Night Beat

by Mikal Gilmore

  In the same respect, the fact that Al Green promotes God as the raison d’être of his art doesn’t particularly secure or sanctify Green’s music. It’s fine, I suppose, to limit music’s purpose to a celebration of God, but music as a way of canvassing for salvation—which is what much of modern gospel is—is an inevitably self-advancing notion. Or at least it’s self-centered more than purely great-hearted or altruistic: The supplicant is concerned with proclaiming himself as a model for deliverance by virtue of personal faith and received grace, which is a lot like the sexual boasting Green used to sing about, but not at all like true outgoing, reciprocal romance. Somehow, I always thought there was as much integrity in Albert Camus’ affirmation, in The Rebel, of those religious insurrectionists (or resisters) who reject the certainty of salvation for themselves because of its elitist, nonegalitarian conditions. Of course, the day I hear a pop (or gospel) song about that view, I’ll figure real miracles are afoot. It’s just that a hardbitten look at real life seems a bit more demanding than a blithe contemplation of a distant afterlife; real life is where spiritual hope is tested and tempered—and remeasured.

  In any event, Al Green clearly feels that today’s pop world is anathema to the purposes of his music, and given his talents, I wouldn’t slight his current repertoire. “The Lord taught me how to sing,” Green explained to his audience at the Greek, “but I rewarded him by singing ’Love and Happiness’ and ’Let’s Stay Together.’ ” The audience roared hungrily at the mention of the songs. “And people ask me, ’Why can’t you still sing “Call Me” or “For the Good Times.” ’ Well, Jesus brought me through all that—He brought me through ’How Can You Mend a Broken Heart’ and ’I’m Still in Love with You.’ Good songs, good times, but I want you to know I found the Rock . . . , and with that, Green moved into a beautiful rendering of “Amazing Grace,” and it seemed just as well that something had brought him through all his previous greatness, because his new greatness is so sweetly convincing.

  Ah, but what greatness it once was. Green, who possesses as well-mannered a drawl as R & B has ever yielded, was pretty much the classy singles artist of the 1970s, producing an even more consistent string of high-art hits than Stevie Wonder or Elton John. Between 1971 and 1976, he slotted thirteen Top 40 singles, including the aforementioned “Love and Happiness,” “Let’s Stay Together,” “Call Me (Come Back Home),” and “I’m Still in Love with You,” as well as “Sha-La-La (Makes Me Happy),” and “L-O-V-E (Love).” Produced by Willie Mitchell for Memphis’ Hi Records, Green’s records were exemplary post-Stax soul: sparse, bass-driven arrangements covered and colored by Green’s breathy, high, fragile crooning. They were records that also bespoke unfathomable reserves of casual, elegant sexiness, and Green’s image as a ladies’ man was further enhanced by a swoony, physically stirring live act in which his lithe yet unrestrained presence gave new depth to sexual euphoria.

  Apparently, the image also carried over to his personal life. In 1974, a woman who loved Green and had tried to fasten him to a promise of marriage, grew wild at his rejection. Embittered, she reportedly attempted to wound him with scalding grits before killing herself. Green’s career fell into quick disarray, and he never recorded another major hit after the incident. When he recouped in 1977, producing himself for the first time, Green seemed still pulled by some of the same old urges, but also reanimated by a new spiritual awareness. “It’s you that I want but it’s Him that I need,” he sang in one of his finest songs, “Belle” (from The Belle Album), and it sounded as if Green were firmly trying to shut out the hope of pop heroism for good. Whatever conflict remained, Green resolved it fairly quickly: All of his albums since that date—including Truth ’n’ Time, Higher Plane, The Lord Will Make a Way, Precious Lord, and I’ll Rise Again—have been gospel affairs, sometimes transfixing, sometimes miscast, but never less than masterly sung.

  Perhaps gospel is Green’s way of making up for the implicit excesses of his previous sex style, but that sexiness—that revelry in loss of inhibition, that surrender to sensual movement—is still very much a part of Green’s live act. At the end of a lovely and rousing version of “People Get Ready,” he tossed off his beige, double-breasted jacket and prowled the stage like a fierce, balletic wolf, as ravenous and alluring as his former carnal self had ever seemed. And just as jolting, too: When, early in the show, he stripped off his black bow-tie, one woman to my left, who had been shouting “Hallelujah” only moments earlier, suddenly shrieked, “Take it all off, Al! Revelations indeed.

