Jerry Lee Lewis at the Ko Samui Music Festival 2005

A dark wind blows through the coconut palms. The air is balmy and the crowd is impatient. Fork lightning flashes across a tropical night sky. But electricity is not limited to the firmament tonight.
Jerry Lee Lewis, AKA the Killer, the last great king of Rock and Roll, the musical revolutionary, the drug-fuelled Louisiana hillbilly maniac with his pumping piano, in short, the next best thing to a deity made flesh, is scheduled to headline the second Ko Samui Music Festival.
Jerry Lee needs little introduction to anyone who’s ever listened to music, but his career and life have been so remarkable, brutal, excessive, glorious and degrading that it would be a wasted literary opportunity not to list the Killer’s most outrageous achievements here.
Born almost 70 years ago to the day of his first appearance in Thailand, Jerry Lee mastered the Boogie-Woogie piano by the age of 14. Despite attending the Southwestern Bible Institute in Texas, Jerry Lee never mastered his own demons and was thrown out of a prospective preaching career for playing Rock and Roll versions of gospel hymns in church.
It’s been steeply up and down hill ever since. Along with Elvis, Roy Obison and Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee founded the last great romantic movement of western civilization – Rock and Roll. But while Elvis got fat and went to Hollywood, while Orbison remained remote, and while Johnny Cash became C&W’s Man In Black, Jerry Lee took too many drugs, balled too many women and became ever more dangerous. Then, in 1958, Jerry Lee married his thirteen year old cousin without divorcing his previous wife. The world’s media was not amused and his career collapsed. Jerry Lee carried on playing and marrying.
The album ‘Live at the Star Club, Hamburg’, released in 1964, is text book Rock and Roll – mad, bad, fast and very, very real. If aliens came to see me and asked me about the defining Rock And Roll moment, this is what I’d play them.
Reality is nasty when it copies great art – his fourth wife died in his swimming pool and a fifth OD’ed on methadone, two of his kids died in accidents. In 1976 he shot his bass player in the chest. No, God did not tell him to do it.
I love Jerry Lee Lewis pretty much unconditionally. He was part of the moment when western culture celebrated the individual and the non-conformist. Like the Surrealists and the Beats before him, Jerry Lee made our world a more interesting, dynamic and soulful place. Jerry Lee managed to convey both the best and worst aspects of the human condition in a two minute song.
Despite being a white southerner, Jerry Lee played black music and promoted black artists. Take a look at racial divisions in Louisiana today and you’ll know what courage or insanity it must have taken back in 1956. What’s more, Jerry Lee was the most sexually charged Rock and Roll artist of the 1950s and sex, then as now, is politics, drawing battle lines across America. Jerry Lee never gave a toss about politics - like a true god king, he refers to himself in the third person in his songs. Perhaps that’s the reason why the moral majority did not manage to crush him, following the revelations about his teenage marriage.
But that was all a long time ago. Now the music business is a franchise of the military-industrial complex and the charts are peopled by manufactured boy bands and bimbos with implants in places where they’re not needed. Jerry Lee is as much a legend as a memory in our media-saturated shallow entertainment world.
Allan Sadd, the festival’s philanthropic promoter, probably doesn’t like boy bands and it’s to his credit that Jerry Lee has made it to the beach. Apparently it’s been a long flight for the frail Rock and Roll pensioner.