, and the poisons of self-destruction. Hellfire follows Lewis's rocket ride career from the lift off of 'Whole Lotta Shakin Going On' to the downward trajectory of substance abuse and debt. While his cousin, Jimmy Lee Swaggart, followed a self-righteous and hypocritical path to piety, Jerry Lee brought himself into Hell, honestly and wholeheartedly.
I know what I am. I'm a rompin', stompin', piano-playing sonofabitch. A mean sonofabitch. But a great sonofabitch. A good person. Never hurt nobody unless they got in my way. I got a mean streak in me.
This is a great story.
I know what I am. I'm a rompin', stompin', piano-playing sonofabitch. A mean sonofabitch. But a great sonofabitch. A good person. Never hurt nobody unless they got in my way. I got a mean streak in me.
This is a great story.
October 27, 2019
That crazy kid from the other side of town, the one who skipped school all the time because schools are for fools man, cussed at his teachers when he did bother showing up to class, got fired from all of his jobs, stole stuff from the five 'n dime store. You knew that kid. The one you were kind of afraid of, especially when he called out your name if he bothered noticing you at all as you were hurrying past him on the way to the library with your school books. He was the one full of piss and vinegar, your grandma said. Full of the devil, a bad influence, going to hell with his boots on. The one who the girls seemed to like the most, even when he got them in trouble. He could have them mooning and lusting and twitching in their seats as they passed notes about him in class and more than willing to follow him down the path of sin. Those girls didn't even know your name. But they sure knew his. He could bang that piano like no one else. He could sneak into places you didn't even know existed. He knew the answers to questions you were afraid to contemplate. He could howl out a tune like a panther passing a kidney stone. All that shit your parents warned you against. No wonder he became a fuckin' rock star.
June 17, 2024
The best rock bio I have ever read
Six Stars
Six Stars
February 16, 2021
Regardless of what you might think of Jerry Lee Lewis personally and his personal life, there is no denying he is one hell of a talent. (After all of the hell raising he has done, it is amazing to me that he is still alive.) There is no denying that he was/is tough as nails, mean as a snake and self destructive as pretty much anyone could be. He also got sued by literally everyone and lost a lot.
This book is also one helluva book. Entertaining and enlightening. This thing is not for the squeamish though, some of the language (pretty problematic to say the least) in this book will make your toes curl right up.
Well written and went on my best reads pile. Highly recommend to the Jerry Lee Lewis fan.
This book is also one helluva book. Entertaining and enlightening. This thing is not for the squeamish though, some of the language (pretty problematic to say the least) in this book will make your toes curl right up.
Well written and went on my best reads pile. Highly recommend to the Jerry Lee Lewis fan.
August 3, 2011
A sinister delight.
July 19, 2007
Not only is Nick among the greatest non-fiction writers that I have ever read - and that is no empty gushing statement - this is really one the the best musician biographies that has ever been published. Of course, when you start with a maniac like Jerry Lee, one the Kings of Rock and Roll, you already have some wild stories to get things rolling. Who exactly was the King and/or Father of Rock and Roll, was always an arguement between Jerry Lee, Elvis and Chuck Berry - while Little Richard was content to be known as the Queen of R&R. Having a 1st cousin in the Reverand Jerry Falwell, who hated and condemned to hellfire (hence the title), all things rock, and a father who might very well have been more insane than Jerry Lee, all help the proceedings. A riot of a read.
Plus, as mentioned, this book is written by one of my all time favorite writers who may very well become one of yours also. Enjoy!
Plus, as mentioned, this book is written by one of my all time favorite writers who may very well become one of yours also. Enjoy!
March 20, 2021
For years I've been seeing rave reviews of Tosches' Jerry Lee Lewis bio "Hellfire" and finally got a used copy to read. Total and utter crap book. Tosches vainly attempts to inject some kind of biblical majesty into a tale of a dumb-as-hell racist, pedophile, bigamist hillbilly who had three notable pop hits on the charts. Lewis was an abusive run-of-the-mill white-trash dimwit dead-beat dad who beat women, shot bandmates, cheated musicians who'd faithfully served him for 30 years. Tosches uses a lot of pseudo hillbilly/biblical prose in lame attempts to give the story with more substance than Lewis' life merits. He injects fantastical conversations and inner dialog that he's clearly pulled out of his butt, in order to muscle up a tawdry little tale that really that other than a few bright moments, consisted of 10% sinew and 90% bones.
March 3, 2023
Not only one of the best music books I've read, but one of the best books period. Absolutely stunning. I picked it up (it had been sitting next to the bed for months) and didn't put it down until I was done. An extraordinary feat. It functions, of course, as a detailed time-line of Lewis' life, but also on the much deeper plane of spiritual poetry. Hellfire. The book could carry no other title. It's a monster book about America, god, music, and degradation. Run, don't walk.
July 31, 2019
Entertaining enough but I feel like the author never really got inside Lewis head. For my taste it would have been better if it would have been an interview style biography done only with direct interviews and quotes from Lewis and those that knew him.
3.5 out of 5 stars.
3.5 out of 5 stars.
December 21, 2023
En av de bästa Musikbiografierna som jag läst
May 30, 2022
This seems like maybe an odd complaint about a brutally critical biography named Hellfire but … it’s arguably too kind to its subject? Granted, Tosches published this just before Lewis (probably) killed his fourth and fifth wives, two in as many years, a fate that Myra and Jane and Dorothy avoided presumably by sheer chance. So the biographer didn’t know that Jerry Lee was quite literally a killer.