  But Green didn’t seem entirely comfortable with this response. During one point when he attempted to venture into the audience and was rushed by women trying to plant fervent kisses on his face, he fairly begged, “Shake my hand, please!” Religious fervor is as much a way of covering for past fears as it is a way of expressing necessary worship, and in those moments, Green looked like a haunted, fearful man.

  But the fear and the correlated joy he has found in his supplication has made of Green a better singer and greater artist. That last trait is what is central here, for what is truly transcendent about Green isn’t the spirituality of his songs so much as the uplifting art he brings to bear upon his religion, for Green is still the most dazzling soul singer around—only now he takes the calling literally. Indeed, he’s as riveting a live vocalist as Frank Sinatra or Dylan. His reading of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” was the ideal example: He curled around the song’s imperative spirit with an impossible effortlessness, imbuing his pinched, high breathiness with the same old tested sensual elegance.

  It was a lot like hearing religion, and also a lot like hearing sex, but nothing like the playful manner in which Marvin Gaye or Prince might mix the two extremes. Green has been through the fire of the latter, and the fiery balm of the former, and he sees nothing light or trendily shocking in juxtaposing the two. But I doubt that I’ll hear anything more sensually pleasing than that vocal on “People Get Ready”—a physical expression of spiritual longing that made me feel good all over, and also made me feel sort of transported. I could listen to Al Green from here to Judgment Day and it would seem like salvation to me. Or at least close enough for this hell on earth.

  jerry lee lewis: the killer

  Look, we’ve only got one life to live. We don’t have the promise of the next breath. I know what I am. I’m a rompin’, stompin’, piano-playin’ 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. . . . I gotta lay it open sometimes.

  JERRY LEE LEWIS, 1977

  Jerry Lee Lewis—the Louisiana-born, wild-haired piano player—had as much assaultive impact on rock & roll culture as any artist prior to the Sex Pistols: He lived out rock & roll’s sexual and impulsive audacity with such hauteur and flamboyance as to be deemed a perilous talent in the late-1950s. For that distinction—as well as for the startling depth and display of his talent—there are many rock & roll chroniclers who regard Lewis as the exemplary performer of his era: more unrepressed than Elvis Presley, more forcible than Chuck Berry, more insolent than Little Richard.

  Of course, it is not only for his musical swagger that Lewis seemed preeminent, but also for the manner in which he has consistently embodied—that is, lived out—the promise of rock & roll’s threat. Rock & roll is mean and corrupting music, he has said many times, and to perform that music, Lewis has forsaken many hopes and a few beliefs. Indeed, he lives and speaks as a man who has lost his soul—and knows exactly what that loss means. For this act, existentialists would have named him a rebel, though his friends and fans simply call him the Killer.

  It is a tough moniker, but Lewis has been tempered by the times. In mid-1958—at the peak of a career that looked to overtake Presley’s—he married Myra Gail Brown, his thirteen-year-old third cousin (it was his third marriage), and the resulting scandal reduced him to a career of secondary concert dates and record deals that he never quite overcame. In subsequent years, Lewis
would bury two sons, lose Myra and other wives to divorce, hatred, and death, and lose his property and wealth to tax liens filed by the U.S. government. Over the years, it became increasingly difficult to tell where Jerry Lee-the-victim ended and Jerry Lee-the-culprit began. The man who was once a preacher began assaulting his wives and lovers with a fearful savor, and in 1976, in a drunken incident on his forty-first birthday, he shot two bullets into the chest of his bassist, Butch Owens (Lewis was charged with a misdemeanor: firing a gun within city limits). In 1981, he entered a Memphis hospital in enfeebled shape and had most of his stomach removed—the result of years of steady consumption of liquor and drugs.

