Memphis and Nashville
1979
“A woman looked at my hands once,” he says.
“I’m surprised,” she said to him, “they’re not bigger.”
“No,” he told her, “but they’re perfect.”
People forgave him the braggadocio, the excesses, the indulgences and wickedness, forgave him everything just to hear him use those hands. The oldest and truest fans thought he had earned it; the new ones, seeing him play on television or nostalgia shows or sold-out arenas in far-off lands, some for the first time, were dumbfounded. In an age of machined music, of sound effects, this was what it was supposed to be. Guitar buffs said the same thing when they saw Stevie Ray Vaughan pick his Stratocaster—that it was so much more than music. Jerry Lee’s fans did not have to proclaim him to be anything; if they waited long enough, he would do it for them. They knew that the rest of it was just showing off, the way he played with his feet, his elbows—even his behind. (“You can do it,” Jerry Lee says, “but you have to have a perfect one.”)
But as his hands flew across the keys in ’79, the corrosion was starting to show. The maintenance he had refused to do on his life—the maintenance mortal people did on their bodies and their money and their future—had long been neglected, and now it was beginning to eat through the indestructible exterior, through the very flesh and personality, of the man.
He was not making much new money, and now he found himself in hock to the United States government. He owed the tax man at least a million dollars, the government said. Internal Revenue came for it the first time in January of ’79, raiding the Nesbit ranch as if he was some kind of subversive, then held an auction in Memphis to liquidate his treasure. The United States Treasury had little need for a tractor that once belonged to Jerry Lee Lewis. On the block that day was a 1935 Ford two-door sedan, a ’41 Ford convertible, drop-top Cadillacs, other luxury cars, motorcycles, televisions, gold and diamond rings, gold coins, pianos and other musical instruments, and what federal agents described as an arsenal of modern and antique firearms. Agents also found $31,000 in cash in one bathroom, in a brown paper grocery bag. Jerry Lee did not trust banks much and had rarely had a checking account.
“I think they’re pretty cruel people, to take your cars,” he says.
From the beginning, he said that any allegations of tax fraud were flat untrue. His bookkeeping had been, for decades, less than perfect, “but I paid my taxes,” he says. And if he was short, over the years, he made it right. “They said I owed something, I paid it, and I wiped the slate clean.” But the IRS said he owed more, more than he could pay.
“They was gonna send me up the river.”
He needed a big hit now, a moneymaker, more than ever, at least since his breakthrough record. “And Jerry Lee Lewis don’t know the meaning of the word defeat,” he says now. After his tenure at Mercury was done, he signed with another label, Elektra, and went back, for a while at least, to doing the kind of music he wanted to record, music without a phalanx of violins and a landslide of overproduction. In a few days’ worth of sessions in January 1979, he cut his most recent in a growing list of anthems, a Mack Vickery song called “Rockin’ My Life Away.” While his voice was showing its scars and the words were frequently obscure, Jerry Lee delivered them with commitment, and the beat was pure Louisiana boogie-woogie.
His new producer at Elektra, Bones Howe, had worked on Elvis’s celebrated 1968 comeback special, and he was sympathetic to Jerry Lee’s mind-set. Together they stripped his band down to something closer to what he used on the road, and the little group romped its way through Bob Dylan’s “Rita May” and Sonny Throckmorton’s “I Wish I Was Eighteen Again” and Arthur Alexander’s “Every Day I Have to Cry,” in which he pushed on past the original lyrics and made up some new lyrics of his own about the life he lived and the women he had loved, some longer than others:
Once there was Dorothy, and then came Jane
Look out Myra—you look insane
Come on Jaren, you struttin’ your stuff
I think I’ll take Punkin, ’cause I can’t get enough
(Punkin was a longtime girlfriend)
I wanna thank you very much for lis’nin’ to me
’Cause brother, let me tell you something—I really need it
Come on, girls, I’m a single man again
I’m really waitin’, waitin’, waitin’ just to hang it in
That spring, for the first time since he’d started popping little white pills in the Wagon Wheel a quarter century before, his body rebelled against the chemicals he had fed it. One morning in March, he woke up at home to find he could not catch his breath. The ambulance rushed him to the hospital, in what the doctors would call respiratory distress.
If it was a warning, he ignored it. He continued to party hard, playing at night, traveling in the day. Two months after his short hospital stay, he appeared on the Country Music Awards telecast, throwing the cover off “Rockin’ My Life Away,” his piano outrunning an overmatched studio orchestra. “Me and Elvis Presley never won an award,” he told the audience, “but we know who the kings of rock and roll are.” Some who watched the performance said he appeared fairly well drunk, that he treated the entire performance with the boozy disregard of a night at Bad Bob’s. He says only that he cannot be expected to recall every show or every night he had a drink of liquor.
In the spring of 1979, he finally filed for divorce from Jaren Pate, pointing out that they had not lived together as husband and wife since October 21, 1971. She countersued, accusing him of years of cruelty and drunkenness, and they awaited a court date to end the marriage that never was.
