He was trying to be courteous but you could tell almost at once that being courteous wasn’t really part of his basic nature. ‘Wahl, ah looks at it this-away, Kill-uh,’ he slurred. ‘There’s only two they done it to this-away. There’s your Al Jolson, they done ’im when he wuz still alive, and there’s me, Jerry Lee Lewis, they doin’ me now whilst ah’m still alive. So there’s your two of us, yer two bona fide livin’ legends o’ all time! Now Adam, he was tellin’ me t’other day somethin’ about someone else [be pauses, snorts], some damn woman [second pause], Loretta Lynn or someone like that!. . . Hell she don’t count!’
Throughout the world he alone was known as ‘The Killer’, but he called me and anyone else he was addressing by that title (‘Howya doin’, Kill-uh’, ‘Hangin’ in there, Kill-uh’ ad infinitum). It turned out to be his only affectionate term of endearment, infinitely preferable to the stern censorious ‘son’ or the Tennessee Williams-ominous, booming and hostile ‘boy’.
What I remember most is how you had to stare directly into his eyes because if you lost his gaze, even for a second, you lost him too. And he’d be off and reeling, focus all shot to hell, raving on, both splendid and quite pitiful. He looked haggard, gaunt, and though his face bore the tell-tale signs of a heavy make-up job, he still looked hard and malevolent. But when the mad sparkle that rejuvenated his manner ceased to glow in his eyes, his whole character seemed to shrivel before me, becoming old and bone-dry. He muttered about ‘wanting to get next to a whole new generation o’ young people’ and it sounded utterly obscene, yet he was only innocuously talking about his ‘comeback’ and about attracting the young people to buy his records and make him ‘the biggest damn star I can hope to be’. And of course at this point I had to ask myself: is this man strictly for real?
But then, oh foolish query, this is Jerry Lee Lewis, large as life and five times as daunting, the last of the true primitives and a man so for real he’s positively surreal. I mean, everybody knows about the Killer on some level: be it as ‘wizened rock legend’, ‘the only real rival Elvis ever had’, ‘the most genuinely psychotic entertainer in show business history’ or, in my perception, as the greatest living one-man soap opera in the entire history of glorious National Enquirer-era America. Take your pick. Anyway, come early autumn, that living legend will be unveiling itself anew at a cinema near you, immortalized for celluloid by Dennis Quaid.
Why a Jerry Lee Lewis biopic, you ask? Well why not? These are godless times we’re living through and this man’s story to date should stand as a terrible example to us all. More to the point, his is an odyssey so extravagant it mocks the very concept of fiction. It has everything: madness, bigamy, religious mania, tragedy, psychotic arrogance, epic violence and debauchery, drugs of every shape and substance, an ocean of alcohol, wealth, corruption, damnation, probably even murder.
Adam Fields, thirty-two, Great Balls of Fire’s producer, is more than cognizant of all these facets: ‘His life is so hugely textured and consistently eventful it seemed out of the question to attempt covering it all. I mean, we’re only tackling eighteen months of his life . . . Jerry Lee and Jimmy Swaggart – these two guys just keep on making history and you can never count them out. For me, Jerry Lee is the last great American original to be immortalized on celluloid . . . I think this will be just the first of a whole number of films dealing with aspects of his life. There has to be at least a sequel.’
The eighteen months covered in Great Balls of Fire focuses on the period – around 1958 – that witnessed the first extraordinary rise and fall of Jerry Lee Lewis, at age twenty-one, a period when, as Fields points out, ‘he went from making $100 a week to $100,000 and right back again. And I don’t think he’s ever understood why.’
In that year and a half he went from playing piano in ‘the evilest, baddest, lowest fightin’-and-killingest place on earth’, a Memphis juke-joint called Haney’s, to recording for Sam Phillips and Sun Records and selling a staggering 31 million records as a consequence. This coincided with Elvis Presley being railroaded into the army, and so mercurial was his ascent, so audacious was his demeanour, that Jerry Lee was really the only one who ever genuinely threatened to dislodge the King from his throne. Arrogance was his undoing however; for it was blinding arrogance and a fervent crazy sense of recognizing God’s will or none at all that drove him to show off his thirteen-year-old bride on a trip to England. The press, discovering her true age, dug deeper and found Jerry Lee Lewis to have been married twice before – a multi-bigamist no less – and his disgrace came fast and furious.
