7

TOO HOT TO ROCK

Memphis

1957

He spent money like a Rockefeller, on cars and motorcycles and rock-and-roll clothes, and he had more pretty women chasing him than a Palm Beach Kennedy, but it is a fact of history that poor Southern boys have a problem in success just as an oddly shaped man has trouble finding a suit of clothes that does not cut, bind, and itch, till it is maddening, those clothes, and you want to tear them from you and run for home.

“H. E. L. L.,” Jerry Lee shouted.

“I don’t believe it,” said Sam Phillips.

“Great God a’mighty, great balls of fire,” chimed in one of the impatient session men.

“That’s it! That’s it! That’s it. It says, it says, Make merry! With the joy of God, only,” Jerry Lee shouted.

Sam Phillips looked at him in wonder, and in some fear. He and Jack Clement had tape set up and running in the studio and had hired session men to back Jerry Lee on what seemed a sure thing, a song written especially for him by the man who wrote all those hits for Elvis, the great Otis Blackwell. Everything was in place for another earth-trembling hit, but Jerry Lee had gone home. He was still standing there among them, all right, still inside the soundproofed walls with the drum sets and amplifiers and electric cords, but his heart and soul were someplace else—caught, as they had always been caught, between the smoke and grind of Haney’s Big House and the dire warning of Texas Street, between the might and thunder of faith and the secular sound of lust and greed. Jerry Lee was refusing to cut the record at all, because to do so would be to serve the devil.

“But when it comes to worldly music,” said Jerry Lee, “rock and roll . . .”

“Pluck it out,” said Billy Lee Riley.

“. . . anything like that,” continued Jerry Lee, unfazed, “you have done brought yourself into the world, and you’re in the world, and you hadn’t come from out of the world, and you’re still a sinner. And then you’re a sinner, and unless you be saved and borned again and be made as a little child, and walk before God and be holy . . . And brother, I mean you got to be so pure. No sin shall enter there. No sin. ’Cause it says no sin. It don’t just say just a little bit. It says no sin shall enter there. Brother, not one little bit. You got to walk and talk with God to go to heaven. You got to be so good.”

Riley gave him a hallelujah. As was sometimes the case in the studio, someone had opened a bottle of brown liquor, and it had already made the circuit a time or two among Phillips and the session men, rock and roll being one of those rare professions in which alcohol is as necessary as guitar picks.

Sam tried to argue that Jerry Lee could do good singing his music, lifting spirits.

“All right. Now look, Jerry. Religious conviction doesn’t mean anything resembling extremism. All right. You mean to tell me that you’re going to take the Bible, that you’re going to take God’s word, and that you’re going to revolutionize the whole universe? Now listen. Jesus Christ was sent here by God Almighty.”

“Right,” said Jerry Lee.

“Did He convince, did He save all of the people in the world?”

“Naw, but He tried to.”

“He sure did. Now wait just a minute. Jesus Christ came into this world. He tolerated man. He didn’t preach from one pulpit. He went around and did good.”

“That’s right. He preached everywhere.”

“Everywhere.”

“He preached it on land.”

“Everywhere. That’s right, that’s right.”

“He preached on the water.”

“That’s right, that’s exactly right. Now . . .”

“Man, he done everything. He healed.”

“Now, here, here’s the difference . . .”

“Are you followin’ those that heal? Like Jesus Christ did?”

“What do you mean? You . . . What? . . . I . . .” stammered Sam.

“Well, it’s happenin’ every day.”

“What do you mean?”

“The blinded eyes are opened. The lame are made to walk.”

“Jerry, Jesus Christ . . .”

“The crippled are made to walk.”

“Jesus Christ, in my opinion, is just as real today as He was when He came into this world,” said Sam.

“Right! Right! You’re so right you don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

“Now, I would say, more so . . .”

“Awww,” said Riley, interrupting, “let’s cut it.”

But Sam Phillips, who’d had just enough whiskey to get his back up, was well into his argument and was not quitting now.

“Never sell, man,” said someone else. “It’s not commercial.”

“Naw, we’ll be with you here in a minute. . . . But look . . . Now listen, I’m telling you out of my heart, and I have studied the Bible a little bit . . .”

“Well, I have, too,” shot back Jerry Lee. “I’ve studied it through and through and through and through and through, and I know what I’m talkin’ about.”

“Jerry, Jerry, if you think that you can’t do good and be a rock-and-roll exponent . . .”

“You can do good, Mr. Phillips. Don’t get me wrong.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, listen. I mean, I say, ‘Do good . . .’”

“You can have a kind heart.”

“I don’t mean, I don’t mean just . . .”

“You can help people.”

“You can save souls!”

“No! NO! NO! NO!”

“You had it,” said that other voice. “You’ll never make it.”

“How can—how can the devil save souls? What are you talkin’ about?”

“Listen, listen . . .”

“Man, I got the devil in me. If I didn’t have, I’d be a Christian.”

“Well, you may have it . . .”

“Jesus!” Jerry Lee almost screamed, and thumped his heart. “Heal this man! He cast the devil out. The devil says, ‘Where can I go?’ He says, ‘Can I go into this swine down here?’ He says, ‘Yeah, go into him.’ Didn’t he go into him?”

“Jerry, the point I’m trying to make is, if you believe what you’re saying, you’ve got no alternative whatsoever, out of—listen!—out of . . .”

“Mr. Phillips, I don’t care. It ain’t what you believe. It’s what’s written in the Bible!”

“Well, wait a minute . . .”

“It’s what’s there, Mr. Phillips.”

“Naw, naw . . .”

“It ain’t what you believe, it’s just what’s there.”

“No, by gosh, if it’s not what you believe, then how do you interpret the Bible? Huh? How do you interpret the Bible if it’s not what you believe?

“Well, I mean, there’s some people, you just can’t tell ’em,” Jerry Lee mused.

“Let’s cut it, man!” moaned Billy Lee Riley.

“No, here’s the thing . . .”

“You can talk,” said Jerry Lee. “You can talk, and you can talk.” The faith Jerry Lee was raised in does not yield to argument, is not open to interpretation. There had been and would be many moments when he was at war with himself this way. This one just happened to have been captured on tape in the Sun studio, and would be proof that the conflict inside Jerry Lee was not a thing of books and movie scripts but a real, wounding thing. He knows he is not special this way, and that most human hearts are at war with themselves, but his battle was more public because fame simply insisted on it. But it is a matter of history that, sometime while the great city of Memphis had mostly gone to bed, the men in the cramped studio finished their whiskey and finally began to play a rock-and-roll song, which became not just another record but another musical landmark.

Jerry Lee, as always, played it the way he thought it sounded best, regardless of how some songwriter or lyricist said it should be played. When the bass player had a hard time following Jerry Lee’s piano lead, “he propped hisself on top of the piano, and he was just layin’ there, he was watchin’ my hands . . . followin’ my fingers. And he was right on it. The drummer was right on it.”

              You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain

              Too much love drives a man insane

              You broke my will, but what a thrill

              Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire!

“I never will forget seeing Sam Phillips lookin’ at me through that window with one finger in the air—number one.”

It was not the usual tandem of Janes and Van Eaton who played on that historic record, but a couple of session men who happened to be nearby when needed. “Only had a bass, piano, and drums—that’s all we had on it.” He did not even know the drummer’s name. “I knew Sidney Stokes,” the bass player up on top of his piano, “but I didn’t know him that well, either. And I don’t know what happened to them people. That’s the last time I ever seen ’em. That’s strange, isn’t it?” But it was the nature of the business, or so he would discover: people just fell away. Only the sound, stamped in that black wax, was forever.

Like “Shakin’,” the song had lyrics that could be seen as salacious, but only if you used your imagination. Sam Phillips did not release the song to the nation right away, with “Whole Lotta Shakin’” still holding strong. First, Jerry Lee went Hollywood—well, actually, he went back to New York—for his first movie role, as himself. Otis Blackwell, who wrote “Great Balls of Fire” after buying the catchy title from a New York songwriter called Jack Hammer, was putting together music for a low-budget rock-and-roll movie called Jamboree, a kind of tribute to disc jockeys that was slated to include the influential Alan Freed as himself, until he walked away because of a contract dispute. To replace him, the producers brought in disc jockeys from all over the country to introduce the music, and it was the music—not a thin plot based on two young singers in love—that people came to see.

It was mostly music, anyway, that movie. Fats Domino did “Wait and See.” Carl Perkins was in it, and Frankie Avalon, with Connie Francis, The Four Coins, Jimmy Bowen, Jodie Sands, Lewis Lymon, and even Slim Whitman, who had told Jerry Lee, “Don’t call us. . . .” There were eighteen acts in all, but of course it was Jerry Lee, a late addition to the cast because of the phenomenon of “Whole Lotta Shakin’,” who stole the show, again, with “Great Balls of Fire.” But it felt all wrong as the cameras focused on him, because the microphone was muted, and the piano was just a prop, anyway, an empty box, its ivory nothing more than a row of shiny dead teeth.

“This piano ain’t got no notes,” he shouted, and the director told him of course it didn’t, this was show business, told him to just pretend he was playing it and mouth the words like he was singing it for real. And while he saw that as an abomination unto his craft and every honest sound that some man had ever coaxed out of a piano or a guitar or even a comb and tissue paper, he got through it, because the pretending he was doing was for the movies, and he loved movies. At least he finally understood how Gene Autry had sung all those cowboy songs while riding his horse, Champion, how he sang without sounding like he was hiccuping or biting his tongue clean off. “Ooohhhh, I said to myself, so that’s how he did it.” If it was good enough for Gene Autry, it was good enough for him.

It was not a good movie, but Sam Phillips knew it would mean night after night of free publicity on the big screen, and for fans of rock and roll, fans who might never make a show to see a Fats Domino or a Jerry Lee Lewis, it was a godsend. It would run for years in places like Birmingham and Atlanta and Knoxville, and on TV shows like Dialing for Dollars, which played old movies sandwiched between Rawhide and reruns of I Love Lucy.

