Des Moines
1959
He might have been just a little drunk, might have had some pills to get him up and level him out, but that does not mean it was not pretty, what he was doing. His fingers knew where to go on the ivory and his voice was soaked in sorrow as he sang with the broken heart of an old man stitched up in a young man’s skin, because hadn’t he lived a whole lifetime already, roared and stomped and finally shot to the very highest, with tens of thousands chanting his name and clawing at his legs, before falling smoking into places like this?
His eyes were closed, in great deference to the music he played, but he knew every inch of this beer joint outside Des Moines, knew every breath of Early Times and Evening in Paris, every drunken laugh and curse, and every crash of long-necked bottles on a slick concrete floor, because it was not so long since he’d been here before—here or in a thousand other places like it—on his way up. He had started from nothing, from the colorless mud, and outplayed and outsang them all, till even Elvis, who was weak, came to him and handed him his crown, just handed it to him, as if he wasn’t going to take it anyway by force of will. But now the people who ran the music had turned on him, and even some of the people he played it for had turned on him, and here he was in a honky-tonk in Iowa playing a knee-high stage but by God playing still, fighting back, coming back, playing some big rooms for good money when he could, but if you had glimpsed him here through the dirty window, you would have thought it was a long way from Memphis.
He cannot be certain what he was singing, after so much time, but thinks it was probably Hank Williams.
This heart of mine could never see
What everybody knew but me
He was near the end of the tune, in the last few lovely, hopeless lines, when a drunk defiled the song, and tried to put his dirty and undeserving feet on his stage.
“You son of a bitch!” the drunk roared from the crowd.
It was loud enough to cut through the music and through the din of the beer joint itself, and then the man laughed, deep in his big belly, proud of himself. Jerry Lee stopped playing—he hated to stop playing—and looked out through the blue smoke and tightly packed bodies for the loudmouth who had ruined that lovely song. “I was still packin’ ’em in, still filling up them clubs,” he says, but since London in the spring of ’58, the louts had gotten a little braver, and sometimes the bravest or drunkest of them would shout something from the audience about him or his young wife or something else with bile and ground glass in it, and he would have to find the nitwit right away and call him out for it.
He located the man, a big man, but soft-looking, a big country boy . . . no, a city boy. He had on a T-shirt. Country boys dressed better when they went to town. City boy for sure. This would be easy.
“I heard you,” Jerry Lee said. He saw his road manager and his boyhood friend, Cecil Harrelson, easing forward, looking at the man, then looking to Jerry Lee. Cecil was too willing to pull a knife back then, and Jerry Lee shook his head. The music died, and the place went quiet, as quiet as a room of drunks can.
Jerry Lee rose from his piano bench. He was twenty-three years old.
“Why don’t you march your dead butt up here,” he said, into the microphone, “and say that to my face.”
“I will!” the man shouted, and came on. He pushed his way through the crowd and came straight at Jerry Lee, put one foot on the edge of the knee-high stage and started to heave himself up.
Jerry Lee, still holding the long, chromed microphone stand in his two hands, lifted it from the floor and with one, quick, stabbing motion jabbed the metal rod into the man’s face. The heavy, weighted base of the stand struck the man mostly in the forehead, and he staggered backward, flailing, sliding on the floor to collapse on his back in the spilled beer. A knot the size of a baseball rose in the middle of his forehead, and one or two of the drunks wailed, “He’s killed him!” but drunks are always saying such as that.
Then Jerry Lee, his blond hair flying, leaped off the stage and into the audience and, still holding the microphone stand like a spear, screamed at them, at all of them: “Does anybody else want some of this? Do you? I’ll give you all some of it!”
“But they didn’t want none,” he says, from the distant dark of his room.
The bar owner called an ambulance, then called the law. In the movies, Jerry Lee would have sat back down and finished playing the song, but the crowd was angry, not at the drunken nitwit but at Jerry Lee; he was a lightning rod for that kind of thing in 1959 and was wounded just enough to make people think they could say anything they wanted, piling on. He watched the paramedics strain to put the big man in the back of the ambulance. Yeah, a city boy, he thought. He went down too easy for a country boy.
“You know, I can still see that boy’s face,” he says now.
It appeared the man would live, but he would likely carry the crescent imprint of the butt-end of the mike stand on his face for weeks. It would make a good story, though, to drink on later, about how he told that criminal, that baby-snatcher, that man who married his cousin, just what we thought of people like him up here, and how Jerry Lee knocked him ass over teakettle, sucker-punched him, really, when he wasn’t looking. Jerry Lee, telling his own story, would forever wonder what the man expected to happen when he cursed Jerry Lee Lewis and Hank Williams in one foul breath, then tried to despoil the sanctity of the stage—his stage. It might not have been much of a stage, might’ve been a pretty sorry excuse for one, to tell the truth about it, but it was one more step up on the way back to a place where they paid in thousands instead of hundreds and had some paid security in the joint, so a man didn’t have to thump these big whippers his own self.
