Well, I read a French (translated) graphic novel about the history of Rock and Roll a while ago. They mentioned in passing that Jerry Lee Louis had a kind of elegant murderer image about him, self perpetuated. The picture they showed of him had him wear a kind of Blackadder velvet suit. Kinda from the same era as the fairy tale character named Bluebeard.
What I was wondering was, where did this image of an elegant killer come from? Why did Jerry Lee Louis decide to go with it. Also, what other bands invoked that image?
Your description of Lewis being depicted wearing a velvet frock coat might be some kind of artistic license on the part of the artist. I saw him live in concert (and many times on TV), and I can’t imagine anyone less suited to that style of dress. Jerry Lee Lewis was a bundle of energy when he was on stage - He’d stand up and start pounding the keyboard, kick the piano stool out of the way, and just go goddamn crazy on stage. Mostly I remember him wearing a fairly normal sort of suit, but a few minutes into playing and the jacket would be off, the shirt unbuttoned at the collar and his tie flopping loose, and he’d have a leg up on the keyboard whaling away.
“Elegant” is one of the last words I’d choose in describing Jerry Lee Lewis’s image. As Uvula Donor mentions, Jerry Lee Lewis is a disheveled wild man onstage, the farthest thing from a foppish dandy.
Who was the artist? I have an issue of Heavy Metal from the early '80s that contains a strip about Elvis in which Jerry Lee Lewis is shown, IIRC, in a sort of purple velvet suit and frilly shirt. (Col. Parker spits in his eye.)
That was it exactly! However, it was in book form, and was narrated by a bunch of humanoid cats. It must have been a series, and then put together into a book.
Let’s see…
Typing “rock and roll” +history +“comic book” into amazon.com’s books section yields no useful results. The cover was quite distinctive.
same with ebay, and google just brings up stuff about heavy metal comic books. Hevymetal.com just gives (interesting) pornographic graphic novels. It must be out of print.
The strip I was thinking of was by Dick Matena, titled “Heartbreak Hotel,” and was in fact 10 pages. Most of the online info about Matena is in Dutch, but there doesn’t seem to be any reference to his having done a book of this nature. If this is part of the book you saw, maybe it was a collection by different artists.
Rough synopsis: Elvis is depicted as a child toting a guitar, and Colonel Parker are riding on top of a train through the desert called Lonely Street; the engineer refuses to stop at the monolithic Heartbreak Hotel so Elvis guns him down with his guitar; Elvis and the Colonel are welcomed to the hotel by a nun who quotes from “Blue Suede Shoes”; they encounter Jerry Lee Lewis, dressed in violet tails and frilled shirt; in the last three panels Elvis becomes peak-era Elvis, then fat Elvis, and finally a long shot of the Hotel with Elvis crying for his mother.
