Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  He had been dangerous before, but now, with a hit, he was armed. “‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ ’ was on its way to the moon,” says Jerry Lee. “From that first time I heard it, I knew it was more than just a good record. I knew it was unstoppable. I just knew it. Wasn’t nothin’ they could do to stop it.

  “And then they banned it.”

  Sam Phillips sat behind the cold glass at Sun, morosely correct. It had to happen. Banning rock-and-roll records had become almost a national sport, from Boston to Biloxi, a kind of chicken-and-egg game among pandering politicians, rock-ribbed preachers, advertisers, government regulatory agencies, and radio station owners, and history was not on Jerry Lee’s side. They all fed on each other, growing larger and louder, not just in the so-called backward South but even in the Northeast, as if the whole country had taken on the guise of a crew-cut daddy slipping off his belt as he entered the room of his teenager, saying, “You will not play that nigger music in my house.”

  In 1954, a Michigan congresswoman had introduced a House bill to prohibit the mailing of any “pornographic” recording, like rock and roll. In Memphis, police confiscated the Drifters’ “Honey Love” before it could be loaded into jukeboxes. In 1955, in Mobile, WABB received fifteen thousand letters of complaint about dirty records. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, police canceled a performance by Fats Domino at the Ritz Ballroom, afraid that dancing might escalate into a riot. In ’56, ABC radio refused to play a recording of “Love for Sale,” a twenty-five-year-old Cole Porter song about prostitution, by Billie Holiday, a forty-year-old jazz singer. In Ohio, dancing to rock-and-roll records in public was outlawed for anyone under eighteen, while in New York, an executive at Columbia Records hosted a program on CBS to discuss with psychiatrists the negative effects of rock-and-roll music on the teenage mind. In ’57, Cardinal Stritch of the Chicago Archdiocese banned all rock and roll from Catholic schools, fearing the effect of its rhythms on teenagers. Radio stations even banned Elvis’s version of “White Christmas,” based on the Drifters’ recent R&B version.

  If they could ban “White Christmas” just because it was sung to a mild form of rock and roll, how could they fail to ban this new “Shakin’” song by a young white singer who didn’t just hint that the listeners ought to shake something, but told them to—told them to shake “it,” in particular, and while he did not say exactly what “it” was, it would take a very sheltered youth minister not to guess it in three or four tries. The preachers and the politicians heaped all their disgust and disdain and fear of rock and roll on this one song; some even claimed he cussed in the lyric, said the word hell, though that was just the way he sang it. The most hurtful thing was that his record even fell out of favor close to home, as Southern stations pulled it from playlists. Sales went stagnant, and the great arc of his rising star began, for just a moment, to slow.

  “I’s just trying to make a record,” says Jerry Lee, innocently, but he was all bound up in the greater story—the just-begun challenge to Jim Crow in the Deep South, which loosed up the fears white folks had over their doomed ideal, and the beginnings of an unbuttoning of sexual mores, and all the rest of it. In Memphis, where the fires of rock and roll had once smoldered underneath Elvis’s twitching leg, the great threat now had a new name and a new snarling face, as politicians and preachers shouted this name and its crimes to the rafters, “and they didn’t know nothin’ about me,” says Jerry Lee. Young people were instructed to smash their Jerry Lee records and then go pray hard. Radio stations that had played the song two or three times an hour, sometimes two or three times back-to-back, pulled it from playlists, and thousands of records stacked up in Sam Phillips’s storeroom, unsold.

  Things looked so bleak so quick that Sam reached out to his older brother, Jud, for help. Jud was pushing used cars down in Florence, Alabama, at the moment, but he had worked in the music business before. A born promoter and salesman, he had ties to disc jockeys and television producers around the country, and when he arrived in Memphis that summer, it was to serve as a kind of vaguely defined marketing director with only one real project: Jerry Lee.