At home in Ferriday, his personal life had taken an even grimmer turn. Jane had given him a second son, but he looked at the child and could not see himself in his face, and claimed Jane had taken up with another man while he was on the road. In September he filed for divorce, accusing Jane of adultery and other acts of lewdness and wildness, including excessive drinking and public profanity. Jane responded in a cross-claim that it was all untrue and asked for a divorce on grounds of nonsupport, inhuman treatment, and abandonment. She alleged that Jerry Lee had left them with no money and little to eat and that the baby was too his progeny, which led Jerry Lee, through his own lawyers, to say that was a crock, and the unhappy and violent marriage would eventually be dissolved—but, as was Jerry Lee’s habit, not in time.

But the messy divorce, miraculously, remained mostly an intensely local matter and did not torpedo his rise at the time, and he did rise, and rise again. Sam was so filled with the promise of Jerry Lee that he bought a full-page ad in Billboard, touting him and Jamboree. Jerry Lee took on a manager named Oscar Davis, a genteel old flack who had worked with his idol, Hank Williams, back in the day and had been a front man for Colonel Tom Parker, who handled Elvis.

He was not afraid of being handled right out of his natural self, as the Colonel had handled Elvis, handling him until he had wrung just about all the rock and roll out of his soul.

“Don’t nobody—nobody—manage Jerry Lee,” he says. “Don’t nobody handle Jerry Lee. I can’t be handled.”

But so far, he liked what was happening to him at Sun and in his career in general. The money kept getting better and better, and Jud had stayed on in his usual, vaguely defined role, to help guide the bookings. It was Jud, the gambler, who decided to wrench Jerry Lee from the stigma of hillbilly music altogether. It was not that he would not play country and western again—in fact, for the B side of “Great Balls of Fire,” he was about to record one of the greatest, most enduring country hits of his career—but Sam and Jud believed, as did the national magazines, that he was becoming the face of rock and roll. As if to seal the matter for good, they decided to send him to a place where no hillbilly would tread. They sent him to 253 West 125th Street, on the island of Manhattan. They sent him to Harlem.

“They sent me,” Jerry Lee said, “to the Apollo.”

“This boy can play anywhere,” said Jud to the theater’s promoters.

Then he crossed his fingers and had a tall drink.

It was not just the Apollo. It was the Apollo in the time of the Little Rock Nine. On September 4, 1957, members of the 101st Airborne Division walked nine black students into Little Rock’s Central High School as mobs outside screamed racial slurs and threatened murder in one of the ugliest public displays of racism in United States history. The South had shown its true self in Little Rock, thought black citizens around the country.

It was in this climate that Jerry Lee Lewis and his little band took off for New York.

“I walked out on that stage, me and J. W. and Russ, and there was not one white face in the whole crowd.” Their footsteps boomed in the place, as if the stage was a drumskin stretched tight across all the rich history here. “They looked,” Jerry Lee recalls now, “like they wanted to kill me.” No one yelled or booed; it was oddly quiet. Rock and roll might have been a bridge for the races, but right now the very sound of a Southern accent was shorthand for meanness and racism and even murder, and no one sounded more Southern then in modern music, perhaps, than Jerry Lee Lewis.

The old theater had been built in the Harlem Renaissance, as blacks in the Northern cities regained their footing in the wake of Jim Crow and World War I. Ella Fitzgerald sang here when she was seventeen. Billie Holliday sang here. Cab Calloway shouted here in his white tuxedo, great jazz combos arrived from Kansas City and Chicago and Paris, and big bands and orchestras made it the nation’s jewel of black music and music in general—a jewel that newer performers, Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson and Chuck Berry, could only polish.

Jerry Lee took his seat at the grand piano, a piano played by some of the greatest musical talents the world had ever known. When he said hello, his voice with its Louisiana accent filled the place. Confronted with the anomaly, he made a snap decision: rather than try to hide it, he decided to exaggerate it. He felt threatened, and a strutting rooster does not run out of the barnyard; he crows louder and scratches the ground. He says he meant no disrespect, but did not see how being apologetic of his Southernness would in any way help the tension. He decided to make himself and his band even more Southern, more unlikable. Most people would not have done such a thing, but they do not think with his head.

“I’m happy to be here at the Apollo Theater with my boys,” he drawled, marbles in his mouth and sorghum on his tongue. “This here on drums is Russ Smith, from Newport, Arkansas,” he lied. Russ, taken aback, began to slightly shake his head; he wasn’t from dad-gum Arkansas but Biloxi, Mississippi. “And this here, on bass, is J. W. Brown. He’s from Little Rock, Arkansas, where’s it’s too hot to rock,” and J. W. did a double-take of his own, because he knew he was from Louisiana even if no one else did.

“Figured I’d just take the bull by the horns,” Jerry Lee says now. If they were going to be run off the stage and out of Harlem and out of New York, better get it over with. There was, for a moment, a deathly quiet. “But there was this big, fat feller sitting right down in the front row,” who got the joke, even if it was not a very good one, “and he just laughed out loud,” says Jerry Lee. He laughed at the guts it took, at these boys coming to play here straight out of the heart of darkness of the segregated and violent South. And that made people in the crowd smile, some even to laugh out loud themselves, and the tension just deflated, recalls Jerry Lee. Then he launched into his set, not into a blues song, which would have been expected, maybe, but into his boogied-up “Crazy Arms,” a country song this white boy had remade as a blues. The crowd clapped, politely, and then he hit the first few keys of “Mean Woman Blues,” and they started to move. “I knew what they were waitin’ on. I knew what they wanted,” and he gave them the new song, stabbing, beating.

              I laughed at love ’cause I thought it was funny

              But you came along and mooooved me, honey

              I’ve changed my mind

              This love is fine

              Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire!

“And real quick, they got with it, and they started dancing.”

They came up out of their seats and out into the aisles.

He combed his blond hair at the piano stool and finished with the “Shakin’” song as hard as he had ever played it, and when he kicked back the stool, he tried to knock it halfway down to Amsterdam Avenue. Critics would say, of that show, he was an uncouth hillbilly with a certain animal vigor, but as he walked offstage, the crowd was clapping and screaming and stomping the floor, and the pretty girls were looking at him with that look, and he left the historic Apollo in a great storm of noise.

“Bet they didn’t see that comin’,” he said to himself as he left the stage.

It seemed like, in those days, he always walked downhill.

“‘Great Balls of Fire’ accomplished the mission and did a whole lot toward gettin’ me right to where I needed to be,” says Jerry Lee. “We knew early on it was a classic, that it would be the kind of song people wait on, and it would come down to a choice between that one and ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ as to which one I closed the shows on, and it didn’t matter, ’cause the people just went crazy either way.” He did it on The Steve Allen Show, slender and slick this time in a dark jacket and white slacks.

“I never looked at the song like it was risqué or anything. WHBQ, they had ‘Great Balls of Fire’ at number one. And it was number one on their station for six weeks straight . . . they couldn’t get it off number one. And they banned it! To get it off.”

By the holidays, “Great Balls of Fire” was the best-selling record Sun had ever had. It was not a deep record, no more or less than “Whole Lotta Shakin’” had been, but it was what rock and roll was then, before the crooners stole the music for a little while, when it lost its bottom. In a way, “Great Balls of Fire” was a love song, but a twenty-one-year-old Jerry Lee Lewis love song, a love song going a hundred miles an hour, not a moonlit drive by the beach but a man and woman fleeing the police and the entire disapproving world. Other people might have missed the meaning in it, lost in the rhythm and the beat, but not him. “It says a lot,” he said. “It says the truth.” Not everybody considers things from all sides or to any depth. Some people make lifetime decisions in the white heat of one moment, at least people like Jerry Lee do. The people who never have, he feels sorry for.

Rock-and-roll music, already, showed the first signs of what it would soon morph into, a kind of musical treacle, but he had no interest in that awful mess, and when he did try to do it, in the studio, he usually just goofed around, to show that such music was beneath him. Producers often wanted a contrasting song for a B-side to a record, but for Jerry Lee that had always meant going back to his roots. For the B-side of “Great Balls of Fire,” he had chosen exactly what he wanted, and he didn’t think the man who wrote it, forever rumbling in that ghost Cadillac down some Lost Highway, would mind.

Sam Phillips stood behind the glass that day and looked like he was about to cry. He had grown up with Hank Williams, like Jerry Lee but even more so. Hank Williams might have belonged to the world then, or to the Lord, but he began in Alabama.

              I’m sorry for your victim now

              ’Cause soon his head, like mine, will bow

Jerry Lee closed his eyes, sometimes, when he played Mr. Williams. Usually, he didn’t even know he was doing it. When it was over, when it was a take, he saw Sam standing in the studio.

“You knocked me out,” he said, and walked away.

That side of the record was a hit, too, even in London. It augmented Jerry Lee’s legend and proved that he hadn’t forgotten his roots even as he made them scream for the rock and roll. But more important, he believes that somewhere Hank Williams looked down and tapped the toe of one boot. “I want to think so,” he says.

To not believe in heaven, in salvation, is to not believe in second chances, but the haunting question is in the tally of a man’s sin, the cost. Can all of a man’s sins be washed away? Can they if he has led the people away from Him in song? “That’s the big deal that me and Sam had that argument about. Well, we’ll know one day. That’s what worries me.”

Jerry Lee would continue to live in a kind of purgatory. Back home, his cousin Jimmy Lee had more and more come to see Jerry Lee not just as a lost soul but a kind of Pied Piper for the Devil himself, and he preached on it hard, on the wages of sin, railing against the bald wickedness of secular music, and not in some vague way but naming his cousin directly. He would make it a lifetime crusade, beating Jerry Lee like a tin drum, over decades. Then, when they met back in Ferriday, they would share some fried chicken, maybe even play a little piano together like they had as boys, as if it had never happened. It had always been an odd family that way, in its ability to turn the other cheek when kin were involved, but then they were descended from men who could take a long, hard pull of corn whiskey and, wobbling, preach the gospel until they passed out, two spirits in one body. If a man like that could live with himself, then surely cousins could live with cousins.