The fruits of this jarring episode – and the music he made for Sun Records – are known to everyone: as time goes by they just sound better and better, harking as they do back to a time when rock’n’roll was the sound of young men taking wild glorious risks, staring the whole world down. Director Jim MacBride (who has already paid extensive homage to Lewis in his albeit ill-conceived remake of Godard’s Breathless) only becomes truly animated when he talks about that music: ‘The most intense expression of young emotions . . . it appeals to all the restless excitement and raw energy that young people have.’
Maybe so, but now more than ever it sounds like the gleeful mad abandon of a man throwing coals into the furnace of a runaway train that’s dragging him straight to hell. It survives as the most vivid and extreme music of its era and genre because it makes no differentiation between ‘fun’ and ‘sin’, between ‘soft sex’ and hard venal lust, between ‘getting really gone’ and flat-out dementia.
‘Elvis was the greatest but I’m the best,’ Lewis, immodest as ever, once stated and here at least he has a point. For though Elvis was the most obviously charismatic, Jerry Lee was the most dangerous and it’s this sense of danger that envelops him to this day, that has him torn between ‘fame’ on the one hand and ‘infamy’ on the other, ricocheting helplessly and ceaselessly betwixt the two. In the brilliant Hellfire, Nick Tosches, Lewis’s premier biographer, chronicles the extraordinary patterns that seem to control the destiny of an individual as undefeatable as he is utterly self-destructive. When Jerry Lee enters a room you feel the earth shuddering on its axis, the ground beneath him moving and shaking ever so slightly. You also get a terrible insight into what it can be like to find yourself in intimate contact with such a volatile force.
Throughout Tosches’s accounts on Lewis havoc inevitably reigns: in-laws go mad or become accident statistics, offspring die horrible, mangled deaths, wives drown or suffer inexplicable fatal overdoses, band members also overdose a lot or end up drug-addicted, penniless and in jail (or, in one case, get shot point-blank in the chest by a ‘Killer’ too stoned to think better of such an action). Record people are terrorized, audiences verbally and physically attacked, promoters bankrupted, journalists threatened with broken bottles for no sane reason . . . On Jerry Lee Lewis’s dark highway of a life everybody else seems to fall by the wayside while the Killer just keeps on rocking, shining ever brighter while everything around him turns to shit.
‘Let’s say it’s made for a very interesting chemistry,’ says MacBride – not without some measure of irony, one feels – when asked about Jerry Lee Lewis’s spectral presence as technical adviser over the making of Great Balls of Fire.
‘But I’ve personally kinda shied away from him . . . I haven’t had much to do with Jerry Lee at all. See, I started my film career doing documentaries – cinema verite stuff – and I realized early that in that medium you can’t really avoid betraying your subject in some form or another. And so this time I felt I should preserve myself from Jerry Lee himself in order to tell his story as best I can. I don’t want to disappoint him, but maybe by placating him I’d end up disappointing myself, which would be worse.’
MacBride might have other, less aesthetic, reasons for keeping a wide berth from the Killer. The filming of Great Balls of Fire has been long, costly and arduous, as well as plagued by illness and inclement weather, but even these natural catastrophes seem secondary to the contagiously destructive presence that Jerry Lee Lewis himself may be exerting on the film set. Stories have already circulated claiming Lewis had pulled a gun several times on Fields during more delicate production negotiations. Fields denies this. ‘There was a story that the Memphis hot-wire picked up stating Jerry pulled a gun and threatened to kill me if I didn’t pay him $50,000 and that I had to escape through a bathroom window. There was another claiming I pulled a gun on him, which is ridiculous. I don’t know where these stories came from. But they make great copy.’
Fields does admit that ‘keeping Jerry Lee happy is a full-time job. He’s had a lot of influence but it’s been hard as well because . . . Jerry remembers the past one way, and Myra will remember it all completely differently. Then Sam Phillips’s [another technical adviser] recollections are different again. He can be very difficult too.’