The chief of police came, since it involved a celebrity and all, but there wasn’t much he could do. Jerry Lee was clearly defending himself; the fact he had baited the man up there with the intention of knocking a knot on his head was one of the finer points of the law that could not really be discussed at midnight in a beer joint full of people under the influence of a few fifty-five-gallon drums of Pabst Blue Ribbon. But the crowd milled, humming in anger like a gang of extras in some old movie show, some mob working up its courage right before Marshal Dillon rode in and stared them down.
The chief told Jerry Lee and his band they should maybe ease off toward their cars.
“Jerry Lee,” he said, “I don’t think you should stay here.”
“We were leaving anyway,” Jerry Lee told him.
“I mean,” the chief said, “I think you need to leave town.”
“It was just like a Western,” Jerry Lee says. Some of the people in the bar jumped into their cars and followed them back to the hotel—it had happened before—but they didn’t want none, either, just wanted to act like they did for a little while longer, only wanted a slightly bigger part of the tale.
He went to his motel room—a year ago, he had stayed in the finest hotels—and waited a little while, waited till it came: the knock, but soft, not hammering and angry. He opened the door to his room and there she was. She was often there, but with a different face, a different name in almost every town. He cannot remember the names after all this time; it’s unlikely he remembered them five miles down the road. “There’s been so many . . . too many, I guess.” But he remembers the fights. Some men just remember rage so much better, remember it better than softer things, as if anger was the only emotion that really mattered to them in the end. It’s why the rich men down here with the soft accents, the ones who know where their great-great-granddaddies came from, hang sabers from an old war over their mantels instead of pictures of their grandbabies and driftwood from the beach they walked on with their dead wives.
“I fought my way out of a bunch of beer joints,” he says. “Had Cecil with me then. I got where I could read an audience, read the meanness in ’em. Every now and then we’d just see a crowd we had to straighten out . . . cursing me from the audience.
“I enjoyed a good fight back then. We had some pretty good fights in Iowa.”
The next day, he and his band loaded their equipment into two Cadillacs shrouded in forty thousand miles of dust and rolled another five or six hundred miles, whatever it took to make it to the next date. Fifty-two years later, with that ill-tempered Chihuahua between his feet, he leans back and travels it again.
“I never shunned a show. If I had to cut my price down to nearly nothin’, I’d take it. To keep workin’. . . . It was brutal strength was what it was, what it took. I played a show every night. Wasn’t no freeways then. We seldom hit a two-lane. Akron . . . Cincinnati . . . Louisville. We’d do little towns and big towns. We’d do one in Ohio, leave for New York, then do one in Ohio, again. . . . Wore out more Cadillacs . . . But wasn’t no choice. We made the dates. Wasn’t no stopping me. We’d pull up just in time, go in and get with it, and then we got back in the car, and we moved on down the road. But we made the dates. Some smart aleck sucker-punched me here in Memphis . . . another in Alabama. He was a big man, too. I musta knocked him fifty feet. Happened again in—where was it? I couldn’t get to him, but Cecil got him. Fight our way in. Fight our way out. I came home once, had the Hong Kong flu. I got up, went to Dallas. Got up, played a show. They said to me, ‘I don’t think you’re gonna make it.’ I made it. . . . Texas. Played all over Texas. Birmingham . . . the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen. The band hung in there with me. I don’t know what I’d done, if they’d given up. . . . Pull up to them ol’ clubs, and rock ’em right on down. Got to where we made them furnish our drum sets. But we never stopped. I never stopped packing the clubs, the auditoriums. . . . Went on for eight or nine years like that, be gone months at a time. Tough on a family, I guess. But I kept going. Back then you could get them real good pills. . . . I’d sleep when I could. We’d see a motel on the side of the road and I’d say, ‘Boys, pull in here, get me a room,’ and I’d get up and barely make the show. Sometimes they’d be five, six of us in a car. . . . I finally got the boys a ’63 Ford to use on the road. They drove it so hard, they melted the head. . . . Played this one club, Mama and Daddy came, out walks this woman without a stitch on, and I just said, ‘She’s just workin’, Mama, same as me.’ But I built my audience back up again, rebuilt my whole foundation. I went in them honky-tonks and them nightclubs, and I went on with it. . . . Had to keep on goin’, ’cause if you quit, you die, and I wasn’t raised to quit.
“It was brutal, I tell you. It was killin’. . . .
“It was beautiful.”
He had played the Paramount on Forty-Third Street in New York City. He had played the storied Apollo, the Boston Arena, and coliseums everywhere. He had played Steve Allen, American Bandstand, and just about every other place a young legend would play, and he never lip-synched a word except in the movies. It was almost like bad luck somehow, doing that. And not long after that came London and the ugliness, then the long road that some people believed to be the only future he had left, the road that he believed—no, he knew—would bring him back to the top, to riches and fame again. It would not break him, this road, but once in a while, it would break his heart. In Newport, Arkansas, he walked into a club and saw that chicken wire stretched across the stage again, strung there to protect the band from a crowd that had so little respect for the music that they felt they could fling their contempt, spray it, at the musicians on the stage. He had seen it before, a screen like this, on the way up, but had it really been only a year or so before?