But as ’57 passed into ’58, the two men’s lives took such drastically different paths that Jerry Lee believes his success ate at Jimmy’s mind. While Jerry Lee was driving Cadillacs and all, their cousin Mickey Gilley was over in Texas trying to get a hit as a country singer, Jimmy was sitting in Louisiana in a wore-out Plymouth, twisting the starter and praying for Jesus to heal his car. He desperately needed the car to get to his revivals, but the valves were burned up, and it was finished. But he prayed and prayed, and suddenly the starter caught and the engine purred, and when he sold it later to a mechanic, the man told him the valves had in fact been healed, and Jimmy knew this was a sign.

Later, after preaching at a revival in Ferriday, Jimmy was invited by Elmo and Mamie back to the new house Jerry Lee had bought them, to have some supper and spend the night. He pulled up to the house to see a driveway covered in Lincolns and Cadillacs, to be told by Mamie that Jerry Lee liked to drive a different one every now and then. He went back into a guest room to take off his suit—he just had the one—to find a closet full of expensive suits that belonged to his famous cousin. He reached into his pocket to find the offering for that evening’s crusade, a single dollar bill and about a dollar fifty in change, and spread the money out on the bed. “Where are you, O Lord,” he asked aloud, and he felt God’s presence explode all around him, and he rededicated himself to the Lord right there next to Jerry Lee’s closet, saying that even if he had to put pasteboard in his shoes, he would walk a righteous path and not be tempted by the mammon that had brought his cousin low.

“At first, I think Jimmy was scared for me . . . really scared for me,” says Jerry Lee. “He saw the cars and the clothes, and he didn’t dig that.” But even as Jimmy’s fame and fortune as a minister grew—and it would grow, hugely—it seemed as though his identity as a man of God remained bound to his wilder cousin.

There was only one other person in the world who halfway understood what was happening to Jerry Lee. “Elvis knew,” he says, because he had lived it, too. They spent some evenings together at Graceland, Jerry Lee playing the piano. Sometimes he would play all night, Elvis just standing there by the piano, sometimes singing, sometimes lost in the past, lost in thought. He looked, Jerry Lee says now, like he was dreaming standing up. Like a lot of people who had all they thought they would ever want, he had to travel back to a time when he didn’t have it, didn’t have any of it, to be happy. One night, Elvis asked him to play a song called “Come What May.” Elvis “loved that song,” Jerry Lee says:

              I am yours, you are mine, come what may.

              Love like ours remains divine, come what may.

Jerry Lee would finish, and Elvis would ask him to play it again and again, till the night passed into morning, like a tape stuck on a loop. “Over and over and over,” says Jerry Lee, “I just kept playing.”

He came to see Elvis as one of the loneliest and most insecure people he had ever known, at least among the famous people he had met. “He was just kinda damaged,” Jerry Lee says now. It seemed to Jerry Lee like he was acting out a script written for him by people like Colonel Parker, playing the rock-and-roll idol, when all he really had to do was be one. “He was a good person,” Jerry Lee says, but he was trying to please everybody, and that wore him down.

He had befriended him and accepted his friendship in return, and now, as his own career bloomed and his own records climbed the charts, was more determined than ever to take the crown. But in ’57, after he had gotten to know him, gotten to see the good, almost guileless person he was underneath the stardom and the insecure boy who lived even deeper inside all that, it was complicated. One night, Elvis asked Jerry Lee if there was a song of his he wanted to hear. “I said, ‘Yeah, “Jailhouse Rock,”’” half joking, because that was a big production number that a man does not begin to sing in a rumpus room. “But he did it live, did the whole thing. He did the dance and everything. All he was missing was the pole. And I was starting to think, Dang, how long is this gonna go on?” till finally Elvis had done the whole show, and there was nothing to do but applaud. It was one of the odder things Jerry Lee had ever seen, Elvis standing there, taking his bow in an almost empty room.

The tension that Jerry Lee sensed between them would never go away and would grow over the years as their lives, in both similar and wildly different ways, grew more and more bizarre. But they remained friends as ’57 vanished into history. Almost always, they wound up together at the piano; almost always, it was old love songs, generations old, or gospel that they sang. There was no tape this time. He was welcomed, Jerry Lee said, even after Elvis began to withdraw from the world of normal men, in part because among the armies of ass kissers who surrounded him, Jerry Lee never fit in.

“What do you think of my acting?” Elvis asked him.

“Well,” Jerry Lee said, “you ain’t no Clark Gable.”

They talked about everything young men talk about—everything but the one thing that, as it turned out, both of them wondered about in the deepest parts of the night. Finally, Jerry Lee asked him the same thing he’d been bothering Sam Phillips about: “Can you play rock music . . . and still go to heaven? If you died, do you think you’d go to heaven or hell?”

Elvis looked startled, trapped. “His face turned bloodred,” remembers Jerry Lee.

“Jerry Lee,” he answered, “Don’t you never ask me that. Don’t you never ask me that again.”

There is religion, and there is faith, in Jerry Lee’s eyes. Religion is just religion; anyone can put a sign or symbol on a door, and claim it as faith, pray to it. But true faith is beautiful, and terrible. He and Elvis understood that. “We was raised in it,” he says, “in the Assembly of God. . . . Him being Elvis, I thought he was the one person I could ask. Seems like sometimes we didn’t have no one to talk to but each other.

“You’ll be judged by the deeds you done. . . . And people don’t want to believe all this kinda stuff, ’cause they’re looking for . . . they’re searching for a way out.” But there is no way, he says. There is only the judgment, in the end.

“I think it stuck with him a long time. I fought that battle myself. I do know Elvis cared for me. I know.” They were true friends then. “He didn’t come around much, after that. I could tell he was scared. So I never did ask him that again. And I never did get an answer, neither.”

It would be hard to make up the life he briefly had, in ’57 and into ’58, a life ripped from the pages of one of his funny books, in which all the women were breathtaking, all the men heroic.

One day, on a trip to Los Angeles, he spent the afternoon with Elizabeth Taylor on the lot at MGM. She smiled at him with those otherworldly eyes, the most beautiful woman in the universe, and when he apologized for not being much of a talker, she told him it was all right, she was beset with talkers.

“Well, what do you think of it?” she asked Jerry Lee of the studio.

“I don’t know. . . . What do you think?” he asked.

“I think it’s pure shit,” she told him (though he spells out the word when he tells the story now).

“I’m glad my mama didn’t hear you say that,” he said.

He met her because her husband, Mike Todd, knew his agent, Oscar Davis. The four of them went to dinner, and afterward, in their hotel room, “Elizabeth was sittin’ right by me. . . . I ain’t never seen a woman that beautiful in my life. I’ve seen a lot of other women, but that one took the cake. And Michael Todd said, ‘Jerry, would you mind settin’ here with Liz while me and Oscar go downtown here to a bar I know? We’ll go have a couple drinks. We’ll be right back.’ He says, ‘Will you kind of, just, look after her for me?’

“There I was, a boy from Louisiana, I didn’t even know what was goin’ on. All I knew was, Elizabeth Taylor was sittin’ right by me. And I was her guardian. I don’t think I had enough sense at that time to be nervous. We talked for a long time.”

He shared a marquee with Sam Cooke, who called him “cousin,” a pure singer whose words seemed to linger on the stage even after he took his bow, like smoke rings in the air. He toured a circuit of all-black venues with Jackie Wilson, watched him glide across the planks like there was Crisco underneath his alligator shoes. “Jackie Wilson could blow you away, I tell you. He could do anything. Oh, man, what a singer.” The two of them stayed friends till Wilson’s death.

On the road, Patsy Cline pushed him into a bathroom and told him a dirty joke, sang “Walking After Midnight” like a honky-tonk angel just before he went onstage, then took a seat in the front row and wolf-whistled like a sailor. He saw a man named Ellas Otha Bates tuning an odd, box-shaped Stratocaster guitar with more unnecessary mess on it than a Shriner’s hat turn into “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Bo Diddley” and lay down a beat onstage that was the bedrock of rock and roll. And he heard it, right there.

He heard “Wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom” through a dressing room wall, screamed out by a man known as Little Richard, who wore more mascara than Cleopatra, who sang every breath like it was going down in history, like he would never have that chance again. “He was a trip,” Jerry Lee says. “He was somethin’ else.” He was a great singer and wailer, but mostly a showman to his bones. “His voice was rock and roll.”

He heard Ray Charles. “An utmost, really, genius. His personal knowledge was—it was incredible. He was just so great . . . such a good man. I’d go see him, he’d say, ‘Hey, Jerry Lee, you’re looking good!’” He still takes offense at the indignity Charles suffered when he was arrested for carrying heroin, “which he had been doin’ for years. And they come down pretty hard on him for that. They didn’t understand, you know?”

He met the greats, and some even cooked him supper. He chatted with Fats Domino, and wondered, “Why do they call him Fats? He ain’t fat. He just kinda looked fat. But he was a great piano player . . . humble as he could be. Cooked me beans and rice.”

He marveled at the smooth vocals of the man they called Gentleman Jim Reeves, and sat with a despondent young man named Michael Landon after the moneymen tried to twist him into a teen idol. “I give up, Jerry Lee, ’cause I just ain’t a singer,” and the next time Jerry Lee saw him, he was riding across the Ponderosa in the same gray pants and green jacket every week, shooting the bad men with Hoss and Adam and Pa, and trying not to tick off Hop Sing.

He finally met one of the music’s true beacons, the man who called on Beethoven to roll over and Johnny to be good—watched him take the stage, long and whipcord lean, moving with that easy grace, long arms and big hands dangling at his side, his anger at the white man still smoking because of the way they tried to box him out. That man took one look at Jerry Lee and his spine went stiff as a ladder-back chair, and promoters whispered, yes, there would be trouble here. “Chuck . . . Chuck Berry,” says Jerry Lee, and shakes his head, smiling. And the promoters were right.

He stood in the wings as Buddy Holly, “who was a rocker, too, oh, yeah,” screamed “all my life, I been a-waitin’” with as much raw passion as he had ever seen. Holly finally yielded the stage to him only after four encores but stayed backstage to watch and dance and whoop like a fan, yelling out, “Man, this is almost as good as Texas!” He was especially fond of Buddy. “A real champion,” he says. “He was hotter’n a pistol, yeah. He done a great show. And he could play the guitar . . . as good as Chet Atkins. He was a gentleman, and he never lied, he never cheated or anything like that on his girlfriend.”