But he did know that Lewis beat Myra (and I’d bet a lot of money he beat Jane and Dorothy too) and while this gets some attention, more dwelling on it would have served the book well. Lewis shooting his bass player Butch Owens in the chest, requiring immediate emergency surgery and years of recovery, gets lots of attention (and rightly so!); his violence against Myra deserved the same.
All that said, the critics are right: this is a fucking phenomenal rock and roll biography about a truly terrible man and a truly brilliant musician, and as insightful as anything about how those two can coexist in one person and feed off each other. I don’t normally go for work this writerly but Tosches earns his flourishes, in part by taking Lewis’s faith seriously and using scripture and promises of brimstone throughout to draw out his milieu and character. He knows he’s a sinner; he simply does not care to do anything about it.
But he did know that Lewis beat Myra (and I’d bet a lot of money he beat Jane and Dorothy too) and while this gets some attention, more dwelling on it would have served the book well. Lewis shooting his bass player Butch Owens in the chest, requiring immediate emergency surgery and years of recovery, gets lots of attention (and rightly so!); his violence against Myra deserved the same.
All that said, the critics are right: this is a fucking phenomenal rock and roll biography about a truly terrible man and a truly brilliant musician, and as insightful as anything about how those two can coexist in one person and feed off each other. I don’t normally go for work this writerly but Tosches earns his flourishes, in part by taking Lewis’s faith seriously and using scripture and promises of brimstone throughout to draw out his milieu and character. He knows he’s a sinner; he simply does not care to do anything about it.
December 27, 2019
Some of the best writing I’ve ever read, about music or otherwise.
January 29, 2020
Probably the best biography I've ever read. The fire & brimstone Southern Gothic style perfectly suits the subject, even if at times all the 'battle raged in him between God and Satan' stuff is just gussying up the fact that Jerry Lee is a colossal arsehole.
August 4, 2025
Inget avslut. Bara en kamp mellan Gud o Satan. Jerry Lee mot världen. Jerry Lee mot resterande Lewis. Men främst Jerry Lee mot Jerry Lee…
Lyssnar mycket på hans musik nu, det hjälper. Men attans vilken plågad man - sanningsenlig, absolut, däremot bör man ibland hålla inne på vissa ting…
Bra bok, oklart hur den är skriven rent faktamässigt, man tror som tur är varenda ord.
Upd: O jäklar,, boken avslutas när Jerry Lee är 47 år och är släppt samma år… sjukt kaxigt. Boken blir ännu bättre med tanke på hur länge The Killer vandrade runt på vår jord
Lyssnar mycket på hans musik nu, det hjälper. Men attans vilken plågad man - sanningsenlig, absolut, däremot bör man ibland hålla inne på vissa ting…
Bra bok, oklart hur den är skriven rent faktamässigt, man tror som tur är varenda ord.
Upd: O jäklar,, boken avslutas när Jerry Lee är 47 år och är släppt samma år… sjukt kaxigt. Boken blir ännu bättre med tanke på hur länge The Killer vandrade runt på vår jord
August 22, 2023
Ever since 2016, my favorite method of hiding from reality has been to sink into music biographies, especially about rock & roll musicians whose work I know well. I tend to favor information-heavy, carefully researched examples over ghostwritten memoirs or tell-alls, which are much thicker on the ground. When Nick Tosches died in 2019, knowing little of his work I read several claims that his book about Jerry Lee Lewis, Hellfire, was the greatest rock bio of them all. I was quite surprised I had never run across it or been aware of it, as being a celebrated text about a legend of the first wave of rock & roll, it seemed right up my alley; not only that but Greil Marcus, who may be my favorite living writer and certainly the biggest all-pervading influence on how I think and write about popular culture, had actively promoted it in glowing terms and even wrote the foreword to the paperback edition, wherein he praised it as a great work of American history. Marcus wasn't alone; numerous critics are quoted in the frontispiece making similar claims.
Of course I knew the broad narrative of Jerry Lee Lewis' life: even more tortured than the likes of Al Green and Little Richard (and Kanye West) over the contradictions between his rattling, sinful rock & roll persona and his obsession with following the Bible and serving the Lord, he was a dangerous, unpredictable misogynist and hypocritical moralist -- which runs in the family: his cousin is none other than Jimmy Swaggart; both took their middle names from a local magnate and political influencer in their hometown of Ferriday, LA -- and his downfall was the stuff of legend. Whereas Chuck Berry's early 1960s prison term is as easily described as a symptom of the waning Jim Crow era as of his (not insignificant) personal transgressions, Lewis seems to have been a full-on monster who never did time. His career derailed after he married his thirteen year-old cousin (a bigamous union to boot), which even within the unenlightened mainstream press of the '50s was an outrageously cancel-worthy act. Stories of domestic violence and general nastiness followed him around for the rest of his life, mellowed it seems only by the inevitable dimming of age; today he is the last of the original, major, fire-breathing rock & rollers to survive unless you count Don Everly and Dion, both great but neither capable of "Great Balls of Fire," "High School Confidential" and "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," which -- it must be said -- are astonishing records and it's easy to feel as though they are sounds that couldn't be made by a man who was healthy or well-adjusted.