In the last days of his great country stardom—and of the dwindling wealth it had engendered—he and Elmo raved across the country. His mama and sons had perished, the troubadours he cherished had all gone silent, but Elmo was forever. If ever a man was born to live in the rock-and-roll dream, to eat it with a spoon, it was his ol’ daddy. He was not the fierce man he once was, not indestructible; age had stooped him some, till he looked downright kindly. But he would still fight you, and more than one drunk nitwit regretted saying something ugly to him about his boy. He walked the runways of the world with a glass of whiskey in his hand, smiling, ever smiling. He even charmed the pretty girls, in a kindly way, or so it seemed; the old bull still had some horn on him right up until the end. Then he would go home to Ferriday to farm, to walk the dirt that his son’s music had bought for him and drive his tractor around in circles, sometimes mildly intoxicated, and when he grew tired of it, he called his boy, and the next time you saw Elmo, he would again have a glass in his hand, a smile on his face, and one ill-intentioned eye on the women. It pleased Jerry Lee to see his daddy living out this life—a form of payment, somehow, for the snakes he killed and the love he gave his boy.
In summer of ’79, Elmo quietly went into the hospital in Memphis with a burning in his own stomach, and while he hoped it was an ulcer, it was not, and the once magnificent man wasted away from the disease that had taken his wife and so many there along the river, where it was said the chemical plants and industry and the agricultural runoff had poisoned the swamps and rivers and backwater and through them had seeped into the people and left them with the disease that so often had no cure.
He died on the twenty-first of July, 1979. His obituary described him as a retired carpenter and a member of the Church of God. He was buried with Mamie in the cemetery in Clayton. The laws of man, of divorces and such, did not count for much when it was all preached and done, and so he joined her in the earth, right beside her, as his son insisted. Their first son, Elmo Kidd Lewis Jr., rests between them, and their second son was more alone than he had ever been. He knows most people remember their daddies by the things they said, but he loves his daddy for a silence, a silence that lasted for decades. When Jerry Lee thinks of his daddy now, he thinks of that long-ago day at the piano when Elmo sat down to show him how to play a song and inadvertently broke his son’s heart.
Two months later, Jerry Lee was arrested for possession of pills. At a fitness hearing before the Board of Health, Dr. Nick told his judges that it was better to manage an addict’s intake professionally than to have him satisfy his habit on the streets. In 1980 he was indicted for overprescribing medications to Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and nine other patients, including himself. He was acquitted but later had his license revoked. Jerry Lee always believed it was wrong to blame him for Elvis’s death. “Dr. Nick was a good man, a remarkable man,” he says now. “If I thought I could get some blues and yellows out of him, I’d call him up right now.” Then he grins, to tell you he is just goofing—or maybe he just grins.
In early 1980, the IRS seized Jaren’s home. “I am poor and destitute,” she told reporters, as she showed up at the Department of Human Services to apply for food stamps. “I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to the beauty shop.” The divorce action was still pending when the IRS auctioned off her home for $102,000. “They’ve sold it all,” she said. “There’s nothing else they can take.”
Jerry Lee was not in the country. He was on another British tour, including a pair of solo piano appearances on the British television shows Old Grey Whistle Test and Blue Peter, but he was thin and his voice seemed rusted out. It was clear he wasn’t feeling well, but again that summer he held off the creeping decay with a new song. In the middle of his grinding tour schedule, he went back into the studio for Elektra and cut a beautiful rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” His voice, even charred as it was, and his tremulous piano gave the song a gritty vulnerability it had never enjoyed, and it became an almost instant classic for him. “It had a certain feeling to it,” he says now, “like a religious undertone. A something that you very seldom ever can hear.” It seemed almost impossible that this one man—the same man who reeled through his life with so little regard for caution or consequence—could create something so purely beautiful. If you ask him how that can be, he merely looks at you with satisfaction and waits for you to figure it out.
In November he appeared in a TV special called Country Music: A Family Affair, playing a piano duet with Mickey Gilley that still has stagehands sweeping up the ivory. Playing side by side, the cousins blistered through a version of “I’ll Fly Away” that gave the audience a taste of what it must have been like years ago when they battled to beat the old church piano to death. Jerry Lee took the lead and Mickey, smiling, just tried to catch up. “We got this song in the wrong key,” Jerry Lee announced after a few choruses. “We gonna modulate up to G and do it.” And he sang:
Just a few more weary days, and then
I hope to God I’ll fly away
“Mickey’s a good person, too. He wanted to be just like Jerry Lee Lewis. He did great, but you can’t get by with just one hit record,” or however many he had. “That boy’s livin’ in a dream world, if he thinks he’s . . .” in the same league as his cousin. But like him, “he knows how to go to church on a song.”
With “Rockin’ My Life Away” and “Over the Rainbow,” it appeared as if there was hope for Jerry Lee and Elektra. Sometime in 1980, he went to the Caribou Ranch recording studio in Colorado to cut a marathon list of songs, more than thirty in all, everything from “Lady of Spain” to “Tennessee Waltz” to “Autumn Leaves” to “Fever.” He did songs he knew from childhood, like “I’m Throwing Rice” and “Easter Parade,” and a whole passel of gospel numbers, including “On the Jericho Road,” “Old-Time Religion,” “Blessed Jesus, Hold My Hand,” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” There were even a few moving new ballads, including a soaring performance on “That Was the Way It Was Then.” And once again he did them all for nothing. Deemed subpar by Elektra executives, the recordings were shelved for decades, available even today only as bootlegs. Many fans would come to consider the Caribou recordings one of the best albums that never was—though actually there was enough material for two or three albums and certainly one of pure gospel. He thought it was good music and one more example of the moneymen messing up an otherwise fine effort.
His relationship with Elektra quickly soured. “I said, ‘It’s not workin’. I don’t feel it workin’, and it’s not happenin’.’ I didn’t want to stay. I wanted away from all of ’em.”
