Monday, August 21, 2017

Jerry Lewis 1926 - 2017

On top of everything else, Monsieur Lewis deserves to go down in history as one of the great avant-garde noise-rock guitar heroes of all time.

You know -- as in Mars, DNA, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks...bands like that.



And speaking of DNA, as you will doubtless notice, Jerry's guitar solos in the clip above sound pretty much exactly like Arto Lindsay. He kind of looks like him, too.


Obviously, if Jerry had been hanging out on the Bowery circa 1984, it wouldn't just have been the French hailing him as a genius.

POSTSCRIPT: So I was at our local watering hole in the Q-Boro yesterday when the news came of Lewis's death.

I mentioned it to the very nice millennial bar lady and she said "I don't know who that is."

ME: The other half of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, the most famous comedy team of the 50s.

HER: I've heard of Dean Martin. Jerry Lewis, no.

ME: (thinking) Ah -- ever see that Eddie Murphy movie THE NUTTY PROFESSOR?

HER: Oh, yeah -- love that.

ME: It's a remake of a Jerry Lewis movie.

HER: Oh. Okay.

Kill me now, is the point I'm trying to make.





4 comments:

Mark said...

The half-life of celebrity gets shorter and shorter with each passing year. When I saw on my phone yesterday that Lewis had died, a little bit of me died too. My wife and I were in NJ with friends, and I passed along the news to my wife and friends with an imaginary Trump tweet. "Jerry Lewis, dead. A great comedian. So sad!"

DrBob said...

MEMORY HALF-LIFE = cell phone brain irradiation/#tweets per hour
RIP Mr. Lewis, you had a great mind, a great mind, and made us ROFL!

Anonymous said...

I raised my millennial right; his text with the news of Jerry's death was how I found out.

Billy B said...

Used to watch Jerry's movies at the Imperial Theater in my hometown in the early to mid 60s. Saturday afternoon double features. Admission was 25 cents Coke and candy bar another 25 cents. Your feet would stick to the floor.