“Take it down!” Jerry Lee shouted.
The owner told him it was for his own protection. He’d need it if the bottles started flying.
“Take . . . it . . . down,” he hissed, “or I won’t go on.”
They took it down.
“It’s your funeral,” some smart aleck said.
That night he played Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers and some Moon Mullican, even some older music, pretty songs, ancient songs, songs that sounded almost like church, and he dared the people in the audience to do something, anything, to assault his stage or try to lessen his music, lessen him. Then he played some honky-tonk, to make them think about the women and the men who had done them wrong, to make them think about their mamas and cry about their daddies maybe just a little bit, and when they were halfway to redneck heaven, he hit them right between the eyes with some nasty, gutbucket blues, with the mess he’d heard sizzling in Haney’s Big House when he was still just a little boy, and he had them hollering for the blues and they didn’t even halfway know what it was. And finally, when he thought they were ready, when he decided they were deserving of it, he kicked that raggedy piano stool back so hard it slammed into the wall with a glorious snapping sound. He played and played through the evening and into the next day, played until the sweat ran down his face and blinded him, and when he whipped his golden hair back out of his eyes, the girls bit their lips and went against their raisin’. He beat the ivory till his fingers hurt, till he transcended this little honky-tonk in the hip pocket of Arkansas, till this one more bleak stop on a bleak and endless road was transformed into the night of a lifetime, not for him but for these pulpwooders and insurance men and waitresses and notary publics who danced and screamed and begged for more till finally there was no more and the screams filled the room and poured into the dark, till the nighttime fishermen on the White River and cars passing on Highway 67 must have heard it, surely, heard it emanating like the rings of some great explosion, till Jerry Lee dropped wearily into the passenger seat of a dusty Cadillac and rolled on. And as the wind rushed into his face in the small hours of the morning, as the pills and the liquor and passing miles finally rocked him to sleep, he was not sure exactly where he was headed or sometimes even where he had been. He was sure of only one thing.
“Jerry Lee Lewis don’t disappear.”
“People, seemed like, were comin’ to my shows with a chip on their shoulder.”
The days ground by rough and noisy. “Seems like we had to fight every night.” He was in the Midwest, again, he thinks in ’59, still, or ’60, doing one of those songs he used to play with a sandwich balanced on his knee back in Black River, but the audience was noisy this night—one of those crowds of people who might love the music but did not yet understand that it took precedence over drinking and fighting and cheating and too-loud talk about who was doing what with whose husband and the gross injustice of the water bill.
He kept a drink and sometimes a bottle on top of the piano now and then, to mellow him out, and he dissolved a pill or two in the glass to hold him up. But it was no big thing. They were just part of sundown.
“Iowa, again, a honky-tonk on a lake,” is all he can remember about the place where it happened. “It was an unruly crowd.”
He played for as long as four hours some nights, then played until the boys playing behind him began to wonder if he would ever stop. That night, in the break after a long set, he waded through the usual handshakers and backslappers and women who wanted a kiss and a squeeze, and past some people who just looked at him hot and mean. There were a few in every crowd who just wanted to see him on the way down, to sneer and relish it. “I got some dirty looks back then,” he says. How long had it been since they mobbed him, since he couldn’t get off a stage without having the fingernails leave trails on his arms and rip at his clothes? Some days it seemed like yesterday, and some days it seemed like such a very long time ago. But it was all just temporary, a hiccup, he was sure, then. . .
“Hey!”
It sounded like thunder down in the bottom of a well.
Jerry Lee looked up to see perhaps the biggest man he had ever seen. “Up steps this guy,” he says, remembering, “up steps this guy who had to be seven feet tall. He had on a sleeveless T-shirt, with arms about this big around,” and he takes his two hands and makes a circle about the circumference of a telephone pole. He did not know if he was a city boy or a country boy, or even if he was altogether from this earth.
“It was the Giant,” said Cecil Harrelson, the road manager then.
They remember it, Jerry Lee and Cecil, the same.
“Which one of you guys is Jerry Lee Lewis?” the giant roared.
Jerry Lee thought that should have been obvious. Even people who didn’t like him knew who the hell he was.
The giant, impatient, bellowed again. “I WANT JERRY LEE LEWIS!”
That shut up even the most oblivious drunk. A beer joint never goes silent, but this was close.
“Well, I’m here,” Jerry Lee said.
The man stepped into the light. He was bigger in the light.
“I am gonna beat on your head,” the man growled.
Jerry Lee searched his mind for some offense he had made to this man the width and breadth of a chifforobe, and decided it had to be something about a woman, with an outside chance that, this time, he might even be innocent.
He had rarely taken a step backward when confronted by any man, except his daddy. But as this man came closer he seemed to block out the light itself, till Jerry Lee was staring into his Adam’s apple. The man pushed him not so much with his arms as with his whole presence, “and I remember he backed me all the way to the door, then out the door, and then all the way out to the car.”
