Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  “I was shootin’ people’s caps off their heads,” he says.

  He is asked why.

  He just stares blankly.

  It was because he wanted to.

  “Anyway,” Jerry Lee says, “I didn’t know the bullets was going through the walls. Just went right on through.”

  The next day, his neighbor in the adjoining suite, a dental technician who fit and manufactured dentures, came to work to find twenty-five holes in the wall. Worse, a display case of dentures, some of them antiques, had been shot into scattered false teeth and shards of pink porcelain gums.

  “He was very upset about that,” says Jerry Lee.

  The man stormed over and told Jerry Lee he had shot his teeth off the wall.

  It took Jerry Lee, who was hungover, a minute to process.

  “What do you mean, I shot your teeth off the wall?”

  He was relieved to realize they were not actually in someone’s mouth.

  “I’ve had these teeth for forty years,” the man said.

  There was great shouting and threats, and the police were summoned.

  “I just got in my car and left,” Jerry Lee says.

  The police needed to arrest someone. They waited for someone, anyone, to approach the door of Jerry Lee Lewis Enterprises. “Elmer Fudpucker drove up,” said Jerry Lee, “so they took him to jail.”

  Elvis was also prone to shoot things in his seclusion. He shot at least one television, which went on display at Graceland. He was rumored to have shot more than one, but that would have made him a serial killer, so hard evidence of that, in his more carefully manicured image, is scarce. If Jerry Lee had shot a bunch of televisions, they would have piled them up and hung a sign on them that read THE KILLER WAS HERE!

  Jerry Lee says now Elvis was just being a copycat.

  “I started shootin’ things, so Elvis got out his gun and started shootin’ things.”

  Well I know I’ve earned my reputation

  Can’t they see I’ve found my salvation?

  I guess they’d rather prove me wrong

  My life would make a damn good country song

  Again as his life got wilder, his time in the studio went dry. The old honky-tonk formula had worn itself thin, and country radio had gotten sweeter, and even when he found himself a damn good country song, it was only a marginal hit.

  “You can only have so many hit records, and record so many, and do ’em different every time, every time, every time, you know?” he says. But he was still Jerry Lee Lewis, and he still did what he wanted. The euphemism muthahumper had begun creeping into the lyrics of his songs—a rare concession for the most dangerous man in rock and roll. His performances and even studio recordings were marked by a rotating repertoire of catchphrases and mannerisms:

  Think about it

  God almighty knows

  I guarantee it

  This is J-L-L, and I’m hell when I’m well

  And always, always, his name, Jerry Lee, inserted wherever the lyric called for “me,” or even where it didn’t.

  He tried what he could to personalize the endless parade of country songs. One day he decided to play the piano from the inside. “One record I had out, I said, ‘I wanna try somethin’ here.’ I reached inside the piano, and kinda moved the quilt back a little bit”—he laughs—“and I took my hand, and I said, ‘Let’s take a take,’ and I said, “‘I wanna hear this. I wanna kick it off with my fingernail right down the strings.’” It did not make music history. Another time, as a lark, he cut a bluesy parody of “Great Balls of Fire,” singing the words slow and low. “I was jus’ cuttin’ up on that. Jerry Kennedy . . . he never said a word. He just cut it. I was havin’ a ball! But even the musicians was lookin’ at me kinda weird.”

  The harder he tried to find a hit, it seemed, the more complicated—and less like him—the music became. The new music had a sophisticated, almost Hollywood sound, a style called countrypolitan that had put Charlie Rich back on the charts. Hard country like Jerry Lee’s style was vanishing in a wash of saccharine strings, or so it seemed; the spontaneity of his recordings, the perfect imperfection Sam Phillips had sought, was being polished out by multitrack recording and overdubbing. He hated to sing in a booth over one of his own prerecorded backing tracks, but it was becoming routine.

  In February of ’76 he had surgery to correct damage to his sinuses, the result of that broken nose. He believes his voice was never affected by the damage, that his body was fine and his hands were still “perfect.” He was not like other men. By now he had been recording music for almost two decades and was still viable, still spending the money he earned from his dream; few could say that, and even fewer could say they had been there for the very beginning of something and were still recording and playing it two decades later in anything more than nostalgia shows.