  Jud Phillips understood human nature and appetite, says Jerry Lee. And it had little to do with taste or even reality. You could tell people anything, and if you yelled it loud enough, they would believe it. As evidence, there was the city’s love affair with wrestling. That year, Farmer Jones, using an Arkansas mule kick and a stump puller, took a two-fall match from Art Nelson in Ellis Auditorium. The people cheered a walking grain silo named Haystacks Calhoun, and booed the bald-headed Lady Angel, who “makes children cry and ladies faint.” It was the year the Zebra Kid defeated Nature Boy Buddy Rogers with a head butt, only to be chased into the street, whereupon a spectator presented a metal chair to the Nature Boy so he could beat the Kid unconscious. And the papers covered it like it was real. But the thing about it was, it was unashamed.

  Jud, who always had a newspaper at his elbow, was a student of the mob. Instead of apologizing for Jerry Lee, he decided they would flaunt him. It came to him after seeing Jerry Lee perform on a bill with Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash and Webb Pierce in the Sheffield/Muscle Shoals area, where the boy beat a piano half to death. After the show, Jud introduced himself, walked with him to the dressing room, and told him what he was going to do and how he was going to do it. He had been around music much of his life, like his brother, and was probably the best-connected used-car salesman in the South. He had friends in the networks in New York. He believed, if he just showed up there with this boy, audacious, like they were supposed to be there, maybe he could get Jerry Lee and his song on national television.

  Sam Phillips was torn between just shelving the offending song and going all in on one last, big gamble. He was not convinced that an expensive lark to New York City with no guarantees of a second of air time was worth the risk. To Jerry Lee, it was beginning to look like the people who had once promised him the stars no longer believed in him. Jud whispered to Sam that he was risking losing this boy the way he had lost Elvis, over nickels and dimes, but Sam told him to hush, that there was nothing much to lose at this point, except a boy with a record no one would play. “I wasn’t scared,” says Jerry Lee, now, but the battle that went on between those brothers in a locked office would determine his fate.

  “He could have been a genius,” says Jerry Lee of Sam Phillips. “Especially on making money. And keeping it.”

  But Jud Phillips believed. As with most people loyal to him, Jerry Lee would never forget that. “Jud was a decent man, and he was a good businessman. He was a salesman. And he saw what Sam didn’t.” Even when he was drunk, which was more than seldom, his mind was turning, always turning, says Jerry Lee. “He’d throw parties, slip people a little money, do whatever it took,” to spread the word, to roust a crowd. Finally, he even talked his brother into two train tickets to Grand Central Terminal in New York City. “I’d never been on a train before,” at least not one for which he had purchased a ticket. “I thought it was cool.” As they rolled down the tracks, he took out a folded Superman and decided not to worry about it all, about New York, about the struggle between the brothers. It was not, he knows now, that Sam Phillips had not had faith in him. If it hadn’t been for Sam’s initial faith in him, he doesn’t know for sure what path his music would have taken, and he formed a friendship with the man that he wanted and needed to be genuine, something beyond business and even music; he still needs that today. “He loved me very much,” he says. “Aw, yeah, his respect for me was unlimited.” He was merely being cautious, says Jerry Lee, and perhaps realistic. Such things, such resurrections, rarely happened in the real world, but did, sometimes, in comic books.

  He remembers now, mostly, not the towering buildings but the crosstown sidewalks. “Amazing,” he says, “the longest blocks I ever walked. But that’s the city, man, that’s New York. You don’t jump from there, then you don’t go.”

  They moved through the throngs of people from one great edifice to another, ask
ing for a chance to show the powerful people, the kingmakers, what he could do. “I wasn’t nervous a bit,” he says now, though he might have been, if he had lived long under the Cyclops of television. But few people back home even had one; his Uncle Lee, of course, had been about the first to get one back in Ferriday, but his mama and daddy had only recently gotten a set, believing, as they had always believed, that one day they would turn the thing on and wiggle the wires and turn the antenna toward some far-off tower, and there would be Jerry Lee, sittin’ at a piano. It seemed like just yesterday he and his mama sat with their heads tilted at that tiny transistor radio to hear the Grand Ole Opry, praying that the battery would hold at least through “Walkin’ the Floor over You.”