Finally, his back pressed up against a door handle, he had nowhere else to go.
“So,” he says, with a certain amount of fatality, “I busted him in the mouth.” He did not throw the punch with just his right arm but with his arm and his shoulder and the weight of his body, used his hips to torque some force into it, the way Elmo threw a punch, and all the Lewises before him, the way daddies taught their sons to throw one: to hurt. But all the Lewises in every dustup and brouhaha since the Yankee War couldn’t have knocked that walking piece of furniture out with one lick. “He went down to the ground, and bounced right back up,” says Jerry Lee.
The man drew back a fist and aimed it at Jerry Lee’s head.
“Here come Cecil,” says Jerry Lee. Cecil leaped onto the man’s back, snaked one of his arms around the man’s throat, and tried his best to choke him to death, but the man didn’t even wheeze. But Cecil locked his own arms under the man’s big arms from behind, just enough to keep him from swinging free at Jerry Lee, and that was good enough. Jerry Lee, giving up on hurting the man about the head, started slamming his fists into the man’s body with everything he had. Cecil could hear bones break.
The man finally began to sag, and sank to his knees. He knelt in the parking lot, and ran his fingers over his rib cage. “I got seven broke ribs,” he said, thickly.
Jerry Lee and Cecil, exhausted, just stood gasping for air.
The man walked his fingers down his torso, counting off on the other hand.
“Seven,” the man said.
“Well, this didn’t have to happen,” said Jerry Lee.
The man nodded. “Where y’all from?” he asked.
“Louisiana,” Jerry Lee said.
The man nodded again.
“Well,” he said after a while, “I think I’ll call it a day.”
But he just kept kneeling there.
“He left in a big white ambulance,” recalls Jerry Lee.
He forgot to ask the man why he wanted to fight him. In time, it would be clear. Not in every town, but in a lot of them, men lay in wait to take a swing at the Killer, suspecting he might be just mortal enough to fold.
“They just wanted to whip Jerry Lee Lewis. Just wanted to beat on my head, like that feller did.”
The man seemed almost friendly as the paramedics took him off.
“He was a hoss,” Jerry Lee says.
“He was a giant,” says Cecil.
“Haven’t been back to Iowa since,” says Jerry Lee.
It was just a part of livin’ then. He did not enjoy the disruption of his shows, did not enjoy the reputation that preceded him in those days. But as it became inevitable, he embraced it, snarling. It would have been easy if they’d just been a bunch of young rogues making noise, but there was a legend at stake here, and this was real music, good music, “and the music always came first. We gave ’em a good show, and then it was time to move on.” He played Le Coq d’Or in Toronto and the Peppermint Lounge in Pittsburgh. He played Café de Paris in New York, the drive-in in Fayetteville, Georgia, and the Adel, Georgia, elementary school auditorium. He played an Alan Freed show in the Hollywood Bowl, and the Gator Bowl in Florida, and a club at Coney Island. He drove to Los Angeles from Memphis, then drove back to Montgomery, and filled up the space in between with whatever gigs he could find. He played a series of all-black clubs across the northern United States, paired again with the great Jackie Wilson in what promoters had billed as a kind of battle of the races for the soul of rock and roll. He played gymnasiums in Tennessee and Mississippi, and festivals in Arkansas where old men whittled ax handles and sold them for fifty cents apiece.
Bad luck literally flung itself at him. “I was comin’ back from the Wagon Wheel, me and Doc Herron,” he says, of a trip home from the road. “I had this big ol’ Limited Buick. Piece of junk. I was doin’ seventy-five, eighty miles an hour. And I was cruisin’ along. It gets foggy over there, sometimes, in Louisiana—off of Natchez, comes off that hill, that fog does. And Doc says, ‘Watch that horse!’” The horse was launched across the hood of the Buick, through the windshield, and into the front seats. “And I just fell right down, right in [Herron’s] lap. And that’s the onliest thing that saved me. The horse hung on to my car.
“Finally got stopped, and the horse just fell off on the road. Wasn’t supposed to be out. Against the law, horse to be out. What you gonna do, though, you know?” Some people would have sued, to get their car fixed. “I don’t sue nobody,” he says, and he would have felt silly, anyway, making such a big thing about a Buick. Besides, a “poor old colored guy owned it, that horse. Wasn’t nobody gonna speak up for the guy.”
He shakes his head at the memory. “I had a lot of hair—long, blond hair, you know. I got out of the car and I shook my head for . . . must’ve been like three hours, and I just kept gettin’ glass, just kept fallin’ out of my hair. Shattered glass.”
On February 27, 1959, Myra Gayle gave birth to a seven-pound baby boy, Steve Allen Lewis. Little Stevie came into this world with a fine head of hair, like his daddy. Jerry Lee named him for the man who had been kind to him and straight with him and took a chance on him when no one else would, a man he would never say a mean word about, no matter how grim things might get. Photographers pushed their way into Myra’s hospital room to record mother and child. Jerry Lee was no longer collecting $40,000 checks, but he was working almost every night and still drawing a rare fat payday from some big shows, so he bought Myra and Steve Allen a new house in Coro Lake, with white shag carpeting, a small waterfall in the foyer, a white grand piano, and a swimming pool in the back. He rarely saw any of it. He truly believed that if he ever slowed down, he would just vanish, so he fought back one road trip, one little club at a time.