His only solace was on the highway with his road-tested band, including guitarists James Burton and Kenny Lovelace, bassist Bob Moore, and drummer Buddy Harman. “And that’s all we needed,” he says. “You had yourself a band there nobody could ever touch. They followed me. They were such great musicians. It’s a one-time-around deal. You’ll never have it again.”
What happened next has become a legend in the family, though the cousins still disagree on the details. Jerry Lee was doing a show in Dayton, but he was drunk and sick. He had challenged the disgruntled crowd to fight him, and things were going south. Then suddenly Jimmy Swaggart, who was doing a crusade in Ohio at the time, walked onto the stage, told the crowd he was taking his cousin away to take care of him—some cheered at that—and told Jerry Lee he would fight him if he had to, to save his life.
“He didn’t let me know he was gonna be there,” Jerry Lee recalls now. “I don’t recall bein’ in that bad a shape. I kinda just went along with it. I couldn’t just kick him off the stage. I stood up, we shook hands, and we left.”
When they got offstage, there was business to attend to. “You want to take me in your plane, or you want me to have mine come get us?” Jerry asked his cousin.
“Naw, we’ll take mine,” Jimmy Lee answered.
It was a long way from stealing scrap iron in Concordia Parish.
On the way out, Jerry Lee says, his cousin “invaded my dressing room and flushed all my pills down the commode. It made me mad. I said, ‘Jimmy, you didn’t have no right to do that.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I did.’
“I went and stayed at his house for five or six days,” he says, down in Baton Rouge. Swaggart administered a cure that seemed to consist mostly of boiled shrimp. “I must have ate a tub,” he laughs. “They were real nice to me while I was there. There’s no doubt about that.”
After a few days, Swaggart told him, “I can’t see as how there’s really that much wrong with you,” and let him go.
Looking back, Jerry Lee has little inclination to second-guess his cousin. “I think he was . . . he was right. He was right in what he was doing and what he thought and what he thinks.”
But what was wrong with Jerry Lee could not be cured with a few days of clean living.
On the twenty-eighth of June, 1981, after a show in Chattanooga, he complained that his stomach was on fire. But he felt better by morning, and the next day he was back in Nesbit, lounging at his pool, which had been impossible for the IRS to haul away. He was Jerry Lee Lewis, not some puny man, and a stomachache was nothing to fret about.
On the morning of June 30, he awoke with a pain like nothing he had ever felt before and began spitting up blood.
“I was standin’ in front of the mirror in the bathroom. And I had an old gal back there, KK was her name,” he says. “I had a bad case of indigestion. Heartburn. And I said, ‘Man!’ I said, ‘Give me a glass of water with some bakin’ soda in it. That’ll knock this heartburn out. And everything will be all right.’ And I did that, and when I did, immediately, my stomach—I saw it open up! It just . . . hit me. And I fell to the floor.
“And I . . . I know how it is if you’re gonna die. I can feel that, you know?
“And I called KK in there. I couldn’t move a finger. And I told her, ‘KK, if you could get an ambulance here in the next five to ten minutes, I believe I can get to the hospital and I believe I’ll be all right. But if you don’t do that, I’m gon’ be dead here in the next fifteen minutes.’”
The ambulance made it on time, but the crisis wasn’t over. “Headin’ out to the freeway,” he says, “they had a blowout. And it was rainin’ so hard you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. And the nurse in the ambulance said, ‘Don’t worry, baby, we’re gonna get you there all right. Don’t you worry!’ So they called another ambulance, and, um . . . it took him quite a while to get there.”
He was taken to Methodist Hospital South in Memphis, where he was met by Dr. James Fortune.
“He says, ‘I’m gon’ operate on you, Jerry Lee, but I’m tellin’ you, there’s no use in it. ’Cause, you know, you don’t have a chance.’”
“I said, ‘Well, in that case, could you just give me a pain shot?’” and he laughs.
“He told the nurse, ‘Give him whatever he wants. It don’t make no difference now, anyway.”
The surgery took four hours to repair a ruptured stomach. Something—a lifetime of pharmaceuticals or whiskey, or suppressed worry and anger, or a cocktail of it all—had eaten a hole clean through it.
“I really overshot my runway,” he says now.
He lay close to death for a week. Doctors kept him in intensive care into the next. Ten days later, he began running a high fever. An X-ray showed that the eight- to ten-inch incision made in his stomach wall during the surgery was leaking, and fluids and stomach acids were infecting his abdominal cavity.
Dr. Fortune and a team of surgeons rushed him to the operating room. Doctors told members of his family that his chances were fifty-fifty. Dr. Fortune told them his condition was a “minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour proposition.”
Fans crammed the hospital lobby that hot summer and sneaked into the waiting rooms to sob and wait and pray for mercy. Some carried flowers. Some held hands and prayed for deliverance in this world or the next. Reporters milled outside. Camera crews set up for the inevitable, sad stand-up when the news finally came. The newspapers touched up his obit; some had had it on standby for years.
Jerry Lee survived the four-hour operation but remained in critical condition. He lay in the third-floor ICU on a respirator. Myra came, and she and Phoebe were allowed to visit his bedside for fifteen minutes every four hours. Sam Phillips called the hospital and spoke to Jerry Lee’s cousin, handsome old Carl McVoy.
“Old Jerry is in pretty bad shape,” McVoy told him. “It’s in the hands of the Good Lord.”
Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash came to the hospital to say good-bye, but they did not tell him that.
“I told Jerry that I didn’t come down here to start praying over him,” said Johnny, hoping that he was right. “I believe Jerry Lee has a lot more songs to sing.”
