20. Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story (Nick Tosches) – The number of music bios I own is relatively small (I’m guessing they account for, at most, 20% of my music books), the number I’ve read even smaller, and the number I’ve loved barely constitute a blip in my reading history, but this is the exception even among the exceptions (of which there are a few). As someone who came to the subject of Jerry Lee rather blindly — aside from knowing the obvious hits — and without an overwhelming amount of interest in learning more, I found Tosches’ telling of the story entirely absorbing, even haunting. Particularly in his channeling of Lewis’s voice, a risky device that resonated long after I put the thing down. “It was 1975. It might just as well have been 1965. He took a drink and beheld himself in the mirror. There were lines on his face that he had never seen before. He looked for the eyes of the hawk, but saw only his own, pink and milky from the wages of unclean succor. The hair, though, the hair — the hair was yet of majesty.”