But Berry's verbose nerdiness and Richard's intoxicating sexuality could of course incite the same kind of riotous furor Lewis could -- for that matter, so could the rather more self-possessed Ray Charles circa "What'd I Say" -- but there was definitely a violence and extremity audible in Lewis that Sun Records' Sam Phillips knew enough not to dilute. Only Gene Vincent among the rockabillies approached his unpredictability, and only Howlin' Wolf among any performer of the era was capable of the same sort of guttural, sexual abandon on his records; when you hear something like Lewis' Live at the Star Club, recorded well past his commercial peak in 1963, you hear an artist of bracing, daunting confidence who will burn down his house and yours without a blink -- a performer with nothing to lose. The notion that it might take such an unhinged, unpleasant maniac to create this kind of din is the uncomfortable Faustian bargain the fan of raw, undiluted rock & roll must sit with; and it's also a fascinating subject to examine. There's little mystery to what attracted Tosches to the material.
In this field I think it's important to keep in mind the differences between history and criticism. A writer of formally ambitious essays like Marcus can take a germ of suggestion from a record and use it to talk about whatever he wants; an offhand phrase in a song can set him off on a poetic tangent about an unrelated hate crime in the South or a tenuous connection or tradition he finds between two disparate pieces of art. This is inspiring and, to my mind, encourages deeper engagement with our culture. But Marcus is not a biographer; and if he chose to write a biography of, say, Van Morrison, I think it would be disappointing to the person seeking information about Morrison's triumphs and contradictions to find any facts therein buried under self-conscious prose and musing, more about the author's thought process than about the book's ostensible subject. Unfortunately this is what Tosches has crafted in Hellfire. The words might often be lyrical, though I think they are less so than they quite nakedly promote themselves as being, but they reveal nothing that the aforementioned "broad narrative" of Lewis' career doesn't already indicate, and I'm left longing for a book with different ambitions. Tosches is superficially a more colorful writer than Peter Guralnick, Mark Lewisohn or Susan VanHecke -- authors of extensive biographies of Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Gene Vincent respectively that range from fascinating to outright brilliant -- but that does not mean that those writers lacked passion or a broader perspective in their work. Their commitment to facts, and to the citation of hard sources (Tosches' book has neither sources listed nor a simple, perfunctory bibliography), does not preclude the injection of humanity and critique into their work. Tosches' book, on the other hand, comes off as a skimming of the basic surface facts of Jerry Lee Lewis' life, rendered in prose as flowery as possible: a Wikipedia entry as composed by Rudyard Kipling.
Marcus's foreword cites a few specific examples of what he claims are exquisitely rendered paragraphs that mark this book as a future acknowledged literary masterpiece. Here is one of them:
The booze and the pills stirred the hell within him and made him to utter hideous peals. At times he withdrew into his own shadow, brooding upon all manner of things -- abominable, unutterable, and worse. At times he stalked and ranted in foul omnipotence, commanding those about him as Belial his minions. He was the Killer and he was immortal -- damned to be, for as long as there were good and evil to be torn between in agony. He would sit backstage in a thousand dank nightclubs, and he would know this, and he would swallow more pills and wash them down with three fingers more of whiskey, and he would know it even more. He would walk like a man to the stage, with his Churchill in one hand and his water glass of whiskey in the other, and he would pound the piano and sing his sinful songs, and he would beckon those before him, mortals, made not as he to destruction from the womb; he would beckon them to come, to stand with him awhile at the brink of hell. Then he would be gone into the ancient night, to more pills and more whiskey, to where the black dogs never ceased barking and dawn never broke; he would go there.
This is all good and well for a fiction written in third-person omniscient, but it's less similar to Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis or single volume on Sam Cooke, for instance, than it is to Richard Garvin and Edmond Addeoj's novel The Midnight Special, which is essentially two white men's salacious fan fiction about the great blues singer Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly), as legendarily troubled and violent as Lewis but on a much grander scale and with much less of a privileged starting position, not to say Lewis didn't have his dirt poor years. And as someone who tends myself toward wordiness and labored prose, I would like to know what information or enlightenment this paragraph honestly intends to deliver, especially in its second half, beyond a yearning by Tosches for his romantic conception of Lewis' self-hatred and self-destruction to be delivered in full bloom to the reader. This omniscience -- this claiming to depict accurately what Lewis was thinking at all times, a curious strand of thought for a book that's promoted as nonfiction -- manifests in its most ugly form in paragraphs like this one, which seems all too clearly to integrate Lewis' sinister attitudes toward women in almost empathetic terms:
Myra, who knew little of the world, simply believed that all marriages were like her own, and she bent her knee in diffident fealty. Still, he smelled a sinfulness in her. Women had thrown themselves on him for five years. Wherever he went, it seemed, cheap-perfumed tights parted, lithe and yielding as the windblown reeds of Turtle Lake -- had parted first to receive whatever scrap of garish, stinking fame and glory they might, then later to receive the grotesque wrath of that fame and that glory. Every time he disgorged himself in the mouth of whoredom, he cursed all women for what they had to him shown themselves to be. He turned on his wife, unable to believe or to see that she could be any different from the rest. He accused her of adultery, and he beat her. Perhaps his mother, who often stayed with the couple in Memphis, encouraged her dear son's accusations; for she, in motherhood, trusted none of Jerry Lee's wives, believing that they lusted only for his gold, and she spent time seeking to discover Myra Gale in an act of moist indiscretion.
