Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  “I tried to make them both happy,” he says now. “I never took sides. I imagine Mama had it pretty rough. Daddy? Daddy was up and goin’.”

  His daddy would continue to follow him on the road when he could, and they would open a bottle of whiskey, kill it together, and speak of finer days. “Sometimes you just need to drink a little whiskey with your daddy,” he says. Elmo even went into the studio at Sun and recorded his own version of “Mexicali Rose.”

  “He finally got to be me,” his son says.

  Then, in February 1961, Jerry Lee went back into the studio for one more try. For the very first session in Sam’s new Nashville studio, he chose the Ray Charles hit “What’d I Say,” and when it was done, he knew he had a hit, finally, after all this time. The original was less than two years old; it was the song that broke Ray Charles out of R&B into the pop charts, and it would put Jerry Lee back there, too. He had such deference for Ray that he was honored even to try it, but he knew it was the kind of song he was meant to play. “A great song,” he says, and he didn’t try to copy the original but did his own thing, channeling all those nights at Haney’s into this one record. And he knew Ray Charles—“Mister Charles”—did not begrudge it; he was too much of a gentleman. Jerry Lee and the boys had tried it several times before at Sun, almost every time he came to the studio, but hadn’t yet captured what he was seeking. On this session, though, he managed to conjure all the soul of Ray’s version and give it something else besides—a little extra rock-and-roll drive—and people liked it, people on both sides of the pop/country divide.

  It would not be deliverance, would not be another bolt of blue lightning, but it might be a handhold on which he could pull himself up to another hit, and then maybe another. “I liked that record,” he says now. Billboard said so, too, and spoke of him the way it had when he was new. “It’s been a long dry spell . . . [but this] song can bring him back with the proper push.” By late that spring, it reached number 30 on the Hot 100, and Jerry Lee was invited back to New York, back to the Paramount, where he played with Jackie Wilson.

  The disappointments and time weren’t showing on him, not yet. His face was fuller, and there were lines there that had not been there before, but he was still thin and sharp as a straight razor, and he still looked dangerous staring down from the posters on the auditorium walls.

  In the early months of ’62, with “What’d I Say” still ringing in their ears, promoters in England reached out to Jerry Lee to see if he would even consider a return to the country where he had been castigated and all but ruined before. “They insisted I come back,” says Jerry Lee, “said people were screaming for me to come back, and I said, ‘Well, I might come back to England, if the money’s right.” The tour was scheduled for April, with some of the concerts to be played in some of the same venues where he had been canceled before, as if the disaster of ’58 had just been some bad dream. It was, for a man of Jerry Lee’s character, a chance not to redeem himself in the eyes of the British people—he couldn’t care less if they approved of him or not and would not approach the island with even a trace of apology on his lips—but it would be one more chance to play them some good rock and roll, and maybe this time that would be the thing that mattered.

  He would take Myra with him again, by God. He wouldn’t go unless he could take her with him again.

  He returned to the club circuit to make a living, and to await his return to England. “It really wasn’t so bad,” he says of the constant touring and the endless string of small gigs and honky-tonk bars. “It was sometimes, when you’d get a sad phone call from home,” from a wife who wondered what went on out there in the great unknown of the road. But they both believed the talent would win out, that he would be a star again, and if the unthinkable happened, and he was not, no one could say he did not chase it down with his last breath. “We didn’t get along that good, later on,” he says, but there was a time when they were in agreement on this much: it would get better. Still, he hated the sad phone calls, dreaded them, sometimes beseeching, sometimes accusing. “Ain’t no woman rule me,” he says.

  Sun surely wanted another strong hit to follow up “What’d I Say,” but Jerry Lee’s next several singles matched a motley assortment of covers—a standout take on Hank’s “Cold, Cold Heart,” an early cover of Barrett Strong’s “Money”—with novelty tunes like “It Won’t Happen with Me” and “I’ve Been Twistin’,” an update of Junior Parker’s old Sun R&B hit “Feelin’ Good.” In an effort to placate Jerry Lee, Sam even signed his teenage sister, Linda Gail, cutting several sessions with her and even putting their duet on “Seasons of My Heart” on the B-side of his cover of Joe Turner’s “Teenage Letter.” It did not placate him.