It doesn’t help that Lewis openly despises the text the screenplay is partly taken from: former child bride Myra Lewis’s Great Balls of Fire. (His most famous ex-wife Jerry Lee Lewis now refers to as ‘a very, very mixed-up young woman’ – a definition of mind-boggling implications from him – ‘tryin’ to poison mah daughter’s mind against me with a bunch o’ spiteful shit! I saw her just a few days ago. I says to her, “Myra, that damn book o’ yours – that weren’t no Great Balls of Fire you wrote. You shoulda called it Great Buncha Balls instead, darlin’, ’cos that’s all it is.” ’)
But that is as nothing compared to the thorny matter of documenting the Killer’s religious obsessions on celluloid for posterity. ‘That’s where the real problems have occurred,’ says Fields. ‘Jerry’s tormented by his religious influences. He sees himself as forever torn between doing God’s work and singing the Devil’s music. It’s a very personal thing with him, something he lives with and something he feels uncomfortable about having splashed over a cinema screen, I guess.’ The Killer took greatest exception, according to Fields, to a scene in the film where, during an Assembly of God church service, one of the congregation is portrayed as speaking in tongues. ‘He was shocked we’d even consider such a thing because he stated that speaking in tongues is the most serious and intimate thing that can happen to a human being. And that it was the greatest sin in the world to mock that state by acting it out.’
To give Lewis’s religious side a more resonant context, the script also utilizes the character of Jimmy Swaggart, Lewis’s equally notorious double first cousin and, up until early 1988, America’s most outspoken, influential (and, many would add, most genuinely diabolical) TV evangelist.
Jimmy’s the only person who’s still alive that we haven’t contacted in order to get his side of the story,’ confesses Fields. ‘Since last year’s scandals’ – when the holier-than-holy Swaggart was reportedly caught slumming in New Orleans’s most sordid red light district, paying to photograph $10 an hour prostitutes in pornographic poses while masturbating himself – ‘he’s sort of kept himself in hiding. He’s basically a recluse right now. We don’t know what to expect from him. He’ll either bless us or damn the whole thing to hell, I suppose. But he and Jerry Lee are incredible, a contemporary Cain and Abel if you like. Only you’re never quite sure which is which.’
Certainly, as Swaggart’s own arrogance and self-destructive weirdness were last year being broadcast in every tabloid throughout America, so the same journals would point to his cousin the Killer and his rise once again – with this film’s advent – from yet another yawning abyss of a career slump. Four years earlier Jerry Lee Lewis’s notoriety quotient had reached a new and chilling peak: Rolling Stone printed a devastating expose of his life of middle-aged craziness, drug addiction and corruption, baldly accusing him of brutally murdering his fifth wife, a former cocktail waitress from Michigan named Shawn, some thirty days into their marriage. After that, everyone was just waiting for him to drop dead, and Lewis certainly seemed to spend a lot of time bouncing in and out of detoxification clinics. Now once again a married man – he informed me that his current wife, Kerrie McCarver, is ‘the only one I never done cheated on . . . that’ll tell ya something right there’ – he is also a father again, to a son named (what else?) Jerry Lee Lewis III.
When not consorting with Lisa Marie Presley (another media sensation: mother Priscilla was understandably Very concerned’) the Killer was re-recording his old repertoire with producer T-Bone Burnette, the man who’d done so much to revitalize Roy Orbison’s career just before the latter’s death, for the Great Balls of Fire soundtrack, receiving in the process ‘major record offers, the likes o’ which you wouldn’t believe’. The whole experience has been ‘a lesson well learned and a blessing well earned,’ he told me. ‘I’m ready to do business again.’
‘You know what Jerry recently told me,’ Fields finally confides. ‘In all seriousness that he sees this film as his salvation, that’s he’s been “risen again by the Lord” and that its success would lead him finally to the Promised Land. I just said to him, “Hey Jerry, do I look like Charlton Heston?”’
‘Dennis? I like ’im well enough, Kill-uh, but he’s always talkin’ a bunch o’ crap . . . I’ll tell ya this tho’. He was born to play me. And playin’ me in this film is gonna make him into one hell of a damn star.’