He saw everyone, played with everyone, and it seemed that no matter where he played, he outdrew the big names who had played before him—even Sinatra, even Elvis—till he was at the top of every billing every day, which is where he should have been all along.

He is asked, after all this time, if there was ever anyone he was afraid to follow onstage—though afraid is probably too strong a word. He says there was one man.

“The only person I ever had a problem with, was Roy Hamilton.”

Hamilton was a good-looking, lantern-jawed rhythm-and-blues singer from Leesburg, Georgia, who could croon and deliver some rockin’ soul. He’d had operatic and classical voice training, had been a Golden Gloves boxer, and, like Jerry Lee, had started off singing in church. He influenced everyone from Elvis to the Righteous Brothers and sang his heart out onstage, from lungs already infected and weakened by the tuberculosis that would help kill him by age forty.

“He had some great songs—I mean, ‘Ebb Tide,’ ‘Unchained Melody.’ He had that record ‘Don’t Let Go.’ He was just beginning to hit. We both were, really. I was doin’ a show somewhere, and I was the star of the show. I was closing the show. And I heard him do his show. He closed his part of the show with that ‘Hear that whistle? It’s ten o’clock! Go, man, go! Go, man, go!’ And he had these boys backing him up, singers—Get-a-Job Boys, they called themselves.” (This was the Silhouettes, whose record “Get a Job” was their only hit.) “And they backed him on that, and it was tremendous.

“And I said, ‘Man, I got to follow that cat on the stage? I didn’t like that at all. I said, ‘That’s an impossibility, to follow him onstage.’ And his manager said, ‘You’re right, Jerry. You got your work cut out for you tonight.’ I went out there and I opened up with ‘Great Balls of Fire” and immediately went into ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.’” He usually closed the shows with those records.

“I finally got their attention pretty good. But he . . . really done it. He should have closed that show.”

But there was no time to be humble in ’57. A great and fearful void had suddenly opened in rock and roll as Elvis prepared for his induction. And swaggering into that frightening place came that boy from Black River, playing his piano on a flatbed truck, but this time on a Hollywood set, and it all made the fans fall out on the floor and the promoters smile that crocodile smile, till it was clear that the only person who could stop Jerry Lee from ascending the throne was Jerry Lee himself. The acclaim was not universal, but detractors were hooted down or their criticism dismissed as snobbery. Some critics sneered at him outright—not his music, but him, chided him for combing his hair onstage and other loutish behavior, while admitting, even though he beat the piano to death, he beat it in perfect key. “I didn’t care one way or another, ’cause I wasn’t doin’ the show for them, anyway,” he says.

Even Liberace, who could play the instrument with great skill beneath all that Old World lace and powder and Vegas glitter, marveled at this untrained boy’s native ability. “He said, ‘Nobody can play a piano, that fast, and hit the right notes . . . and sing at the same time,’” Jerry Lee remembers. “He said there must be another piano somewhere, hid.” Finally, in Hot Springs, he came to see for himself. “He went backstage, where I was playing, and he set back there and watched and listened to me play. He didn’t believe it till he saw it with his own eyes.”

At Sun, the usually tightfisted Sam Phillips packed up thousands of records to give away at disc-jockey conventions, and Jud laid the groundwork for promoting the next record, another Otis Blackwell sure thing called “Breathless,” with a campaign unlike anything the industry had ever seen before. They were men he trusted then, handling parts of the business he could not even pretend to care about. “I was paid to play piano and sing,” he said, repeating another mantra he would hold to all his life, “not any of that other stuff.” The business part of it—the production and bookings and all that junk—took something natural and bled the fun out of it. Playing piano, he would stress, was like making love to a woman, but he seduced everybody.

“Elvis, he charmed the women, and he leaned more toward the women in his music,” he says. “The women was his deal. But I had the women and the men going crazy for me, because my music had guts.”

In Graceland, Elvis watched Jerry Lee’s hits march relentlessly past his on the charts, and when hangers-on talked a little too much about the new boy, because they had all come to think of Jerry Lee as Elvis’s friend, Elvis said to shut up.

The darker side of rock and roll was yet another thing he shared with Elvis. Since the days at the Wagon Wheel and Blue Cat Club in Natchez, he had been taking pills, pills to keep him sharp, keep him awake in the endless nights. He ate them like M&M’s, those amphetamines. “People would just give me a handful—I’d put ’em in my shirt pocket, and reach in and get one.” It became a kind of magic shirt with a bottomless pocket. People, believing they were helping him, would continue to do that for years, till “I had a full pocket of ’em, all the time. I don’t think I ever was a full-fledged addict,” he says, but that reliance on pills to make a show or get through one would deepen, worsen. At the time, in the mid- to late 1950s, he was indestructible, seemingly bulletproof. “But it was easy to get hooked on them pills, especially them pain pills,” and the slow process of destroying his body, night after unrelenting night, had begun.

He was hardly the first. Country music stars had been hooked on amphetamines forever—for Hank Williams, it was morphine—and blues and jazz musicians had made the needle and reefer part of their national persona. But with Jerry Lee that kind of thing was more dangerous. As his daddy had discovered, he had no governor. He was quickly becoming known as not a rock-and-roll singer but a wild man who would outplay, outdrink, outfight and, well, out-everything anybody. He’d steal your girlfriend or your wife, in front of you, dare you to make something of it, and then leave you at the emergency room and her at the motor court.

Most of that is true, he says, but not so much the drinking. “I never drank that much liquor,” he says, knowing that will probably make some people shake their heads and grin at the audacity of it. He did, he says, come to have a taste for Calvert Extra, “and I’d buy a fifth and set it on the piano lid. It kind of cleared my voice, usually.” But it did not take a lot of liquor to coax him into bad behavior. He was a fighter by nature—he liked the thrill of it then, when another man meant to cause him harm—and a lover, he says, by design.

“It’s rough, when they’re beggin’ to get on your bus, or on the plane. It was real life. But it seemed like a dream.”

The women—other men’s wives, often—were another, more immediate threat. “I’d be playin’, and I’d look up and see a bullet sittin’ on top of the piano,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, I wonder who left me this,’ but I had a good idea who left it there. I showed it to the audience,” further cementing his legend. He did not have a lot of respect for husbands who could not keep their women happy. He knew how to do it; if they didn’t, they should try harder.

“I always had this dream, that I had a horse, this special horse, bullets wouldn’t hurt it, and the horse had a speedometer on it, and it’d go sixty, a hundred miles an hour, and I’d set ’er on one hundred and we’d go jumpin’ fences, wide-open across the land, and never got tired,” he says, and smiles. “And I’d have a gun, the fastest gun, and no one could touch me.” He is not certain what that dream means; he is not the kind of man to sit and wonder about dreams. But he has an idea.

Like men do, and have since the beginning of time, he saw no reason why he could not have everything, why he could not have the wild rock-and-roll life and all its excesses, and a family life to root him, to hold him, and there was still the ghost of his raisin’ whispering always in his ear. “I was bad about gettin’ married, though. You’d run into ’em that wouldn’t turn you aloose, so you marry them. I’d just say, ‘Ain’t no use to count you out. The rest of ’em had it.’”

In Coro Lake, the ascending monarch strolled down the street with Myra, his biggest fan. He was still living there with J. W., Lois, the boy Rusty, and Myra. He had enough money to buy a mansion, would have enough soon to buy his own Graceland, if he wanted to, but he didn’t want a mansion, didn’t want to be surrounded by yes men inside the walls and nutcases leaving love letters twisted in the iron of the gate. He liked being the richest perpetual houseguest in the history of Coro Lake, because he liked to be around Myra when he came home. She was slim, with wavy brown hair and a swan’s neck and big, big eyes, and if she was a child, he was a Russian monkey cosmonaut.

“I’ll race you,” he said to her.

“You’ll beat me easy,” she said.

“I’ll run back’ards,” he said.

She took off, giggling.

Jerry Lee could fly, backward, a skill any man who has played some football must have and one a man who is prone to take other men’s women would perhaps need. He was going full speed when he tried to swing around, lost his balance, “oh, man, it was an adventure,” and went tumbling across the asphalt of East Shore Drive. He tried to catch himself but succeeded only in scraping much of the skin off the palms of his priceless hands. “Tore ’em up,” he says. He was not badly hurt, but he did play his next show in bandages, and if there was any kind of warning in it, any irony, he missed it, but if he had caught it, he would have ignored it anyway.

“Myra was a twelve-year-old kid when I first got there. I paid no attention. . . . We wasn’t doin’ nothin’ at that time. But I got to watching her, and she was a grown woman all of a sudden.”

He always got what he wanted, and he wanted Myra. He did not ask himself what it would mean to his place in rock and roll’s hierarchy or history, nor did he ask himself what society would think or demand in return—what penalty he would pay for not caring that he offended the sensibilities of more careful women and men. “I wasn’t worried about my career,” he says. “If I wanted to do something, I just did it.”

Many people have asked why someone, anyone, did not explain it all to him, that it didn’t matter whether he considered it right or wrong based on his culture. It was only that, if he was to be the new king of rock and roll, there were customs and practices he would have to hold to in order to rule in this wider world. But if anyone did see the danger in what was happening in Coro Lake, anyone with any influence, they either hoped it would go away or pretended, as money flowed in, that it was not happening at all. But even if someone—Sam or Jud or someone he trusted—had vigorously questioned Jerry Lee on his relationship with Myra, he would have merely reared his head and hitched up his pants, looked down at them from a high place, and told them nobody handled him, then taken Myra to get a milk shake in his Cadillac, the top cranked down so everyone could see.

“I used to take her to school,” he said, wheeling up at the steps in one of his big convertibles, the rest of the girls giggling and squealing at her famous cousin. The legions who have condemned him for it, for romancing a thirteen-year-old girl, have painted a picture that had nothing to do with reality, he said. His own sister married at twelve. People celebrated it, because, as his mama said, the child knew her own mind. Marriage to a girl of thirteen or fourteen was routine in his family’s history, and had been for as long as anyone could remember. It might be offensive to some, to many, but it was what was.