He recorded almost every time he landed back in Memphis, many of them good songs, but it was as if he was singing them into the wind. He had twenty-one recording sessions at Sun between ’59 and ’63, resulting in eighty-five songs, but few of them were potential breakout singles. He cut a hot, “Breathless”-like single called “Lovin’ Up a Storm,” and a novelty song called “Big Blon’ Baby,” and another Otis Blackwell tune, “Let’s Talk About Us.” He even cut his father’s signature song, “Mexicali Rose.”
It was just the beginning of what writer Colin Escott would call “the locust years,” a quagmire that just sucked him down deeper no matter how many miles he drove or how many shows he played. As if in some cruel joke, his music grew in popularity in England and Europe, where young people continued going wild for each new record he released. Yet in the States the taint of scandal was slow to dissipate, and while at one show he might have standing room only, others, unpromoted, left him staring into empty seats. “I played for two old ladies one time in Kansas,” he says. “I told ’em, ‘Y’all don’t owe me nothin’ for this show.’”
But he was also facing a bigger problem: the changing style of rock and roll. The truth is that the American music scene was morphing around him, changing into something he did not recognize and could hardly stand. It was losing its guts, its backbone; the day of the country boogies and the hard rockers was blinking out almost as soon as it arrived. You could listen to the Top 40 all day and not hear a lick of Hank Williams in it, or Junior Parker or Moon Mullican or Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. As the 1950s died, the great roar of rock and roll faded to a kind of simpering sigh. In late 1957, after an airplane engine exploded into a fireball on one of his tours, Little Richard announced that he’d been saved, had joined the clergy, and was preaching of the end of time. Elvis had been overseas since the fall of 1958. In 1959, Richie Valens, J. P. Richardson (known as the Big Bopper), and Jerry Lee’s good friend Buddy Holly died in a plane crash. And in December 1959, the great Chuck Berry was sentenced to three years under the Mann Act for transporting a fourteen-year-old girl across state lines.
Into the breach flooded a wide array of music for twelve-year-old girls. It was the time of Ricky Nelson, and Fabian, and Frankie Avalon, the time when Chubby Checker replaced Fats Domino at every hamburger stand in the nation. It was the dawn of surf rock, ushered in by the Ventures’ “Walk—Don’t Run” and culminating in two years with the arrival of the Beach Boys and songs like “Surfin’ Safari.” It was the time when indies like Sun Records were being eclipsed by new labels: Berry Gordy’s Tamla/Motown, with the Marvelettes and the Miracles and the Supremes; Phil Spector’s Philles, with the Crystals and the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers. It was all very catchy and pretty, but it was a long, long way from Haney’s Big House.
As if in disgust, great black musicians with heart and grit went their own way with a music called just “soul,” and Sam Cooke, Solomon Burke, James Brown, and Ben E. King did their thing without great regard to the once grand experiment of rock and roll. It was not that there was no good music on the air—Roy Orbison finally broke through with “Only the Lonely” in 1960 and proved that soft rock could still be rock—but it was clear that great change was upon the industry. By the time Del Shannon’s relatively stripped-down “Runaway” broke in 1961, it was treated as a rare return to rock and roll. Carl Perkins had long since faded away. Johnny Cash had gone all the way over to country. Elvis returned from the army with what critics called “less menace” and “more maturity”; he cut one decent album for RCA, did a TV show with Frank Sinatra, then gave one last live show in ’61 and did not perform again live for eight years. And somewhere out there, somewhere at the end of some gravel driveway in a club with a two-drink minimum, Jerry Lee Lewis gave them the boogie-woogie and the lowdown blues, and when it came time to slow it down and sing them something pretty, he sang them Ray Price or Gene Autry, which was about as sissy as he was willing to get.
“It seems,” he says, “like they let rock and roll wither, a little bit.”
Jerry Lee himself was still calling the tunes, and with the well of new songs drying up, he dug back into the bottomless bag of classic American music. In the fall of ’59, he cut takes on Chuck’s “Little Queenie” and Hank’s “I Could Never Be Ashamed of You,” and released them as a single, to little commercial effect. Six months later, he backed a throwaway new song—“Baby Baby Bye Bye”—with a Stephen Foster song, “Old Black Joe,” which was more than a century old. The stations that no longer boycotted his music outright simply didn’t play the new records much. He was rumored to be starring in a movie in Hollywood, but it was never made. He was rumored to be a sure thing for another film, something called Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys, but that went to some guy named Paul Newman, who couldn’t even sing. At Sun, his star was dying. Sam Phillips was building a new $400,000 studio and pushing records by Charlie Rich and others, but not Jerry Lee. Sam had started to refer to him as a tragic figure, said he wouldn’t throw “good money after bad.” The musicians union was boycotting him for transgressions that had occurred with backup musicians before Oscar Davis went on the lam with the payroll.