But Dennis Quaid is already one hell of a damn star. ‘Right now he’s enormous,’ says Fields. And that enormity is the key reason that this whole project is finally off the ground after eight years of being just another script doing the rounds . . . Quaid and MacBride scored heavily as a team with The Big Easy and the success of their relationship – ‘There’s a very lively chemistry between us,’ says Quaid. ‘We’re either screaming at each other or we’re like brothers’ – has made Great Balls of Fire not merely bankable but the property on which Orion Pictures appear to have their highest hopes riding. A clip is already being shown in cinemas across America – a three-minute trailer for a film that isn’t finished – and watching it you can see just how much pressure there is on Quaid to deliver the goods, for the success or failure of Great Balls of Fire will ultimately hang on his gangly Texan shoulders. Actually it’s a disappointing showcase. Quaid looks weird and defiant but lacks the true-made arrogance.
That said, the Dennis Quaid who allowed one perfunctory interview during the three weeks of filming in London seemed to have achieved an impressive, if slightly unsettling, synthesis with the character’s firmly primal instincts. His manner was authentically wild, flamingly arrogant, but also slightly comic, full of piss and vinegar. He looked very thin and extremely handsome in a disturbed sort of way, his hair dyed blond and swept into a pompadour so preposterous his head at times resembled an exploding field of corn. If this Jerry Lee Lewis madness is as contagious as the facts of his life purport it to be, then the 34-year-old Quaid was quite firmly in its grip. For the next half-hour you couldn’t tell the two of them apart.
‘This is a hell of an experience,’ he began, his Texas drawl already merging with Lewis’s Memphian cadences of punch-drunk bluster. ‘A larger-than-life experience. It’s been a big challenge. When I played Gordo Cooper in The Right Stuff he was a real person, but nothing’s gonna prepare you for playing the part of Jerry Lee Lewis. For starters, we’re talking about a man who is the ultimate extrovert on the face of this earth . . .
‘He’s like a goldmine, that’s how I see it. He’s also pretty scary. You have to take a big chance to really get near to what’s goin’ on in his heart. When we first met he was very, very wary of me. He’d start talkin’ about the old days, then he’d clam up, just glare at me and say, “Ah ain’t gonna tell you mah secrets, son.” Stuff like that. He’s a tough nut to crack and that’s the truth. You’ll be talkin’ and you’ll see him driftin’ off there. But I’ve learnt now never to underestimate his powers. He’s dumb like a fox that Jerry Lee Lewis! He’s always surprisin’ me.
‘Basically he’s been three different people in his life. The first’s the guy I’m playin’ right now. The second was this rather wild bein’, the one they call the Killer, and the third is the person he is right now, this person who’s kind of popped out the other side of madness. Actually I find him very reasonable most of the time.
‘His obsession with goin’ to hell? Well let’s just say Jerry Lee Lewis has a very close personal relationship with God. I mean, haven’t you ever felt that you were damned? I’ve felt that way. Man, I feel that way right now.’
The lady press officer was sympathetic. ‘Today, he’s being lovely,’ she offered. Yesterday had been different though. ‘He has a problem with women journalists,’ she began, before admitting that yesterday he’d had a problem with almost everyone. In short he’d been surly, monosyllabic, disdainful and hostile. ‘He just kept murmuring to one poor girl, “I don’t like you, I don’t like you.”’
Downstairs a camera crew was filming an interview with the Killer. The press officer had a point, I suppose. He sounded as polite as any man in an advanced state of stupefaction probably can hope to be. But lovely? He didn’t sound lovely to me. The TV interviewer – a plummy-voiced Brit from the old school of broadcasting – started a question about the fact that the character of Jimmy Swaggart was part of this film, but Jerry Lee misheard him or wasn’t listening and the rest was deranged calamity.
Jimmy? In mah movie? Are you sayin’ Jimmy’s in mah movie? [Explodes.] Well, what’s he doin’ in it, Kill-uh? Shit, they don’t tell me nothing, these damn movie people! Always the last t’know! They still callin’ it Great Balls of Fire? Shit, I don’t know! If Jimmy’s in this damn film, I’ll probably end up with third billin’! To hell with it!’
