Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  With his litany of big hits piled up around him, Berry insisted on being given his due, and insisted that no one—no one—follow him onstage. In fact, just like Jerry Lee, he insisted no one could. He made a good case for it, putting on one of the most dynamic and unusual rock-and-roll shows ever done, duckwalking as he played that white guitar, gliding across the stage on one foot, jerking and twisting and moving, spreading his legs out so far he almost did the splits, then hopping along the stage that way, a thing that might have ruined a lesser man or at least ruined the stitching in the straddle of his trousers. In the end, that was what people said about Chuck, as much as anything else: Chuck was a man. He’d had more women than most people had thoughts about them, and he’d done time on top of it all.

  Jerry Lee didn’t much care about any of that. He loved the man’s music, and he respected him, but he had pulled himself up from nothing, too. They stood jaw to jaw backstage, one hot word away from fighting right there behind the curtain, with newspaper and magazine reporters everywhere and film and still cameras pointed from every direction. Jerry Lee’s father had made the trip this time, and as he saw the man get right in his son’s face he sidled closer. Elmo was of the school that believed no man should ever threaten another man more than once before knocking him down if not out, and he believed, too, that just because a man was down, you did not put the boot heels to him.

  “Daddy didn’t walk around no man . . . and neither did I,” says Jerry Lee.

  It was a bad time to inject violence of any kind into rock and roll. Crowds increasingly had been getting out of control, acting out, using the music as an excuse to steal, fight, cut, even riot; every teenager with a leather jacket was suddenly a desperado, a tough guy, or a moll. Freed, sensing potential disaster, took Jerry Lee aside and pleaded with him to let Berry close the show, almost as a humanitarian act. Jerry Lee didn’t much care about Freed’s anxiety, but in a way he knew it might be fun to show Chuck as he had shown Johnny Cash, as he’d shown poor Fats, as he’d shown everybody. Chuck may have thought no one could follow him onstage. Jerry Lee knew that no one on this earth could follow him. No matter where he was in the billing, he planned on being the last thought in the audience’s heads when they left.

  After Frankie Lymon, after the Chantels, and after Buddy Holly did his usual rockin’ set, Jerry Lee took the stage of the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn in a jacket trimmed in the fake fur of some jungle cat and plowed into his boogie. He did “Breathless” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’,” and by the time he got to “Great Balls of Fire” the crowd was already out of control and police were moving to cut off the inevitable mass lunge for the stage. He shot that piano stool backward with such force that it went clear off the stage, skittering into the wings and sending people leaping out of the way.

  Then he did something that has been written about and argued about and celebrated and denied ever since: he reached inside the piano, took a small Coke bottle of clear liquid, and poured gasoline across the top of the instrument, then struck a match and set it aflame. “I just sprinkled a little bit on it,” he says, but it went up with a whoosh! Instead of walking offstage, he just kept playing and playing as the piano burned, and the crowd screamed. Jerry Lee played, hunched over the flames, the smoke in his face and hair, till the song was done, and then swaggered off stage toward Chuck Berry.

  “First time I ever saw a colored guy turn white,” Jerry Lee says. He left the piano burning onstage. “They had to call the fire department and everything.”

  “I want to see you follow that, Chuck,” he said, as he walked past Berry.

  Some accounts—and there are several—say that he said, “Follow that, nigger,” but he says he did not. There was no room for that mess then, in a music where color and style blended to make the music itself. But it is a fact that he immolated a piano, sent it straight to its ancestors, though even that story has shifted and changed over the years. In many interviews, he has flatly denied it, even gotten belligerent with the interviewer.

  He also says he could swear it was outside Cincinnati where it happened. But it hardly matters now. “I do know I like to get in a lot of trouble for that . . . for burning that piano. That story just kept blowing up. They just kept saying it.”

  The battle between the two men continued for years. In another show, after closing his regular show with “Great Balls of Fire,” instead of yielding the stage to Chuck, he walked over and picked up a guitar.