“Myra was not a baby girl. She was a woman. She looked like a grown woman, blossomed out and ready for plucking,” he says now. He does not care how that sounds, and says it, partly, just to show he doesn’t care. “She looked like a woman to me.” She was not innocent of boys, not the way books and movies tried to make it seem, he says, and for months they had been kissing and making out. J. W. and Lois would say they knew nothing about it, that they felt betrayed by Jerry Lee, but he believes it would have been hard not to figure out that something was going on in that house, especially if they had looked outside and seen them in the car. They talked on the phone when he was on the road and disappeared in his car almost the minute he got back. “She was my third cousin, and when I talked to her on the phone, I’d say, ‘How you doin’, cuz?’

“One night, we parked out in front of the house. . . . After we got through, she started crying. ‘Now I’ve done this,’ and it wasn’t the first time, ‘you’ll never marry me, will you?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ And I lived up to my bargain.

“I thought about it,” he says now, “about her being thirteen and all, but that didn’t stop her from being a full-fledged woman.”

Finally, J. W. did ask why he was calling the girl so much from the road, he would write in his own memoir, but it was too late to stop what was in motion.

“I wasn’t even trying to hide her,” says Jerry Lee. “I liked to ride around in them convertibles too much, and it’s hard to hide a woman in one of those, ’specially if she’s sittin’ on my lap.”

The fact that she was kin, his cousin, was also not troubling to him even in the least, because marriage between even first cousins was routine in his culture and certainly in his family line. If cousins had not married cousins, the great tribe in Concordia Parish would not have existed at all. It was not just accepted, it was, by all evidence, preferred. By such standards, a distant cousin was almost a rank stranger, a foreigner. “She was my third cousin. I was gonna marry her, either way,” says Jerry Lee, “even if she was my sister. . . . Well, maybe I won’t take it that far.”

Jerry Lee’s divorce from Jane was still not final in December of ’57 and would not be for about five months, another of those ridiculous laws and conventions that should have had nothing to do with him. But he had filed his papers asking for it and so had she, so as far as he was concerned, that marriage was dead and done—Jane had kept custody of Jerry Lee Jr.—and he believed he was free to remarry. He had been taught that marriage was a covenant between a man, a woman, and God, a covenant no man could put asunder, but it was a fact of life that men and women fall in love and sometimes fall slap out, and marriages die. “I think the reason I kept gettin’ married is I couldn’t find nobody,” nobody lasting, he says. As that year wound to its close, with everything he had ever dreamed of in his reach, Jerry Lee drove due south in his Cadillac across the Tennessee state line into northern Mississippi, where marriage had always been an inexact science at best, allowable to almost anyone with a few dollars and a good story or a plausible lie. With Jerry Lee was a woman who went into the Jefferson County Courthouse that day and signed a legal document stating that her name was Myra Gayle Brown and she was twenty years old. Jerry Lee signed it too, and they drove back to Memphis with that silly little piece of red tape snipped clean in two. The real Myra was in Memphis that day, in seventh grade.

The second week in December, in a lull in his touring schedule, he proposed in the front seat of his Cadillac. Myra would write that she was frightened and reluctant and that he pressured her, but Jerry Lee does not recall any of that. “We was in front of her house, making a little love,” he says, “and I said, ‘You want to get married?’ and she said, ‘I don’t see why not,’ and we decided to get married.”

The next day, on December 12, 1957, he drove south again, through the Christmas shopping traffic, with a Myra Gayle Brown beside him. Again he headed into Mississippi, to the town of Hernando in DeSoto County, where the young people of Memphis had been going for years to marry in secret. At about one o’clock in the afternoon, they pulled up to the chapel. The Reverend M. C. Whitten, a Baptist, performed the short ceremony, and with no family or friends to witness, Jerry Lee and Myra were married before God. The minister, who was accustomed to such things, did not question the union. There was no honeymoon—no possibility of one—so they drove back to Coro Lake. They told no one, because Myra was afraid of what her mother and father would say. Jerry Lee did not much care if they knew or not but agreed to wait, at least a little while, before telling his cousin J. W. that he was now his father-in-law, too.

He has been asked, a thousand times, if he loved the girl.

“At one time,” he says, “I thought I did.”

He thinks about it a moment, considering.

“There was love there.”

It lasted about a week before they were found out, before a well-meaning maid saw a marriage license in a drawer and pointed it out to her parents. Here stories drastically differ. J. W. and Lois said they were stunned, shaken to their very core, heartbroken, incensed, and of course betrayed. J. W. also said it sent him into a killing rage, said he was bent on murder and didn’t mind suffering the consequences, said he took after the boy in his car with a loaded pistol on the seat beside him. That might make for a good screenplay, said Jerry Lee, but it was not as dramatic as that.

“I wasn’t running from J. W. I might have been drivin’ a little fast,” he said, smiling, “but I wasn’t runnin’. He said he was gonna shoot me, but he wasn’t gonna do nothin’.” He doesn’t even believe it was much of a shock to anyone except maybe Sam and Jud Phillips, who understood, immediately, the danger in it, not from J. W. but from the inevitable bad press.

J. W. did come into the Sun studio asking if Jerry Lee was there, and he did have a pistol with him—Jerry Lee maintains it was posturing—and Sam told him to sit his pistol-waving behind down and listen to reason.

“Now, J. W., I understand that you’re mad, and I understand you want to shoot Jerry Lee,” said Sam, intimating that there were many times he’d felt like doing it himself. “But you need to understand one thing, son. You can shoot him, but you’ll make a whole lot more money not shooting him.”

J. W. went home, and Jerry Lee went unshot.

“Talk is what talk is, just a bunch of yapping,” says Jerry Lee. “I done what I wanted to do,” and for J. W. or anyone else to pretend to be shocked by that, to be caught flat-footed by his courtship of Myra, by the fact that it led to a wedding, is a revision of the way things were in those days, he believes.

He would be painted as a man leering over the cradle, while Myra would be depicted as either a nervous and confused little girl or a giddy, gushing schoolgirl, torn between puppy love and a great, deepening regret. In that portrait she seemed to go overnight from a child playing with dolls to a wife. Tearfully, in shame, she crammed her clothes and little girl’s belongings into her dollhouse, the closest thing she had to a grown-up suitcase, and left the sanctuary of her parents’ home. This would become the lasting and damning portrait of Jerry Lee, and many people believed no more damning than he deserved. But it was greatly exaggerated, says Jerry Lee. “When this so-called news broke, it was like I had committed an unforgivable sin,” he says. “I did not.”

The marriage was, to the outsiders who stumbled across it, puzzling. Myra was routinely pulled over by police when she went for a drive in one of Jerry Lee’s Cadillacs, because they believed she was a teenager taking her parents’ car out for a spin. Once she was detained and her car dismantled by police after she tried to pay for a meal with a hundred-dollar bill, the same day a nearby bank was robbed by someone matching her description; the police themselves were unable to decide if she was a child joyriding in her daddy’s Caddy or a grown woman capable of sticking up a bank. But somehow the news of Jerry Lee’s marriage to Myra mostly remained bottled up in Memphis and the surrounding area, contained by the river and the bluffs on the Arkansas side, the best-kept secret in rock and roll. For their first Christmas, Jerry Lee bought Myra a red convertible Cadillac of her own, with white leather interior.

J. W. even briefly considered filing criminal charges against Jerry Lee, but he let himself be talked out of that, too, by a prosecutor. “Talk . . . ain’t . . . nothing,” says Jerry Lee. “Me and J. W. never had no problem.” He told Myra’s mother, Lois, that he loved her daughter, and told J. W. that he would take care of Myra, that she would never want for a thing, and that was the end of it, as far as he was concerned. “I’ve always tried to be nice to my women, buy ’em what they want, keep ’em satisfied, keep ’em in a pretty car,” he says. He does not care that his attitudes about such things seem frozen in the past. It was the past, where this all happened, and it is where he is happiest, much of the time.

Jerry Lee and Myra went to New York City that Christmas so he could perform in a series of important holiday shows, and J. W. and Lois went with them. This was the controversial heyday of Alan Freed, the disc jockey who popularized the very words rock and roll for a national audience. Freed was putting on a package tour in New York that holiday season of a scope no one had ever seen. Fans hoping to get a seat in the Paramount Theater lined up for an entire block in midtown, pushed and shoved into place by police. Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, and Jerry Lee Lewis were headliners on a bill that would also include Paul Anka, the Everly Brothers, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Danny and the Juniors, the Rays, Lee Andrews and the Hearts, and the Twin Tones, all crammed into a two-hour show that would be replayed throughout the day. Fights erupted on Forty-Third Street as fans pushed and fought to get in, smudging the face of rock and roll just a little bit more, but it was tame outside compared to the fit that Jerry Lee was pitching inside.

Buddy Holly would go on first among the headliners, and Freed wanted Jerry Lee to go on next, leaving the more established Fats and his orchestra to close the show. Fats had a whole stable of number one hits and was already a legend in his own time, truly, but Jerry Lee had the biggest record in the country in “Great Balls of Fire.” The problem was, Fats’s contract guaranteed him top billing in the show, and Fats’s manager drew it like a gun. Jerry Lee had no choice but to go on before him—that, or walk—but as usual, when Jerry Lee Lewis lost an argument, it meant there would soon be the sound of things breaking.

Jerry Lee took the stage to screams. On his newest hit, he beat the piano with every part of his body, elbows, feet, and derrière, beat like he was mad at it, and it was as if his sweltering music was some kind of contagion that spread to the crowd. Women fainted; hundreds, maybe more, mobbed the stage. Police formed a thin barrier as Jerry kept beating, beating, even as it began to dawn on him that what was happening in the audience was off the scale of anything he had seen, something that made the rabid girls in the Nashville National Guard Armory look like teatime at the Junior League. Some of the young people dove into the orchestra pit and clawed at Jerry Lee’s legs, trying to tear off a piece of him to take home, till he snatched off his own shoes and hurled them away (one of them was said to have hit J. W. square in the face), till finally the band just had to flee the stage, leaving by a side door. He remembers it all, but it happened so often, he says, that it kind of runs together. “Seemed like it was every night.”