  Jud’s old contacts and fast talk got them in the door at the networks, but not an audition.

  Jerry Lee watched Ed Sullivan throw him out from a distance. “Get out of here,” he said. “I don’t want any more of this Elvis junk.”

  It embarrassed Jerry Lee; it was too much like begging. “Come on, Jud, I don’t think he wants us, to even hear us,” he said.

  So Jud reached out to Henry Frankel, an old acquaintance who was now talent coordinator for NBC, and Frankel reached out to Jules Green, who was Steve Allen’s manager. Steve Allen’s show, which ran opposite Ed Sullivan’s on CBS, was willing to take greater risks to steal a few ratings points from the competition. They featured everything from comedians to ventriloquists to people who spun plates on sticks—and of course, music, as Allen himself was a pianist of the cocktail variety.

  Green did not even get up from his desk, just sat there with his wingtips on his desk as Jud walked in. Green was unimpressed by the number of records Jerry Lee had sold and generally unimpressed by the notion of another hillbilly rock and roller. It wasn’t too long since they’d had to camouflage Elvis in order to bring him on the show, to keep the public outcry down to a manageable number of decibels.

  “Where’s your tape?” he asked Jud.

  “Ain’t got no tape,” Jud said.

  “Pictures?”

  He told Green he had his product in the lobby, holding up a wall.

  Green got up and looked through the window of his office.

  “All I see,” he said, “is a guy chewing bubblegum and reading a funny book. You say he can do something. I don’t know.”

  The kid, with more blond hair than was appropriate, leaned against a post, engrossed in the adventures of Mickey Mouse. He popped a big bubble and looked bored. He had already been through a Superman.

  “If you got a piano,” said Jud, “he can show you what he can do.”

  It was one of those rare times when being unknown saved a performer. Green did not know about any ban, about all the stations and sponsors lined up against him, and Jud did not volunteer. Why open the door on a mean dog when it’s only going to bite you?

  “Jerry Lee,” Jud said, “come on in here.”

  This part, Jerry Lee remembers exquisitely.

  “I took my bubblegum out and stuck it on the top of the piano, and I laid my Mickey Mouse funny book down, and I did my thing.”

  He played “Shakin’” all the way through, hot and perfect.

  By the time he was done, Green was reaching for his wallet. “I’ll give you five hundred dollars right now,” he told Jud, for a promise that he take Jerry Lee back to the hotel, lock the door, talk to no other television producers of any kind, and bring Jerry Lee back to audition for Steve Allen tomorrow at 9:00 a.m.

  The next morning, Allen stood right in front of Jerry Lee as he played it again.

  “He played drums with his pencil on the piano,” recalled Jerry Lee. “I can still see it. It’s funny, how somethin’ as little as a tapping pencil can change your whole life, change everything.”

  Jud told Steve Allen that if he would give Jerry Lee three minutes of air time, there would not be one viewer who would get up to change the channel, or do anything except sit there enthralled. Allen did not see how a man could keep a promise like that, but this was not his first hootenanny, and in a time when people were still feeling their way blind through this new medium, he could see for miles.

  “I want you to do that song, Jerry Lee, do it just like that on my show tonight,” Steve Allen told him. Years later, when asked why he gave the boy his chance, Allen would say only that he loved quality and knew it when he saw it.

  “He even liked the talking part of the song,” the part that so frightened other people, said Jerry Lee. “He heard that, and he knew we had a serious record. He knew we had something to sell.”

  Jerry Lee shook his hand and thanked him for the opportunity. It was July 28, 1957.

  “I wasn’t nervous,” Jerry Lee says.

  Steve Allen waited onstage for the signal.

  Three . . . , two . . . , one . . .

  Allen, benign and bespectacled, welcomed America to step out from behind its TV trays and coffee tables and join him for a solid hour—give or take a commercial or two—of variety-show entertainment, with Shelley Winters, Tony Franciosa, the Four Coins, Jodie Sands, singer Jerry Lee Lewis, pantomimist Shal K. Ophir, and “our regular cast of crazies, Tom Poston, Don Knotts, and Louis Nye.”