Kris Kristofferson interrupted a tour to come and sit at his bedside. He considered him one of the greatest singers of all time, comparing him with the legends of opera, and he told him so again. Even Elizabeth Taylor, his old friend from Oscar Davis days, called the hospital to wish him well.
The great threat, doctors feared, would be an onset of pneumonia. They pumped him full of antibiotics to try to ward it off. He spent most days in darkness.
He looked up one day and saw his Aunt Stella standing over the bed.
He winked. She leaned in close.
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” he whispered.
He improved, slowly.
“I’s in the hospital ninety-three days,” he said.
“It was rough. People wouldn’t believe the kind of pain that I was in. A lot of pain, man. They was givin’ me pain medicine that would kill an elephant.”
But worst of all was the simple fact of lying there, helpless.
“I was frustrated beyond the realms of imagination,” he says, and laughs again. “God pulled me through that. And if it hadn’t been for Him, I wouldn’t have made it at all.”
The first thing he did when he got home was sit down at a piano to make sure there was nothing wrong with his hands.
It was fall before he was released from the hospital. He had appeared on NBC’s Tomorrow show shortly before his emergency, and in September he returned for another appearance to show America he wasn’t dead yet. Then in January 1982, he taped a show called 25 Years of Jerry Lee Lewis in the sold-out Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville. It was a tribute show, with guest stars Kris Kristofferson, Charlie Rich, Dottie West, the Oak Ridge Boys, Mickey Gilley, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. Perkins did “Blue Suede Shoes.” Cash did “Get Rhythm,” and gave testimonial to the man he once battled for supremacy in the auditoriums of the frozen north, when they lived on saltines and potted meat. He was there, he told the audience, when Jerry Lee, “blond hair flying . . . came onto the scene with such a bang the entire Western world was aware of him.”
Jerry Lee, first in a red crushed velvet jacket and then a rust-red tuxedo, looked waxen, ravaged, tired beyond his years. “It was severe,” he says of the recovery and the lingering pain.
“You never looked better, buddy,” Johnny Cash told him.
Jerry Lee still kicked the bench backward, but it did not go very far. He still banged the keys with his boot, but not more than a time or two. But he seemed genuinely touched by the crowd, which gave him standing ovations, and by the words of his old friends. It was a scripted show, but he knew they meant it. To the tune of “Precious Memories,” he summed up his life and his recent ordeal, and said he wished he could go home to his boyhood days in Ferriday, that he would give “five million dollars, if I had it . . . to spend five minutes with my mama again. . . . She’d straighten me out.” He reached out to Jimmy Swaggart, telling of their boyhood and the life they lived, “but we went separate ways.” He seemed glad to be alive inside that sewed-up body. “My blessings,” he testified, “far exceed my woes.”
“You know they call me the Killer,” he said to the audience. “The only thing I ever killed in my life was possibly myself.”
Shawn Stephens was twenty-three, a small, pretty, honey-blond cocktail waitress at the Hyatt Hotel, trapped in the inertia of Dearborn, Michigan. In February 1981, Jerry Lee was playing the Hyatt lounge, part of the truncated road schedule he had been forced into since his surgery and convalescence. There was no record money coming in; he had no record deal, at least not one producing any new songs. But he was glad to be alive, and he picked the vivacious Shawn out of the throng of pretty cocktail waitresses at the hotel lounge. He sang a song to her and smiled; women like a good-lookin’ rock-and-roll singer, especially a wounded one.
A girlfriend of Shawn’s was keeping company with J. W. Whitten, Jerry Lee’s road manager, and that led to a visit by Shawn and the girlfriend to Jerry Lee’s ranch, with its piano-shaped pool and sprawling lake. The IRS had taken most of the cars, but it was still an impressive estate. Jerry Lee fell in love with her; it had never taken a whole lot for that to happen, anyway. “I was bad to get married,” he says. “But she was a real good woman,” one who bounced into a room and lit it up. He needed that. She came to visit him again in Nesbit, and he gave her a gold bracelet and some other expensive presents, and they talked of getting married after his divorce from Jaren was final. His life then seemed glamorous still. In April he jetted off to London to appear at the great Wembley Stadium for the first time since his illness; he told the audience he was “probably not exactly all the way up to full par,” but they gave him a hero’s welcome, and he sliced through the keyboard with an almost casual defiance.
Shawn’s family told her to stay away from the man, that he could be dangerous. She told them he needed her.
His performing life was still almost charmed, in some ways, able to survive long droughts in the studio and even increasingly erratic live shows, but tragedy in his private life seemed to rattle and clank behind it all, the way tin cans do when tied to the bumper of a car.
On June 9, 1982, Jaren Pate was sunbathing at a friend’s house in Collierville, Tennessee, outside Memphis. The owner of the house where she was staying, Millie Labrum, looked out the window and did not see her, and sent her son to check on her. He found her floating in the aboveground pool, dead. She was still married to Jerry Lee; they had been scheduled to appear in divorce court later that month. The coroner ruled that her death was an accident. Jerry Lee would never accept her child as his, and no one would ever launch any legal proceeding to prove his parentage. Some people of long memory in Memphis still call it a case of abandonment, the one thing they cannot forgive. But friends of Jerry Lee would say that the marriage had existed mostly on paper, finally ending in a great sadness. And if there was any kindness in it, it was that Jerry Lee would never loudly denounce either the mother or the child.