Fats did his set in a decimated, shell-shocked room, with about half the seats empty, and told Freed if it was all the same to him, he would play before Jerry Lee from then on. The show broke quite a bit of furniture but also broke every attendance record the Paramount had ever set, and Billboard raved again, calling him “one of the most dynamic chanters on the current scene” and quoting Sam Phillips saying that Jerry Lee was “the most sensational performer I’ve ever watched, bar none,” and everyone knew who the “bar none” was he was talking about. Myra, back at the hotel, saw none of the craziness, none of the excitement; she and Jerry Lee had a quiet supper in the hotel when he came back, like he was home from a long day of selling insurance. It would be his routine, to try and keep his home life and rock-and-roll life separate, or as separate as possible.

The year came to a close as the crowd roared in New York, first for Jerry Lee and then for that dropping ball, which seemed to signal not just the passing of the year but the passing of the young, dark king and the rise of the young, fair one—though the people who love Elvis like a religion say that was not so then and will never be, because their King was so much more than just a singer of songs. In Memphis that winter, Elvis readied to leave for Germany and the Cold War; girls wept at the gates of Graceland and said they would wait on him for the two years of his hitch and forever if they had to. It was enough to know he was still out there somewhere, like a distant star.

But as far as Jerry Lee was concerned, it was over already and had been for some time. In the coming months, he had four substantial hits as Elvis slipped. But the people who said he yearned to be Elvis have it dead wrong, he said. He might have once wanted to be, when Elvis was the essence of rock and roll, but that had shifted, altered, become something else. “I wanted to play that piano and sing and make hit records, and not worry about nothin’ except where my next check was coming from. . . . Naw, not even that.” He wanted to stand at the zenith of rock and roll and hear the multitudes call his name, then take his bow. And when it was over, when he was home from the road, he did not want them to camp out on his lawn or block his driveway or twitch at the mere thought of him or any of that nonsense. He wanted both lives; he wanted everything.

It was awkward at best, living with J. W. and Lois, so he bought Myra a three-bedroom rancher in the quiet Memphis neighborhood of Whitehaven, on Dianne Drive, and in no time the driveway was clogged with big cars and other expensive toys. It cost about $14,000, an impossible dream for a man riding a garbage truck, a life’s pursuit for a man laying brick, and one night’s pay for Jerry Lee. Myra, though she was three years too young for a driver’s license, continued to drive and continued to crash, and when Jerry Lee heard about it, he just laughed, because when you’re a rock and roller, the Cadillacs, like the women, fall out of the trees, though now of course he’d have to throw the women back. Myra quit school and went about the business of being Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis full time, sometimes traveling with him, other times staying home. To help her with the loneliness, he would later buy her a poodle they named Dinky, though Dinky was said to be badly behaved, prone to accidents, and hard on furniture and carpet and nerves. But that was the kind of real-life problem that all real-life couples have, and it was real life there on Dianne Lane, except for the preponderance of Cadillacs.

Otis Blackwell’s next great creation—he was as bankable as Coca-Cola—was something different, something without so much rough edge as his first contribution, “Great Balls of Fire,” and certainly without the grit of Jerry Lee’s first great hit, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” But it was a singular song that moved fast and had nuances in almost every breath, spiced as always with Jerry Lee’s signature rolling, thumping piano sound. It was not a one-take recording this time—it was a complicated song in some ways—but something Jerry Lee and the session men worked over and over till they came up with a song on which he almost wailed on one line and whispered on the next, a song that even now people have trouble trying to categorize or even explain. But if “Shakin’” and “Great Balls of Fire” were about sex, theorized music historians, then “Breathless” was about the feeling that came after.

              My heart goes ’round and ’round

              My love comes tumblin’ down

              You . . . leave me . . . breathless

It was a slicker song, but Jerry Lee’s piano gave it that locomotive quality, and his accent mussed its hair a little bit, and at the end of the day it was unmistakably him, but with a little wink to it. “I think it was a great song,” he says. It was like Otis Blackwell was writing blank checks for the great singers to fill in.

With what he felt was another sure hit in the bank, Jerry Lee took Myra home to see his people and found no criticism of his marriage among the kin in Concordia Parish, and those were about the only people—outside of Sam and Jud Phillips, perhaps—whose opinions mattered to him all that much anyway. His cousin Jimmy, who had condemned pretty much everything about his life over the past few years, lambasting him to the point that his sins had become a kind of cottage industry on the Louisiana and Mississippi revival circuit, said not a word about his marriage to the girl. “Jimmy was human, too,” Jerry Lee says, a mantra he would repeat over and over again where his cousin was concerned.

In January of ’58, he left for his first real international tour that did not involve a Buick or a can of Vienna sausages. Though he was a little reluctant to fly that far over water, he boarded a plane for a whirlwind tour of Australia, with stops to perform shows coming and going in Hawaii. He would be playing, again, with his friend Buddy Holly, and with Paul Anka, the boy crooner whose “Diana” was one of the top hits in the country that year. He was glad to see Buddy, but not so much Paul Anka, whom he saw as an example of the slow softening and weakening of rock and roll, a purveyor of music that had no honky-tonk, juke joint, or even church in its makeup. Jerry Lee even now lacks the capacity to pretend to like someone, and he was not fond of the fifteen-year-old Anka, disliking him only slightly less than Pat Boone.

It was not a happy tour, clunked up as it was with child singers and big orchestras. It left him wishing he and Buddy Holly could just bust out on their own and go do some good, simple, driving rock and roll and leave this mess behind. He found some peace in Hawaii. “We spent the night at the Hilton, went swimming in that beautiful water, wasn’t even scared of sharks.” But the next night, in Sydney or some such place, he found himself in a backstage area crowded with unnecessary musicians and difficult access to a bathroom, badly needing to pee. Desperate, he found an unguarded bottle of beer. He poured the beer in the trash, found a single, semisecluded corner of the staging area, and turning his back, let it go. He filled it up and set the bottle back where he found it. “I had to pee somewhere,” he says, shrugging.

A large man, one of the musicians in the orchestra, walked up, took the bottle, and took a swig.

“Yeeeeaaaaggggghhhhh!”

He flung it down, cursing and spitting.

“Just name the man,” he screamed to everyone there. “Just show me the man . . .”

His bandmates gathered ’round, ready to attack.

“I want to kill somebody!” the offended musician shouted.

“I don’t blame you,” Jerry Lee shouted back. “I would too.”

He promised to help, because musicians had to stick together.

“I’ll get him,” Jerry Lee said. “I’ll find him.”

He walked away, as if hot in pursuit.

“He was a horn player. I think, the saxophone.”

Anka, meanwhile, was getting on his nerves. He cannot recall exactly what it was about the boy; maybe just the fact he was so dad-gum nice, so good.

“He was a drip,” Jerry Lee says.

Anka was a milk drinker. Jerry Lee told him it came from kangaroo, down here, or some other marsupial, and told him to have some beer.

“The guy who was watching after him was trying to get it on with this little ol’ gal. . . . I got him a beer.”

Anka, he says, liked the beer. “He drank all that beer and got knee-walkin’ drunk, and we all walked up to the roof of the hotel. . . . Tallest building in Sydney, Australia, and it was only twelve stories high. But if you jumped off of it, it’d make a pretty good splash, I imagine.”

Anka, he remembers, walked to the edge. “I don’t like the way things are going,” he said. “I think I’m just gonna jump. I’m gonna jump off this thing.”

“That’s a good idea, Paul,” Jerry said, disgusted. “That’s the very thing you ought to do.” He sauntered over to the edge and looked down. “It’s clear.”

Buddy Holly, who was watching from a safe distance, got worried.

“He might do it, Jerry Lee,” he said.

Jerry Lee looked at him and quickly shook his head.

“Well,” Jerry Lee said to Anka, “jump.”

Anka looked down.

“Well, you gonna jump, or you gonna make us stand here all night?”

Anka hesitated. “Well,” he said finally, “I’m not gonna give you the satisfaction.”

“Son,” Jerry Lee said, “you better have some more beer.”

The boy was never in danger, says Jerry Lee. “Nawwww, you couldn’t have pushed him off. You couldn’t have got him off of there with a bulldozer.”

Buddy Holly, on the other hand, was smokin’ then, one of the driving forces in rock and roll after less than a year of making the big time, and as Jerry Lee watched him on the stage in Australia and Hawaii, he knew that the climb, the race, was never over, never really won. “Hmmmmm, I remember thinkin’, this boy’s gettin’ pretty good.” He opened for Elvis in Lubbock, caught the attention of a moneyman, and proved—even in those ugly black-frame spectacles—that he could rock it right down to the floor.

“He was my buddy.”

A few months after that night, he says, the phone rang in his house in Memphis. Holly called him about every other week, and they would talk music and the rest of it.

That night, Buddy was happy.

“Jerry, I’m thinking about marrying this girl. Now, just what do you think I should do?”

“I really can’t say, Buddy. I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Well, you’ve experienced it pretty good.”

“Yeah, that’s very true,” Jerry Lee conceded. “That should tell you something.”

But Buddy was serious. He wanted a real answer. “What do you think?”

“If it’s what you want to do, do it.”

Buddy went on to tell Jerry Lee about the girl, a beautiful girl he’d met in New York City named Maria Elena. He’d already proposed to her, it turned out—proposed on their very first date.

“If you love her,” said Jerry Lee, “it don’t matter what nobody else thinks.”

“Breathless” sold a hundred thousand records that spring, and it climbed the charts, but it didn’t shoot up as “Great Balls of Fire” had. “‘Great Balls of Fire’ was number one for six weeks,” said Jerry Lee, and had hovered at or near the top of the country-and-western, rhythm-and-blues, and pop charts. He performed “Breathless” in prime time on Dick Clark’s evening variety show, but it still hadn’t really broken loose. The song had a break in it that left people on the dance floor just kind of frozen in midstep, one of its quirks. “They learned how,” said Jerry Lee. “I showed ’em how,” but in the meantime Jud Phillips went searching for that one big shove.