  He found a kind of second residence at 6907 Lankershim Boulevard, at the Palomino Club in the San Fernando Valley. He had been playing the storied Palomino almost from the nightclub’s first days, watching as the onetime neighborhood bar grew into a hot spot for country, country-rock, and good music in general, on the West Coast and in the nation as a whole. It had been a destination for Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson; Patsy Cline did “Crazy” here, Buck Owens did “Love’s Gonna Live Here,” and Jerry Jeff Walker sang “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris stopped hearts here, and George Harrison jammed with Bob Dylan and Taj Mahal. It was a place where patrons could come in from the harsh California daylight and sip a beer in the cool dark as the musicians—famous and more obscure—played, rehearsed, or just jammed. Patrons wandered backstage for autographs. In its layout in the early 1970s, it could hold more than four hundred people. Jerry Lee packed the place and would play the Palomino at least once a year for three decades. He loved it.

  “Come out of there,” he says, “with more money than we could tote. And they got their money’s worth.”

  He played what he wanted when he wanted, but in ’76 he played little of it cold sober. His shows achieved a level of wildness perhaps unequaled in his career—so much so that it nearly got in the way of the music.

  One such performance from the Palomino was captured in All You Need Is Love: The Story of Popular Music, a seventeen-part television documentary chronicling performers as diverse as Bing Crosby and Bo Diddley. The filmmakers caught Jerry Lee in a kind of red-faced frenzy, standing on the keyboard in white loafers, keeping time by banging the fall board against the cabinet. It is not exactly anything new, any of it, but it seems uncontrolled and a bit joyless compared to some of his wild shows of the near and distant past. He wanders around the stage, shirt unbuttoned and tied at his waist, crashing through a rendition of “Shakin’” in which it’s hard to make out what he is saying; he stares briefly off into space, then sticks his face close to the camera, nose still swollen, and announces:

  You know what I mean. . . .

  And I’m lookin’ at every good-lookin’ thang in America right now. . . .

  Meat Man! You know what I am. . . .

  He doesn’t seem to notice the audience. Some called it one of his wildest performances; to others it seemed bleak, and a foreshadowing of darker things.

  Celebrities still came to the Palomino every night then. One night, Phoebe came backstage to see her daddy. “She was pretty young at the time. And she come back cryin’, you know? And I said, ‘What’s wrong with you, girl?’

  “Do you know who’s standin’ in line out there to get your autograph?” she asked.

  “I have no idea, baby. There’s usually somebody standing in line to get it.”

  “She started callin’ off their names. She said, ‘Keith . . . Ronnie . . .’”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “The Rolling Stones. They come around and see me quite often.”

  “That,” he says now, “was when they were the hottest thing in the country.”

  The Stones saw in Jerry Lee the same trailblazer that J
ohn Lennon had. But Jerry Lee connected somehow with the Stones, who lived the rock-and-roll life full tilt—but who always, first and foremost, played the music. They took old blues and introduced it to a whole new generation, as he had done with so many genres.

  “We had some great times,” he says. “I used to flip a bottle of Crown Royal, flip it and catch it. Well, Keith then started doin’ it. They must have dropped fifteen bottles of Crown Royal whiskey—the best whiskey—lost it all! Busted all to pieces, you know? And they’d just reach to get another one. It was a trip! I laughed. I said, ‘Don’t do that no more. You’re wastin’ that whiskey.’”

  Again he told people to do as he said, not as he’d done.

  “I worried about ’em. I warned them. I talked to ’em. Just like I did John Belushi.”

  Belushi was another regular, a fan of Jerry Lee and already well on his way to the addictions that would kill him.

  “I could see he really wasn’t payin’ that much attention to what I thought was right and wrong. He was just like me; you wasn’t goin’ to tell him what to do. He was dead set in his ways. . . . He liked what he was doin’, and you wasn’t going to stop him from doin’ it.”

  In September of ’76, probably not long after that Palomino performance, Jerry Lee was celebrating his forty-first birthday at the house he had purchased for Jaren in Collierville. They were still married, though Jaren had twice filed for separate maintenance so that she could remain married to Jerry Lee without actually living with him.