Finally it was my turn and I got my first full glimpse of him. I was admitted to a large banquet room where ten, maybe fifteen individuals were standing in servile attendance, religiously savouring Jerry Lee Lewis’s every slurred syllable. There were fan club presidents present, press people, film people, cameramen. But they all seemed invisible to me, like Scotch mist. All eyes fell fixedly on Jerry Lee Lewis. The Killer held the whole focus of that room right there in the hollow of his hand.
A young man from a Swedish magazine was asking him a question but he wasn’t really paying attention. He was looking away from his inquisitor, one hand hiding the whole right side of his gaunt face and his left eye brimming with diffident disdain. Sometimes his mouth would flash a snarl and he’d look just like one of those evil old Alsatian dogs one occasionally encounters in squalid provincial drinking-houses – the kind no one seems to own but there they always are, crouched in a corner, immovable and authentically alarming, snarling at everyone within the general vicinity of its fangs. Even wearing a white ski jersey with gambolling red reindeer knitted on to the chest (hardly suitable apparel for such a professed homophobe), he still looked like Murder Incorporated. He was the Killer right enough. I offered up my firmest handshake and sat facing him. For the next half an hour he seemed by turns heroic, pathetic, comic and dangerous. To quote Marlene Dietrich in A Touch of Evil, ‘He was some kind of man.’
You once did Shakespeare, I began. You played Iago in Othello.
‘That’s right, Kill-uh. And it was the hardest six weeks o’ my life. But I did it. It was rock’n’roll Shakespeare but I learnt all the lines in the damn play. Did it up pretty good. I kept askin’ Jack Good, I says, “Why you got me playin’ this cat Iago anyway?” “ ’Cos you were born to it,” he tol’ me. “ ’Cos you’re the only one I know as evil as he is.” Hell, I reckon ol’ Jack had me pegged pretty good, doncha think?’
Did the location of both this hotel and the film’s reconstruction of the child-bride gigs that brought about your first controversial fall from favour jar any strong recollections after thirty years? The Killer looked old and vacant.
‘Can’t say as they do, no. Memory’s not what it used to be.’
Nothing at all?
‘It’s all vague, pretty vague. Even this hotel . . . I ‘membered it as a big ol’ place, twelve-storey high, and there ain’t but three floors to it. Wouldn’t a done no good me throwing Myra out the windows o’ this place, Kill-uh? [ Weird laughter] Wouldna left a mark on ‘er!
‘The gig? There weren’t no damn carry-cot wheeled onstage . . . Leastways I nevah saw one. Few tomaytas flyin’ past. Coupla eggs maybe . . . but. . .’
He paused and his eyes looked glazed and faraway as though a heavy patch of brain-fog was suddenly crowding out his every thought process. And for a split second he looked incredibly old and frail, almost pathetic. Then just as spontaneously his whole personality shifted gear: his eyes regained their focus, only more so, becoming younger, somehow bigger, and his whole manner became charged, unsettlingly expansive.
‘What I ’member most, though, is that in the audience there was a helluva a lot of good-lookin’ women!’
He suddenly paused and burst out laughing.
‘A lotta good-lookin’ women! Man, ain’t that just the kind o’ shit you’d expect t’come out of the mouth of Jerry Lee Lewis?’
He laughed uproariously then just as suddenly stopped, becoming intense once more.
‘But there was, Kill-uh. Lotta good-lookin’ women! Hell, there was a lot of good-looking young men there too. I’m not queer or anythin’, y’understand. It’s just a fact: good-lookin’ young people o’ both sexes come to my shows. It’s always been that way. Jerry Lee Lewis has always attracted the best lookin’ crowd o’ people y’all can find packed inside o’ four walls.’
I’m surprised you’re doing any interviews at all, I continued. The press have almost destroyed your career in the past with their interference, revelations and accusations. Don’t you hold the media in some contempt?
‘Not really, Kill-uh. No, I think y’all done treated me pretty fair when all’s said and done. I think most of the writers are decent fair-minded people and that I’ve always got pretty much what I deserved.’
Even with Rolling Stone insinuating you killed your last wife?
‘Well maybe they did, Kill-uh, I don’t know . . .’ He paused, as though suppressing something distant and uncomfortable. Then he was once more suddenly transformed, animated, the grand extrovert, a Southern Baptist W.C. Fields.