That begs another question. I see no contradiction is saying that Lewis is, or was, one of the most consistently brilliant if fractious performers of recorded music in the 20th century, and also an inexcusably vile excuse for a human being-- moreover, it's not a matter of "separating art from artist," which I'd tend to regard as a pointless and self-defeating exercise, but of hearing and acknowledging that ugliness within the work, as something that colors and defines it, as an inseparable part of its cultural legacy and of one's personal response to it. When I hear Lewis' early Sun records or that magnificent live album, I know I'm hearing the work of a man I would never want to be in a room with. I don't even like looking at his face and I never have. I think Tosches does capture this rather well -- and the book even has the nerve to have been published before one of Lewis' wives died under the usual "mysterious circumstances," and moreover before Swaggart's own glorious public downfall, which somewhat violates the book's structure of contrasting them as good and evil sides of the same coin -- because he is as intrigued as most of us naturally are by the fuckups that ensue in all humanity, spotlight or not, but I think the way that he approaches Lewis as a kind of rugged anti-hero is troubling, especially when you counteract it with the portrayal by other authors of cultural biographies of their own subjects', for lack of a better term, personal failings.
By that I mean that generating a version of the Lewis story as a grand American tragedy, as Tosches implicitly and Marcus explicitly argue it is, insults the true idea of tragedy. Buddy Holly, Kirsty MacColl, Otis Redding, Jackie Wilson, Jam Master Jay and Patsy Cline were tragedies. Elvis Presley, in the end, was a tragedy. Even in the confines of Tosches' mythologized version of events, Jerry Lee brought his downfall upon himself, and the natural course of that downfall never rendered anything like clarity or wisdom. It's somewhat alarming to me that this most celebrated of rock & roll biographies attempts in expressionistic fashion to place the reader inside the head of a person whose cruelty and abuses are taken as a kind of funhouse mirror of classic Americana. I can't escape the feeling that Tosches attempts to do all this, and attempts to wean a kind of grandiose sorrow out of the process, because it is a book about a white man; because as in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the rage and bellowing of unchecked masculinity are looked upon as having some sort of sacred, universally primal utility.
I started to become deeply immersed in, and evangelical about, '50s and early '60s rock & roll, R&B and pop when I was in my early twenties, having had some familiarity with it in my childhood. As I've recounted many times, a chance encounter with a minor Everly Brothers hit from their Warner Bros. period ("Walk Right Back") set me on the path of discovering the infinite emotional possibility, the thrilling musical spareness and -- at times -- the tempestuous hunger and noise that exists in this music and no other. I became infatuated not only with the first wave of rock & roll but with girl groups, Brill Building pop and Motown around this time. Going deeper and deeper I found affinities and treasures that won't ever have books like this written about them. One artist who's always disproportionately fascinated me is Little Eva, born Eva Boyd, who hailed from the Outer Banks and was "discovered" while babysitting for Gerry Goffin and Carole King, two of the titans of the Brill Building. Boyd was tapped to perform the international #1 hit "The Loco-Motion" after Dee Dee Sharp turned it down, and inspired the legendarily controversial Goffin-King composition "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)" -- recorded not by Eva but by the Crystals under producer Phil Spector, who played up its sadomasochistic, melodramatic aspects more than its composers may have intended -- after a conversation with the couple in which she defended her boyfriend's regular habit of beating her. They tried to generate further hits for Little Eva, including terrific songs like "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby" (covered beautifully by John Lennon on a Beatles BBC gig) and "What I Gotta Do (To Make You Jealous)" plus splendidly dumb dance-craze attempts "Let's Turkey Trot" and "Let's Start the Party Again," but nothing approached the success of "The Loco-Motion" and in an era of heady, insurmountable pop competition, each successive single did less business than its predecessor.
Like so many Black women who were distinctive performers of great pop music, Eva gleaned few long-term rewards for her brief chart success and ended up back in North Carolina by the early '70s, forgotten completely by the recording industry. Various resurgences of "The Loco-Motion" by Grand Funk and Kylie Minogue did nothing to lift her descent into poverty because she had no claims on the material; her former behind-the-scenes cohort Carole King became a pop star in her own right -- the one person in the business Lennon is said to have been nervous about meeting -- while Eva raised her kids on her own and toiled in food services. But Eva's oddball dancing and exuberant vocals had been as responsible as anything for determining King's longevity. When tracked down by interviewers and historians interested in the surviving performers on the oldies circuit -- to which she did return for a time, touring briefly in the late 1980s -- Eva was pricelessly thorny about her legacy and others' tendency toward capitalizing on it. She died at age 59 of cervical cancer, not far away from me geographically (in Kinston). Rock & roll, a ruthless business, is full of such stories -- the image-makers and the ubiquitous voices, whatever the scale of their popularity or obscurity, live eternal lives after their moments are permanently laid down, but there are still children to feed and clocks to punch, the usual rough-and-tumble existence of constant hustling and keeping one's head barely above water for all but a select few Lennons and Kings; and as we know, even they can't always avoid doom in some form.