  He was in Minnesota on Easter Sunday 1962 when the phone began to tremble on the nightstand. It was not Myra this time but Cecil, telling him he had to call the hospital in Memphis, had to call home.

  Construction on the Coro Lake house was still ongoing. It had rained hard that Easter Sunday, and the swimming pool had partially filled with water. Inside the house, seventeen-year-old Myra was working on supper, on a big pot of spaghetti, and thinking about buying groceries. Elmo was there, and Jerry Lee’s uncle George Herron. Steve Allen was at Myra’s side, munching on jelly beans and candy chickens. It had been a good day. She had dressed the boy up like a little man and taken him to church for the first time. Now he had candy on his hands and his face and he was happy.

  A few minutes later, Myra noticed that the boy wasn’t by her side anymore. She called to him, then panicked and ran outside, searching. No one had seen him leave the house. She called his name, louder and louder, and a neighbor heard, and came to see what was wrong. He found the child at the bottom of the pool, and while there had been a rumor of a heartbeat, just enough to give Myra false hope, the child was dead.

  They buried the boy in the cemetery in Clayton, under the trees just now going green, beneath the rising voices of the great intermarried tribe. Jerry Lee’s cheeks were dry and his backbone was straight. He had done his crying in a locked room, and he will not let anyone inside it even now. He says only that he questioned it, questioned why it happened to him, his boy, but only briefly. “Why did this happen to me? I don’t understand. But I will understand someday. It knocked me to my knees, but you don’t see me cryin’, don’t see me carryin’ on. I accepted it. What can you do but accept it? And live with it. I didn’t question God. ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’ But you don’t forget. He’s always, always on my mind.” The hateful thing was how little time he’d had with the boy to store up some kind of memory, some kind of picture to carry. His own brother had died on a dirt road before Jerry Lee was old enough to store up the memories he needed to build something fine and lasting to cushion that one awful moment of death, and now his son was gone, taken while he traveled a million miles of highway, believing he had a lifetime to see the boy grow up, to listen for the first signs of musical talent, that thing passed down in the blood.

  A few days later, he was supposed to leave for England. Family and friends assumed he would cancel, that he would closet himself with Myra and grieve, which was the decent thing. But he could not. He could not stand being left here with his own doubts about his choices and ambition and the burning need to succeed that had sent him across the country again and again to try to reclaim what had been his for only a little while. He had drunk and fought and sinned across the land, chasing and chasing, and it would be noble to say that his desire for it all was reduced to insignificance by the death of his son, but it would be a lie. Instead, as he stood over that small grave, he knew that his drive was the only thing that could save him. “It never took my desire,” he said. “I had to go to England. It wasn’t easy, but I had to go. You get a family, you hate to put ’em through all the stuff, all the fightin’ and the carryin’ on that comes with a life like mine, but I didn’t know any other way.” To give up and stay home and hurt would make
it all useless, pointless.

  But there was another reason. Those who sometimes dwell in the dark, who live in what some people just call depression but that they know is something far worse, know there are times when that quiet is too awful to stand, and that the worst of all things is to be alone with your thoughts. You can stand it out on the stage, or in the crowd, where you can stomp and howl and burn and rave, where the lights scorch your wired eyes and the drums drown out the cries inside your mind. “The show covers everything,” he says again. He believes it with all his heart.

