Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  He made it roll and thump in the spaces between the plaintive lyrics, a thing of rhythm impossible to describe in words. “The girls crowded around me and the boys got all upset and wanted to start a fight, but before long ever’body was lovin’ it. I can see ’em now. And it was love. Pure love. I loved it, and they loved it. That don’t come around too often, I don’t believe. And it wadn’t just the song they loved, it was the way.” At first he was struck by the power, at the rapt faces, the heaving chests, but did not marvel at it for long. “If you know you can do a thing,” he says, “then you ain’t never surprised.”

  He is not, even with the years tearing at him, a soft man. His body has been hammered by hard living, and scoured by chemicals, and pain-racked by arthritis and most of the ailments of Job, but now he is rallying again, with clean living and that mysterious thing he has always had cloaked around him, something beyond science. He is still a good-looking man, his hair faded from gold to silver; he still records and fills concert halls in the United States and Europe, though he admits it is sometimes all he can do to finish a show. Young women still push to the edge of the stage and try to follow him back to his hotel room. Now it is his prerogative to tell them no, because the shows exhaust him. What a sorry thing, a rotten choice for a good lookin’ rock-and-roll singer to have to make.

  “If I’s fifty-one,” he says, “they’d have to hide the women.”

  He lives near the river still, south of Memphis in the low, flat green of north Mississippi on a ranch with a piano-shaped swimming pool, behind a gate with a piano on the wrought-iron bars. Here the living history of rock and roll sits unrepentant to any living man, and even as he tells you his life story, he seems to care little what you think. “I ain’t no goody-goody,” he says, the Louisiana bottomland still thick on his tongue, “and I ain’t no phony. I never pretended to be anything, and anything I ever did, I did it wide-open as a case knife. I’ve lived my life to the fullest and I had a good time doin’ it. And I ain’t never wanted to be no teddy bear.”

  He has been honored by state legislatures and dog-cussed over clotheslines. He has disowned children and walked away from wives and girlfriends—even in the age of DNA, none has challenged his actions—and does not much care that his life and his choices might not make sense to other people. “I did what I wanted,” he says. He lived in the moment, unconcerned what those moments would add up to in the eyes of men. “Other people,” he says, “just wished they could have done what I done.” He is unconcerned with worldly redemption. He has bigger worries than that.

  He has played over seven decades, from pubs to palladiums, from soccer stadiums to Hernando’s Hideaway South of Memphis, for thousands, or hundreds, or less, because even when there was no one to play for but a handful of drunks or hangers-on, there was still the talent, and when you have a jewel, you do not hide it in a sock drawer. Raw and wild in the 1950s, almost forgotten in the mid-’60s, a honky-tonk chart-topper by the early ’70s, and a Rolls-Royce–wrecking, jet plane–buying crazy man in the late ’70s and ’80s, he always played. He absorbed scandal—Rolling Stone virtually accused him of murder—and played when he could barely stand. He spent two decades wandering the wilderness, overmedicated, set upon by the tax man, divorce lawyers, everything but a rain of toads. There were more fights and pills and liquor and car crashes and women and discharge of firearms—accidental and on purpose—than a mortal man could be expected to survive, but he played.

  I approached him with great anticipation—and one reservation, as to getting shot. People told me he was mercurial; some said he was crazy. He shot his bass player, they said. Why not shoot a book writer? Instead, across the days, he was mostly gracious, and asked about my mother. “I hit this one guy in the face with the butt of the microphone stand,” he tells me, as he eats a vanilla ice cream float. He actually hit four or five that way. He remains willing to take a swing at a man who offends him and suffer the prospect that some drunk redneck half his age will not care he is living history and knock him slap out. His bedroom door is reinforced with steel bars. I started to ask about that but decided I did not need to. He still has a loaded long-barreled pistol behind a pillow, a small arsenal in a dresser drawer, and a compact black automatic on a bedside table. Holes in a bedroom wall and an armoire prove that all that has come to claim him in the night, ghosts, bad dreams, or time itself, has been dealt with violently. A bowie knife sticks in one door. A dog sleeps between his feet—a Chihuahua, but it bites.