Two months later, in a haze of new pain from his stitched-together stomach, he stood weakly on the deck of a riverboat as Elmo’s long-ago prophecy come true: with Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, and assorted other country swells, he sang and played aboard the Mississippi Queen for a television special. He played his piano and sang his songs as the big river rolled, as people watched from the banks, but there was no one there, with him, no one who remembered that it was ever said.
His ability to bounce back from almost anything was intact. He left in April for another European tour, and in stops in London and Bristol, England, put on shows that seemed to defy or ignore all that had happened to him in the last two traumatic years. Gone, or mostly so, were the runaway ego and erratic behavior. He was gaunt, perhaps more introspective onstage, but he smiled with genuine pleasure at the tightness of the band, of Kenny Lovelace’s guitar licks, as his own piano went ringing through the Hammersmith Odeon in London. He asked for a drink, and they brought him a Coca-Cola; he looked ruefully at the bottle and then played them “Mona Lisa.”
A few days later, in Bristol’s historic Colston Hall, lucky fans witnessed a loose and sustained performance from a pure music man, chatting warmly with the crowd and the band. “I thought it was Wednesday! Thought we were off tonight,” he said when he took the stage, dressed in a simple red turtleneck. He gave them “Chantilly Lace” and “Little Queenie” and “Trouble in Mind,” a roaring “I Don’t Want to Be Lonely Tonight,” even Jimmie Rodgers’s “The One Rose That’s Left in My Heart,” and more, the whole time seriously intent on his piano, on his craft. “Glad to have a sober audience for a change,” he said, sipping from a bottle of Heineken sitting on the piano; later, when he sipped again, it foamed over when he set it back down on the piano lid. He could have nursed one beer all night. He complimented his band again and again. “Them boys are gettin’ pretty good,” he said, a kind of mantra for him in good times. “I can play guitar just like that—well, I wish I could.” But this new, almost modest Jerry Lee still brought them the rock and roll on “Little Queenie,” singing about how “I need a little lovin’—won’t you get your little . . . self . . . back home? . . . Pick it, Kenny!” He was still hurting then, but it was nothing he could not stand; the show he gave them was satisfying, hopeful, and if it was just a window, a glimpse of what things might have been, well, how lucky those people were to get to see it.
The following month, he played the Memphis Cotton Carnival, a kind of Mid-South Mardi Gras for the river city, and it was a different story. He took the stage in dark glasses and a black sleeveless T-shirt, as if he were a punk rocker, and appeared wired, mumbling some of the lyrics, and not just for effect. At the end of the show, barreling without interruption through “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” into “Meat Man” and then into “(Hot Damn!) I’m a One-Woman Man,” he started pushing the band to go faster, faster, till even he could barely keep up, and wouldn’t stop until three girls rushed the stage to distract him with a kiss.
While it’s hard to place an exact moment when it happened, it was about this time that a new downward spiral began, a descent into a whole new hell.
He should have toned down his lifestyle, should have slowed his consumption of the chemicals that put him in such shape. He did not. He was in constant pain, and painkillers replaced amphetamines; eventually it was needles.
“When you get those shots and things, you get addicted to ’em,” he says of the painkillers he took. “I thought it was helpin’ me. I thought I was gettin’ pretty high out of it. And I thought it was helpin’ me onstage.” He laughs, but there is no humor in it. “It wasn’t helpin’ me onstage. It was all in my mind. I got to thinkin’ it was very necessary to have, but I was wrong.”
Instead, he seemed to withdraw inside himself onstage, breaking off a song midstream, often running off to chase a thing inside his head and leaving his band behind—the band he had been so proud of, for the way they meshed, for the good music they had played across thousands of miles. It was that way in the hotel lounges and bigger venues, too.
“I was—kinda got addicted. I liked them shots. But the shots didn’t like me. There’s no way you can make it work. It don’t work. It’ll kill you.”
He was shooting the painkiller directly into his stomach—the only way, some nights, he could climb the steps to the stage.
Now forty-seven, he was starting to miss shows and to be sued by club owners and promoters when he did. The IRS waited at his concerts to take the receipts to pay off his debt. “They were all after me,” says Jerry Lee. “I didn’t pay no attention to ’em. I just kept on rockin’.”
He was free to marry now, and he did not worry about propriety. Jaren and he had not lived as husband and wife for years before her death, so to him it didn’t seem too soon to marry again. On June 7, 1983, he put on a white tuxedo with a ruffled red shirt and a big white bow tie and said “I do” for the fifth time, to Shawn Stephens, now twenty-five. The National Enquirer took photographs, covering the event as if it was some kind of royal wedding, as if the editors somehow knew this story would be gold for them, now or at some time in the future.
It was not, of course, a storybook life there in northern Mississippi. It was much less glamorous than it seemed there in the Dearborn Hyatt. The couple argued. Jerry Lee was fully addicted to the painkillers now. His new wife soon began to soften her own reality with her own drugs, barbiturates. “But she done it to herself,” he says now. He never asked her to take anything and never forced her to take anything, he says. “I never hurt her.”
The maid at the Nesbit ranch found Shawn Stephens Lewis dead in a guest bedroom about noon on August 24, 1983, seventy-seven days after she and Jerry Lee were wed. Jerry Lee, who had slept in his own bedroom, had arisen early that morning and had assumed she was sleeping in.
DeSoto County sheriff Denver Sowell said a preliminary autopsy found that the cause of death was pulmonary edema, or fluid buildup in the lungs, a condition that often accompanies pneumonia or a heart condition. The pathologist who conducted the autopsy concluded that Shawn Lewis had not been the victim of a violent death. But later, a full autopsy conducted by Dr. Jerry Francisco—who had also performed the procedure on Elvis Presley, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.—found the painkiller methadone in her system at ten times the normal dose.