  But the most serious discredit to the Lewis legend was detailed in an article that appeared in the March 1, 1984, issue of Rolling Stone, “The Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis.” Written by Richard Ben Cramer (a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the recipient of a Pulitzer prize for journalism), the article seems a scrupulous account of Lewis’ two-and-a-half-month marriage to twenty-five-year-old Shawn Michelle Stephens and the mystifying events surrounding her August 23, 1983, death: the bruises and blood on her body, the scratchlike wounds on Lewis’ forearm, the permeation of fresh, small bloodstains around Lewis’ Mississippi home, and the superficial police investigations and coroner’s reports that followed. Though it was eventually concluded that Shawn had died as the result of an overdose of methadone and that there was “no indication of foul play,” Cramer uncovers much overlooked (and withheld) evidence, including clear indications that there had been some sort of fight at the Lewis house the night of the young woman’s death. The article raises disturbing questions about Lewis’ accountability in the demise of his fifth wife, and though Cramer doesn’t accuse the rock performer of murder, he certainly indicates that the matter merited a more careful inquiry.

  But it isn’t my purpose here to recount the Rolling Stone article, and certainly not to draw conclusions about Jerry Lee Lewis’ culpability. From my understanding of Cramer’s reportage, it may no longer be possible to reach any incontestable conclusions on the matter. If I were to be callous about it, I might add that Lewis’ guilt may be beside the point: Jerry Lee clearly has developed a reputation as some kind of archetypal modern American “outside the law” (as one writer put it), living out tragedy, violence, and dissolution as the fruits of a self-willed fall from grace. That’s a fairly romantic conception, and for my interest, it raises another, equally troubling question: Do we (meaning his fans and chroniclers) really care much about whether Lewis has brutalized his wives, or in fact contributed to Shawn Stephens’ death? Or does the possibility somehow further his antiheroic standing? Or as one friend put it, if we thought Lewis had killed his wife, would we still buy his music, attend his shows? Would we disown our conviction in the importance of his earlier work?

  These are questions that each of us can answer only for ourselves and I must admit I’m not sure what my own answers might reveal. Like many other pop writers, I have often celebrated the angry, violent impulses of rock & roll, because, in part, such impulses seem born of a hard-earned moral courage, though also, I should admit, because the angry, violent side of rock can be fun. (If you doubt me, listen to the Who or the Sex Pistols, or see The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, The Blackboard Jungle, The Harder They Come, Quadrophenia, or High School Confidential—the latter featuring Jerry Lee Lewis on the title song.)

  But it is also true that fans and critics have often romanticized rock & roll’s violent side to a distorted degree—until a roughhouse aesthetic and mean-eyed stance seem to take on matchless and inevitable value. By example, the hardened, menacing posture of punk was so widely reported and lionized that violence appeared as a genuine and off-putting trait of the movement, though in fact it was always more stylized than it was necessary or actual. Of course, that didn’t stop some punks from living up to an acquired style: When Sid Vicious was arrested for the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in 1978, and then died by heroin overdose later, to many punk followers those deaths had the ring of idyllic, inescapable pop history about them. And yet the critics and fans who venerated “punk violence,” and who memorialized Vicious’ pathetic end, didn’t have to live with the consequences of his life. It was as if the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols, Spungen’s murder, and Vicious’ death were all part of a merciless pageant lived out for our dark enjoyment.

  But then that’s the immutable allure of violence: It makes for great entertainment, great mystique, and as a fan of hard-boiled crime novels (the best of which inquire after the impulse to murder), I am hardly one to moralize. The problem develops when an art form’s stylized violence becomes so idealized to its critics and audience that its real-life performances seem some sort of enactment of bravado. Or worse, when we begin regarding real-life victims as less consequential than the music or mystique of their victimizers.