  He has, in old age, a stiff-necked and—all things being relative—sober dignity, but do not say he is growing old gracefully, any more than an old wolf will stop gnawing at his foot in a steel trap. It is harder, even now, to explain what he is than what he is not. He is not wistful, except in the rarest moments, and does not act wounded; he just gets mad. He does not swim in regret, even when he walks between the graves of two sons and most of the people he has ever loved. Six marriages ended in ashes, two of them in coffins. He believes he is due some things but not the right to whine. A man like him forfeits that. A Southern man—a real one, not these modern ones who have never been in a fight with a jealous husband or changed a tire or shot a game of pool outside the church basement—does not whine, anyway. “It didn’t bother me none,” or “I didn’t think much about it,” he often says when talking about things that would have torn another man down to his shoes. Then he would physically turn away. In time I came to understand that remembering, if you are him, is like playing catch with broken glass.

  His friends and closest kin, most of them, are protective of him now, always polishing his legend. They will fight you if you question his generosity, or the goodness that, they assert, shines just beneath his more public persona. He has played benefit after benefit for charity, even when he himself was busted, or nearly so. That does not mean he does not expect to get his way, almost all the time. “He don’t jump on top of the piano anymore,” said guitar picker Kenny Lovelace, who played three feet away from him for forty-five years. “But still, he walks out there and sits down, and you know the Killer is here.”

  “I was born to be on a stage,” says the man himself. “I couldn’t wait to be on it. I dreamed about it. And I’ve been on one all my life. That’s where I’m the happiest. That’s where I’m almost satisfied.” He knows that is what musicians say, what a musician, in his twilight, is supposed to say. “I do really love it,” he says, in a way that warns you not to doubt him. “You have to give up a lot. It’s hard on a family, on your women, on the people that loves you.

  “I picked the dream.”

  Even if it was worn and scarred, or hidden in some raggedy place at the end of a gravel road, or protected by chicken wire, he would drive six hundred miles, even club a man with a microphone, to possess it. And for much of his life he gave his fans more than they paid for, gave it to them slow and soulful and fast and hard, till the police came clawing through the auditorium doors, refusing to relinquish the stage even as other rock-and-roll idols, including the great Chuck Berry, waited helpless and seething in the wings. In Nashville, three hundred frenzied girls in the National Guard Armory tore his clothes off his body, “down to my drawers,” and he grumbles about it to this day, about all those crazed, adoring women, because they cut short a song, dragged him off the stage, and cut short the show.

  The dream is why, when news of his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin, Myra, caused promoters and some fans to turn away and his rocket ship to sputter, when scandal and changing times caused record sales to sag, he filled two Cadillacs with musicians and equipment and went on the road. He played big rooms at first, then dives or beer joints where he had to fight for his money or fight his way out the door. But he played, fueled by Vienna sausages, whiskey, and uppers, and the next day he rolled out of some little motel, said good-bye to women without names, and drove all day and into the night to play again. Others became footnotes, vanished. He fought, tore at it, one motel room, one bottle, one pill, one song at a time.
And it is why, in the early days of his stardom, he would come back onstage when the house was dark and the door chained shut, to play some more. Other musicians on the bill, ones who would be legends, too, trickled back to the stage to sing with him, for that one last encore to the empty seats.

  “I want to be remembered as a rock-and-roll idol, in a suit and tie or blue jeans and a ragged shirt, it don’t matter, as long as the people get that show. The show, that’s what counts,” he says. “It covers up everything. Any bad thought anyone ever had about you goes away. ‘Is that the one that married that girl? Well, forget about it, let me hear that song.’”

  Hank Williams taught him this, and he never even met the man.

  “It takes their sorrow, and it takes mine.”

