Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  When the organizers started planning the gala, a year before the event, they had wondered who would accept the award for Jerry Lee Lewis, certain that there was no way he could rise one more time. The musicians in the room had last seen him in hospital beds or too sick to stand; others had seen the headlines, the death watches. It had seemed only a matter of time until he joined the ones who fell from the sky or swallowed down their own destruction.

  Keith Richards swayed to the stage and stripped off his black tuxedo coat to reveal a yellow faux-leopard-skin jacket, to wild applause, looking a little surprised, as if he had just been roused from a good nap. “It’s very difficult for me to talk about Chuck Berry because I lifted every lick he ever played. . . . This is the gentleman that started it all, as far as I’m concerned.” The house band—Paul Shaffer and his band from Late Night with David Letterman—ripped into “Johnny B. Goode,” and Berry, still spry, duckwalked onto the stage. Richards, once punched in the eye by Berry at a rehearsal, hugged him and handed him his statue.

  “Dyn-o-mite!” Berry said, and they danced offstage together.

  John Fogerty then spoke eloquently of the never-ending cycle of rock and roll and how a riff from Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ “That’ll Be the Day” would echo in the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and later in his own music. “All of us,” Fogerty told the crowd, “are made up of the people we love and we admire. We take those reflections, and hopefully grow from those. I think that’s why we’re here, in all ten cases tonight.” Accepting for Buddy was his widow, Maria Elena, whom Buddy had loved so strongly that one night he called Jerry Lee to ask if he should marry her.

  Ray Charles, whose “What I’d Say” had been a hit for Jerry Lee in the lean years, stared into the darkness of the ballroom, and heard nothing but love. Little Richard was unable to accept the award in person, because of a car accident, but he wasn’t too far gone to deliver one great “whooooooooooooooo!” via videotape. The Hall honored Robert Johnson, who shed his soul on Highway 61, the same road that took Jerry Lee to stardom, and the great stylist Jimmie Rodgers, who sang inside Elmo’s head in the prison in New Orleans. Sam Phillips, whose induction was a foregone conclusion, whose ear for talent had affected an entire society, received his due, as did the late Alan Freed, who had slumped down on that curb years ago to await word that Elmo Lewis had cut Chuck Berry’s throat. Every award, every halting induction speech, every great song the house band played seemed to be mirroring a part of Jerry Lee Lewis’s turbulent life, as if he were the frayed, tight, and trembling string that bound all this history together on a cold night in New York City. For almost every story told that night, he had seen another, better one, one they wouldn’t have wanted their wives to know.

  Hank Williams Jr. waited backstage under a camel-colored Stetson. He, too, had a long, strong thread binding him to Jerry Lee. Years before, when he’d first heard Jerry Lee’s recording of his daddy’s “You Win Again,” Hank Jr. had felt his heart break, and he had called to tell him so. “You know I love my daddy,” he said, “but that’s the best I’d ever heard it done.” Now it was Hank’s boy who walked into the spotlight to speak of Jerry Lee.

  “He could tear an audience apart,” he said, “I’m talkin’ tear them out of their frame and throw babies in the air when he got through. I saw this guy, I said, ‘I have got to get some piano lessons.’ I respect music and musicians for how good it is, not for the label that it has on it. Jimmie Rodgers is going in. I would imagine that Hank Williams, with his wiggling around in ‘Lovesick Blues’ in ’50 and ’51, might be in this Hall of Fame someday.” He was, the following year.

  “So let’s get to the matter at hand. I’d like to bring up and induct into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, on all of y’all’s behalf, the Killer, Jerry Lee Lewis,” and the crowd clapped and whistled and roared as a saxophone howled “Great Balls of Fire.”

  He walked out in a white tuxedo trimmed in purple, with a ruffled purple shirt. He was wasted away now, perhaps worse than ever—the flesh hung loosely on the bones in his face—but his hair was still perfect. He looked like a man who had walked through a fire and been put out just in time. He kissed Hank Jr. on the cheek. “I just don’t know what to say, except I thank God that I’m living to be here to get this award. I love you people. I need you. Couldn’t do it without you. . . . I don’t know what else to say, except may God richly bless each and every one of you. . . . Thank you very much.” And he left the stage smiling, to more wild applause.