It wasn’t that Sun didn’t try to rescue his career; it was just that what they tried had almost nothing to do with Jerry Lee Lewis. His single for the fall of 1960, “When I Get Paid” backed by “Love Made a Fool of Me,” matched a midtempo pop number with a generic ballad and had a piano part that sounded suspiciously like Charlie Rich. In a bid to get around any lingering discomfort over his name, Sun even had Jerry Lee record an instrumental take on the old Glenn Miller hit “In the Mood” under the pseudonym The Hawk, believing that great talent would find an audience even without the name attached, but since no one in the known universe played piano like Jerry Lee Lewis, it was laughably clear who it was, like a football in Christmas wrapping.
One dilemma seemed to intersect with another till it all just wrapped around itself in one suffocating ball. The radio stations wouldn’t play him, so the songwriters wouldn’t bring him good material. Without the songs, his records suffered. He remained the wildest live show around—still explosive, still dynamic, still the fierce, good-lookin’ devil he’d been in ’57, when it seemed like the collective police departments of the Eastern seaboard couldn’t contain the people who wanted to love him to death. People still walked out the doors of the auditoriums or out the gates of the county fairs shaking their heads, stunned, some of them, and amazed, some of them—and almost every one of them mightily entertained. “The day I don’t see that look in their faces, that’s the day I quit. Not before.”
In the midst of this, one of his rocks, his foundation, split in two. His mother and father had always been quietly at war, against each other and both against the world. Mamie and Elmo, leaning on each other, balancing each other, had survived the Depression, the ordeal of prison inside and outside the walls, and the death of a child; one of them was strong as iron inside, the other like steel outside. Mamie’s faith had never weakened, but Elmo’s had never really been strong enough to suit her, and as he drank and caroused into middle age she finally told him to go on about his sorriness without her, though she loved him anyway and always would. They separated in 1961 and later divorced, and the one thing that Jerry Lee depended on more than anything in this world had come apart beneath his feet.
“I tried to make them both happy,” he says now. “I never took sides. I imagine Mama had it pretty rough. Daddy? Daddy was up and goin’.”
His daddy would continue to follow him on the road when he could, and they would open a bottle of whiskey, kill it together, and speak of finer days. “Sometimes you just need to drink a little whiskey with your daddy,” he says. Elmo even went into the studio at Sun and recorded his own version of “Mexicali Rose.”
“He finally got to be me,” his son says.
Then, in February 1961, Jerry Lee went back into the studio for one more try. For the very first session in Sam’s new Nashville studio, he chose the Ray Charles hit “What’d I Say,” and when it was done, he knew he had a hit, finally, after all this time. The original was less than two years old; it was the song that broke Ray Charles out of R&B into the pop charts, and it would put Jerry Lee back there, too. He had such deference for Ray that he was honored even to try it, but he knew it was the kind of song he was meant to play. “A great song,” he says, and he didn’t try to copy the original but did his own thing, channeling all those nights at Haney’s into this one record. And he knew Ray Charles—“Mister Charles”—did not begrudge it; he was too much of a gentleman. Jerry Lee and the boys had tried it several times before at Sun, almost every time he came to the studio, but hadn’t yet captured what he was seeking. On this session, though, he managed to conjure all the soul of Ray’s version and give it something else besides—a little extra rock-and-roll drive—and people liked it, people on both sides of the pop/country divide.
It would not be deliverance, would not be another bolt of blue lightning, but it might be a handhold on which he could pull himself up to another hit, and then maybe another. “I liked that record,” he says now. Billboard said so, too, and spoke of him the way it had when he was new. “It’s been a long dry spell . . . [but this] song can bring him back with the proper push.” By late that spring, it reached number 30 on the Hot 100, and Jerry Lee was invited back to New York, back to the Paramount, where he played with Jackie Wilson.
The disappointments and time weren’t showing on him, not yet. His face was fuller, and there were lines there that had not been there before, but he was still thin and sharp as a straight razor, and he still looked dangerous staring down from the posters on the auditorium walls.
In the early months of ’62, with “What’d I Say” still ringing in their ears, promoters in England reached out to Jerry Lee to see if he would even consider a return to the country where he had been castigated and all but ruined before. “They insisted I come back,” says Jerry Lee, “said people were screaming for me to come back, and I said, ‘Well, I might come back to England, if the money’s right.” The tour was scheduled for April, with some of the concerts to be played in some of the same venues where he had been canceled before, as if the disaster of ’58 had just been some bad dream. It was, for a man of Jerry Lee’s character, a chance not to redeem himself in the eyes of the British people—he couldn’t care less if they approved of him or not and would not approach the island with even a trace of apology on his lips—but it would be one more chance to play them some good rock and roll, and maybe this time that would be the thing that mattered.
He would take Myra with him again, by God. He wouldn’t go unless he could take her with him again.