  He looks across the arc of bad-boy rockers who have come after him and laughs out loud; amateurs, pretenders, and whistle-britches, held together with hair spray. But worse, they were not true musicians, not troubadours, who lived on the road and met the people where they lived. He crashed a dozen Cadillacs in one year and played the Apollo. With racial hatred burning in the headlines, the audience danced in the seats to a white boy from the bottomland, backed by pickers who talked like Ernest Tubb. “James Brown kissed me on my cheek,” he says. “Top that.”

  In recent years he has recorded two new albums, both critically acclaimed, and both made the Top 100. He did them between hospital visits: viral pneumonia, a stabbing recurrence of his arthritis (in his back, neck, and shoulders, never in his hands), and broken bones in his leg and hip have left him in pain and unable to travel or even sit for more than a few minutes for much of the past few years. But even at his lowest, of course, Jerry Lee was merely between resurrections. In March 2012 he married for the seventh time, to sixty-two-year-old Judith Brown, a former basketball star who had been married to his former wife’s little brother. She had come to help care for him when he was sick. To make the proverbial long story short, he got better. “I didn’t mean to fall in love with him,” she says, “but . . .” They married and honeymooned in Natchez, near the bridge he walked as a boy. By late summer 2013, he was back playing gigs in Europe, booking studio time in Los Angeles, buying a new Rolls-Royce and stopping for Sonic cheeseburgers before driving Judith’s Buick one hundred miles an hour down Interstate 55. The laws of Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the United States of America have never much applied.

  Once, while mulling over a difficult question, he muttered, “This feller’s about to get shot.” And I thought, Well, I’m dead. It was only Gunsmoke he was watching over my shoulder. He’d seen it all before, and he knew what happened next.

  “You know, you can load that .357 with .38 shells,” I told him, “and you won’t blow such deep holes in . . . things.” I waited a few flat, silent seconds, knowing I had wasted my breath.

  “Naw,” he finally said, “I don’t think I’ll do that.”

  One afternoon near the end of it, I told him why I wanted to write his story. I was born in the South in a time of tailfins, when young men with their hair slicked back with Rose hair oil and blast-furnace scars on their necks and arms would thunder down the blacktop with his music pouring from the windows. The great Hank Williams lifted their hearts with “Lovesick Blues” and became a kind of sin eater for their lives and pain. “That’s it,” says Jerry Lee. “Hank got them up off their knees, and Jerry Lee got them to dancin’.” They loved Elvis, too, but there was a softness in him, a kind of beauty the men did not understand. They got Jerry Lee. He was a balled-up fist, a swinging tire iron. My people, aunts and uncles, rode ten to a car to see him in Birmingham’s Boutwell Auditorium in 1964. “I was wild as a buck then,” said John Couch, who made tires at Goodyear. “And he embarrassed me.” His wife, Jo, was scandalized. “They got all over Elvis for shaking one leg. . . . Jerry Lee shook everything.” Juanita Fair, a bird-like member of the Congregational Holiness Church, remembers just one thing, and has to whisper. “He played piano, with his rear end.” They drove home to pipe shops, furnaces, and cotton sacks, somehow lighter than when they left. I told him this one afternoon as heroes sang to their horses and bad men reached for the sky.

  “I did it for them people,” he says, though a great deal of the time he did it for him, because without the music, I had come to believe, he would just cease to be, like cutting through the drop cord on an electric fan. In the still, awful nothing, he is just like everyone else. But it was still a fine thing to say. The point is, when he talked about lifting the blues off people, I knew it to be true. In the past, in telling his story, he pretty much cussed out the world. It was like the story of his life was a record warped and stuck on the wrong speed, but left on, anyway, to howl, groan, and hiss. He was, he admits, often a little bit drunk or mad in those days, and he put people on, to watch them twitch or swing on the gallows of his temper and moods. Even today, it can seem that the only people he truly trusts with his legacy are the ones who knocked over seats as they lunged to their feet in the city auditorium, who got their money’s worth in the Choctaw casino, or who begged him for one last song in some airport hotel lounge. Only they will remember him right. “I look at the faces,” he says. “I look out there, and I know. I know I’ve given ’em something, boy, something they did not know was out there in this world. And I know. They won’t forget me.”