I was DJing in downtown Wilmington once and played the Goffin cowrite "The Trouble with Boys," a late '63 b-side of Little Eva's I always loved that failed to chart but was miraculously clocked by a random well-dressed Boomer in the room, who approached me to comment that he had been the station manager for Wilmington's oldies station (WKOO, 98.7, still active until around 2004) in the early '90s when he ran across Little Eva, working as a waitress at a convention center for some radio industry event he attended for work. He had indicated to her that he recognized her and also made noises about who he was and how important he was, which available evidence indicates he was quite fond of doing; maybe she'd like to record some idents (probably for a pittance) or something? And in his telling she rolled her eyes and told him to get lost until he was ready for his check. He told me this story, carping about her "attitude," as though I was naturally going to side with him -- all these roving singers now forced to be waitstaff for assholes, god only knows why they would have an "attitude problem"! -- when instead I was just vicariously thrilled at her managing to get under this windbag's skin (like a real-life version of Bo Diddley's apocryphal slagging off of Eric Burdon in the latter's earshot) to such an extent that he still remembered it 15+ years later, five or six years after Eva Boyd died and was buried in an unmarked grave in Belhaven. (A tombstone has since been erected after town council was made aware of her cultural significance.)
To my mind, that's a very interesting life story -- a tragic one too -- and just from what little information I have of it, it feels like it could make a hell of a book. Maybe there's research to be excavated. Maybe not, though; maybe it even could be an expressionistic, "creative nonfiction" book like Tosches', one that just grabs at what little we have and extrapolates from it. Even that would tell us something we don't already know. We already know what it is like to be a white man who plays rock & roll, is a total creep and ruins everything he touches, because we have a great number of books about that. I'd like to read what it's like, what it's really like, to be someone who isn't white, who isn't a man, and who gets completely forgotten by the machine that cruelly gave them a taste of fortune and immortality. Lewis hardly needed help with the latter. He still walks among us, the only one of the Million Dollar Quartet who ever had to don a mask for COVID-19 (assuming he was compliant enough to do so), while Eva Boyd who sang "The Loco-Motion" and now, per her tombstone, "sings with the angels" is gone and so is Nick Tosches, who wrote so convincingly and glowingly of Lewis's inevitable slide toward doom and terror almost forty years ago. If any of these people really did make some sort of a deal with the devil, only one seems to have reaped the benefits.
Of course I knew the broad narrative of Jerry Lee Lewis' life: even more tortured than the likes of Al Green and Little Richard (and Kanye West) over the contradictions between his rattling, sinful rock & roll persona and his obsession with following the Bible and serving the Lord, he was a dangerous, unpredictable misogynist and hypocritical moralist -- which runs in the family: his cousin is none other than Jimmy Swaggart; both took their middle names from a local magnate and political influencer in their hometown of Ferriday, LA -- and his downfall was the stuff of legend. Whereas Chuck Berry's early 1960s prison term is as easily described as a symptom of the waning Jim Crow era as of his (not insignificant) personal transgressions, Lewis seems to have been a full-on monster who never did time. His career derailed after he married his thirteen year-old cousin (a bigamous union to boot), which even within the unenlightened mainstream press of the '50s was an outrageously cancel-worthy act. Stories of domestic violence and general nastiness followed him around for the rest of his life, mellowed it seems only by the inevitable dimming of age; today he is the last of the original, major, fire-breathing rock & rollers to survive unless you count Don Everly and Dion, both great but neither capable of "Great Balls of Fire," "High School Confidential" and "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," which -- it must be said -- are astonishing records and it's easy to feel as though they are sounds that couldn't be made by a man who was healthy or well-adjusted.
But Berry's verbose nerdiness and Richard's intoxicating sexuality could of course incite the same kind of riotous furor Lewis could -- for that matter, so could the rather more self-possessed Ray Charles circa "What'd I Say" -- but there was definitely a violence and extremity audible in Lewis that Sun Records' Sam Phillips knew enough not to dilute. Only Gene Vincent among the rockabillies approached his unpredictability, and only Howlin' Wolf among any performer of the era was capable of the same sort of guttural, sexual abandon on his records; when you hear something like Lewis' Live at the Star Club, recorded well past his commercial peak in 1963, you hear an artist of bracing, daunting confidence who will burn down his house and yours without a blink -- a performer with nothing to lose. The notion that it might take such an unhinged, unpleasant maniac to create this kind of din is the uncomfortable Faustian bargain the fan of raw, undiluted rock & roll must sit with; and it's also a fascinating subject to examine. There's little mystery to what attracted Tosches to the material.
In this field I think it's important to keep in mind the differences between history and criticism. A writer of formally ambitious essays like Marcus can take a germ of suggestion from a record and use it to talk about whatever he wants; an offhand phrase in a song can set him off on a poetic tangent about an unrelated hate crime in the South or a tenuous connection or tradition he finds between two disparate pieces of art. This is inspiring and, to my mind, encourages deeper engagement with our culture. But Marcus is not a biographer; and if he chose to write a biography of, say, Van Morrison, I think it would be disappointing to the person seeking information about Morrison's triumphs and contradictions to find any facts therein buried under self-conscious prose and musing, more about the author's thought process than about the book's ostensible subject. Unfortunately this is what Tosches has crafted in Hellfire. The words might often be lyrical, though I think they are less so than they quite nakedly promote themselves as being, but they reveal nothing that the aforementioned "broad narrative" of Lewis' career doesn't already indicate, and I'm left longing for a book with different ambitions. Tosches is superficially a more colorful writer than Peter Guralnick, Mark Lewisohn or Susan VanHecke -- authors of extensive biographies of Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Gene Vincent respectively that range from fascinating to outright brilliant -- but that does not mean that those writers lacked passion or a broader perspective in their work. Their commitment to facts, and to the citation of hard sources (Tosches' book has neither sources listed nor a simple, perfunctory bibliography), does not preclude the injection of humanity and critique into their work. Tosches' book, on the other hand, comes off as a skimming of the basic surface facts of Jerry Lee Lewis' life, rendered in prose as flowery as possible: a Wikipedia entry as composed by Rudyard Kipling.
