Hellfire

By Nick Tosches

A Book Review by Marcia Wickes

March 2010

“I’m draggin’ the audience to hell with me.” ~Jerry Lee Lewis

Before I began to read Hellfire, a biography of singer Jerry Lee Lewis, I visited YouTube and watched several videos of Jerry Lee Lewis performing. I knew his name, of course, and some of his songs and I knew of the scandal surrounding his marriage to a very young cousin, but little else. As I read the book, I found myself drawn back to these videos time and again, and I would watch them, saying to myself, him? He did that? Really? Because when you watch him perform with the jaded eyes of present tense, he doesn’t look as nefarious as he certainly was.

This is a delicious book. The author has a sumptuous writing style that makes you want to go back and reread passages, not for further understanding, but to revisit the sheer delight of reading them just one more time. Having said that, I should also say that Nick Tosches is an uneven writer; but his style worked for me. Reading Tosches is like a roller coaster ride; it’s fast, slow, high, low, ragged and then amazingly smooth, but definitely rewarding although you may feel a bit dizzy at the end of it all. He sounds almost Biblical at times which certainly fits the subject matter, and you can almost envision him at a pulpit roaring to his audience about the trials and tribulations of the tormented Jerry Lee Lewis.

For Jerry Lee Lewis was a tormented man, no doubt about that. The recurring theme of Hellfire is Lewis’ constant struggle against the impulses and behaviors that he felt were so wrong and that he seemed unable to control. His drinking, drugging, womanizing, and even criminal activities dominated his life and his natural arrogance often estranged him from the very people who might have wanted to help him. He was raised knowing a severe Pentacostal God, an old Testament terror, in the hellfire and brimstone atmosphere of the god-fearing Bible-beating old South, and he was torn all his life between preaching and performing, between righteous behavior and wild carousing and excess in all aspects of his life. He began performing professionally in wretched dives and hole in the wall bars when still a young man of 14; as a child he had learned to play piano with his famous cousins Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Lee Swaggart. In fact, for most of his life Lewis was envious of Swaggart because Swaggart had turned to the godly way of life Lewis longed for while Lewis was pulled more and more into darkness. Jerry Lee, in a conversation later in his life, told someone, “Jimmy Lee Swaggart’s done it. That’s what makes me mad. We learned to play on the same piano. Ran into him the other day. Boy, he got on me hot and heavy. That man is a powerhouse for God. We both were at one time. But you can’t serve two masters, for ya’ll end up hatin’ one and lovin’ the other. ‘Be ye hot or cold, for if ye be lukewarm I’ll spew ya outa My mouth.’ You’re goin’ to heaven or you’re goin’ to hell. There’s no in-between.”

Lewis did try periodically to break free from his demons. He would drink, womanize, do drugs, engage in criminal activity, then would repent and try once again to get back on the ‘straight and narrow’. He would perform, then give up performing because he felt it put him on the road to hell. Certainly when he performed (especially in his early days) he surrounded himself with less than stellar personalities and activities but he seemed naturally drawn to trashy circumstances and seedy barrooms full of carousers and lushes. Later as he became more famous he was abusive to the people who should have mattered most to him and he couldn’t seem to control that either. The author does an amazing job of showing that pull back and forth that dominated most of Lewis’ life. The pull between dark and light, good and evil, god and the devil, is the theme that winds throughout this book as over and over again Lewis sins and repents.

The book also shows a bit of Lewis’ troubled relationships with other famous performers of the time. For example, Lewis admired but was wildly jealous of Elvis Presley and openly competed with him for most of his career. Surprisingly, although at times Lewis was openly antagonistic toward Elvis, Presley didn’t seem to feel animosity toward him. When hearing of the scandal of Lewis’ marriage to his 14 year old cousin, Presley stated: “He’s a great artist……I’d rather not talk about his marriage, except that if he really loves her I guess it’s all right.” Interestingly, Presley also fell in love with his future wife Priscilla when she was 14 but unlike Lewis waited until she was older and they could marry without scandal. The book actually reads like a who’s who of American music, with names like Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and Chuck Berry all drifting in and out of the text. Lewis was uniformly jealous of them all and although he seemed to admire some, that admiration stopped short when he felt that his position at the top might be threatened.