  Paul Shaffer told Rolling Stone there was no plan to have Jerry Lee and others play, though “we brought in instruments just in case.” But by midnight an all-star band was jamming onstage, led by Jerry Lee, Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, Neil Young, Ron Wood, Billy Joel, Steve Winwood, and others. The crowd roared when John Fogerty hit the first few chords of “Proud Mary,” surprising the music-savvy people in the Waldorf ballroom. He had not played the song in public since ’72. But this was a historic evening, and it deserved something special.

  Fats Domino hit a lick or two on the piano for old time’s sake, but it was clearly Jerry Lee’s and Chuck’s show, even when they were playing Chuck’s music. They played “Roll Over Beethoven,” and “Johnny B. Goode” and “Little Queenie,” and Jerry Lee slowed it down for what the critics called a “delicious” version of Jimmie Rodgers’s “Blue Yodel.” But perhaps the jewel of the night was “Reelin’ and Rockin’,” as almost everybody on the crowded stage—Billy Joel almost sawed an organ in two—got to show off a little bit, none so much as Chuck and Jerry Lee, who seemed to think it was 1957 all over again. Berry, his voice not as clear and strong as it used to be, still shouted the glory of rock and roll like a man who knew.

  I looked at my watch and it was quarter to four

  She said she didn’t but she wanted some more

  “I heard that,” shouted Jerry Lee.

  Chuck pointed at Jerry Lee to take it.

  And he sang:

  I looked at my watch and it was three twenty-five

  I said, “Come on, Chuck, are you dead or alive?”

  15

  THE FORK IN THE ROAD

  New Orleans

  1986

  The Airline Highway in New Orleans is not a place you meander through or go to sightsee. If you have no business there, then you have no business there. Prostitutes work some of the cheap hotels, and much darkness occurs here. In Room 7 at the sad Travel Inn, a variety of men came to visit with the woman there for an hour, a half hour, or so. One of the men was familiar, a tall, elegant man. He spoke from the sky itself and lived on the air. From a parked car nearby, his enemies took his picture to document his sin.

  For Jerry Lee and his cousin Jimmy, the road had forked long ago, way back in the gravel and ragweed and flattened bottle caps of Ferriday, as the blues called to them from a propped-open window on Fifth Street. Jerry Lee knew that much even as a little boy, as he tried to drag Jimmy by his overall strap into Haney’s Big House to hear it better. Sometimes he says he actually succeeded in getting him inside, for a very little while, but other times he says his cousin held strong, hands clasped in front of him. Jimmy would see it as a plain choice between heaven and hell, but little Jerry Lee had a different idea, and left Jimmy in the high Johnson grass to pray for his soul. Jimmy would backslide as a teenager, during the great scrap-iron heist of ’47, but he kept to his path, mostly, begging forgiveness, then marching onward. Jerry Lee sinned and prayed for forgiveness, too—not so different, when you think about it, except perhaps in the arithmetic—and danced and boogied down his own twisting fork, always hoping that in a faith founded on redemption, the two divergent paths might somehow lead to the same destination.

  “I think Jimmy saw me doin’ things that he couldn’t do,” says Jerry Lee.

  By the 1980s, Jimmy Swaggart was in a battle with the devil on many fronts. He led a national crusade against sexual immorality. He called rock and roll “the new pornography” and wrote a book calle
d Religious Rock & Roll: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, to condemn even Christian-themed rock music. He exposed and preached against fellow Assembly of God minister Marvin Gorman, who then admitted committing an immoral act with a woman who was not his wife. He led a purification of the denomination after televangelist Jim Bakker had an affair with a church secretary, Jessica Hahn, then used more than $250,000 of ministry money to cover it up. He called the scandal a “cancer that needed to be excised from the body of Christ.” He made himself the guardian of sexual morality, not only within the denomination but among all Christians and everyone else. He was already one of the most visible men in America. His church in Baton Rouge held 7,500 people for services, but his tearful sermons could also be seen in Africa and Central Asia, as satellites beamed his message out of the sky to 143 countries. He filled stadiums, and couldn’t walk across a parking lot without being handed a prayer request on a scrap of paper. His ministry sold Bibles with his name on the cover, and his untold followers defended him against all questions, all criticism, simply pointing to the multitudes he had helped bring to Christ.