  He had been playing guitar since he was a little boy, picking out tunes on Elmo’s old acoustic, as well as drums, violin, bass, and just about every string or percussion instrument used on a stage. He slipped the strap over his shoulder, took one long look over at Chuck, and started hollering:

  Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans

  Way back up in the woods among the evergreens . . .

  Chuck stood with murder in his eye.

  Jerry Lee kept playing.

  “Finally, Chuck walked across the stage and sat down at the piano.”

  The crowd roared and roared, enjoying the joke, but Chuck was not smiling.

  “He did not play very good piano,” said Jerry Lee.

  Later, in a hotel lobby, the two men clashed again.

  “Chuck was poppin’ off to me,” says Jerry Lee. “We had been drinkin’.”

  “Me and you gonna get this straightened out,” Chuck said, “straightened out right now.”

  Elmo, who had been drinking seriously, who drank like he drove nails and pulled corn, without resting, reached into his pocket, pulled out his Barlow knife, and slipped it under Chuck’s chin.

  “You know what we do to men like you back home?” he asked, keeping the tip of the blade pressed into the soft flesh of Chuck’s jugular. “We cut their heads off and throw ’em in the Blue Hole.”

  Jerry Lee can still see his daddy standing there, can remember thinking that it would be a sight if his daddy murdered Chuck Berry. He did not quite know how he would explain it to his mama, who loved Chuck’s music—maybe just by saying that Chuck was being mean to him. Then she would not only understand but be in agreement.

  Chuck was a fearsome man, but Elmo, even deep into middle age, had not declined much; he still looked like he could do what he said, and might enjoy it. “Well, Chuck took off running, and Daddy took off running after him.”

  Alan Freed, who was standing steps away, asked Jerry Lee, “You think he’ll catch him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jerry Lee.

  They took off running after them.

  “But we gave out,” remembered Jerry Lee, “and set down on the curb.”

  He did not see his father that night—“like I said, we was drinkin’”—and after a while the prospect of Elmo’s taking Chuck Berry’s life became less compelling, and he went to bed.

  “The next morning, Chuck and Daddy was sitting together in the hotel café, eatin’ breakfast.”

  The show moved around the Northeast and finally to Boston in May.

  “Boston had banned rock and roll,” says Jerry Lee.

  It was as though the crowd came into the Boston Arena intending to give the city fathers exactly the ugliness and violence they had warned would occur if the paganism of rock and roll was allowed to flourish. Jerry Lee could feel it, an ugliness beyond the usual good-natured hysteria that followed a great show. But they had paid their money and come expecting to hear his music. “You give ’em what they deserve,” he said, “always.” But he had barely started playing when the crowd rushed forward and began to push and swell against the police cordon, bulging out toward the stage like some kind of blob from a science-fiction movie. “The cops were holding ’em back, tryin’ to hold ’em back, and I was thinkin’, Please don’t turn them people loose on me. But they mobbed the stage and got to fightin’ and carryin’ on.” Riots broke out around the city; the teenagers put on their leather jackets, to be dangerous, and looted stores, and stabbed at old people and other helpless people with their knives, a
nd the enemies of rock and roll said, “See? See what happens?”

  “I just kind of snuck out,” said Jerry Lee. The prosecutors in Boston tried to charge Alan Freed with anarchy, with trying to overthrow the actual government, but it was hard to make those charges stick, since a bunch of dumbasses throwing bricks and waving switchblades could not be proven to be an actual armed revolt. Jerry Lee was not trying to overthrow the government; he was singing rock and roll and truly did not understand how that would make you want to do anything bad, beyond some spur-of-the-moment fornication.

  In Haney’s, when people took to fighting, the floorwalkers came up and cracked some heads and dragged the offenders out into the weeds, and the music never stopped. But what do you do when the stage you are playing on really is the world itself, and there ain’t a bouncer big enough to straighten out all the fools who use the music as an excuse to debase themselves and attack their fellow man? Jerry Lee did not believe he was making good people into bad people or making bad people worse. He believed that any such urge must have been in a person or not before they ever bought a ticket. So he just kept pounding, and his stage shows got wilder, but it was always just a show. “People come to expect things a certain way, and they’re disappointed if you do it different,” he says. So he kicked the stool, and beat the keys with his whole body, and went wild—every time.