‘One time, the press – I had ’em all of one accord facin’ me in one big ol’ room. And I tol’ em, I says, “Boys, I hear y’all bin doin’ a lot o’ writing about me and I can’t say as ah blame ya. And I want y’all to know ah don’t give a damn what ya write about me, but if one o’ yous evah spells mah name wrong, ah’m gonna find ’im and come kill ’is ass!”’
His voice here receded into a low, treacherous-sounding growl.
‘And they ain’t nev-ah did that! ’Cos they know anyone messes with me, ah’ll kill ’m! Everybody knows that.’
You’re renowned for being mean.
‘What’s that shit? Mean? I’m not mean. Strict, yes, but I’m not mean. Hell, what kinda “mean” ya talkin’ about?’
Mean as in ruthless and wild.
‘Oh! Well then, ah’m mean!’
He fired it out like a punchline, ending the statement with a stranglehold laugh.
You’ve often been quoted as saying you consider yourself unquestionably the greatest talent in rock’n’roll. Is there anyone you view as being even close to you, talentwise?
More low snarling.
‘Nah. There ain’t never bin no one as good as me.’
Never ever?
‘Nev-ah ev-ah.’ Pause. He stared at me, eyes burning with a venal arrogance. ‘There ain’t never bin a one could cut me, boy. Are you shittin’ me? Are you shittin’ me? Listen, son, I’m fifty-three years o’ age and I haven’t yet ever bee-gun to reach mah peak or t’sell as many damn records as I can and be just as big a damn star as I wanna be. The rest of ’em . . . I already done buried the rest of ’em . And they were the only ones who were any damn good. Hell, there ain’t nothin’ on th’ horizon that’s got me breakin’ sweat, boy. Are you shittin’ me?
‘Johnny Cash? He’s history man. One damn word. Chuck Berry? History! Little Richard? You shittin’ me? History! Plus he’s queer! Is that it? That’s all o’ em? Right well, I reckon we just wrapped ’em all up, Kill-uh. Mopped ’em all up.’
Your relationship with Jimmy Swaggart is legendary, I began. The Killer was now squinting, myopic and sinister.
‘Who?’ he muttered querulously.
Jimmy Swaggart, your first cousin.
‘Oh Jimmy!’
The brain-fog started slowly parting.
‘What’s that shit yo’ just said?’
He’s your first cousin.
‘Double first cousin.’
He paused, shot me a killing glance, then coldly muttered, ‘Well, what about ’im?’
What do you think of his current fall from grace?
Here Jerry Lee Lewis could contain himself no longer. ‘Boy how can you be fallin’ from grace for just wantin’ to beat your meat?’ he exploded. ‘Shit, that’s stupid. Let’s not get too down on Jimmy now. Hell, he’s a human bein’ same as the rest of us. We all got our urges. He’s picked hisself a pretty hard row to hoe.’
But he’s a hypocrite, something you’ve never been accused of.
‘True, Kill-uh, true, I have never been a hypocrite. Shit, I ain’t got nothin’ to hide. Never tol’ a lie in my whole life. ’Cos my life has always bin an open book. Don’t believe in lyin’ and hidin’ and damn secrets. Anyone as does, they’ve got big problems. You can call me any damn name you want but I ain’t no hypocrite and no one can call me one.’
Is the subject of religion something you feel comfortable talking about?
‘I feel comfortable talkin’ about religion ’cos I don’t believe in it. Shit no! I believe in salvation. Salvation and sanctification. The rest is just a bunch o’ wrong-headed bullshit.’
You’ve been quoted as saying you’re going straight to hell. . .
‘Well I probably will if’n I don’t change my way of livin’. I don’t want to think about it too much but it’s probably a fact.’
And here he started laughing, at first sardonically.
‘Hell where d’you think I’d go? You think oP St Peter’s gonna swing open them pearly gates for a crazy old rock’n’rollin’ cat like me?’
His hysterical laughter rang out loud and long for several seconds.
But doesn’t it worry you?
‘Does it worry me?’ There were almost tears of laughter in his wild eyes now. ‘You’re damn right it worries me. Shit, yes. Are you shittin’ me?’
But you’ve tried to join the ministry several times . . .
