Linda Gail Lewis International Affair “More twang per syllable than prime Duane Eddy … She’s Jerry Lee’s sister, wildass before anything else”
by Michael Gray
6/6/2003
Though not yet a star in her own right, Linda Gail Lewis has
proven she has what it takes to hold her own alongside two of the most
talented and notoriously difficult figures in popular music. Barely in
her teens when she surfaced in the early 1960s, she first accompanied
her older brother, Jerry Lee Lewis. Four decades later, Lewis has given
her career new momentum by forming a musical partnership with Van
Morrison.
She has recorded on her own, but Lewis built her reputation primarily
through her association with her brother. She opened shows and sang
backing vocals for “The Killer” on tours throughout most of the ’60s and
’70s, and the siblings recorded an album of duets, Together, released in 1969, that produced the Top 10 country single “Don’t Let Me Cross Over.”
In 1987, after a long layoff, Lewis, at age 40, picked up the threads
of her career. Stepping out of Jerry Lee’s shadow, she dusted off
piano-boogie skills she learned from him and set out as a solo artist,
performing in Memphis and touring nationally and internationally. She
found audiences in Europe especially receptive to her Lewis-family brand
of rock ‘n’ roll and country. The demand for her talents has become so
great overseas that Lewis now has a second home in Wales, where she
spends more time than she does at her U.S. home in Big Sandy, Tenn.
Lewis’ 1991 album, International Affair, issued in France by New Rose, created excitement among European rockabilly fans and her cult following in the U.S. Village Voice
music critic Robert Christgau named the import a “pick hit” in one of
his monthly “consumer guides.”
Lewis, he wrote, registered
“more twang
per syllable than prime Duane Eddy, belting and screeching like a
flat-out hillbilly… She’s Jerry Lee’s sister, wildass before anything
else.”
Two years ago, Lewis published a rambunctious autobiography, The Devil, Me and Jerry Lee,
in which she revealed that she has been married eight times and had a
life every bit as colorful as her brother and her famous cousins, TV
evangelist Jimmy Swaggart and country star Mickey Gilley.
But nothing has raised her profile more than Lewis’ recent studio and
concert collaborations with Irish singer/songwriter Morrison, the
incendiary, blue-eyed-soul singer behind pop classics such as
“Brown-Eyed Girl,” “Moondance” and “Gloria.”
Lewis shares billing with Morrison on You Win Again, an album
of duets released in October and taking its title from a Hank Williams
song. A prolific, sometimes anguished songwriter, Morrison has written
his share of haunting and deeply personal epics, but You Win Again is a buoyant collection of covers at the other extreme from his dark, 1968 masterpiece, Astral Weeks.
Morrison contributes one original, “No Way Pedro.” The rest of the
set is a high-spirited frolic through a baker’s dozen of ’50s classics
by the likes of Williams (covered three times), bluesman John Lee Hooker
(with whom Morrison also has collaborated), rock ‘n’ roll guitar
slinger Bo Diddley and, perhaps predictably, Jerry Lee Lewis.
“Van has been wanting to do some stuff with my brother for a long
time,” says Lewis during a phone interview from her home overseas. “Van
has loved my brother’s music since he was a boy. They are friends, but
Jerry Lee is not real big on going into the studio these days. Van heard
what I was doing and he thought ‘Well, this is the real thing. I like
this.’ He felt we could do something good together, but neither one of
us knew it was going to turn out the way it did.”
Lewis first crossed paths with Morrison in 1993 at a Jerry Lee Lewis
convention at the King’s Hotel in Newport in South Wales. Earlier this
year they shared dinner and a conversation about music, discovering they
liked the same kinds of songs. Morrison heard Lewis perform during a
sound check before one of her concerts. A week later, Lewis caught
Morrison’s show in Cardiff, Wales, and they got together for an
after-hours jam session.
“I didn’t realize I was going to be singing with him,” she explains.
“He did a couple of blues songs and I played piano for him. We’d been
talking about one of my brother’s songs we both loved called ‘Let’s Talk
About Us.’ It was written by Otis Blackwell, who wrote ‘Great Balls of
Fire,’ but it really wasn’t well-known. Van asked if I knew the words,
so I wrote them down for him and he asked me to sing it with him.”
Lewis breaks out laughing. “Suddenly I was rehearsing duets with Van
Morrison,” she recalls. “Van kept calling out songs for us to try. It
was real informal. Our two voices together were wonderful. I had no
problem phrasing with him. It was great, and we were having such a good
time. Then we sat down to have tea, and Van picked up his cell phone and
said to me, ‘Well, are you available next Tuesday?’ He called his
studio and booked it.
“I was just flabbergasted,” Lewis continues. “Still puzzled, I said,
‘Are we going to record these songs?’ He said, ‘Well, yeah,’ as if to
say, ‘Are you crazy … don’t you know?’ I didn’t think anything would
come of the recordings, but I knew I was going to have fun and enjoy my
day in the studio with this legend.”
They cut nine songs together before Lewis returned to Tennessee, not
expecting to hear any more about the project. When she went back to
Europe three weeks later, Morrison invited her to his studio for tea and
told her he might release their duets as his next album.
“He had another album ready to go, but he said he liked our album
better,” Lewis explains. “He told me that if we could come up with some
more songs, and if our act worked together live, then he would release
the album. I was really floored. That is when I became nervous, because I
knew I had a shot at something great.”
By the time Lewis rejoined Morrison in the studio, any anxiety she
felt about the scope of what they were trying to do had disappeared.
“I really couldn’t be that nervous with the next bunch of songs that
we did,” she says. “We did [Bo Diddley’s] ‘Cadillac,’ [Hank Williams’]
‘Why Don’t You Love Me’ — those songs were so easy for me to sing with
him, and they were so much fun to sing with him.”
In fact, the recording sessions turned out to be as informal as the
circumstances that led to them. The spontaneous performances were cut
live and very quickly in the studio, with little or no rehearsal.
“It’s unbelievable that things like that can happen today,” Lewis
says. “Van is doing something for music. It’s natural and it’s real, as
opposed to something that is overdubbed to death and pieced together.”
Lewis points out that her famous brother works in a similar style.
“They both cut their sessions live on the floor and don’t do a lot of
overdubs,” she says. “Neither one of those guys plays with a set list.
They go on stage and they call out the songs.
“Well, Van calls them out,” Lewis adds with a laugh. “He’s a little
more cooperative than my brother. Jerry Lee just starts playing and you
have to figure out the key and song. They both do spontaneous music.
They play for the audience and they figure out the audience as they go
along.”
“Van the Man” — as Morrison is known to legions of rock fans — has
parted ways with his regular band for now in favor of working with
Lewis’ Welsh backup band, the Red Hot Pokers, with whom the duo recorded
You Win Again. They have performed across Europe, and Lewis
hopes American tour dates are in the offing. She is working on
Morrison’s next album of original songs, playing piano and singing some
backup on the project. She also hopes to record a set of Morrison
originals under her own name, with him producing, but he has yet to
commit.
In the meantime, Lewis is thankful for the career boost provided by
her alliance with the Belfast Cowboy, as Morrison also is known. She
enjoys her return to the spotlight and feels grateful that Morrison has
shared his talent with her.
“This is a big opportunity, for me to be singing with Van,” she
acknowledges. “I’m 53 years old, but I’m still learning, and he’s taught
me one helluva lot. I put him right up there with my brother. They’re
both geniuses.”