  The big fish was still out there. He had preached of his cousin’s sin from the hood of a ’58 Oldsmobile, at tent revivals and big city cathedrals and finally from the heavens themselves. It seemed, at times, as if his great crusade would be incomplete until he turned this one final soul away from the devil’s music toward a place where God rewarded his faithful with everlasting life. His path of righteousness had led to Learjets and a wealth beyond even the standards of rock and roll, which allowed him to do God’s will in ever widening circles, but he could never reach quite far enough to bring his cousin to him, on his knees.

  “Jimmy called down here one time and got Kerrie,” says Jerry Lee, “and he said to her, ‘What’s this I hear about Jerry Lee having two and three or more women at once? Ain’t no way he can handle that.’ And Kerrie told him, ‘Believe me, he can handle it.’”

  His own life continued to sway between accolade and addiction, despite the precipice his drug use had carried him to, twice, three times. In June of that year, he won a Grammy, his first—a spoken-word Grammy, for the interviews he gave in support of Class of ’55—for telling the story of the very music his cousin had spent a lifetime condemning. In December he checked himself into the Betty Ford Center for treatment of an addiction that would not die. After a week, he walked out. You had to get up too early, and you had to do chores. “Don’t nobody tell me what to do,” he says.

  The choices Jerry Lee and Jimmy Lee had made in life were not so drastically different, he believes. “I never stopped prayin’,” he often says, even when it was a long-distance call. “I pray before I go to sleep. I bless my food. I pay my tithes. I think God takes that into account. I guess I have to wait and see.”

  On January 28, 1987, Jerry Lee Lewis III was born in Baptist Hospital in Memphis, at six pounds three ounces. His mother, Kerrie, was twenty-four. Jerry Lee was fifty-one. He was still battling the federal government, still being picked at by the IRS; he would spend much of his fifties waiting outside courtrooms or standing before judges and the lawyers for his creditors. But again, that seemed not to be real life to him; it seemed like something other people suffered. In July, a photograph in the Memphis Commercial Appeal captured him sitting on a bench beside Kerrie and the baby, whom they called Lee, waiting outside a Shelby County courtroom to testify in a real estate lawsuit. Jerry Lee looks skeletal yet buoyant, as if he had not a care in the world. Kerrie, dressed in a tight leopard-print pantsuit, is striking, her hair big and fluffy. She is feeding the fat, healthy baby from a bottle, and Jerry, beaming, is wiggling his finger in the baby’s face to make him smile.

  Jimmy Swaggart was rich and powerful; Jerry Lee Lewis was having a good time.

  “It just got to Jimmy, I believe.”

  The scandal broke in ’88. Jimmy Swaggart confessed that he went to the Travel Inn on the Airline Highway in New Orleans to consort with a prostitute, not to have sex with her but to watch her perform pornographic acts. He came to see her again and again. His visits might not have come to light if relatives of the preacher Marvin Gorman had not photographed him for revenge. The preacher’s son, Randy, and his son-in-law, Garland Bilbo, followed Swaggart around the city and photographed him entering and leaving the hotel room rented by a woman named Deborah Murphree.

  “He just weakened and fell,” says Jerry Lee. “I guess we all have our weak points.”

  More than eight thousand people crowded into Jimmy Swaggart’s Family Worship Center church in Baton Rouge for the Sunday service that followed the revelation. His response, through tears, has been referred to as the “I Have Sinned” confession. He apologized to his wife, Frances. “I have sinned against you,” he said, in a whisper. He apologized to his son, Donny, and to the Assemblies of God. “Most of all, to my Lord and my Savior, my Redeemer, the One whom I have served and I love and I worship . . . I have sinned against You, my Lord. And I would ask that Your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God’s forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me, anymore.” Many of the congregation wept before him. “The sin of which I speak is not a present sin,” he said, tears rolling like hot coins down his cheeks. “It is a past sin. I know that so many of you would ask, ‘Why? Why?’ I have asked myself that ten thousand times through ten thousand tears.”

