Jerry Lee Lewis

“Stone cold sober? I don't believe in that.”

Jerry Lee Lewis may be most famous for lighting innumerable pianos on fire, leaving a suspiciously long trail of dead bodies in his wake, a botched attempt to assassinate Elvis and almost always being the first person found at the scene of a crime, but these antics don’t even scratch the surface of his amphetamine laced, killin’-it life.  By the age of fourteen Lewis was a married man but naturally unfulfilled, so he married another woman and was a bigamist by the age of sixteen. His cousin, Jimmy Swaggart, the scandal-prone televangelist as well known for his whoring as for his religious lessons, probably blessed both unions. As Nick Tosches put it, “Jerry Lee can out-drink, out-dope, out-fight, out-cuss, out-shoot and out-fuck any man alive.

“I was born feet first; I’ve been rocking ever since.”

Whether he was doing kick-flips in his Rolls Royce on a back country turn after killing a couple fifths of Jack and then passing the sobriety test with flying colors, or smuggling illegal drugs in one of his private planes, Jerry Lee always made sure he rolled with the most disreputable entourage and that his vast collection of handguns and automatic rifles were well primed and loaded.  For Lewis, tearing apart a hotel room didn’t simply mean breaking some mirrors and spilling red wine on the carpet, it meant unloading the entire clip of a Thompson machine gun while slamming half a fifth of whiskey and then shoving his ascot in the bottle, lighting it in on fire, throwing it against the wall and then walking up to the front desk to complain about the people across the hall.

“Just give me my money and show me where the piano is.”

Lewis was never really bothered by laws, which never applied to him anyways.  Despite shooting his bass player in the chest, trying to break into Graceland with a loaded .38, marrying his thirteen year old cousin, and being caught several times with copious amounts of illegal drugs, Lewis never found himself in serious legal trouble.  His methods of dealing with the law primarily centered around claiming that he was framed and when that didn’t work he would simply not show up to court, and because the Judge was often his kid sister’s third fiancée’s second cousin once removed, he would usually get off anyways.

“You know, there’s nothing like tearing up a club now and then.”

Jerry Lee Lewis killed it so hard that his nickname was actually the killer and like his father, Elmo Lewis, who probably would have made killin' it in the bathtub if the Feds ever banned it, he didn’t let old age get him down, but continued to mow through women, band mates and trumped up drug charges like shots of Old Crow.  Whether he’s having Kris Kristofferson write singles for him, marrying another close relative or lunging across a table while brandishing a half broken bottle of Rye Whiskey with the intent of stabbing an interviewer that asked him the wrong question, Jerry Lee certainly remains on the war path.

Jerry’s friend and no stranger to killin’ it, Waylon Jennings, really sums Lewis up best; “Just don’t get too close to him and you won’t get hurt.”

Prince

"When I want to hear good music, I write it myself.”

What do you get the man who has everything? That is the trivial question the hoi polloi ponder as they move ignorantly through life without realizing that only one man truly has it all:  The finest velvet suits. A harem of women so enamored with you that they literally let you change their names because you can't be bothered to remember them otherwise. Multiple Grammys, tons of platinum albums, and an Oscar. The genius to play literally any instrument. The ability to communicate with angels. A guitar that is modeled after your dick.  Prince truly has the killin'-it trade on lockdown.

“I've got more hits than Madonna's got kids.”

Born in Minneapolis, it is rumored that Prince came out of the womb with a full head of Jheri curled hair, the ability to ride motorcycles, and a guitar which he played as he seduced a nurse. It appeared to be a pattern: When he was sixteen, Prince's father caught him messing around with some hot Midwestern babe and kicked him out of the house. Which didn't really matter because his demo was already garnering a ton of buzz and record labels were fighting to sign the young prodigy. When you're sixteen and killin' it, record executives get on your casting couch, not the other way around.  

With a hugely talented backing band (including the notoriously pimping Morris Day) and a bordello of groupies consisting of the choicest young suburban high school dropouts looking to make their fathers have heart attacks, Prince headed to the Record Plant in Sausalito – where Fleetwood Mac recorded, and where artists were still finding 8-balls and pairs of Stevie Nicks’ underwear from the Rumours sessions hidden in Mick Fleetwood’s bass drums – and made his debut. He played every instrument on the album, which included a song called “Soft & Wet,” which is what every woman on earth was after they listened to the album. Besides hitting the charts, there was a lost generation of mysteriously tan and sexy children born in Marin County around 1977.