  In the dark of his room, the rock-and-roll singer watches himself on the big-screen television, watches himself in fifty-year-old black and white do that song about shakin’ that conquered the world, watches the power in that young, dangerous man. He sees the man stab the keys and kick away the bench and lift the audience from its seats to come swarming, twisting, jumping onstage, to close in a tight circle around his grand piano, all of them shakin’ and twitchin’ like he has them on a stick or a string or a jerking rubber band. He sees him vault on his young legs to the lid of the piano as if some outside force just threw him there, as the other young people snatch at him, at his hair, at the hems of his garments. The boys seem about to lose control of themselves and break something or turn over some cars. The women, jerking and sobbing, seem about to faint, or die, or embarrass their mamas. As he watches, the old man’s toes tap, tap, tap in time, and his fingers play the air. “Gr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r,” he says, in duet with the young man, and grins wickedly. When the song is over and the young man takes his exaggerated bow, the old man settles back in his pillows, content. Then, from the gloom, barely loud enough to hear, comes a soft “Hee-hee-hee.”

  Later, on one of those quiet, weary afternoons, I have one more question before we stop for the night.

  “Didn’t I hear once that you . . .” But he cuts me off.

  “Yeah,” he says, “I probably did.”

  1

  THE FATHER OF WATERS

  Concordia Parish, Louisiana

  THE BEGINNING

  The water would rise up every few years, wash across the low, flat land, and take everything a poor man had, ruin his cotton and corn and drown his hogs, pour filth and dead fish into his home, even push the coffins from the earth and float his ancestors all the way to Avoyelles. Jerry Lee’s sister, Frankie Jean, tells of a day the rains beat down, the rivers rose, and the swelling groundwater shoved the dead from the mud. “Uncle Henry and Aunt Maxine had been nippin’, and they went by Uncle Will’s grave and saw he’d come partway out of the ground. Uncle Henry said, ‘Oh, Lord, Maxine, the Rapture has done come and the Lord has left us here. He tried to take Will and Will just wouldn’t go. Oh, God, Maxine, we done been left behind. Oh, God, Maxine, I told you not to buy that whiskey. . . .’” The point is, it takes guts to stay with it when the land you owe the bank for runs liquid between your toes and balls of water moccasins form islands on the rising tide. Water was everywhere, was life, and death. A person could not live here in this low place, Jerry Lee believes, and be afraid of water.

  “We were going to the backwater one day, me and Daddy,” he says, traveling as far back as his memory could reach. “I was
three years old.” It was late summer, the Louisiana sun hot on his blond head. Elmo, singing about trains and untrue women, swung his boy like a knot on the end of a rope. They followed the river to a place where the current slacked and died and pooled in lakes and sloughs, as still as black glass. The air smelled as it has always smelled and smells now, of a thousand years of silt, rot, and mud. His daddy pushed an old boat into the shallows, and they headed to deep water. The boy had never been out so far, never done more than wade close to the bank, toes digging into the silt and sand, his mama and daddy holding his hands. This water had no bottom, let in no light. They drifted a while, just living.

  Then his daddy reached for him, lifted him high in his arms, and threw him out of the boat.

  The water closed over his head. He thrashed toward the light, sank, and clawed his way up again, in panic. He kicked at it with his legs as if it was filled with devils, all twining around his skinny body, dragging him down. It was not a cruelty, he knows now, it was just his turn. It did no good to wait till a boy was older. The terror only grew with the child. You threw them both in the river and took what came out.

  “Get with it, boy!” his daddy yelled.

  Jerry Lee drank the water in, breathed it, choked.

  “Swim,” his daddy yelled, “or float!”

  “Help me!” the boy hollered.

  But his daddy only knelt in the boat, his arms outstretched.

  “Come on, boy!”

  “Help me!”