  Myra stayed home, planning, if things went well, to perhaps join him later. He came off the plane at Heathrow in a dark suit and white shirt, to stare into the same wall of reporters and photographers who had met his plane in England just a few years before. They asked him about Myra, asked where she was, and when he told them she was grieving and unable to travel, they asked him why he was not grieving and why he was able, and for just a few minutes, there with the flashbulbs exploding into his face, it seemed like it might be like it was before. They asked him if he did not feel it was callous to play rock and roll just eight days after his son’s drowning, and he talked to them about “the mysteries of the Lord,” and how he had to keep going, that this was the best thing for him now, to just keep singing and playing and keep working. “They were screaming for me, this time.” He opened in a theater in the industrial town of Newcastle, where working-class Brits, people with grease ground into their hands, had been sneered at by the upper classes for generations. It was a two-show gig to near-capacity crowds. He waited in the wings in an elegant black suit, white shirt, and black tie, peeking at the crowd. They cheered and stomped and howled and waved banners and signs that said WELCOME BACK JERRY LEE, as if what had happened before had all been some kind of bad dream.

  It galls him to admit to any kind of fear, but he felt a sliver of it as he climbed that stage, walked to the edge of the curtain, and took that first look. “I was a little nervous,” he says. But he knew, even before he hit the first key and sang the first line, that this time it would be different, this time he would get to prove what he could do. He had always believed that they’d wanted him before, before it was all poisoned by the newspapers and their feigned outrage, which he now knew to have been phony all along, like a kind of sport. Now he looked out into the crowd and all the long miles and disappointments in the dusty Cadillac sloughed away, and he itched for the opening acts to hurry up and clear him a runway.

  He surged onto the stage at a dead run, slid several feet like he was on ice and landed on his knees at the grand piano, and tore into “Down the Line.” He told the crowd he was going to drown his sorrows in his music, then, unhappy with the backup band’s tempo, showed the young drummer how to keep the beat. He pounded into “Whole Lotta Shakin’” and leaped on top of the piano. He did a wild, fifteen-minute encore as fans tried to storm the stage; later some tried to break down his dressing-room door. He would call it, later, one of the finest moments in his life, proof that he was still him, still the rocker he had been. He called Myra and told her to come to England. She arrived with a black ribbon in her hair and a Bible under her arm. A reporter stopped her in the terminal and asked her if she had any regrets.

  “I love Jerry. Jerry loves me. That’s the real story of my life.”

  There was still snobbery, still outrage that the man had been permitted to bring his smut back into their grand old England, and there was criticism of his decision to come and play music like his just a week or so after his son was buried. But mostly, he was spared. The reporters had already gone at him once, and gleefully, and nothing bores a newspaperman more than old news. A cat will stalk a live mouse for a very long time, but will play with a dead one for only a little while before losing interest. The only real news in Jerry Lee’s life was the tragedy of his son, which was the opposite of scandal; the press couldn’t worry it for long without appearing tacky and callous itself. And this time Jud Phillips, who was nobody’s idiot, made the trip as publicist, plying the press with good whiskey, with such copious amounts of free liquor that some of the reporters assigned to the Jerry Lee Lewis story didn’t write anything at all.

  That left Jerry Lee free to sing and play, and he did it with that still-young man’s fury and vengeance and with an older man’s broken heart, and they were still screaming as he left; he could hear it even through the walls of his dressing room, and he felt young again, and thought of the first time, the first time he ever approached a man about singing a song for folding money in a club, and how simple it had all been. “Julio May, owned the Hilltop in Natchez,” he recalls. “‘What you doin’ in here, boy?’ he asked me, and I told him, ‘Sir, I play the piano and I sing,’ and he looked at me for a minute, and then he said, ‘Well, get up there and do it, then.’” The drumming on his door—the fans had fought past the security and found him—brought him back. The security guards said they couldn’t guarantee his safety if he lingered, and again he was forced to flee a crowd that climbed all over his car and pressed their faces and lips to the window, only this time there was no doubt: “They loved me in England.”

  The tour continued to go well. Some writers would say that not every theater was full, but Jerry Lee remembers it as a triumph, night after night, an unending standing ovation. In Glasgow, the crowd rushed the stage, Jerry Lee climbed atop the piano, and a few fans followed him there, too, breaking the lid. The instrument was left in such a pitiful condition that promoters were forced to cancel an upcoming classical concert.