He returned to the club circuit to make a living, and to await his return to England. “It really wasn’t so bad,” he says of the constant touring and the endless string of small gigs and honky-tonk bars. “It was sometimes, when you’d get a sad phone call from home,” from a wife who wondered what went on out there in the great unknown of the road. But they both believed the talent would win out, that he would be a star again, and if the unthinkable happened, and he was not, no one could say he did not chase it down with his last breath. “We didn’t get along that good, later on,” he says, but there was a time when they were in agreement on this much: it would get better. Still, he hated the sad phone calls, dreaded them, sometimes beseeching, sometimes accusing. “Ain’t no woman rule me,” he says.
Sun surely wanted another strong hit to follow up “What’d I Say,” but Jerry Lee’s next several singles matched a motley assortment of covers—a standout take on Hank’s “Cold, Cold Heart,” an early cover of Barrett Strong’s “Money”—with novelty tunes like “It Won’t Happen with Me” and “I’ve Been Twistin’,” an update of Junior Parker’s old Sun R&B hit “Feelin’ Good.” In an effort to placate Jerry Lee, Sam even signed his teenage sister, Linda Gail, cutting several sessions with her and even putting their duet on “Seasons of My Heart” on the B-side of his cover of Joe Turner’s “Teenage Letter.” It did not placate him.
He was in Minnesota on Easter Sunday 1962 when the phone began to tremble on the nightstand. It was not Myra this time but Cecil, telling him he had to call the hospital in Memphis, had to call home.
Construction on the Coro Lake house was still ongoing. It had rained hard that Easter Sunday, and the swimming pool had partially filled with water. Inside the house, seventeen-year-old Myra was working on supper, on a big pot of spaghetti, and thinking about buying groceries. Elmo was there, and Jerry Lee’s uncle George Herron. Steve Allen was at Myra’s side, munching on jelly beans and candy chickens. It had been a good day. She had dressed the boy up like a little man and taken him to church for the first time. Now he had candy on his hands and his face and he was happy.
A few minutes later, Myra noticed that the boy wasn’t by her side anymore. She called to him, then panicked and ran outside, searching. No one had seen him leave the house. She called his name, louder and louder, and a neighbor heard, and came to see what was wrong. He found the child at the bottom of the pool, and while there had been a rumor of a heartbeat, just enough to give Myra false hope, the child was dead.
They buried the boy in the cemetery in Clayton, under the trees just now going green, beneath the rising voices of the great intermarried tribe. Jerry Lee’s cheeks were dry and his backbone was straight. He had done his crying in a locked room, and he will not let anyone inside it even now. He says only that he questioned it, questioned why it happened to him, his boy, but only briefly. “Why did this happen to me? I don’t understand. But I will understand someday. It knocked me to my knees, but you don’t see me cryin’, don’t see me carryin’ on. I accepted it. What can you do but accept it? And live with it. I didn’t question God. ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’ But you don’t forget. He’s always, always on my mind.” The hateful thing was how little time he’d had with the boy to store up some kind of memory, some kind of picture to carry. His own brother had died on a dirt road before Jerry Lee was old enough to store up the memories he needed to build something fine and lasting to cushion that one awful moment of death, and now his son was gone, taken while he traveled a million miles of highway, believing he had a lifetime to see the boy grow up, to listen for the first signs of musical talent, that thing passed down in the blood.
A few days later, he was supposed to leave for England. Family and friends assumed he would cancel, that he would closet himself with Myra and grieve, which was the decent thing. But he could not. He could not stand being left here with his own doubts about his choices and ambition and the burning need to succeed that had sent him across the country again and again to try to reclaim what had been his for only a little while. He had drunk and fought and sinned across the land, chasing and chasing, and it would be noble to say that his desire for it all was reduced to insignificance by the death of his son, but it would be a lie. Instead, as he stood over that small grave, he knew that his drive was the only thing that could save him. “It never took my desire,” he said. “I had to go to England. It wasn’t easy, but I had to go. You get a family, you hate to put ’em through all the stuff, all the fightin’ and the carryin’ on that comes with a life like mine, but I didn’t know any other way.” To give up and stay home and hurt would make it all useless, pointless.
But there was another reason. Those who sometimes dwell in the dark, who live in what some people just call depression but that they know is something far worse, know there are times when that quiet is too awful to stand, and that the worst of all things is to be alone with your thoughts. You can stand it out on the stage, or in the crowd, where you can stomp and howl and burn and rave, where the lights scorch your wired eyes and the drums drown out the cries inside your mind. “The show covers everything,” he says again. He believes it with all his heart.