Marcus's foreword cites a few specific examples of what he claims are exquisitely rendered paragraphs that mark this book as a future acknowledged literary masterpiece. Here is one of them:
The booze and the pills stirred the hell within him and made him to utter hideous peals. At times he withdrew into his own shadow, brooding upon all manner of things -- abominable, unutterable, and worse. At times he stalked and ranted in foul omnipotence, commanding those about him as Belial his minions. He was the Killer and he was immortal -- damned to be, for as long as there were good and evil to be torn between in agony. He would sit backstage in a thousand dank nightclubs, and he would know this, and he would swallow more pills and wash them down with three fingers more of whiskey, and he would know it even more. He would walk like a man to the stage, with his Churchill in one hand and his water glass of whiskey in the other, and he would pound the piano and sing his sinful songs, and he would beckon those before him, mortals, made not as he to destruction from the womb; he would beckon them to come, to stand with him awhile at the brink of hell. Then he would be gone into the ancient night, to more pills and more whiskey, to where the black dogs never ceased barking and dawn never broke; he would go there.
This is all good and well for a fiction written in third-person omniscient, but it's less similar to Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis or single volume on Sam Cooke, for instance, than it is to Richard Garvin and Edmond Addeoj's novel The Midnight Special, which is essentially two white men's salacious fan fiction about the great blues singer Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly), as legendarily troubled and violent as Lewis but on a much grander scale and with much less of a privileged starting position, not to say Lewis didn't have his dirt poor years. And as someone who tends myself toward wordiness and labored prose, I would like to know what information or enlightenment this paragraph honestly intends to deliver, especially in its second half, beyond a yearning by Tosches for his romantic conception of Lewis' self-hatred and self-destruction to be delivered in full bloom to the reader. This omniscience -- this claiming to depict accurately what Lewis was thinking at all times, a curious strand of thought for a book that's promoted as nonfiction -- manifests in its most ugly form in paragraphs like this one, which seems all too clearly to integrate Lewis' sinister attitudes toward women in almost empathetic terms:
Myra, who knew little of the world, simply believed that all marriages were like her own, and she bent her knee in diffident fealty. Still, he smelled a sinfulness in her. Women had thrown themselves on him for five years. Wherever he went, it seemed, cheap-perfumed tights parted, lithe and yielding as the windblown reeds of Turtle Lake -- had parted first to receive whatever scrap of garish, stinking fame and glory they might, then later to receive the grotesque wrath of that fame and that glory. Every time he disgorged himself in the mouth of whoredom, he cursed all women for what they had to him shown themselves to be. He turned on his wife, unable to believe or to see that she could be any different from the rest. He accused her of adultery, and he beat her. Perhaps his mother, who often stayed with the couple in Memphis, encouraged her dear son's accusations; for she, in motherhood, trusted none of Jerry Lee's wives, believing that they lusted only for his gold, and she spent time seeking to discover Myra Gale in an act of moist indiscretion.
That begs another question. I see no contradiction is saying that Lewis is, or was, one of the most consistently brilliant if fractious performers of recorded music in the 20th century, and also an inexcusably vile excuse for a human being-- moreover, it's not a matter of "separating art from artist," which I'd tend to regard as a pointless and self-defeating exercise, but of hearing and acknowledging that ugliness within the work, as something that colors and defines it, as an inseparable part of its cultural legacy and of one's personal response to it. When I hear Lewis' early Sun records or that magnificent live album, I know I'm hearing the work of a man I would never want to be in a room with. I don't even like looking at his face and I never have. I think Tosches does capture this rather well -- and the book even has the nerve to have been published before one of Lewis' wives died under the usual "mysterious circumstances," and moreover before Swaggart's own glorious public downfall, which somewhat violates the book's structure of contrasting them as good and evil sides of the same coin -- because he is as intrigued as most of us naturally are by the fuckups that ensue in all humanity, spotlight or not, but I think the way that he approaches Lewis as a kind of rugged anti-hero is troubling, especially when you counteract it with the portrayal by other authors of cultural biographies of their own subjects', for lack of a better term, personal failings.
By that I mean that generating a version of the Lewis story as a grand American tragedy, as Tosches implicitly and Marcus explicitly argue it is, insults the true idea of tragedy. Buddy Holly, Kirsty MacColl, Otis Redding, Jackie Wilson, Jam Master Jay and Patsy Cline were tragedies. Elvis Presley, in the end, was a tragedy. Even in the confines of Tosches' mythologized version of events, Jerry Lee brought his downfall upon himself, and the natural course of that downfall never rendered anything like clarity or wisdom. It's somewhat alarming to me that this most celebrated of rock & roll biographies attempts in expressionistic fashion to place the reader inside the head of a person whose cruelty and abuses are taken as a kind of funhouse mirror of classic Americana. I can't escape the feeling that Tosches attempts to do all this, and attempts to wean a kind of grandiose sorrow out of the process, because it is a book about a white man; because as in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the rage and bellowing of unchecked masculinity are looked upon as having some sort of sacred, universally primal utility.