The older Jerry Lee Lewis got, the more his excesses began to catch up with him. Physically, emotionally, financially he danced with total ruin as he became more wild and also more abusive toward his friends and family. The tragedies in his life had not helped him; he suffered the deaths of 2 of his children and was profoundly affected by both. Each time he lashed out to those closest to him instead of seeking help and comfort from them and alienated many of the people in his life that loved him and would have been willing to try to help him. During his later years the swings between “good” behavior and wild excess grew more pronounced and his personality became more erratic and troubled. No doubt his years of excessive drinking and drugs played a part in aggravating what may have been a serious mental illness inherent in him from the beginning. Shortly before his death his loved ones once again warned him that if he didn’t change he would die. His cousin Mickey Gilley was one who tried. He flew to Memphis at one point to talk to Jerry. Gilley said, “Jerry…..What are you tryin’ to do? Are you tryin’ to destroy yourself? Is that what you want? Do you want to die? Because that’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna kill yourself. You can’t keep doin’ what you’re doin’ to yourself and expect to go on livin’. It’s not gonna happen. We’ll end up buryin’ you just like they did Elvis if you don’t get off it. You’re gonna die.” Although Lewis protested that he did want to live, to Gilley and the others who tried to bring him to reason, he did not change his behavior. After losing everything, Lewis died at the age of 45.

Although author Tosches does not list his sources (there is no bibliography and no notes section, although the book has an excellent and inclusive index), it is obvious that he has researched meticulously and thought deeply in order to write a book about Lewis that goes far beyond the bare facts of his wild life and premature death. Rolling Stone Magazine calls Hellfire, “Quite simply the best rock and roll biography ever written.” That may not be entirely true but even taken with a grain of salt the book Hellfire is a fascinating read. Tosches has definitely put his stamp of personal interpretation on much of Lewis’ behavior but his opinions and assumptions ring true in light of the framework of given facts and things we know for sure about Lewis’ life. Truthfully, even if the book were historical fiction it still would be as compelling to read. I don’t know of a biography more complex, more deeply written, more lyrical in its prose, than this one. I do wish that a bibliography had been provided however. This is the kind of book that makes you want to attack the bibliography with a highlighter and head to the local library. Hellfire makes me want to know more about Jerry Lee Lewis. Why could he never resolve his issues with religion vs. rock and roll? It makes me want to read more about the people in his life to try to understand why he dealt so harshly with those who loved him the most. It makes me wonder why he deliberately set out time after time to sabotage himself and his life, to undermine his own success. Did he indeed have mental health issues that were aggravated by religion and his excessive lifestyle? Would he have destroyed himself if he hadn’t become famous? Who in his life might have been able to help him? All of these questions that reading Hellfire have raised make me want to go out and read more about him and the other musicians who had an impact on him.

I suspect that I would not have liked Jerry Lee Lewis if I had met him. To me he represents the worst kind of excess that now more than ever infects the music industry and the people who participate in it. Lewis’ behavior was erratic and out of control even by today’s lax standards and I don’t think I would have wanted to spend much time around him. His cruelty to the women in his life, his arrogance, his abuse of his friends, his casual visits into criminal activity, all mark him as a person I would steer clear of in real life. But his life is like a train wreck; how can you walk past without looking and trying to understand what happened? I think my fascination with him is morbid but I can’t deny it; why was he the way he was? What could have been different for him? How is his behavior a preview of the excesses we see today in the world of rock and roll? Is it impossible to be a great artist without the demons that he had? Is the torture part of the art? Hellfire doesn’t answer any of those questions but the fact that the book raises them makes it worth reading.

I don’t often reread non-fiction books but this is a book I will keep and reread; it is one I will loan to friends and then want back. I also want to read Nick Tosches’ other books (he’s written extensively) even if they are about subjects I have no interest in. The man should have been a poet but we are lucky enough to have his prose so will have to be satisfied with that. When all is said and done, I think that Jerry Lee Lewis was lucky to have such a sympathetic and eloquent voice telling his story of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.