“Although you never feel like you know everything everybody did, exactly,” said Bill Ballard, the DeSoto County prosecutor, “I think we made a thorough investigation of this case and nothing has pointed to homicide.”
Francisco told the prosecutor that he found no evidence that the dosage was forced into her mouth or throat. A DeSoto County grand jury reviewed the case and found no grounds for indictment.
But Shawn’s family in Michigan hired a private attorney to investigate her death, unwilling to accept that it was a self-administered overdose. “They feel if Shawn had never met Jerry Lee Lewis, she would probably be alive today,” said Michael Blake, the attorney. Months later, Rolling Stone magazine published a long, dark, ominous article headlined “The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis,” written by Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Richard Ben Cramer. The story raised questions about law enforcement’s handling of the investigation, suggesting that public officials had been covering for Jerry Lee for years. Cramer also suggested that investigators did not pursue some facts in the case, including reports of blood at the scene and questions about the integrity of the evidence.
Both Cramer and ABC News 20/20 reporter Geraldo Rivera cited a violent altercation between the couple the night before her death as evidence suggesting foul play. A bodyguard told 20/20 that he saw Jerry Lee slap her “a time or two.” Rolling Stone reported that an ambulance attendant saw bruises on her arm and scratches on the back of Jerry Lee’s hand. Rolling Stone also wrote that Jerry Lee had struck Shawn’s sister, Shelley, and that he had threatened Shawn. The magazine cited Shelley as the source. They all used his own nickname against him: the Killer.
None of it prompted charges against Jerry Lee or changed the state prosecutor’s conclusions. Police in northern Mississippi and Tennessee had been responding to incidents involving Jerry Lee Lewis for years: fights, cussfights, accidents, gunfire, threats, and untold other infractions. He had been helped into police cars in handcuffs in three counties and judged and fined, usually in absentia, on a regular basis. The notion that they would give him a pass on murder did not make sense, officials here would say. It was not a storybook marriage, obviously; divorce records indicated that none of Jerry Lee’s marriages had been harmonious, but investigators would say that the evidence was a long way from proving murder.
Jerry Lee told reporters that he did not believe Shawn meant to kill herself. “We had our usual arguments, but there was no reason for that,” he said.
The Rolling Stone story was devastating to him, he says now.
“They treated me like a dog.”
He has called it ridiculous, a manufactured lie.
“I was innocent, and they never proved nothin’. . . . Never proved I hurt no one. She done it herself. She wasn’t beaten at all. There wasn’t a touch of circumstantial evidence that I done it. It was a mistake,” he says of the overdose. “But I hurt nobody.”
The worst of it, he says, was that it made him seem like he had no feelings for the young woman, that people assumed he would not grieve. “That’s the ‘Killer’ part, I guess,” he says now. “You don’t take something you can’t give, when it’s a person’s life. You can never do that.”
But his persona made the tragedy into a story people would hunger for, especially so soon after Jaren’s drowning.
“If I had done everything these people think that I’ve done, I would have been buried in the penitentiary years ago,” he says. “I never killed anything in my life.”
He believes there was another reason that story spread.
“I ain’t never sued nobody,” he says, “and everybody knows it.”
Shawn was buried in Clayton, with his people.
He retreated behind the gates of his ranch and sealed them with a padlock. But it’s hard to be a private man if you are him. In October, two months after Shawn’s death, he taped a concert for Austin City Limits, playing the show behind a set of dark sunglasses that concealed his emotions. Thin and solemn, he played the boogie-woogie in a sweat, but it would be a lie to say he did not still play it like him, did not put on a show, and when he was done, he flew home to wait for the next show and medicate himself in seclusion.
The guilt in it, in the death of his fifth wife, was in the lifestyle he lived, and had lived for so long. He was the unstable rock his blood kin leaned on, and the rock the people who loved him broke themselves against.
Record labels were not courting him. As a last resort, he signed a deal with MCA, but throughout the mid-’80s, the sessions yielded only a few memorable tunes, including yet another signature song, this time by Kenneth Lovelace, called “I Am What I Am”:
I am what I am, not what you want me to be
Meanwhile, the tax man was relentless. Jerry Lee had developed a bad habit of ignoring official documents as if they could all be thrown into the Black River, treating court summonses and marriage licenses like throwaway comic books. It had been his experience that most of them just went away with time, that the courts always got tired of waiting. But on February 14, 1984—Valentine’s Day, wouldn’t you know—he got a piece of paper he could not just discard. He was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of tax evasion.
Prosecutors charged that he had tried to hide assets under the names of other people to avoid having them seized to pay another million dollars in taxes he owed between 1975 and 1980. When he was no longer able to ignore the charges, prosecutors alleged, he went on the lam.
He left his car at a Nashville hotel, hid behind dark glasses and a massive cowboy hat, and sneaked into the studio to record some more songs. Two days later, as if just to show that he would turn himself in on his own schedule, he surrendered to federal authorities in Memphis. He pleaded not guilty and was released on $100,000 bond, after Kenny “Red” Rogers put his club, Hernando’s Hideaway, up for security. The high bond reflected the court’s opinion that Jerry Lee Lewis had shown “a defiant attitude toward the court,” for as long as anyone could remember. “I was just glad to do it,” Rogers told the Associated Press.