  Jerry Lee waited in the wings. He was twenty-one years old.

  “I wasn’t nervous,” he says again.

  But he also did not see any real point in standing around doing nothing, watching a panto . . . pantonomer . . . whatever the devil that was. He and the band went across the street and had a drink.

  They came back just a minute or two before they were supposed to go on, to some angry glares from the producers and a worried look or two from Steve Allen himself. They didn’t know any better, Jerry Lee says. This TV stuff was like walking on the moon.

  “I’ve been waiting on you for an hour, ’cause I didn’t know where you were,” said Allen, on camera, as Jerry Lee, J. W. Brown, and drummer Russ Smith sauntered onto the stage, off camera, to set up. If you listen to the show, to the noise on the set, you can hear them setting up. Allen, the old pro, went on smoothly. “Now, we’re gonna have a word”—crash, thunk, bang—“from our, uh, stagehands, apparently. We want you to stay tuned for rock and roll sensa-”—thunk, bang—“. . . you think this is knocking the joint apart, wait till you hear Jerry Lee Lewis. He destroys the piano and everything.”

  Allen cut to a commercial, in which a perplexed but perfectly coiffed housewife watches her son track rainwater in on immaculate floors, but it does not matter, because her floors are waxed with Johnson Stride Wax, “the wax spills can’t spot.” Then with less than five minutes left in the show, the camera reopened on Allen. “There’s been a whole lotta shakin’ going on here all day, as a result of a fella dropping in by the name of Jerry Lee Lewis . . . as you know, you young folks in particular, he has a new record out. . . .” He fumbled around for a while, like he was trying to decide how to warn the people behind their TV trays what he was about to inflict on them. “And now here he is, jumpin’ and joltin’, Jerry Lee Lewis!”

  Come on over, baby

  Jerry Lee, dressed like he was going to the movies in a striped, short-sleeved shirt, black pants, and white shoes, did what he does. He seemed trapped halfway between wild joy and burning anger, and he glared into the camera like he did it every day, like a little boy on a playground saying, “You wanna make somethin’ of it?” till it just gave in, cried uncle, and took its whuppin’. The only difference he made, the only concession to TV, was slight. When the offending finger rose into the air, when he would have rotated it around salaciously and sung “wiggle it around just a little bit,” he sang instead “jump around just a little bit,” with no discernible rotating or talk of wiggling whatsoever. It would be about the only compromise he would ever really make, for a lifetime, and most people did not even notice it. He banged the keys so hard they seemed to jump back up to meet his fingers, and his hair bounced like some kind of live animal on his head, and at the end, when he kicked that stool back, it went fl
ying all the way across the stage to land near Steve Allen, who picked it up and flung it back across the stage at him. It looked spontaneous and playful and real, but of course it was just good TV. As it happened, Milton Berle was backstage during rehearsals, and he told Allen, “Now, when he kicks that stool back, you pick it up and throw it back so that it goes by in front of the camera.”

  When the boy was done, he just stood up and hitched up his pants and looked around as if to say, “Well, there it is,” and the studio audience thundered and thundered inside the small studio. “Not a whole bunch of people, a small stage. They didn’t even know me. . . . But they saw me, and they liked me. That’s what you call opening the door, and I flew.”

  Such shenanigans did not happen every week on national television, where producers were still scouring the country for jugglers and comedians; this looked like a party, and because of television everyone was invited. Steve Allen came out onstage dancing, though in a kind of goofy, very white man’s way, slapping his hands together and motioning for all the other guests—there was a passel—to come out and join them onstage. Jerry Lee was grinning like he stole something and got clean away, and he would have plopped back down on the bench and played all night, played all the way through the commercials, if they had let him.

  “Mama and Daddy even saw it, saw me on the TV. They flipped out.”

  Allen would later say the boy was pure gold under a camera; the show brought great numbers, better even than Ed Sullivan’s, and in television nothing much really mattered except the arithmetic. “He was quality,” Allen later said. And after that night, “he was a star.”