Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  Harold Loyd, a cousin Elvis had hired to man the gate at Graceland, watched the big car, brand-new and gleaming, whip into the driveway, tires squealing, and rumble toward the gate. It did not seem to be slowing down. To him, it looked like the driver—he did not yet know who it was—was trying to ram through the gates of Graceland. The big white Lincoln just kept coming. Finally the driver hit the brakes, but too late. The car slammed into the iron gates, and rocked back on its springs.

  “I hit the gate,” he says now, nodding. “The nose of that Lincoln was a mile long.” He misjudged it. “ ’Cause I’s drunk.” He did not mean to ram those famous gates, with their wrought-iron music notes.

  The champagne was empty. Disgusted, he drew back the empty bottle and hurled it through the window of the Lincoln. Or at least he meant to.

  “I thought the window was down. It broke the bottle and the window,” showered him in broken glass, and cut a gash across the bridge of his nose.

  “I don’t know what the problem was, except I was drunk.”

  Jerry Lee stepped from the car, wearing a Western vest and no shirt underneath.

  “I’m here to see Elvis,” he announced.

  He remembers wobbling.

  “Boy,” he says, “I was drunk.”

  Loyd was so frightened he hid in the guard shack.

  Other accounts would claim that Jerry Lee stepped from the car brandishing a small pistol, saying he was going to see Elvis or else, even implying that he intended to do Elvis harm. “That is ridiculous,” Jerry Lee says, and patently so; if he had planned to ram through the gates of Graceland and shoot Elvis, he would have done a much better job than this. He never brandished “nothin’,” he says. The derringer he had placed on the dashboard had slipped onto the floorboard; he never pointed it at anyone, he says.

  The idea that he brought the gun there to shoot Elvis is not even worth talking about, he says. It makes a good story, but a better lie. “I really didn’t mean to do nothin’ to harm Elvis. He was my friend. I was his.”

  But Elvis, watching on the closed-circuit television, told the guards by phone to call the police. The Memphis police found the gun in the car and put Jerry Lee, protesting, hollering, threatening them, away in handcuffs. He was mad then.

  “The cops asked Elvis, ‘What do you want us to do? And Elvis told ’em, ‘Lock him up.’ That hurt my feelings. To be scared of me—knowin’ me the way he did—was ridiculous.

  “He was a coward. He hurt me. That did.”

  He was charged with carrying a pistol and public drunkenness, and released on a $250 bond. When he failed to show for his hearing the next day, a Memphis judge ordered that he be arrested again, but rescinded that order when it was learned that Jerry Lee was in the hospital. The burning in his stomach had been a peptic ulcer, the first proof of a sickness that would almost kill him.

  Elvis never commented publicly, and the story would not die. It became fable, told by Graceland tour guides even today. The fact still grates on him.

  “I don’t know . . . everybody got carried away with that,” he says. “They wanted a big story out of that. They wanted to know the real truth about it.” And, as the years went on, the constant demands to retell the story wore on him—so much so that he couldn’t stand to tell it straight. “I’d get up to a certain extent, [then] I’d say, ‘Aw, I just can’t tell no more. That’s as far as I go.’

  “I had thought one day we’d get a laugh out of all of it.” But it wasn’t to be. “I never seen him after that,” says Jerry Lee.

  The studio was a desert, still. It had been since ’73. He cut songs that sounded bad even on the naked page, like “I Can Still Hear the Music in the Restroom,” and other songs that seemed like commentary on his increasingly embittered life, like “Thanks for Nothing” and “I Hate You,” and even self-pitying songs like “Lord, What’s Left for Me to Do?” His voice did not quite sound like him anymore, a bit more faded and hoarse. He was still in demand on television; he still put on his tuxedos of almost every possible color and climbed the piano. But in one appearance on The Midnight Special, two weeks before Graceland, he had gone silent after the monologue in “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and just stared off into space for a full ten seconds of airtime, as though savoring the moment. It was as if he knew the times were catching up with him. He says he cannot possibly remember every moment onstage, says that people just try to read too much into things, but it had been a while “since we had a big record.”