When he showed up to be fingerprinted and photographed, he was with a new girlfriend, a twenty-one-year-old singer from Hernando’s Hideaway named Kerrie McCarver. “Honey,” he told her as he was processed, “this is a breeze.”
They were married on April 24, 1984, making her wife number six. They said they were very much in love and wanted children.
Jerry Lee went on trial in October. He was facing a maximum sentence of five years. “Mr. Lewis’s job is to play the piano,” said his attorney, Bill Clifton. “He doesn’t know anything about business.” Jerry Lee thought he was paying his taxes, he said.
When the jury came in with the verdict, Jerry Lee was sitting in the courtroom with his new wife. “I saw that two or three young women on the jury winked at me and gave me the ‘Okay’ sign, so I knew I was in.”
The jury indeed believed him, that he’d meant to do right by the government, but had allowed others, less righteously inclined, to handle his business; they said the government hadn’t proven its case. The courtroom erupted in cheers, and Jerry Lee said he felt the power of God.
Although the charges were dropped, he still owed the government more than $600,000, and federal agents seemed content to follow him to every club date with a briefcase to collect.
He traveled to Europe for another tour in 1985, but he seemed to be running on fumes. Pale, unsteady, he told an audience in Belfast, “I’m doing the best I can tonight, but . . . I’m just sick. I’m out of breath. I can’t seem to breathe right, but I’m tryin’.” He tried to shrug off what everyone was thinking: “You can call it what you want to. I’m not drinkin’. I’m not takin’ any dope, ’cause I can’t find any.” But the humor was halfhearted, and he left the stage a short time later. The shots he had self-administered for the pain—now he knows he was simply addicted to them—were no longer giving him much relief, so he did more of them. “The dope, it didn’t do nothin’ for me,” he says. “They pushed me into it,” he says of doctors who first prescribed it, but he admits he shared the blame: “It takes two to tango.”
The best balm, he had always found, was to just drift back in time. Back home in Memphis, he reunited with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison to record an album called Class of ’55, a commemoration of their contributions to a whole new kind of American music, and a tribute to the man who could not be there, Elvis. Jerry Lee did the requisite boogie number, “Keep My Motor Runnin’,” and a take on “Sixteen Candles,” and joined with the others for John Fogerty’s “Big Train (from Memphis)” and the Waylon Jennings song “Waymore’s Blues,” but he was in pain throughout, and looked it. In photographs of the recording sessions, the other men stand; he is sitting down. He looks even more troubled in black and white.
He says he enjoyed seeing his old friends/competitors again, but the best part of that reunion may have been not the music, but rather the on-camera sessions in which the aging rock-and-roll pioneers talked about the raw and beautiful beginning of it all.
In November, he was taken by ambulance back to the hospital. His stomach was perforated again. “I had seven bleeding ulcers in my stomach,” he says. “That time, it almost killed me.”
He did not behave. In the middle of the operating room, he stood up on the hospital bed like it was a piano, raving, out of his mind. He does not remember much of it. Much of what happened to him in the coming days happened in sunbursts of pain shrouded in a morphine cloud. The doctors had to cut away a third of his stomach in an attempt to save his life.
But there was more damage, as it turned out.
“I used a syringe that hadn’t been sterilized,” says Jerry Lee, resulting in a massive infection in his thigh that went untreated. “Dr. Fortune . . . he had to cut all that out from my hip, with infection on both sides.” Fortune, who had saved his defiant patient more than once before, was incensed. “And to think I pulled you through all that,” he told Jerry Lee. “I had six doctors flown in here, man!’”
“Boy, he was mad about it,” Jerry Lee remembers.
Again doctors were unsure he would recover.
He looked up through a haze and saw Carl Perkins.
“Hey, Carl,” he said weakly, “what are you doin’ here?”
Two months later, rock-and-roll royalty gathered in an opulent ballroom in New York to honor the survivors and the fallen. The Waldorf-Astoria had seldom beheld so much hair gel, and had never hosted a gathering such as this. Keith Richards, sunken-cheeked and hollow-eyed, lounged at one elegant, candlelit table with tuxedo-bound Ronnie Wood, separated by a centerpiece of pale pink tulips. Quincy Jones, once Big Maybelle’s bandleader, now a legend, dined on smoked Colorado river trout. John Fogerty chatted with Neil Young about a time when their music made politicians sweat and worry, when the radio sang of love and Vietnam.
Pups, all of them. The real legends, the ones who showed the way, were past middle age now, those who had survived at all. They were ushered into this opulence, the living and movies of the dead, to be feted as the first class inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was January 23, 1986, three decades after the great year of Elvis. The inductees included some of the most influential musicians and personalities in music history, and as presenters called their names, they rose and walked to the stage, some more stiffly than others: Fats Domino, who would not follow Jerry Lee Lewis onstage in New York; the Everly Brothers, who would not follow him, either; James Brown, who had walked in from the wings of the Apollo and kissed his cheek. But it was a hard business, this rock and roll, and sometimes when they called the names, there was a second or so of sad silence: For Buddy Holly, who rocked ’em to the floor and became his true friend. For Sam Cooke, who sang prettier, perhaps, than any man he ever heard, who called him “cousin.” And, most of all, for Elvis, who had listened to Jerry Lee play the same song a hundred times, and cried before him and others at Sun.
When the organizers started planning the gala, a year before the event, they had wondered who would accept the award for Jerry Lee Lewis, certain that there was no way he could rise one more time. The musicians in the room had last seen him in hospital beds or too sick to stand; others had seen the headlines, the death watches. It had seemed only a matter of time until he joined the ones who fell from the sky or swallowed down their own destruction.