“It took five women to getcha off of my mind…”

Prince has slept with Kim Basinger, Madonna, Carmen Electra, Anna Fantastic, Apollonia, every woman born in Minnesota before 1993, a large percentage of Eastern Europe, and your mom. In a move that can only be described as saucy, Prince gave Electra, Fantastic, and Apollonia their names because he hadn't yet slept with anyone named Carmen Electra, Anna Fantastic, or Apollonia, although he had slept with Anna Electra, Carmen Fantastic, and twins named Saturnalia & Plutonium.  During a concert in 1984 every woman in attendance along with a handful of men were impregnated after Prince played Purple Rain.

“People say I'm wearing heels because I'm short. I wear heels because the women like 'em.”

Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and played a guitar fashioned after it that looked like a huge cock at the Super Bowl – after Janet Jackson had caused a furor by showing her nipples. And in a killer move that deserves much praise, he caused Tipper Gore, who is a boring prude and famous for being married to a robot that gives PowerPoint presentations, to start her tyrannical effort to censor music after she caught her daughter listening to "Darling Nikki," a poetic ode to the legions of women named Nikki that he slept with.

If you ever want to try and swim in Prince’s wake, just follow the trail of discarded panties and men's size eight high-heeled boot prints to the velvet mansion on the mystical shores of Lake Minnetonka.

This month in the world of killin’ it: James Hunt

While, we’ve had to sit a few rounds out, there was one news piece that especially stood out over the last month, which we’d like to bring to everyone’s attention.  It’s a Daily Mail piece on Formula One race car driver, James Hunt, that truly reestablishes the boundaries of killin’ it.  We feel this piece deserves a post of its own and accordingly, we’ve pulled some of the best nuggets from the article.

The James Hunt guide to preparing for the most important race in your life:

James Hunt was not known for behaving appropriately. But never was he more outrageous than in the last two weeks of October 1976, when he was in Tokyo battling Niki Lauda for the title of Formula One world motor racing champion.

His preparations were unconventional, to say the least. He had spent the two weeks leading up to the race on a round-the-clock alcohol, cannabis and cocaine binge with his friend Barry Sheene, who was world motorcycle champion that year.

While Jackie Stewart famously abstained from sex a week before a motor race, Hunt would often have sex minutes before climbing into the cockpit…

In Japan, his playground of choice was the Tokyo Hilton, where every morning British Airways stewardesses were dropped off at reception for a 24-hour stopover.

Hunt unfailingly met them as they checked in and invited them to his suite for a party — they always said yes.

It wasn’t unusual for him and Sheene to have sex with all of the women, often together…

No one watching Hunt that week in 1976 would have believed he was preparing for the race of his life.

At the circuit, he had been behaving bizarrely — at one point dropping his overalls and urinating in full view of the crowds in the grandstand.

The spectators, many of whom had powerful binoculars trained on him, applauded once he had finished.

In the end, all the sex and drugs paid off for Hunt, as he went on to win the world title and celebrated in truly excessive but entirely appropriate killin’ it fashion:

At a British Embassy reception in his honour, Hunt was so drunk that the ambassador hesitated to let him in.

The return flight on Japan Airlines had been block-booked by F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone’s travel company and was the scene for a riotous 12-hour party that drained the plane of alcohol.

When Hunt arrived back at Heathrow airport, 2,000 fans were waiting to greet him. He staggered down the steps of the aircraft, drunk, into the arms of his mother Sue and his beautiful, long- suffering girlfriend Jane Birbeck. 

Clearly Hunt wasn’t just a winner on the race course, he was also a winner with the ladies.  Over the course of his 43 year long life it’s reported that he bedded roughly 5,000 women.  

Assuming he started in his mid teens, that comes out to a new woman every other day for the remainder of his life.  When he decided to get married, he tied the knot with British model Suzy Miller:

The day of the wedding was a farce. At six o’clock that morning, Hunt poured himself the first of many beers. Before leaving for the church, he knocked back a couple of Bloody Marys. By the time he walked up the aisle, he was hopelessly intoxicated…

The following day, they left for their honeymoon in Antigua and, once more, the occasion proved to be anything but straightforward.

