I just finished reading Hellfire, Nick Tosches's biography of Jerry Lee Lewis. Jerry Lee once said that there are only four distinct stylists in American music: Al Jolson, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Tosches said that he had two inspirations for Hellfire: the King James Bible and William Faulkner. There can be no better subject for a biography than Jerry Lee Lewis showing his constant wavering between the Assembly of God and the devil's music. Tosches traces Jerry Lee's ancestry back to 1803 and depicts Jerry Lee's childhood friendship with his first cousin Jimmy Lee Swaggart. Hellfire was published in 1982, so Tosches misses the opportunity to write about the mysterious deaths of at least two of Jerry Lee's wives in the 80s and 90s.
An interviewer once commented that Hellfire shows Jerry Lee roaming the Earth and facing the abyss. Tosches replied, "It's the way we all live. Shallow life, shallow ditch. Big life, big abyss."
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There is a quote at the end of Tosches' The Last Opium Den that pertains to what I think Tosches, Dylan, and this blog all accomplish: a rare perseverance to examine and journey through the past to understand the present. Speaking of the "Papa" of the opium den, Tosches writes:
" It is as if he, like the old image above the door, is here now only to do what he was born to do, and to ward off the end of a dying world of which he alone remains."
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