  Butch Owens, his bass player, arrived with a friend, Dagwood Mann.

  “Was there drinking going on?” says Jerry Lee. “Unconsolable drinking.”

  Dagwood Mann pulled out a big .357 and handed it to Jerry Lee.

  “Careful,” he said. “It’s got a hair trigger.”

  “Whaddaya mean, a hair trigger?” Jerry Lee said, and laughed, pretending to look for a hair on it.

  “It went off,” says Jerry Lee. “It hit a Coke bottle, and that Coke bottle flew into a thousand pieces.”

  “I-I-I-I been shot,” screamed Butch Owens.

  “It appears to be that way, Butch,” Jerry Lee said, too drunk to be overly concerned.

  “Why?” asked Butch.

  “ ’Cause you appear to be sittin’ in the wrong spot,” said Jerry Lee.

  For reasons that only very drunk men could comprehend, the revolver was cocked when Dagwood Mann handed it to Jerry Lee. Jerry Lee still does not know exactly how it happened.

  He will not even admit that he shot the man, not with a bullet, anyway. “I believe it was a piece of the Coke bottle that went into Butch,” says Jerry Lee. “He stuttered a lot when it happened, whatever it was.”

  Jerry Lee was charged with discharging a firearm within the city limits, but the shooting was, in criminal terms, judged to be accidental. But Butch Owens sued Jerry Lee for $50,000 and won, claiming that just before he was shot, Jerry Lee told him, “Butch, look down the barrel of this,” and then aimed at the Coke bottle next to him. As he lay there bleeding, Jaren yelled at him for ruining her white shag carpet.

  “I just know it took him a couple days to talk right,” says Jerry Lee.

  He was being sued by everybody, for broken contracts and such. Jaren had lawyers after him, to pay her for not being his wife and not being divorced from him either, which was a whole new level of marital hell he had not even known existed. In Memphis, people talked bad about him, and talk bad about him today, how he let his wife and daughter live on welfare, how he ignored their needs while he partied the night away at Hernando’s and Bad Bob’s. In the clubs, it seemed like even cocktail waitresses were waiting to pick fights with him, then send in their lawyers to collect. The airports wouldn’t sell him fuel for his plane unless he paid in hundred-dollar bills. Band mates quit him and sued him for back wages. Myra sent lawyers for not meeting the commitments of their divorce. He had to keep a close eye on Elmo, who had somehow gotten himself married during all this. At the Denver airport, drug agents in black Ninja outfits stormed his plane, and their hellhounds sniffed out every pill in the fuselage. He was interrogated about an international drug cartel, which was preposterous, as trying to hide drugs on Jerry Lee’s plane would be like trying to hide a pullet in a chicken house; drugs spilled from the seat cushions.

  One night, going home to Nesbit in his white Rolls, feeling no pain, he felt the liquor run warm through his blood. He had never seen anything wrong with going out and driving off a good drunk. The exits whizzed past him like fence posts, and as he pulled off the highway on his exit he noticed a long line of trucks in front of him. “I’d pulled into the weigh station,” he said. “People were looking at me, all them guys in their big trucks, like I was crazy.” He pulled onto the scales and waved.

  His physical health continued to deteriorate, but again it did not show that much on the outside. The whiskey and chemicals had eaten a hole in his stomach, and it burned night and day, but he medicated himself and went on. By the fall of ’76, it seemed like the only person who halfway understood him was his old buddy Elvis. They had seen each other off and on over the years, but Elvis had withdrawn from everyone lately. His weight had ballooned. “He had got big, boy, real big,” said Jerry Lee, and Elvis was ashamed of that. Instead of going out, like Jerry Lee did, he hid in his mansion, eating pills. The music had saved both of them, and now fame was doing its best to kill them both. The larger, pill-ravaged Elvis slowly devoured the slim, pretty boy, and in ’76 he watched the outside world pass on the gray blacktop on the black-and-white screen of his closed-circuit televisions. They didn’t see each other in those days but talked on the telephone, mostly about times different from these.