Keith Richards swayed to the stage and stripped off his black tuxedo coat to reveal a yellow faux-leopard-skin jacket, to wild applause, looking a little surprised, as if he had just been roused from a good nap. “It’s very difficult for me to talk about Chuck Berry because I lifted every lick he ever played. . . . This is the gentleman that started it all, as far as I’m concerned.” The house band—Paul Shaffer and his band from Late Night with David Letterman—ripped into “Johnny B. Goode,” and Berry, still spry, duckwalked onto the stage. Richards, once punched in the eye by Berry at a rehearsal, hugged him and handed him his statue.
“Dyn-o-mite!” Berry said, and they danced offstage together.
John Fogerty then spoke eloquently of the never-ending cycle of rock and roll and how a riff from Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ “That’ll Be the Day” would echo in the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and later in his own music. “All of us,” Fogerty told the crowd, “are made up of the people we love and we admire. We take those reflections, and hopefully grow from those. I think that’s why we’re here, in all ten cases tonight.” Accepting for Buddy was his widow, Maria Elena, whom Buddy had loved so strongly that one night he called Jerry Lee to ask if he should marry her.
Ray Charles, whose “What I’d Say” had been a hit for Jerry Lee in the lean years, stared into the darkness of the ballroom, and heard nothing but love. Little Richard was unable to accept the award in person, because of a car accident, but he wasn’t too far gone to deliver one great “whooooooooooooooo!” via videotape. The Hall honored Robert Johnson, who shed his soul on Highway 61, the same road that took Jerry Lee to stardom, and the great stylist Jimmie Rodgers, who sang inside Elmo’s head in the prison in New Orleans. Sam Phillips, whose induction was a foregone conclusion, whose ear for talent had affected an entire society, received his due, as did the late Alan Freed, who had slumped down on that curb years ago to await word that Elmo Lewis had cut Chuck Berry’s throat. Every award, every halting induction speech, every great song the house band played seemed to be mirroring a part of Jerry Lee Lewis’s turbulent life, as if he were the frayed, tight, and trembling string that bound all this history together on a cold night in New York City. For almost every story told that night, he had seen another, better one, one they wouldn’t have wanted their wives to know.
Hank Williams Jr. waited backstage under a camel-colored Stetson. He, too, had a long, strong thread binding him to Jerry Lee. Years before, when he’d first heard Jerry Lee’s recording of his daddy’s “You Win Again,” Hank Jr. had felt his heart break, and he had called to tell him so. “You know I love my daddy,” he said, “but that’s the best I’d ever heard it done.” Now it was Hank’s boy who walked into the spotlight to speak of Jerry Lee.
“He could tear an audience apart,” he said, “I’m talkin’ tear them out of their frame and throw babies in the air when he got through. I saw this guy, I said, ‘I have got to get some piano lessons.’ I respect music and musicians for how good it is, not for the label that it has on it. Jimmie Rodgers is going in. I would imagine that Hank Williams, with his wiggling around in ‘Lovesick Blues’ in ’50 and ’51, might be in this Hall of Fame someday.” He was, the following year.
“So let’s get to the matter at hand. I’d like to bring up and induct into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, on all of y’all’s behalf, the Killer, Jerry Lee Lewis,” and the crowd clapped and whistled and roared as a saxophone howled “Great Balls of Fire.”
He walked out in a white tuxedo trimmed in purple, with a ruffled purple shirt. He was wasted away now, perhaps worse than ever—the flesh hung loosely on the bones in his face—but his hair was still perfect. He looked like a man who had walked through a fire and been put out just in time. He kissed Hank Jr. on the cheek. “I just don’t know what to say, except I thank God that I’m living to be here to get this award. I love you people. I need you. Couldn’t do it without you. . . . I don’t know what else to say, except may God richly bless each and every one of you. . . . Thank you very much.” And he left the stage smiling, to more wild applause.
Paul Shaffer told Rolling Stone there was no plan to have Jerry Lee and others play, though “we brought in instruments just in case.” But by midnight an all-star band was jamming onstage, led by Jerry Lee, Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, Neil Young, Ron Wood, Billy Joel, Steve Winwood, and others. The crowd roared when John Fogerty hit the first few chords of “Proud Mary,” surprising the music-savvy people in the Waldorf ballroom. He had not played the song in public since ’72. But this was a historic evening, and it deserved something special.
Fats Domino hit a lick or two on the piano for old time’s sake, but it was clearly Jerry Lee’s and Chuck’s show, even when they were playing Chuck’s music. They played “Roll Over Beethoven,” and “Johnny B. Goode” and “Little Queenie,” and Jerry Lee slowed it down for what the critics called a “delicious” version of Jimmie Rodgers’s “Blue Yodel.” But perhaps the jewel of the night was “Reelin’ and Rockin’,” as almost everybody on the crowded stage—Billy Joel almost sawed an organ in two—got to show off a little bit, none so much as Chuck and Jerry Lee, who seemed to think it was 1957 all over again. Berry, his voice not as clear and strong as it used to be, still shouted the glory of rock and roll like a man who knew.
I looked at my watch and it was quarter to four
She said she didn’t but she wanted some more
“I heard that,” shouted Jerry Lee.
Chuck pointed at Jerry Lee to take it.
And he sang:
I looked at my watch and it was three twenty-five
I said, “Come on, Chuck, are you dead or alive?”