  He was all but done with Mercury, anyway. His contract would be up soon, but in August 1977 he went back into the studio one more time, and this time he found himself cutting a hit. It was a song called “Middle Age Crazy” by a veteran songwriter from Carlsbad, New Mexico, named Sonny Throckmorton. It was a song about a man trying to stay young forever.

  Today, he traded his big ninety-eight Oldsmobile

  He got a heck of a deal

  On a new Porsche car

  “That was our last big hit,” Jerry Lee says. “No piano at all on that,” or not his piano, anyway. “That’s something Jerry Kennedy wanted to prove he could do.” Kennedy gave Jerry Lee an acetate with the complete backing track—strings, rhythm, and a host of guitars he’d overdubbed himself. “The voices and everything, except mine. And I brought it home and played it, and I played it, and I learned it. . . . And I went up there into Nashville, and he set up everything, and I walked up to the microphone, took one take on it, and that was it.”

  It was not what he remembered recording a song to be.

  The relationship with Mercury had grown thankless, each side wary of the other. “Seemed like I was doin’ the same thing over and over and over. . . . They tried to get me to quit working the road. They said, ‘Stay home, and you’ll be making all the money you can make. Take care of your body.’ But I said, ‘I can’t. I just can’t.’ I couldn’t take it, not bein’ on the road. I had to be in front of my audience. Besides, no one told me what to do. Bull, trying to tell me what to do.”

  Still, today he has second thoughts about the whole thing.

  “I just got so tired of it, I left Mercury. I just bidded them good-bye. Tired, y’know?” But that was a “bad mistake,” he says now, with a laugh. “I should have never left Jerry Kennedy. I should have never left Mercury Records. ’Cause they were too good to me.” It is another rare expression of regret, but he concedes that he would probably make the same choice if he had it to do over, because he’s still Jerry Lee Lewis.

  He still had the urge to cut quality music. At some point he and Mack Vickery went back to Memphis to collaborate on a kind of tribute to Stephen Foster, whose music he had learned on his old piano at Black River. Foster, who died in 1864, is known as the father of American music, with songs like “Camptown Races,” “Oh, Susanna,” and “Beautiful Dreamer.” His songs were played as the citizens of New York rioted in the streets over conscription for the Civil War, were sung in barrooms in the Old West, and are sung today in grammar schools. Jerry Lee felt a kinship with the man: like him, Foster had forged white and black American music into a new kind of sound, almost a hundred years before rock and roll. Jerry Lee and Mack met Sam Phillips’s son, Knox, at the Madison Avenue studio and recorded hours of material, including a version of “Beautiful Dreamer” that opened with a long monologue about the importance of Foster’s music.

  And no one heard any of it, or at least only a handful of people did.

  His cousins, meanwhile, were conquering the charts. Jimmy Swaggart was selling millions of gospel albums while asking people to kneel in their living rooms and pray before the TV, and little cousin Mickey Gilley had used the same rolling, thumping country boogie to blow away the competition on the country charts. In the year 1974 alone, he had three number one country hits, including “Room Full of Roses,” “City Lights,” and “I Overlooked an Orchid.” People said he sounded a lot like Jerry Lee, but then, who else would he sound like? The music was in the dirt they had all walked on. He says
now that he was happy for them. “They were family,” he says. But at the time, it seemed like they were stealing his act. He would hit a piano lick and shout out, “Think about it, Jimmy!” or “Think about it, Mickey!”

  “Neither one of them could touch me,” he says.

  On August 16, 1977, nine months after he charged the gates of Graceland, three weeks after he cut “Middle Age Crazy,” Jerry Lee woke up to find that Elvis Presley had died. The death, by what the coroner called cardiac arrhythmia, had left Elvis on his bathroom floor, his bloodstream polluted by prescription pills and his heart stressed by his weight. He was so beloved that many people would simply refuse to believe he was dead, and the public would invent sightings, till even the dead Elvis took on a celebrity of its own.

  The next day, a reporter asked Jerry Lee what he thought when he heard the news.