  How all this relates to the troubles of Jerry Lee Lewis is a tricky question. Certainly, to read Nick Tosches’ fine biography of Lewis, Hellfire, or Myra Lewis’ equally adept account of her marriage to the pianist, Great Balls of Fire, is to come face-to-face with the heart-affecting story of a wild, mean, and unequaled pop star—a man robbed of his shot at rock glory and so irrecoverably confounded in spirit that his ambition, intelligence, wit and pride prompted him to turn his back on redemption. “I’m draggin’ the audience to hell with me,” Jerry Lee is famous for saying, and while that may seem a darkly alluring statement, it implies awful possibilities: A man who is no longer fearful of death, but feels certain only of damnation, may no longer fear the consequence nor the conceit of any deeds. If that is so, Jerry Lee Lewis may be telling us enough about himself to inspire our distance.

  miles davis: the lion in winter

  Face-to-face, Miles Davis seems much like the Miles Davis one might expect him to be: That is, he has the manners and bearing of the legendary Dark Prince of post-bop, one of the last great icons and agitators of jazz. He greets me at the door of his multilevel Malibu guest house, leads me into the lower den strewn with his many-colored erotic-expressionist ink paintings, and graciously offers me some of the homemade gumbo simmering on the stove. But quick as a blink (and it is startling how fast this abiding fifty-nine-year-old man can will moods and wits), the amiability can disappear. At one point he asks me what I think of a particular track on his soon-to-be-released You’re Under Arrest, and I tell him I haven’t heard the track because it isn’t on the advance copy of the album that I received. Davis’ eyes flicker behind his tinted, thick glasses and his notorious wrath flares. “Shit, you’re trying to talk to me about my music and you don’t even give a listen to my music?” I go out to my car, fetch the advance tape that Columbia Records had sent me, and hand it over to Davis. He studies the tape and sees that, indeed, the track under discussion had been omitted—which only makes him angrier.

  “Man, they fucked up the way you’re supposed to hear this transition,” he says in his raw, irascible voice, then pulls out his own master cassette of the album, slaps it into the Nakamichi mounted into the wall, and keeps the music rolling throughout the visit. Occasionally he will call attention to specific passages—pointing out the album’s constant counterplay between the forcible rhythms and hot textures of the band arrangements and the cool, playful, mellifluent, often introspective tone of his trumpet lines. As he talks, the man himself seems much like his music—fiery, then lulling, then impossibly complex, indefinable. His dark, dignified features may seem drawn these days, but they also ripple with the creases of experience, and the wear of myth.

  Still, as impressive or disarming as Davis’ bearing and temper may seem, for some reason there’s nothing that inspires awe so much as when, during an idle point in our conversation, he picks up the trumpet that has been resting nearby, places it in his lap, and begins stroking it, in an offhand way. This particular horn is princely looking—black, with curled, gold gilt that spells Miles around its edge, and a weatherworn mute nuzzled int
o its flared bell. It just may be the single most famous, best played instrument in all America. And at that moment when he raises it to his lips, breathes gently into its looped tube as he fingers its valves, filling his corner of the room with a tone so subdued it seems almost private—well, the distinctions between Davis and his instrument blur. It is, in fact, a powerful but unconscious gesture that fuses the man’s legend with his art. It is also an instant that drives home the fact that one is in the presence of perhaps the most important living musical hero in America—the essential (and solitary) link between the music of Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane and Michael Jackson.

  Indeed, since his first recordings with Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Max Roach in the late 1940s, Miles Davis has been involved in and has nurtured more diverse jazz forms (from be-bop to cool to neo-bop, from modal reveries to electric atonalism) than any other figure in the music’s history—and has also connected those traditions to rock and funk style and pop aspiration with bold, controversial, and liberating effect. Of course, in many fans’ and critics’ eyes, it was Davis’ plunge into electronic texture, his mix of open-ended melodic improvisation and hard-edged, R & B-derived tempos, that spawned the dread specter of fusion jazz in the 1970s. In the end, the movement itself proved merely crass and formulaic, and perhaps also broke jazz history in two, inspiring a generation of technique-obsessed instrumentalists who proved unable to advance Davis’ original vision. The style even seemed to enclose the trumpeter himself: Whereas early, groundbreaking excursions like In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and Jack Johnson had been seen as imaginative and unforgettable tone poems, later flurries like Agharta, Pangaea, and Dark Magus were seen as furious, pain-ridden, self-destroying exercises—work so forbidding, chaotic, and frustrating, some critics charged that they had been designed to keep an audience at bay (though for me, their fitful, disturbed brilliance places them among my favorite Miles Davis recordings).