Clark’s nighttime program, The Dick Clark Show, was sponsored by Beech-Nut Gum, but Clark wasn’t selling enough chewing gum to satisfy the sponsor, and Jud, hearing Clark’s lament while they were out drinking in Manhattan, had an idea that would serve both the television host and Sun Records. For fifty cents and five Beech-Nut Gum wrappers, Clark would give away a record of “Breathless.” Beech-Nut was a strong gum that Jud said, grinning, left you “breathless.” In three weeks, there were fifty thousand takers, and the demand kept swelling until the song busted into the top ten in every chart. And Jerry Lee just kept blazing, till the real rock-and-roll star, the genuine man, began to be swaddled in myths.

“I was in the William Morris Agency one day, up in New York,” he remembers, “and there was this beautiful woman sitting behind the desk.” As the receptionist listened, rapt, he regaled her with a mile-long line of talk, full of tales of rock-and-roll wildness, and the bottomland, and anything else he thought she wanted to hear.

Then something occurred to him.

“What if I told you that none of that was true?” he asked.

The woman looked stricken. “Please don’t tell me that!” she said. “That’s the Jerry Lee Lewis I know. The one people love.”

Well, he told her, that’s all right, it’s all true. She relaxed, her dreams restored.

“Like I said, people like to remember things a certain way.”

In March of ’58, he traveled back to New York as a headliner of an Alan Freed package tour called The Big Beat, starring him, Buddy Holly, and Chuck Berry. Holly was almost congenial in agreeing to take third billing, but as the two other headliners came together backstage, it was like watching two trains closing in on a single track.

In some ways, he and Berry were much alike, perhaps even more alike than he and the outrageous piano player Little Richard, whom Jerry Lee had always admired. He and Berry were both natural showmen with original sounds; both took roots music and smelted and hammered it into the very design of rock and roll. Jerry Lee was a white man who could feast on traditionally black music; Chuck Berry could twang country with the white boys, could sound more Texas swing and Opry than blues and R&B, and talked between sets like a New England schoolteacher. Like Jerry Lee, he lived with demons—different ones, but demons.

The older of the two, Berry had not grown up poor in St. Louis—his daddy was a deacon and his mother a school principal—but that did not protect him from bad decisions: he did three years for armed robbery in St. Louis, leaving jail on his twenty-first birthday. He hung bumpers on cars on an automobile assembly line, worked as a janitor in an apartment building, even worked as a beautician. He had always loved music and especially loved country and western. But when he heard the blues singer and guitarist T-Bone Walker, he knew he could play it just like that and make a dollar. He was denied the big stage for years as he fought his way into the spotlight, sometimes even turned away from his own bookings when club owners learned he was a black man. Like Jerry Lee, he had been influenced by the music of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, and even bluegrass greats like Bill Monroe. He went to Chicago to make his name—recommended to Chess Records by Muddy Waters—and had a hit with a rewrite of the old song “Ida Red,” now renamed “Maybellene.” It was a little country too, and in black clubs people grumbled a bit but then got up and danced to “that hillbilly black cat.” He followed it with other hits, “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Johnny B. Goode” and “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and suddenly rock and roll had a songbook. Jerry Lee and Elvis and other white rock singers of the era admired Chuck, especially that “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” song, but it wasn’t until they toured together that Jerry Lee saw the man’s showmanship; he wasn’t concerned about who was the better musician—he knew that with certainty—but at least it would be a head worth taking.

With his litany of big hits piled up around him, Berry insisted on being given his due, and insisted that no one—no one—follow him onstage. In fact, just like Jerry Lee, he insisted no one could. He made a good case for it, putting on one of the most dynamic and unusual rock-and-roll shows ever done, duckwalking as he played that white guitar, gliding across the stage on one foot, jerking and twisting and moving, spreading his legs out so far he almost did the splits, then hopping along the stage that way, a thing that might have ruined a lesser man or at least ruined the stitching in the straddle of his trousers. In the end, that was what people said about Chuck, as much as anything else: Chuck was a man. He’d had more women than most people had thoughts about them, and he’d done time on top of it all.

Jerry Lee didn’t much care about any of that. He loved the man’s music, and he respected him, but he had pulled himself up from nothing, too. They stood jaw to jaw backstage, one hot word away from fighting right there behind the curtain, with newspaper and magazine reporters everywhere and film and still cameras pointed from every direction. Jerry Lee’s father had made the trip this time, and as he saw the man get right in his son’s face he sidled closer. Elmo was of the school that believed no man should ever threaten another man more than once before knocking him down if not out, and he believed, too, that just because a man was down, you did not put the boot heels to him.

“Daddy didn’t walk around no man . . . and neither did I,” says Jerry Lee.

It was a bad time to inject violence of any kind into rock and roll. Crowds increasingly had been getting out of control, acting out, using the music as an excuse to steal, fight, cut, even riot; every teenager with a leather jacket was suddenly a desperado, a tough guy, or a moll. Freed, sensing potential disaster, took Jerry Lee aside and pleaded with him to let Berry close the show, almost as a humanitarian act. Jerry Lee didn’t much care about Freed’s anxiety, but in a way he knew it might be fun to show Chuck as he had shown Johnny Cash, as he’d shown poor Fats, as he’d shown everybody. Chuck may have thought no one could follow him onstage. Jerry Lee knew that no one on this earth could follow him. No matter where he was in the billing, he planned on being the last thought in the audience’s heads when they left.

After Frankie Lymon, after the Chantels, and after Buddy Holly did his usual rockin’ set, Jerry Lee took the stage of the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn in a jacket trimmed in the fake fur of some jungle cat and plowed into his boogie. He did “Breathless” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’,” and by the time he got to “Great Balls of Fire” the crowd was already out of control and police were moving to cut off the inevitable mass lunge for the stage. He shot that piano stool backward with such force that it went clear off the stage, skittering into the wings and sending people leaping out of the way.

Then he did something that has been written about and argued about and celebrated and denied ever since: he reached inside the piano, took a small Coke bottle of clear liquid, and poured gasoline across the top of the instrument, then struck a match and set it aflame. “I just sprinkled a little bit on it,” he says, but it went up with a whoosh! Instead of walking offstage, he just kept playing and playing as the piano burned, and the crowd screamed. Jerry Lee played, hunched over the flames, the smoke in his face and hair, till the song was done, and then swaggered off stage toward Chuck Berry.

“First time I ever saw a colored guy turn white,” Jerry Lee says. He left the piano burning onstage. “They had to call the fire department and everything.”

“I want to see you follow that, Chuck,” he said, as he walked past Berry.

Some accounts—and there are several—say that he said, “Follow that, nigger,” but he says he did not. There was no room for that mess then, in a music where color and style blended to make the music itself. But it is a fact that he immolated a piano, sent it straight to its ancestors, though even that story has shifted and changed over the years. In many interviews, he has flatly denied it, even gotten belligerent with the interviewer.

He also says he could swear it was outside Cincinnati where it happened. But it hardly matters now. “I do know I like to get in a lot of trouble for that . . . for burning that piano. That story just kept blowing up. They just kept saying it.”

The battle between the two men continued for years. In another show, after closing his regular show with “Great Balls of Fire,” instead of yielding the stage to Chuck, he walked over and picked up a guitar.

He had been playing guitar since he was a little boy, picking out tunes on Elmo’s old acoustic, as well as drums, violin, bass, and just about every string or percussion instrument used on a stage. He slipped the strap over his shoulder, took one long look over at Chuck, and started hollering:

              Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans

              Way back up in the woods among the evergreens . . .

Chuck stood with murder in his eye.

Jerry Lee kept playing.

“Finally, Chuck walked across the stage and sat down at the piano.”

The crowd roared and roared, enjoying the joke, but Chuck was not smiling.

“He did not play very good piano,” said Jerry Lee.

Later, in a hotel lobby, the two men clashed again.

“Chuck was poppin’ off to me,” says Jerry Lee. “We had been drinkin’.”

“Me and you gonna get this straightened out,” Chuck said, “straightened out right now.”

Elmo, who had been drinking seriously, who drank like he drove nails and pulled corn, without resting, reached into his pocket, pulled out his Barlow knife, and slipped it under Chuck’s chin.

“You know what we do to men like you back home?” he asked, keeping the tip of the blade pressed into the soft flesh of Chuck’s jugular. “We cut their heads off and throw ’em in the Blue Hole.”

Jerry Lee can still see his daddy standing there, can remember thinking that it would be a sight if his daddy murdered Chuck Berry. He did not quite know how he would explain it to his mama, who loved Chuck’s music—maybe just by saying that Chuck was being mean to him. Then she would not only understand but be in agreement.

Chuck was a fearsome man, but Elmo, even deep into middle age, had not declined much; he still looked like he could do what he said, and might enjoy it. “Well, Chuck took off running, and Daddy took off running after him.”

Alan Freed, who was standing steps away, asked Jerry Lee, “You think he’ll catch him?”

“I don’t know,” said Jerry Lee.

They took off running after them.

“But we gave out,” remembered Jerry Lee, “and set down on the curb.”

He did not see his father that night—“like I said, we was drinkin’”—and after a while the prospect of Elmo’s taking Chuck Berry’s life became less compelling, and he went to bed.

“The next morning, Chuck and Daddy was sitting together in the hotel café, eatin’ breakfast.”

The show moved around the Northeast and finally to Boston in May.

“Boston had banned rock and roll,” says Jerry Lee.

It was as though the crowd came into the Boston Arena intending to give the city fathers exactly the ugliness and violence they had warned would occur if the paganism of rock and roll was allowed to flourish. Jerry Lee could feel it, an ugliness beyond the usual good-natured hysteria that followed a great show. But they had paid their money and come expecting to hear his music. “You give ’em what they deserve,” he said, “always.” But he had barely started playing when the crowd rushed forward and began to push and swell against the police cordon, bulging out toward the stage like some kind of blob from a science-fiction movie. “The cops were holding ’em back, tryin’ to hold ’em back, and I was thinkin’, Please don’t turn them people loose on me. But they mobbed the stage and got to fightin’ and carryin’ on.” Riots broke out around the city; the teenagers put on their leather jackets, to be dangerous, and looted stores, and stabbed at old people and other helpless people with their knives, and the enemies of rock and roll said, “See? See what happens?”