I started to become deeply immersed in, and evangelical about, '50s and early '60s rock & roll, R&B and pop when I was in my early twenties, having had some familiarity with it in my childhood. As I've recounted many times, a chance encounter with a minor Everly Brothers hit from their Warner Bros. period ("Walk Right Back") set me on the path of discovering the infinite emotional possibility, the thrilling musical spareness and -- at times -- the tempestuous hunger and noise that exists in this music and no other. I became infatuated not only with the first wave of rock & roll but with girl groups, Brill Building pop and Motown around this time. Going deeper and deeper I found affinities and treasures that won't ever have books like this written about them. One artist who's always disproportionately fascinated me is Little Eva, born Eva Boyd, who hailed from the Outer Banks and was "discovered" while babysitting for Gerry Goffin and Carole King, two of the titans of the Brill Building. Boyd was tapped to perform the international #1 hit "The Loco-Motion" after Dee Dee Sharp turned it down, and inspired the legendarily controversial Goffin-King composition "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)" -- recorded not by Eva but by the Crystals under producer Phil Spector, who played up its sadomasochistic, melodramatic aspects more than its composers may have intended -- after a conversation with the couple in which she defended her boyfriend's regular habit of beating her. They tried to generate further hits for Little Eva, including terrific songs like "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby" (covered beautifully by John Lennon on a Beatles BBC gig) and "What I Gotta Do (To Make You Jealous)" plus splendidly dumb dance-craze attempts "Let's Turkey Trot" and "Let's Start the Party Again," but nothing approached the success of "The Loco-Motion" and in an era of heady, insurmountable pop competition, each successive single did less business than its predecessor.
Like so many Black women who were distinctive performers of great pop music, Eva gleaned few long-term rewards for her brief chart success and ended up back in North Carolina by the early '70s, forgotten completely by the recording industry. Various resurgences of "The Loco-Motion" by Grand Funk and Kylie Minogue did nothing to lift her descent into poverty because she had no claims on the material; her former behind-the-scenes cohort Carole King became a pop star in her own right -- the one person in the business Lennon is said to have been nervous about meeting -- while Eva raised her kids on her own and toiled in food services. But Eva's oddball dancing and exuberant vocals had been as responsible as anything for determining King's longevity. When tracked down by interviewers and historians interested in the surviving performers on the oldies circuit -- to which she did return for a time, touring briefly in the late 1980s -- Eva was pricelessly thorny about her legacy and others' tendency toward capitalizing on it. She died at age 59 of cervical cancer, not far away from me geographically (in Kinston). Rock & roll, a ruthless business, is full of such stories -- the image-makers and the ubiquitous voices, whatever the scale of their popularity or obscurity, live eternal lives after their moments are permanently laid down, but there are still children to feed and clocks to punch, the usual rough-and-tumble existence of constant hustling and keeping one's head barely above water for all but a select few Lennons and Kings; and as we know, even they can't always avoid doom in some form.
I was DJing in downtown Wilmington once and played the Goffin cowrite "The Trouble with Boys," a late '63 b-side of Little Eva's I always loved that failed to chart but was miraculously clocked by a random well-dressed Boomer in the room, who approached me to comment that he had been the station manager for Wilmington's oldies station (WKOO, 98.7, still active until around 2004) in the early '90s when he ran across Little Eva, working as a waitress at a convention center for some radio industry event he attended for work. He had indicated to her that he recognized her and also made noises about who he was and how important he was, which available evidence indicates he was quite fond of doing; maybe she'd like to record some idents (probably for a pittance) or something? And in his telling she rolled her eyes and told him to get lost until he was ready for his check. He told me this story, carping about her "attitude," as though I was naturally going to side with him -- all these roving singers now forced to be waitstaff for assholes, god only knows why they would have an "attitude problem"! -- when instead I was just vicariously thrilled at her managing to get under this windbag's skin (like a real-life version of Bo Diddley's apocryphal slagging off of Eric Burdon in the latter's earshot) to such an extent that he still remembered it 15+ years later, five or six years after Eva Boyd died and was buried in an unmarked grave in Belhaven. (A tombstone has since been erected after town council was made aware of her cultural significance.)
To my mind, that's a very interesting life story -- a tragic one too -- and just from what little information I have of it, it feels like it could make a hell of a book. Maybe there's research to be excavated. Maybe not, though; maybe it even could be an expressionistic, "creative nonfiction" book like Tosches', one that just grabs at what little we have and extrapolates from it. Even that would tell us something we don't already know. We already know what it is like to be a white man who plays rock & roll, is a total creep and ruins everything he touches, because we have a great number of books about that. I'd like to read what it's like, what it's really like, to be someone who isn't white, who isn't a man, and who gets completely forgotten by the machine that cruelly gave them a taste of fortune and immortality. Lewis hardly needed help with the latter. He still walks among us, the only one of the Million Dollar Quartet who ever had to don a mask for COVID-19 (assuming he was compliant enough to do so), while Eva Boyd who sang "The Loco-Motion" and now, per her tombstone, "sings with the angels" is gone and so is Nick Tosches, who wrote so convincingly and glowingly of Lewis's inevitable slide toward doom and terror almost forty years ago. If any of these people really did make some sort of a deal with the devil, only one seems to have reaped the benefits.
January 20, 2018
Published in 1982, “Hellfire” covers just a little over half of Jerry Lee Lewis’s life ... and yet, it stands as a powerful biography about a demon-possessed, god-fearing, devil-tempted, booze- and pill-addicted, (hilariously) vulgar musician — or, as he might say, stylist.