  He says adamantly that he rarely abused a good piano, but promoters had seen him go wild so often on the keyboards, seen him pound the keys with his feet and other body parts, that some gave him inferior pianos to play. He could get more out of a mediocre piano than most, but could not get great sound out of a hulk, out of a wreck, and one night in Florida he lost his temper and pushed the piano offstage, down a ramp, and out a stage door. “It was harder to do than you would think,” rolling it down a sidewalk with half the audience running along beside him.

  “What you doin’, Jerry Lee?” they cried.

  “I’m takin’ it swimmin’,” he shouted back.

  He wasn’t sure if he could actually make it to the water, but the topography was in his favor, and he pushed and pushed till all at once there was a great splash and the people cheered and cheered. “It’s insulting,” he says, “to give a bad piano to a piano player like me.”

  That spring, even as Jimmy Lee drove around condemning evil and immorality like he’d just discovered them, his cousin’s music became the soundtrack for a movie about smoking dope and blond hussies in tight pedal-pushers doing God knows what on a drive-in screen the size of the First State Bank of Louisiana.

  High School Confidential, directed by Jack Arnold, the same man who gave America the horror classic Creature from the Black Lagoon, was the story of an undercover agent, played by Russ Tamblyn, who wades into the dark jungle of a public high school to confront a plague of demon marijuana. Designed to capitalize on the cravings of American teenagers of that time to rebel against something, for God’s sake, anything, High School Confidential was about drag racing and delinquents but mostly dwelled on the dimensions of Mamie Van Doren, the villain’s squeeze. And while that was a hard show to steal, Jerry Lee did steal it, shouting the title song from the bed of an old 1940s-era pickup truck, banging that dead piano the same way Gene Autry sang to his horse Champion, till no one could tell, not in a million years, that the real version of the song was recorded back at Sun, and all this stuff was just pretend.

  Honey, get your boppin’ shoes, before the jukebox blows a fuse.

  The song, written by Ronald Hargrave, was done for another low-budget, quickly made B movie, but its singer was Midas then, and the song took hold with live audiences and appeared to be another sure hit whenever Sun got around to releasing it. Jud and Sam celebrated another freight-car load of free publicity, as the movie opened around the country with the voice and face of their star looking down from the big screen.

  With such a hurricane wind at his back, how could it not last forever?

  His friendship with Elvis had faded as his own star rose, as Elvis hid more and more at Graceland in the company of his family and friends and employees—when you could tell the difference—and finally shipped off to Europe. It was surprising how different their lives were starting to seem, these two boys born in the bared teeth of the Depression South, with mamas they loved above all others and daddies who drank and did time in prison and a brother who died, leaving their parents to pour all their love and hope for a better life into the living son. Elvis’s parents had bought him his first instrument, and he learned to make music by watching people around him, studying, absorbing everything he could from the black people in the fields and the white people in church, and on weekends he gathered with his people around the radio to hear the Opry and Hayride, and snuck off to hear hillbilly blues on WELO in Tupelo, hosted by a singer named Mississippi Slim. They were brothers, the blond boy and the dark boy, separated only by three hundred miles of cotton fields. They had both taken the music of their South, black and white, hillbilly and blues, and made it shake. They were alike, those boys, but not the same.

  A few months before, as if in some crazy moment of déjà vu, Jerry Lee was lounging around Sun when he saw Sam come walking toward him through the usual crowd of hopefuls and hangers-on.

  “Are you gonna be here a while?” Sam asked.

  “Sure,” said Jerry Lee. “Why?”

  “Elvis called, and said he wants to see you.”