He had invited his newly- married best friend, the Hesketh Formula One team manager Anthony ‘Bubbles’ Horsley, to come along with his new bride.

While Suzy Miller and Bubbles’ wife had undoubtedly envisaged honeymooning alone with their husbands, the two men clearly preferred each other’s company.

‘I just couldn’t handle the whole scene, so I went out and got blind, roaring drunk.’

But when married life got a little too real for Hunt, he set his wife up with British actor Richard Burton who offered to take Suzy off his hands for the hefty sum of one million pounds.  As the article explains:

Hunt was delighted his wife had found Richard Burton. The two men immediately spoke on the telephone to arrange what they called the ‘transfer’ of Suzy.

Burton offered to pay Hunt’s divorce settlement to Suzy: $1 million. Burton couldn’t believe that Hunt was so casual about letting go of his beautiful wife.

Hunt simply said: ‘Relax, Richard. You’ve done me a wonderful turn by taking on the most alarming expense account in the country.’

Miller, effectively, had been sold to Burton by Hunt for $1 million and both were satisfied with the transaction.

For Hunt, it couldn’t have worked out better; he had got rid of the wife he never wanted and saved himself the divorce costs.

Take away: If you see someone in a three piece suit, chain smoking and cruising down the Las Vegas strip in a European sports car with a rakish glint his eye, it’s probably one of thousands of illegitimate children Hunt fathered over the course of his killin’ it filled life.

Charlie Sheen

"I've got volumes on how not to behave. I've got more information now than a guy should have at my age."

What is killing it? When you write off the cost of trashing a hotel room, lose a $150,000 watch, and forget to pay the hooker you were just blowing more coke than Mick Fleetwood ever did in the 70’s with as just another night. Because it is: For Charlie Sheen. Charlie was such a prolific user of Heidi Fleiss' services that he had every single speed dial button on every phone in his house programmed to her number. McKinsey once used a night in the life of Charlie Sheen in order to research a study on the social benefits of legalizing hard drugs and prostitution. The McKinsey consultants were never seen again.

"The way I look at it, if you have expensive tastes, you gotta be prepared for expensive losses. If a guy has one bad night everybody goes insane and panics... I'm not panicking."

Charlie Sheen probably knew he was killin’ it when he’d wake up looking like Ronnie Wood after a two week bender circa Tattoo You, but when you're the one thing that cocaine, high class prostitutes and the best movie of all time (Hot Shots Part Deux) has in common, it's what you come to expect.  And such is the case for America’s favorite bon vivant, a man for whom Kobe beef doesn’t refer to an Asian delicacy, but slamming Kobe Bryant’s wife while he’s out of town playing the Chicago Bulls. Charlie Sheen's killin'-it lifestyle casts such a broad shadow, his brother was forced to change his name in an ill-conceived attempt to get out from under it only to find himself thrown aside by the booze and cocaine fueled train-wreck that is Charlie Sheen.

"Sure, I did a lot of things in excess. But if you look at the core, the foundation of what I pursued, what red-blooded young American male in my position wouldn't?" 

To prepare for Wall Street in true Brando fashion, Sheen researched his role by taking a high level position at Goldman Sachs, eventually taking over their Trading & Principal Investments unit, where if he wasn’t giving Jon Corzine a mind-blowingly massive wedgie he was probably cornering the pork bellies market in a way that would have made Sir John Templeton go into retirement at the height of his career. When Shia Labeouf was given Sheen's role in Wall Street II, Oliver Stone was forced to make Shia look like less of a bitch. One method? Put Shia on a strict regimen of indulgence, luxury and immoderation.

"I loved you in Wall Street!" 

If you ever find yourself in a town that looks like the Russian Army circa 1944 just passed through, chances are Charlie Sheen had probably been there within the last five years. Robert Downey Jr. tried to hang with Sheen in the mid nineties, a period of his life that nearly ended his career and left him addicted to hard drugs, eventually leading to his arrest for possession of heroin, cocaine and an unregistered .357 while hurtling down Sunset Blvd at a 120 per in a desperate attempt to abscond from Charlie’s realm of debauchery and over the top profligacy.  In the end Charlie got Robert's girlfriend and Robert got three years.

 "Slash sat me down at his house and said, ‘You've got to clean up your act.’ You know you've gone too far when Slash is saying, ‘Look, you've got to get into rehab.’"