  He was invited back for another tour the following year, and the one after that.

  On the opening night of his May 1963 tour, he walked onto the stage in Birmingham to a standing ovation and left it running, chased by fans who had ripped away his jacket, tie, and half his shirt. “No matter what you have read, no matter what you have heard, watching Jerry Lee Lewis on stage always produces a profound shock for the ears, the eyes, and for the very soul,” wrote Alan Stinton in the Record Mirror. “What Jerry does on stage is so beyond the realms of human imagination that no one can fully anticipate the aura of sheer magical excitement which he creates.” And the crowd chanted:

  We want Jerry!

  We want Jerry!

  We want Jerry!

  At home in Ferriday, planting season had come and gone for the spring crops, the bounty of the Southern table. Old men walked through fields of tomatoes and okra and squash, searching for blight, hoping for rain but not too much, thumping off the stinging, leaf-eating caterpillars and stomping them underfoot. In the rows of yellow squash, the old men took the first blooms and pinched them off the way their fathers had taught them to do. They were wise old men and knew that sometimes a bloom is not a bloom at all, just a flower, just something pretty to look at, and nothing would grow from it. They call them false blooms.

  10

  AMERICAN WILDERNESS

  The Road

  1963

  He was supposed to be done again, finished again, but he was too hard-headed to lie flat. He had merely risen again, this time in neon almost two stories tall, glowing over the Memphis streets. He had a regular gig playing the Oriental, a nightclub owned by his latest manager, Vegas-hard-and-slick Frank Casone, who hung the giant electric Jerry Lee over the club to usher in the tourists. It had blazing yellow hair and blinking neon fingers and looked just like him, people said, a Jerry Lee you could see from space. He swaggered out onstage as if against a crosswind, listing a little, and as he approached the piano, he located a petite blonde beauty standing with her girlfriends near the stage.

  “He just picked me up—I didn’t weigh but ninety-eight pounds, soaking wet—and sat me down on the piano,” said Gail Francis, who had ventured bravely into downtown Memphis after dark to see the infamous Jerry Lee Lewis play real rock and roll. Her girlfriends were jealous.

  “I was a looker then,” she said.

  She remembers that he seemed very drunk or a little bit high or maybe both, but the mom
ent he reached the piano stool and stretched his fingers out to rest them on the keys, well, there was just something about it, something hard to explain after all this time, something sweet and sad but magic just the same.

  “He was mostly there in spirit,” she said.

  The place was jammed, she remembers, “mostly girls, and he sure had some admirers there,” she said. She cannot remember everything he played and sang, but remembers singing along to “Great Balls of Fire.”

  “It was exciting. It was fun, sitting on that piano. I know I’ll never forget that.”

  But mostly, she will never forget his face. “The look on his face . . . it was worth everything,” she said, worth the kidding she would take, worth the tiny scandal if her people ever found out. “He was happy. You could see it. You could tell he loved it, tell that he just loved being there.”

  He was still big in Memphis, would always be big in Memphis, and his fans there knew what he had endured and what he had lost. They thought he might be jaded by now, tired of the old hits that were only a reminder of how great he had been. They thought he might be sick of the endless road and constant newspaper stories of scandal and excess, sick of the eternal comeback, of every grubby little part of it. But the man Gail Francis saw in the Oriental that night was flying above all that, or maybe just flying, still desperately in love with the music. After the show, he invited her and some of the girls to a party with the band, and she said no, but a few girls said yes, they might.

  “She told me that story a million times,” said her daughter, Alicia. “She told me, ‘Jerry Lee Lewis lifted me up on his piano, and I just weighed ninety-eight pounds.’ A million times.”

  But even that neon glow winked out eventually. The man who couldn’t be handled had a falling out with Frank Casone, as with every manager he ever had, and of course lawyers were involved, and those days at the Oriental blended and blurred into a kind of lost decade. It is not that he did not sing and record good songs or that he slipped from sight; he only slipped, again, from fame.