  It was like someone had just rewound time to the day he first met Elvis, not much more than a year before. The difference was in Sam himself. He was a smiling man by nature, a hand-gripper and an arm-squeezer. You made contacts, smiling like that, made money. But he was not smiling now.

  Elvis, Jerry Lee believes, wore a mask in the winter of 1958, in those last months before he left. He made himself appear stoic, brave, patriotic, the face Colonel Tom Parker decided he would show reporters and weeping fans as his induction neared. Elvis talked of doing his duty. He would not ask for special treatment, would not become a singing serviceman but would wait to be selected, go where the army’s bureaucracy decided he would go, and live off his seventy-eight dollars a month instead of whatever unearthly amount he was making back home. If the army decided he should peel potatoes and tote a rifle in the Cold War he would do it, because the Colonel had decided that was the best of all outcomes to this train wreck of dreams. But that was not the face that looked back at him in the mirror in his mansion on the hill, or the face he pressed to the telephone when he sobbed to his mama, telling her he would just disappear into those two long years; the world would move on to other talented boys.

  That face, the haunted one, was the one Jerry Lee saw staring into his through the glass at Sun Records, as Elvis opened the door and walked up to him. They shook hands, but Elvis just stood there, as if he was a little lost.

  “You got it. Take it,” he said to Jerry Lee. “Take the whole damn thing.”

  Then, Jerry Lee recalls, Elvis started to cry.

  “It happened. It did,” Jerry Lee says. He just stood there, awkward, frozen. Grown men only cried when their mamas died, or maybe their children, and when they were in the grip of the Holy Ghost. They did not cry before other men, in a lobby crowded with people in the middle of the afternoon. He remembers how the room went quiet. “They didn’t say a word, them people. They didn’t even move.” He remembers trying not to look at Elvis, trying to look at anything else, at the drab green walls covered in that ugly surplus paint. He remembers the dust on the tiles, and secretary Sally Wilbourn looking up from the desk, her face bleak. He remembers Sam coming up from the back to handle things, how he came to stand at Elvis’s side, nodding his head, gently, talking softly, saying it’s all right, son, it’s gonna be all right. Finally, there was nowhere else to look, and Jerry Lee will never forget the tears running down Elvis’s cheeks.

  “You can have it,” Elvis told him.

  “I didn’t know,” Jerry Lee told him, “it meant that much to you.”

  What h
e meant by that, he says now, was that he knew Elvis had already moved on to Hollywood, that he was inching away from the music that had made him. He seemed headed for a life of soft ballads and pop music, says Jerry Lee, because what Elvis really wanted to be, and what he told people he wanted to be, was “a good actor,” and, failing that, he might have to settle for just being a movie star. But in ’58 he was still the king, and with the induction just days away and the blond-haired boy rising, rising, he believed his time was over.

  “That ain’t nothing to cry about,” he said, like they were little boys on a playground.

  Elvis broke down, sobbing.

  “I just wondered . . .” he said, but could not finish.

  “What?” said Jerry Lee.

  “I just wondered,” Elvis said, “why you didn’t have to go. Why do I have to go and do eighteen months and you don’t have to?”

  “ ’Cause I ain’t that crazy,” he said.

  After he threw that first notice into the Black River, no one had ever pursued it. Besides, he says, he had already been rejected years before. “I tried to enlist, then, with Arnell Tipton, to go fight in Korea. ‘You’re 4F,’ they told me. Said there was something medically wrong. I really don’t know what they thought. I wanted to go. They said, ‘We’ll take Arnell.’ And as soon he got over there, a sniper killed him.”

  Elvis had seemed angry when he came in—Jerry Lee knew how to handle anger, knew how to rise to another man’s anger the way a game rooster knows—but now he just seemed like his heart was broken. “He was not just crying, he was sobbing. . . . I didn’t know how to handle it.”

  He felt Sam’s hand on his arm, tugging.

  “He’ll be all right,” Sam said, softly. “Elvis is emotional. He’ll be all right, just ignore him. Pay no attention to him. He’ll quit here in a minute.”