Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  My heart goes ’round and ’round

  My love comes tumblin’ down

  You . . . leave me . . . breathless

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yeeeeaaaaggggghhhhh!”

  He flung it down, cursing and spitting.

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

  His bandmates gathered ’round, ready to attack.

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

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

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

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

  He walked away, as if hot in pursuit.

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

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

  “He was a drip,” Jerry Lee says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “He might do it, Jerry Lee,” he said.

  Jerry Lee looked at him and quickly shook his head.

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

  Anka looked down.

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

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

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

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

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

  “He was my buddy.”

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

  That night, Buddy was happy.

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

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

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

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

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

  “If it’s what you want to do, do it.”

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

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

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

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

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

  Then something occurred to him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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