‘I’ve tried. Tried and tried and tried.’ Suddenly his mood became sober and bleakly reflective. ‘I tried once for three long years. Just couldn’t do it Had to back off. It’s just not in me an’ I can’t live a lie . . . See, it’s like, Satan, he’s got power next to God.
‘He’s second in command, seated right next to ’im. Satan, he’s the Archangel, he’s like the Programme Director or somethin’ . . . Anyway, seems like the two o’ them are always playing some damn game against each other, using me as their pawn. That’s what it feels like anyways.’
And this feeling of being damned is something you live with constantly?
‘It’s somethin’ I live with every damned minute of every damned day and night o’ my life! You’re absolutely right, son.’
Moving right along here, is it true you’ve been teaching Lisa Marie Presley how to play piano?
‘What?’
Suddenly his whole manner seems under attack from waves of random hostility, like static on the radio. I repeat the question.
‘No, she taught me. You don’t teach a lady nuttin’ in this life, son. Shit, don’t you know that?’
Has she inherited much of her father’s talent?
‘Oh . . . Yes . . . I think . . . Ah . . . She . . .’
(Suddenly reception is getting very vague again.)
‘. . . Yes . . . I do believe she probably has. If’n it’s in her and that’s what she really wants to do. It’s early days for that little lady, Killuh. Just a babe in arms. She ain’t but a chile. Good people but a chile all the same. Just a chile livin’ in a world o’ greed ‘n’ trouble! [Nods sagely.] Them Mormons and that other son o’ bitch Parker – them type o’ people can give a little girl a rough ole ride.’
Talking of rough rides, how does it feel to file bankruptcy with debts of three million? Do you ever see yourself getting over your financial difficulties?
‘Shit, yes. I’ll get out under it if not over it, anyways. Same as I’ve done all my damn life. Are you shittin’ me? Hell, it ain’t nothin’. Just a damned formality. See, filin’ bankruptcy’s just a form of business you go through just so’s you can get a bunch of motherfuckin’ leeches off your damn back. That’s all it is. Doin’ it legal. Man, where I come from, if you got honest debts t’ pay you go to jail. I just got a load o’ people who placed these judgements agin me. And not a one of ’em showed up in court! Nossir! Not one of dem debt-seeking motherfuckers showed ’is face. . .’
Maybe they’re frightened of you . . .
‘Hell no, son, frightened ain’t nothin’ to do with it. Theys just lyin’ sons of bitches is all! Goddamned sons o’ bitches at that! [Almost screams] Goddamned sons o’ bitches!’
He was snarling and steaming now, his eyes looking every bit as cold and mean as his legend could hope to suggest, and for a split second I sensed that I’d overstepped the bounds of reasonable provocation here, for he was staring right through me, his left hand clenched into a fist, his right hand pointing a remonstrative finger directly at me.
‘They ain’t evah gonna take nothin’ from me, boy! Print that! Shit, I got one of the most beautiful homes you could ev-ah imagine! Got eighty damn acres o’ the prettiest land! Two big ole lakes runnin’ thru’ . . . Ten miles outside o’ Memphis. Had it sixteen years. They ain’t takin’ nothin’ from me.
‘Enough o’ this talkin’! I’ve had enough anyway. All this talkin’ bullshit! Like to make a man lose his sex drive! Ah’ve said mah piece. Now ah aim to abide by mah word. Gonna cut more hit records – that’s mah first love. Bein’ in the studio, cuttin’ hits. Gonna keep playin’ live, hell yes. I’d play a hundred damn shows a month if’n they could stack ’em all up for me. Keeps me in shape. It’s when I’m not working things get weird. Start dragging around the damn house, your attention gets side-tracked. It can easily happen, son. Hell, for damn years mah attention was wanderin’ everywhichway. I was strung out all over the damn universe. I didn’t know what the hell wuz goin’ on.
‘I’m coming back. Now, I’ve said it, it’s for me to prove it. That’s my job. Never get thru’ provin’ yourself in this life, son. And if’n you do, you’re dead. But I’m only still doin’ it ’cos I can and ’cos I want to. Don’t have to prove nuttin’ to nobody! I just likes to kick ass is all.’