Tracing Lewis’s roots back more than 200 years, we eventually meet up with Jerry Lee as he’s learning to boogie-woogie on the piano. Focusing mainly on his quick uprise and almost-as-quick exile after the discovery of his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin, Jerry Lee struggles to serve his two masters, God and Satan — variously loving one while hating the other — as he spirals violently out of control into debt and lawsuits.
Special appearances by Elvis and creative profanity.
Tracing Lewis’s roots back more than 200 years, we eventually meet up with Jerry Lee as he’s learning to boogie-woogie on the piano. Focusing mainly on his quick uprise and almost-as-quick exile after the discovery of his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin, Jerry Lee struggles to serve his two masters, God and Satan — variously loving one while hating the other — as he spirals violently out of control into debt and lawsuits.
Special appearances by Elvis and creative profanity.
April 15, 2025
Kinda mindblowing bio of the Killer. Not strictly based in reality, yet more real than a lot of bios.
January 22, 2023
Jerry Lee Lewis truly lived a wild, and often batshit insane life. Just one of the dozens of stories in this book would be enough for a man to rest his laurels on and/or find some help and sobriety. Tosches is an extremely gifted writer and really brings the larger than life story to full technicolor, enriched with lyrical prose of biblical order. The writing is absolutely top notch. Loved it
December 29, 2007
nick tosches has an obscene gift for the biopic. more precisely: he has a gift for intuiting the precise fold of human flaws and foibles, and distilling them into language and narrative so compelling and rapturous that you mistake tragedy, disaster and personal failing as some kind of holy grail truth. and maybe it is, at least the way nick tosches writes it.
there were so many things i did not know about jerry lee lewis before i read this (number one: that the man is even still alive), and things that i did not really know or understand about "the south" (despite being a southerner for most of my life) that got picked apart and described so simply, so plainly, that any previous not-knowing of these facts or ways of existence seems incredible after encountering it on the page.
mostly this novel is about a man of prodigious charisma, power and talent, and despite all this keeps fucking it up, fucking it up, and fucking it up Real Good again. it's ultimately a doomed elegy for someone still living, but it's a gem of a story and nick tosches tells it so very well.
there were so many things i did not know about jerry lee lewis before i read this (number one: that the man is even still alive), and things that i did not really know or understand about "the south" (despite being a southerner for most of my life) that got picked apart and described so simply, so plainly, that any previous not-knowing of these facts or ways of existence seems incredible after encountering it on the page.
mostly this novel is about a man of prodigious charisma, power and talent, and despite all this keeps fucking it up, fucking it up, and fucking it up Real Good again. it's ultimately a doomed elegy for someone still living, but it's a gem of a story and nick tosches tells it so very well.
March 9, 2018
Nick Tosches has an unfortunate tendency to fall into tough guy bullshit (or so that I can tell from reading up on his other excerpts). Head up his ass or not, he manages to make Jerry Lee Lewis's life the southern gothic novel you didn't know you needed. Imagine ABSALOM, ABSALOM if it made sense and was about a hillbilly piano genius and you'll get an idea of what this book reads like.
Tosches's real masterstroke is counterposing Jerry Lee's cousin Jimmy Lee Swaggart with him throughout the book.
If I had one wish with no funky business allowed from a genie, it'd be that Paul Thomas Anderson decided to film an adaptation of THIS book.
Tosches's real masterstroke is counterposing Jerry Lee's cousin Jimmy Lee Swaggart with him throughout the book.
If I had one wish with no funky business allowed from a genie, it'd be that Paul Thomas Anderson decided to film an adaptation of THIS book.
February 4, 2017
Mind blowing - best biography I've ever read, bar none
September 27, 2023
Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story by Nick Tosches (Delacorte Press 1982) (784.54) (3870).
Jerry Lee Lewis: he was the Killer, baby!
Jerry Lee Lewis: he was the Killer, baby!
Jerry Lee was to Elvis as Mick Jagger is to Paul McCartney. Jerry Lee was THE backslidin,’ sinnin,’ and grinnin’ king wild man of rock ‘n’ roll and rockabilly during the late 1950s. But that was no grin on the Killer’s face; it was something between a sneer, a leer, and a snarl.
He was on top of the rock ‘n’ roll music world until word got out in 1958 that he had married his thirteen year old cousin Myra. When the public learned that he had married a thirteen year old, people were stunned. The public grew even more horrified when it emerged that (1) she was his first cousin, (2) she was his third wife (Jerry Lee was 22 at the time), and (3) he was still married to his second wife Jane, who he had never gotten around to divorcing before marrying thirteen year old cousin Myra.
When fans heard that Jerry Lee Lewis, born in Farraday, Louisiana and raised to be a god-fearing member of the pentecostalist Assembly of God church had married his own baby cousin, US audiences dropped him like a hot potato.
Though he became a popular country music performer a few years later, Jerry Lee never regained his lost fame - or the trust and goodwill of his former audience.
He was a wild man, and he barely slowed down as he aged.
After Nick Tosches’ biography Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story was published in 1982, Jerry Lee lived for another thirty years. He may or may not have learned his lesson, but he lived for many years as a drug addict and an alcoholic. He never tired of the ladies either; he married six times before his death in 2022.
This biography of the Killer brings to mind the story of the great bluesman Robert Johnson, who purportedly sold his soul to the devil at a rural crossroads in Mississippi in exchange for incredible musical mastery.
I’ve read several biographies of Jerry Lee Lewis, and this is by far the most interesting if not the most comprehensive.
My rating: 7/10, finished 9/26/23 (3870).
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