“I just kind of snuck out,” said Jerry Lee. The prosecutors in Boston tried to charge Alan Freed with anarchy, with trying to overthrow the actual government, but it was hard to make those charges stick, since a bunch of dumbasses throwing bricks and waving switchblades could not be proven to be an actual armed revolt. Jerry Lee was not trying to overthrow the government; he was singing rock and roll and truly did not understand how that would make you want to do anything bad, beyond some spur-of-the-moment fornication.

In Haney’s, when people took to fighting, the floorwalkers came up and cracked some heads and dragged the offenders out into the weeds, and the music never stopped. But what do you do when the stage you are playing on really is the world itself, and there ain’t a bouncer big enough to straighten out all the fools who use the music as an excuse to debase themselves and attack their fellow man? Jerry Lee did not believe he was making good people into bad people or making bad people worse. He believed that any such urge must have been in a person or not before they ever bought a ticket. So he just kept pounding, and his stage shows got wilder, but it was always just a show. “People come to expect things a certain way, and they’re disappointed if you do it different,” he says. So he kicked the stool, and beat the keys with his whole body, and went wild—every time.

He says adamantly that he rarely abused a good piano, but promoters had seen him go wild so often on the keyboards, seen him pound the keys with his feet and other body parts, that some gave him inferior pianos to play. He could get more out of a mediocre piano than most, but could not get great sound out of a hulk, out of a wreck, and one night in Florida he lost his temper and pushed the piano offstage, down a ramp, and out a stage door. “It was harder to do than you would think,” rolling it down a sidewalk with half the audience running along beside him.

“What you doin’, Jerry Lee?” they cried.

“I’m takin’ it swimmin’,” he shouted back.

He wasn’t sure if he could actually make it to the water, but the topography was in his favor, and he pushed and pushed till all at once there was a great splash and the people cheered and cheered. “It’s insulting,” he says, “to give a bad piano to a piano player like me.”

That spring, even as Jimmy Lee drove around condemning evil and immorality like he’d just discovered them, his cousin’s music became the soundtrack for a movie about smoking dope and blond hussies in tight pedal-pushers doing God knows what on a drive-in screen the size of the First State Bank of Louisiana.

High School Confidential, directed by Jack Arnold, the same man who gave America the horror classic Creature from the Black Lagoon, was the story of an undercover agent, played by Russ Tamblyn, who wades into the dark jungle of a public high school to confront a plague of demon marijuana. Designed to capitalize on the cravings of American teenagers of that time to rebel against something, for God’s sake, anything, High School Confidential was about drag racing and delinquents but mostly dwelled on the dimensions of Mamie Van Doren, the villain’s squeeze. And while that was a hard show to steal, Jerry Lee did steal it, shouting the title song from the bed of an old 1940s-era pickup truck, banging that dead piano the same way Gene Autry sang to his horse Champion, till no one could tell, not in a million years, that the real version of the song was recorded back at Sun, and all this stuff was just pretend.

              Honey, get your boppin’ shoes, before the jukebox blows a fuse.

The song, written by Ronald Hargrave, was done for another low-budget, quickly made B movie, but its singer was Midas then, and the song took hold with live audiences and appeared to be another sure hit whenever Sun got around to releasing it. Jud and Sam celebrated another freight-car load of free publicity, as the movie opened around the country with the voice and face of their star looking down from the big screen.

With such a hurricane wind at his back, how could it not last forever?

His friendship with Elvis had faded as his own star rose, as Elvis hid more and more at Graceland in the company of his family and friends and employees—when you could tell the difference—and finally shipped off to Europe. It was surprising how different their lives were starting to seem, these two boys born in the bared teeth of the Depression South, with mamas they loved above all others and daddies who drank and did time in prison and a brother who died, leaving their parents to pour all their love and hope for a better life into the living son. Elvis’s parents had bought him his first instrument, and he learned to make music by watching people around him, studying, absorbing everything he could from the black people in the fields and the white people in church, and on weekends he gathered with his people around the radio to hear the Opry and Hayride, and snuck off to hear hillbilly blues on WELO in Tupelo, hosted by a singer named Mississippi Slim. They were brothers, the blond boy and the dark boy, separated only by three hundred miles of cotton fields. They had both taken the music of their South, black and white, hillbilly and blues, and made it shake. They were alike, those boys, but not the same.

A few months before, as if in some crazy moment of déjà vu, Jerry Lee was lounging around Sun when he saw Sam come walking toward him through the usual crowd of hopefuls and hangers-on.

“Are you gonna be here a while?” Sam asked.

“Sure,” said Jerry Lee. “Why?”

“Elvis called, and said he wants to see you.”

It was like someone had just rewound time to the day he first met Elvis, not much more than a year before. The difference was in Sam himself. He was a smiling man by nature, a hand-gripper and an arm-squeezer. You made contacts, smiling like that, made money. But he was not smiling now.

Elvis, Jerry Lee believes, wore a mask in the winter of 1958, in those last months before he left. He made himself appear stoic, brave, patriotic, the face Colonel Tom Parker decided he would show reporters and weeping fans as his induction neared. Elvis talked of doing his duty. He would not ask for special treatment, would not become a singing serviceman but would wait to be selected, go where the army’s bureaucracy decided he would go, and live off his seventy-eight dollars a month instead of whatever unearthly amount he was making back home. If the army decided he should peel potatoes and tote a rifle in the Cold War he would do it, because the Colonel had decided that was the best of all outcomes to this train wreck of dreams. But that was not the face that looked back at him in the mirror in his mansion on the hill, or the face he pressed to the telephone when he sobbed to his mama, telling her he would just disappear into those two long years; the world would move on to other talented boys.

That face, the haunted one, was the one Jerry Lee saw staring into his through the glass at Sun Records, as Elvis opened the door and walked up to him. They shook hands, but Elvis just stood there, as if he was a little lost.

“You got it. Take it,” he said to Jerry Lee. “Take the whole damn thing.”

Then, Jerry Lee recalls, Elvis started to cry.

“It happened. It did,” Jerry Lee says. He just stood there, awkward, frozen. Grown men only cried when their mamas died, or maybe their children, and when they were in the grip of the Holy Ghost. They did not cry before other men, in a lobby crowded with people in the middle of the afternoon. He remembers how the room went quiet. “They didn’t say a word, them people. They didn’t even move.” He remembers trying not to look at Elvis, trying to look at anything else, at the drab green walls covered in that ugly surplus paint. He remembers the dust on the tiles, and secretary Sally Wilbourn looking up from the desk, her face bleak. He remembers Sam coming up from the back to handle things, how he came to stand at Elvis’s side, nodding his head, gently, talking softly, saying it’s all right, son, it’s gonna be all right. Finally, there was nowhere else to look, and Jerry Lee will never forget the tears running down Elvis’s cheeks.

“You can have it,” Elvis told him.

“I didn’t know,” Jerry Lee told him, “it meant that much to you.”

What he meant by that, he says now, was that he knew Elvis had already moved on to Hollywood, that he was inching away from the music that had made him. He seemed headed for a life of soft ballads and pop music, says Jerry Lee, because what Elvis really wanted to be, and what he told people he wanted to be, was “a good actor,” and, failing that, he might have to settle for just being a movie star. But in ’58 he was still the king, and with the induction just days away and the blond-haired boy rising, rising, he believed his time was over.

“That ain’t nothing to cry about,” he said, like they were little boys on a playground.

Elvis broke down, sobbing.

“I just wondered . . .” he said, but could not finish.

“What?” said Jerry Lee.

“I just wondered,” Elvis said, “why you didn’t have to go. Why do I have to go and do eighteen months and you don’t have to?”

“ ’Cause I ain’t that crazy,” he said.

After he threw that first notice into the Black River, no one had ever pursued it. Besides, he says, he had already been rejected years before. “I tried to enlist, then, with Arnell Tipton, to go fight in Korea. ‘You’re 4F,’ they told me. Said there was something medically wrong. I really don’t know what they thought. I wanted to go. They said, ‘We’ll take Arnell.’ And as soon he got over there, a sniper killed him.”

Elvis had seemed angry when he came in—Jerry Lee knew how to handle anger, knew how to rise to another man’s anger the way a game rooster knows—but now he just seemed like his heart was broken. “He was not just crying, he was sobbing. . . . I didn’t know how to handle it.”

He felt Sam’s hand on his arm, tugging.

“He’ll be all right,” Sam said, softly. “Elvis is emotional. He’ll be all right, just ignore him. Pay no attention to him. He’ll quit here in a minute.”

So Jerry Lee stepped away.

This was not how he had imagined it, not how he wanted it.

“I wasn’t likin’ this,” he says, thinking back.

He wanted to be thought of as the best rock and roller there was, but he wanted to take it one hit record at a time.

Finally, Elvis dried his eyes and just walked out the door.

“Sally Wilbourn and the rest of them people hung their heads. They wouldn’t even look at me.”

“It was . . . a sad thing, a sad scene. Not something I would ever care to go through again.” Both young men were embarking on great and uncertain journeys, Elvis to Germany, and Jerry Lee on a trip to England that would change his life. It was devised by his manager, Oscar Davis, and the William Morris Agency, designed to expand his overseas fan base through some thirty-six theater shows over six weeks. It would put some serious cash in his pocket—he was said to be pulling fees upwards of $30,000 a show—and Sam and Jud were hoping the tour would make him a true star overseas, just as Sun released his first long-playing album at home. “Whole Lotta Shakin’” and “Great Balls of Fire” had already been hits in England, “Breathless” was moving strong into the top ten there, and “High School Confidential” had just landed. The timing, it seemed, was perfect.

The only foreseeable complication was Jerry Lee’s new bride, Myra—whether the British would take to her. Sam and Jud urged him not to bring her along on the trip, to keep her a secret at least a little longer. But he said no, he would not do that; Myra deserved the trip, and he had nothing to be ashamed of and neither had she. Besides, his fame was growing so swiftly and surely that he ought to be able to absorb a little bad publicity if it came. He really believed there were things in his life that were the world’s business and things that were his business, like the things that happened between a man and his wife. He believed it.

After all, he was the king of rock and roll. Elvis had said so. And one thing was for sure: he would never give it up, never just hand it off in tears. They would have to take it from him.