  “Was I surprised?” said Jerry Lee. “Naw, I was never surprised.”

  It was never that one of them believed and the other didn’t, he said. They both believed.

  But there was always that one difference between them. “I never pretended to be nothin’,” he says. When he looked up and saw a .45 bullet resting on the lid of his piano, he knew exactly what he had done, though not always with whom, exactly. “But I knew.”

  But in the end, Jimmy was still family, bound not by paper but by blood.

  “Jimmy is a human being, too, and people need to remember that. They need to stop and think about that. He never had any close sex with that woman. He never crossed that fence. I think it was something he had to get out of his mind. But it ain’t nothin’ God can’t forgive you for.”

  Jimmy Swaggart’s following, his flock, not only returned, but swelled and swelled, as he became an independent, nondenominational minister, preaching to untold millions. “They just got in line and followed him,” says Jerry Lee.

  To rise from ashes, like the music, was also in the blood.

  The year of Jimmy’s fall and quick resurrection, Jerry Lee sat before a piano at Hank Cochran’s landmark studio, dashing off solo renditions of Jolson’s “My Mammy” and Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer,” but none of it was for release, and it would languish on the shelf for decades. That did not help Jerry Lee in the here and now. In 1988, he declared bankruptcy. He was more than $3 million in debt, he said, $2 million of it owed to the United States Treasury in back taxes and penalties. He listed twenty-two separate creditors, including $40,000 owed to one Memphis lawyer. He owed $30,000 to three different Memphis hospitals, hundreds of thousands to clubs for breaches of contract, and more to claimants in lawsuits. He owed payments on a Cadillac and a Corvette, and there was one unpaid hotel bill, of $119, to the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, from the night he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

  Meanwhile, the IRS continued to raid his possessions almost as fast as he could procure them. They took more cars, a Jet Ski, and a mechanical bull.

  During the worst of it, Jerry Lee went home to Ferriday and walked through the Assembly of God Church on Texas Avenue. He did not kneel and ask for anything, but noticed that the floor where his mother once knelt was caving in; the little church that had stood throughout his life seemed to sag around him. He went home, stuffed seven thousand dollars in an envelope, and sent it to Gay Bradford, who had also grown up in the church, and she and her husband used the money to restore it. Then he bought the church a new piano.

  In a moment of great iron
y, in the summer of ’89, the bankrupt Jerry Lee received his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He posed there with his wife, Kerrie, and with Jerry Lee Lewis III, who was a toddler then, and with the actor Dennis Quaid, who was about to become the face of Jerry Lee on the big screen.

  The film, Great Balls of Fire, was not a full biopic but the story of his breakout in 1956 and ’57, his courtship and marriage to Myra, and the ensuing scandal, all based on a book by the same name written by Myra with coauthor Murray Silver.

  The film also made hay of his relationship with Swaggart. One of its most talked-about scenes was in the film’s beginning, a shot of two little boys looking down on the debauchery of Haney’s. One little dark-haired boy, Jimmy, begs his blond-haired cousin to leave this sinful place.

  “Jerry Lee, that’s the devil’s music!” he yelps.

  “Yeaaaaahhhh!” says little Jerry Lee.

  It did not happen just like that, but the scene was true in spirit.

  The rest of it, Jerry Lee says, was not.

  Before filming even began, the filmmakers asked Jerry Lee to relinquish his own music, his own sound, to the actor who would play him. Quaid disliked the notion of lip-synching the lyrics and wanted to record the music himself with his own band.

  “I said, ‘You can forget it. I’m not giving up the soundtrack. Dennis can never sing and cut these songs the way I did it. You can forget about that, or it ain’t gon’ work.”

  He took Quaid for a walk down by the Mississippi River.

  “Jerry Lee told me that if he didn’t do the songs, only one of us was coming back up that bank,” Quaid told the Austin American Statesman.

  “That boy came to his senses,” said Jerry Lee.

  Executives insisted that he audition his own music for the story of his own life, which insulted him. But the results proved that he could do himself better than anyone. “What you hear is me,” he says of the film, and it was worth the trouble: In the songs on that soundtrack, critic Greil Marcus later noted, Jerry Lee sounded “as if decades were minutes.”