Jerry Lewis eats White Castles, recalls his dreams; Gia Margaret's 'Romantic Piano'; Vintage hi-fi ads
Discussed: Medtronic, spinal cord electrodes, Percodan, erections, Wigwam socks, Grace Kelly, Jagjaguwar, Sansui Electronics Corp.
Would you like to interview Jerry Lewis about how he’s managing his back pain? That was the PR pitch from Medtronic, a company that was marketing a device that promised to alleviate lower back issues. They’d hired the legendary comedian as its spokesman, and part of the PR blitz involved Lewis traveling the country and making appearances in hospitals and clinics to shill for Medtronic. I certainly did want to interview Jerry Lewis about back pain, and I did. After watching the presentation at St. Joseph’s Hospital (I think), we made our way to his hotel room in downtown St. Louis. Here’s the brief piece I wrote, updated with a few tweaks to make up for previous poor execution.
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Jerry Lewis was in town [in 2004] to shill for Medtronic, maker of a "pain pacemaker" – a device Lewis says saved his life after 37 years of extreme back pain, the result of more than 2,000 pratfalls. From his suite at the Cupples Station Westin Hotel, surrounded by the remains of a White Castle lunch, the star of stage and screen invited me in and offered me a leftover burger. He said he treated himself to White Castles whenever he was in a city that had them. We sat at a little kitchen table a few feet from each other. He smelled like Scope, cologne and Sliders.
Lewis told me that because he was hard of hearing he’d like to record the interview, too, and set a mini-cassette recorder next to mine. I think he was fibbing. He didn’t want to be misquoted and required his own copy to ensure that. Regardless, he was a joy to meet and interview, and he was totally game for my approach.
RR: It's my dream for you to do this interview in the Nutty Professor voice.
Jerry Lewis: [assumes Nutty Professor voice] Actually, you might just, ahhh, pull that off, as they say in the ahhh, vernacular. Ha-ha hee-heee-heee!
Thank you. Feel free to answer all the questions in that voice.
Certainly. Certainly.
Tell a little bit about your pain device.
[returns to regular Jerry Lewis persona and holds up a red device] I have a battery under my skin. Two electrodes come from the battery around to the spinal column, where they cut bone out to accommodate two electrodes that cut the pain from going to the brain. When I feel pain, I hit it [hits it, then lets out a gasp of relief]. Like being reborn every time. And it opens your garage door, too.
Any side effects?
When it's vibrating I have this erection that I've had for nine months.
The pain got you addicted to Percodan, huh?
Oh yeah, thirteen a day. I was really a champ. There's about a six-year period that I'm trying to remember if it's true. Everyone tells me I made two films, I did six telethons, 25 concerts in Paris, London and Rome. And I have no recollection of that period, from 1965 to 1974.
Is it true that you wear a pair of socks only once before you throw them away?
I don't throw them away. They go to the McKinley Boys Home in Las Vegas. They're manufactured by the Wigwam corporation. They're white socks, and they feel fleecy and cozy when they're brand-new. When they're washed, they feel like they've been washed. I'm indulging myself. I'm not sticking it up my nose or going to a race track, so allow me this one indiscretion.
Do you remember your dreams? Any classic Jerry Lewis dreams that you'd like to share?
The classic dream that I have was with Grace Kelly. I had gone to the famous Red Cross benefit in Monaco for Grace, and that night, having had dinner, we had cocktails, after dinner rather than before, and they bombed me with piña coladas or something, and when I went to my suite I fell asleep on the couch, I didn't even make it into bed. My dream was that Grace was undressing me and she was telling me that she was so sick of the Prince, that he's such a schmuck, and that I would be better in her life. She didn't care that I was married or had children. She said, "Let's go somewhere."
Can I read you a quote about your past sexual dalliances? "I was like a kid in a candy store. It was nothing for me to knock off four broads in an afternoon." Can you expand on that a little?
It was easy. When you're 22 and 23 years old, you start at ten in the morning, you got the second one moving in at about 1:05, then at 3:15 you're meeting the third one and by seven o'clock you're having dinner and you knock her off by nine. But you must know that I'm not the only one who had that appetite. Every young kid that does well and makes a lot of money, the first thing that happens is the female appetite, which I'm very grateful to say I still have. I cut down on doing anything about it like I did. It's only now about three a day. R|R
Chicago pianist Gia Margaret’s Romantic Piano
“Instrumental music it can be kind of endless. Sometimes you wonder if what you made is music at all,” the pianist Gia Margaret recently told Stereogum’s James Rettig, adding that she “didn’t want to subject anyone to two hours of me hammering on the piano.”
Margaret doesn’t once hammer on Romantic Piano, her sublime new album for Jagjaguwar. Thirteen pieces that range in length from 30 seconds to nearly four minutes, the record explores the peaceful, melodic side of the instrument, drawing on cited inspirations including Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Erik Satie and Masakatsu Takagi’s Marginalia series.
For In Sheep’s Clothing, where I help write, edit and curate content, their collection and programming, we invited Margaret to recommend five records. Read the whole bunch here, but one in particular, by Luis Bonfa, stood out to me.
Here’s Margaret’s take on Bonfa’s Introspection:
This is something I’ve come across in the past few years (so it feels a bit recent) but I can already tell it is inspiring the way I play and produce guitar. I think I found it at the right time. I love the almost direct input sound of the guitar and the way it’s recorded with a chorus effect. It feels the perfect amount of ahead of its time, and a bit dated in the way that it sounds. (Introspection came out in 1972.) It’s refreshing and innovative and like a cool breeze. I can’t compare it to much else. A perfect record to play on a summer evening or a lounge in the park. R|R
Founts of stereophonic desire: Getting lost in vintage Hi-Fi ads
Mostly the aim of this In Sheep’s Clothing quickie from last week was to offer drool-worthy, curious, or otherwise engaging advertisements from the peak hi-fi era of the 1970s, when competition for consumer dollars, coupled with overwhelming demand for home sound systems, generated gear that a half-century later endures.
To explore, say, High Fidelity magazine issues from 1973, is to experience desire for objects you never knew you needed. A display ad for Altec’s array of speaker systems from that year (above) is likely to send you to Reverb or HiFiShark in search of possible deals.
The Sansui Corp’s advertising firm took copious amounts of LSD before crafting the ad campaign above. What does the eye represent in this illustration? Shouldn’t it be an ear? Or a Sansui amplifier? R|R
Hey go to the Royale in STL on June 17 because I’ll be playing records