Myra stayed home, planning, if things went well, to perhaps join him later. He came off the plane at Heathrow in a dark suit and white shirt, to stare into the same wall of reporters and photographers who had met his plane in England just a few years before. They asked him about Myra, asked where she was, and when he told them she was grieving and unable to travel, they asked him why he was not grieving and why he was able, and for just a few minutes, there with the flashbulbs exploding into his face, it seemed like it might be like it was before. They asked him if he did not feel it was callous to play rock and roll just eight days after his son’s drowning, and he talked to them about “the mysteries of the Lord,” and how he had to keep going, that this was the best thing for him now, to just keep singing and playing and keep working. “They were screaming for me, this time.” He opened in a theater in the industrial town of Newcastle, where working-class Brits, people with grease ground into their hands, had been sneered at by the upper classes for generations. It was a two-show gig to near-capacity crowds. He waited in the wings in an elegant black suit, white shirt, and black tie, peeking at the crowd. They cheered and stomped and howled and waved banners and signs that said WELCOME BACK JERRY LEE, as if what had happened before had all been some kind of bad dream.
It galls him to admit to any kind of fear, but he felt a sliver of it as he climbed that stage, walked to the edge of the curtain, and took that first look. “I was a little nervous,” he says. But he knew, even before he hit the first key and sang the first line, that this time it would be different, this time he would get to prove what he could do. He had always believed that they’d wanted him before, before it was all poisoned by the newspapers and their feigned outrage, which he now knew to have been phony all along, like a kind of sport. Now he looked out into the crowd and all the long miles and disappointments in the dusty Cadillac sloughed away, and he itched for the opening acts to hurry up and clear him a runway.
He surged onto the stage at a dead run, slid several feet like he was on ice and landed on his knees at the grand piano, and tore into “Down the Line.” He told the crowd he was going to drown his sorrows in his music, then, unhappy with the backup band’s tempo, showed the young drummer how to keep the beat. He pounded into “Whole Lotta Shakin’” and leaped on top of the piano. He did a wild, fifteen-minute encore as fans tried to storm the stage; later some tried to break down his dressing-room door. He would call it, later, one of the finest moments in his life, proof that he was still him, still the rocker he had been. He called Myra and told her to come to England. She arrived with a black ribbon in her hair and a Bible under her arm. A reporter stopped her in the terminal and asked her if she had any regrets.
“I love Jerry. Jerry loves me. That’s the real story of my life.”
There was still snobbery, still outrage that the man had been permitted to bring his smut back into their grand old England, and there was criticism of his decision to come and play music like his just a week or so after his son was buried. But mostly, he was spared. The reporters had already gone at him once, and gleefully, and nothing bores a newspaperman more than old news. A cat will stalk a live mouse for a very long time, but will play with a dead one for only a little while before losing interest. The only real news in Jerry Lee’s life was the tragedy of his son, which was the opposite of scandal; the press couldn’t worry it for long without appearing tacky and callous itself. And this time Jud Phillips, who was nobody’s idiot, made the trip as publicist, plying the press with good whiskey, with such copious amounts of free liquor that some of the reporters assigned to the Jerry Lee Lewis story didn’t write anything at all.
That left Jerry Lee free to sing and play, and he did it with that still-young man’s fury and vengeance and with an older man’s broken heart, and they were still screaming as he left; he could hear it even through the walls of his dressing room, and he felt young again, and thought of the first time, the first time he ever approached a man about singing a song for folding money in a club, and how simple it had all been. “Julio May, owned the Hilltop in Natchez,” he recalls. “‘What you doin’ in here, boy?’ he asked me, and I told him, ‘Sir, I play the piano and I sing,’ and he looked at me for a minute, and then he said, ‘Well, get up there and do it, then.’” The drumming on his door—the fans had fought past the security and found him—brought him back. The security guards said they couldn’t guarantee his safety if he lingered, and again he was forced to flee a crowd that climbed all over his car and pressed their faces and lips to the window, only this time there was no doubt: “They loved me in England.”
The tour continued to go well. Some writers would say that not every theater was full, but Jerry Lee remembers it as a triumph, night after night, an unending standing ovation. In Glasgow, the crowd rushed the stage, Jerry Lee climbed atop the piano, and a few fans followed him there, too, breaking the lid. The instrument was left in such a pitiful condition that promoters were forced to cancel an upcoming classical concert.
He was invited back for another tour the following year, and the one after that.
On the opening night of his May 1963 tour, he walked onto the stage in Birmingham to a standing ovation and left it running, chased by fans who had ripped away his jacket, tie, and half his shirt. “No matter what you have read, no matter what you have heard, watching Jerry Lee Lewis on stage always produces a profound shock for the ears, the eyes, and for the very soul,” wrote Alan Stinton in the Record Mirror. “What Jerry does on stage is so beyond the realms of human imagination that no one can fully anticipate the aura of sheer magical excitement which he creates.” And the crowd chanted:
We want Jerry!
We want Jerry!
We want Jerry!
At home in Ferriday, planting season had come and gone for the spring crops, the bounty of the Southern table. Old men walked through fields of tomatoes and okra and squash, searching for blight, hoping for rain but not too much, thumping off the stinging, leaf-eating caterpillars and stomping them underfoot. In the rows of yellow squash, the old men took the first blooms and pinched them off the way their fathers had taught them to do. They were wise old men and knew that sometimes a bloom is not a bloom at all, just a flower, just something pretty to look at, and nothing would grow from it. They call them false blooms.