by Rick Bragg
“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 insec
ure 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—e
ven 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.