  “I was glad,” he reportedly said. “Just another one out of the way. I mean, Elvis this, Elvis that. All we hear is Elvis. What the shit did Elvis do except take dope I couldn’t get ahold of?”

  He was drunk at the time, and sick, and hurting, and angry.

  He did not mean those words.

  “I loved Elvis,” he says now.

  Everybody loved him, didn’t they?

  He does not believe Elvis is alive; that stuff is for tourists. But he is haunted, a little bit.

  “I don’t know what was on his mind,” he said of that night Elvis called and asked him to come see him, “but he had something on his mind. But I hit that gate, boy . . . ,” and the police came, and so he will never know. Some would say Jerry Lee wanted to be him, to crash the gates and seize the castle, but that was wrong. They were too different, he says, and wanted different things from their lives. . . . Sometimes it seems like all there ever was, between him and Elvis, is unanswered questions.

  “I think of him,” he says now, “quite a bit.”

  But he does not like to think of that night.

  In late ’77, he made a solemn and sober-seeming appearance on Nashville Remembers Elvis, a television special, singing “Me and Bobby McGee” and “You Win Again,” which seemed a mournful, rueful tribute to Elvis from his most persistent rival. The year before, he had told a camera crew that Elvis had failed rock and roll, that “he let the Bobbys take it, Bobby Vinton, Bobby Darin, all the Bobbys,” and they turned it into treacle. “I think he let us down,” he still says now, though with less scorn than sorrow.

  Once upon a time, he knows, “Elvis was a rocker. Oh, yeah.”

  A great singer? Of course. And “a great star.”

  Jerry Lee? He was a better pure musician than Elvis, truer to the spirit of rock and roll, and both of them knew it.

  Where do they rank in the pantheon of the music?

  “After me was Elvis,” he says, and that will make some people angry, those who followed this music and those who still wait for Elvis to reappear in line at Walmart or behind a newspaper at Waffle House. But if you know how Jerry Lee Lewis looks at the world and his place in it, then you know he has paid his old friend a great compliment.

  14

  “BABIES IN THE AIR”

  Memphis and Nashville

  1979

  “A woman looked at my hands once,” he says.

  “I’m surprised,” she said to him, “they’re not bigger.”

  “No,” he told her, “but they’re perfect.”

  People forgave him the braggadocio, the excesses, the indulgences and wickedness, forgave him everything just to hear him use those hands. The oldest and truest fans thought he had earned it; the new ones, seeing him play on television or nostalgia shows or sold-out arenas in far-off lands, some for the first time, were dumbfounded. In an age of machined music, of sound effects, this was what it was supposed to be. Guitar buffs said the same thing when they saw Stevie Ray Vaughan pick his Stratocaster—that it was so much more than music. Jerry Lee’s fans did not have to proclaim him to be anything; if they waited long enough, he would do it for them. They knew that the rest of it was just showing off, the way he played with his feet, his elbows—even his behind. (“You can do it,” Jerry Lee says, “but you have to have a perfect one.”)

  But as his hands flew across the keys in ’79, the corrosion was starting to show. The maintenance he had refused to do on his life—the maintenance mortal people did on their bodies and their money and their future—had long been neglected, and now it was beginning to eat through the indestructible exterior, through the very flesh and personality, of the man.

  He was not making much new money, and now he found himself in hock to the United States government. He owed the tax man at least a million dollars, the government said. Internal Revenue came for it the first time in January of ’79, raiding the Nesbit ranch as if he was some kind of subversive, then held an auction in Memphis to liquidate his treasure. The United States Treasury had little need for a tractor that once belonged to Jerry Lee Lewis. On the block that day was a 1935 Ford two-door sedan, a ’41 Ford convertible, drop-top Cadillacs, other luxury cars, motorcycles, televisions, gold and diamond rings, gold coins, pianos and other musical instruments, and what federal agents described as an arsenal of modern and antique firearms. Agents also found $31,000 in cash in one bathroom, in a brown paper grocery bag. Jerry Lee did not trust banks much and had rarely had a checking account.

  “I think they’re pretty cruel people, to take your cars,” he says.