  Jerry Lee was a little weary of the way their legends had diverged. Elvis’s legacy had been carefully groomed and handled, and little ol’ ladies prayed for him and bought clocks with his face inside the glass, while Jerry Lee’s legend had run amok, a tale of crashed cars, pills, liquor, gunfire, divorce, lawsuits, and sexual profligacy. They had both loved their mamas.

  On Monday, November 22, 1976, during one of the many reconciliations—or cease-fires—with Jaren, Jerry and his still-wife were speeding through Collierville in his Rolls-Royce when somehow he managed to turn it upside down. They were not badly hurt, but Jerry Lee was charged with driving while intoxicated and reckless driving, though the Breathalyzer would show that whatever was wrong with Jerry Lee’s faculties that day, alcohol was not involved. He was arrested and bailed out later that day, and when reporters approached him, he lashed out. He wanted to know why the press always hovered around him in the worst of times, while they always gave Elvis a pass. “Y’all hate my guts or something,” he told the Commercial Appeal. “I’m no angel, of course, but I’m a pretty nice guy.”

  The Rolls was pretty well finished. He bought a brand-new white Lincoln Continental. He had always liked a good Lincoln.

  The next day, Elvis called him.

  “Come out to the house,” he told Jerry Lee.

  Jerry Lee said he would if he had time. Elmo had managed to get himself arrested for driving drunk in Tunica, and that would require some straightening out. Later that night, Jerry Lee went looking for a drink himself, at the second-swankiest nightclub in Memphis, and for some reason he settled on champagne. He never did have much luck with champagne.

  Walk on, Killer

  “I was at the Vapors nightclub that evenin’,” he says. There the owner of the club had given him, as a gift, a brand-new over-and-under pocket pistol, loaded of course. “Charles Feron, he owned Vapors, he give it to me. A .38 derringer.” He spent the night drinking champagne, playing with the gun, watching pretty women, and talking to old friends. Midnight came and vanished in a fog.

  Finally, unsteadily, he stood and announced that, sorry, boys, but he had to go to the house.

  “Me, pretty well drunk, with that derringer—it ain’t somethin’ strange.”

  He knew he had something to do on the way home—oh, yeah. He ha
d to stop off by Graceland, “ ’cause Elvis called and wanted me to. Elvis called me. It was his idea for me to come over,” he says. “I was coming to see him, answering his beck and call.”

  He took the derringer with him, and a mostly full bottle of champagne.

  As he got in the car, Feron told him not to put the gun in the Continental’s glove compartment, because he could be charged, if he was pulled over, with carrying a concealed weapon. So Jerry Lee just put the loaded pistol on the dash, in front of God and everybody, and—holding the champagne bottle by the neck—drove off toward Graceland. He didn’t bring the cork; it was a bottle without a future.

  Just before three o’clock in the morning on the twenty-third of November 1976, the long white Lincoln Continental thundered down Elvis Presley Boulevard, weaving between the lines.

  He was not angry at Elvis, he says now. He was not eaten up with jealousy. What he did feel, and had always felt, was disappointment at the way Elvis, who should have fought him to the death for the crown, had been managed by Colonel Tom Parker into such a sorry state, into a paunchy semirecluse behind locked gates. “He didn’t go nowhere,” he says. “He didn’t see people.”

  As he slalomed around the white lines in the Memphis dark, he remembered better days. Once, in 1957, Elvis had pointed him out to George Klein, a friend and Memphis DJ.

  “He said, ‘Take a good look, boys, ’cause there goes the most talented human being to walk the face of God’s earth.’ Elvis just had a strange way, is all.”

  Elvis had only ever said one mean thing to him, back when they were both playing Vegas. In the only real argument he could recall, Jerry Lee had called him Colonel Parker’s puppet.

  If Jerry Lee was so smart, Elvis reportedly responded, how come Elvis was playing the big room, and Jerry Lee was playing the lounge?

  But Jerry Lee wasn’t thinking about that, not now. “We was just two kids when we got started. Cars, motorcycles, women . . .” The world belonged to them both then, and they had lived as if in some shared dream.