  From the beginning, he said that any allegations of tax fraud were flat untrue. His bookkeeping had been, for decades, less than perfect, “but I paid my taxes,” he says. And if he was short, over the years, he made it right. “They said I owed something, I paid it, and I wiped the slate clean.” But the IRS said he owed more, more than he could pay.

  “They was gonna send me up the river.”

  He needed a big hit now, a moneymaker, more than ever, at least since his breakthrough record. “And Jerry Lee Lewis don’t know the meaning of the word defeat,” he says now. After his tenure at Mercury was done, he signed with another label, Elektra, and went back, for a while at least, to doing the kind of music he wanted to record, music without a phalanx of violins and a landslide of overproduction. In a few days’ worth of sessions in January 1979, he cut his most recent in a growing list of anthems, a Mack Vickery song called “Rockin’ My Life Away.” While his voice was showing its scars and the words were frequently obscure, Jerry Lee delivered them with commitment, and the beat was pure Louisiana boogie-woogie.

  His new producer at Elektra, Bones Howe, had worked on Elvis’s celebrated 1968 comeback special, and he was sympathetic to Jerry Lee’s mind-set. Together they stripped his band down to something closer to what he used on the road, and the little group romped its way through Bob Dylan’s “Rita May” and Sonny Throckmorton’s “I Wish I Was Eighteen Again” and Arthur Alexander’s “Every Day I Have to Cry,” in which he pushed on past the original lyrics and made up some new lyrics of his own about the life he lived and the women he had loved, some longer than others:

  Once there was Dorothy, and then came Jane

  Look out Myra—you look insane

  Come on Jaren, you struttin’ your stuff

  I think I’ll take Punkin, ’cause I can’t get enough

  (Punkin was a longtime girlfriend)

  I wanna thank you very much for lis’nin’ to me

  ’Cause brother, let me tell you something—I really need it

  Come on, girls, I’m a single man again

  I’m really waitin’, waitin’, waitin’ just to hang it in

  That spring, for the first time since he’d started popping little white pills in the Wagon Wheel a quarter century before, his body rebelled against the chemicals he had fed it. One morning in March, he woke up at home to find he could not catch his breath. The ambulance rushed him to the hospital, in what the doctors would call respiratory distress.

  If it was a warning, he ignored it. He continued to party hard, playing at night, traveling in the day. Tw
o months after his short hospital stay, he appeared on the Country Music Awards telecast, throwing the cover off “Rockin’ My Life Away,” his piano outrunning an overmatched studio orchestra. “Me and Elvis Presley never won an award,” he told the audience, “but we know who the kings of rock and roll are.” Some who watched the performance said he appeared fairly well drunk, that he treated the entire performance with the boozy disregard of a night at Bad Bob’s. He says only that he cannot be expected to recall every show or every night he had a drink of liquor.

  In the spring of 1979, he finally filed for divorce from Jaren Pate, pointing out that they had not lived together as husband and wife since October 21, 1971. She countersued, accusing him of years of cruelty and drunkenness, and they awaited a court date to end the marriage that never was.

  In the last days of his great country stardom—and of the dwindling wealth it had engendered—he and Elmo raved across the country. His mama and sons had perished, the troubadours he cherished had all gone silent, but Elmo was forever. If ever a man was born to live in the rock-and-roll dream, to eat it with a spoon, it was his ol’ daddy. He was not the fierce man he once was, not indestructible; age had stooped him some, till he looked downright kindly. But he would still fight you, and more than one drunk nitwit regretted saying something ugly to him about his boy. He walked the runways of the world with a glass of whiskey in his hand, smiling, ever smiling. He even charmed the pretty girls, in a kindly way, or so it seemed; the old bull still had some horn on him right up until the end. Then he would go home to Ferriday to farm, to walk the dirt that his son’s music had bought for him and drive his tractor around in circles, sometimes mildly intoxicated, and when he grew tired of it, he called his boy, and the next time you saw Elmo, he would again have a glass in his hand, a smile on his face, and one ill-intentioned eye on the women. It pleased Jerry Lee to see his daddy living out this life—a form of payment, somehow, for the snakes he killed and the love he gave his boy.