“I never will forget seeing Sam Phillips lookin’ at me through that window with one finger in the air—number one.”
It was not the usual tandem of Janes and Van Eaton who played on that historic record, but a couple of session men who happened to be nearby when needed. “Only had a bass, piano, and drums—that’s all we had on it.” He did not even know the drummer’s name. “I knew Sidney Stokes,” the bass player up on top of his piano, “but I didn’t know him that well, either. And I don’t know what happened to them people. That’s the last time I ever seen ’em. That’s strange, isn’t it?” But it was the nature of the business, or so he would discover: people just fell away. Only the sound, stamped in that black wax, was forever.
Like “Shakin’,” the song had lyrics that could be seen as salacious, but only if you used your imagination. Sam Phillips did not release the song to the nation right away, with “Whole Lotta Shakin’” still holding strong. First, Jerry Lee went Hollywood—well, actually, he went back to New York—for his first movie role, as himself. Otis Blackwell, who wrote “Great Balls of Fire” after buying the catchy title from a New York songwriter called Jack Hammer, was putting together music for a low-budget rock-and-roll movie called Jamboree, a kind of tribute to disc jockeys that was slated to include the influential Alan Freed as himself, until he walked away because of a contract dispute. To replace him, the producers brought in disc jockeys from all over the country to introduce the music, and it was the music—not a thin plot based on two young singers in love—that people came to see.
It was mostly music, anyway, that movie. Fats Domino did “Wait and See.” Carl Perkins was in it, and Frankie Avalon, with Connie Francis, The Four Coins, Jimmy Bowen, Jodie Sands, Lewis Lymon, and even Slim Whitman, who had told Jerry Lee, “Don’t call us. . . .” There were eighteen acts in all, but of course it was Jerry Lee, a late addition to the cast because of the phenomenon of “Whole Lotta Shakin’,” who stole the show, again, with “Great Balls of Fire.” But it felt all wrong as the cameras focused on him, because the microphone was muted, and the piano was just a prop, anyway, an empty box, its ivory nothing more than a row of shiny dead teeth.
“This piano ain’t got no notes,” he shouted, and the director told him of course it didn’t, this was show business, told him to just pretend he was playing it and mouth the words like he was singing it for real. And while he saw that as an abomination unto his craft and every honest sound that some man had ever coaxed out of a piano or a guitar or even a comb and tissue paper, he got through it, because the pretending he was doing was for the movies, and he loved movies. At least he finally understood how Gene Autry had sung all those cowboy songs while riding his horse, Champion, how he sang without sounding like he was hiccuping or biting his tongue clean off. “Ooohhhh, I said to myself, so that’s how he did it.” If it was good enough for Gene Autry, it was good enough for him.
It was not a good movie, but Sam Phillips knew it would mean night after night of free publicity on the big screen, and for fans of rock and roll, fans who might never make a show to see a Fats Domino or a Jerry Lee Lewis, it was a godsend. It would run for years in places like Birmingham and Atlanta and Knoxville, and on TV shows like Dialing for Dollars, which played old movies sandwiched between Rawhide and reruns of I Love Lucy.
At home in Ferriday, his personal life had taken an even grimmer turn. Jane had given him a second son, but he looked at the child and could not see himself in his face, and claimed Jane had taken up with another man while he was on the road. In September he filed for divorce, accusing Jane of adultery and other acts of lewdness and wildness, including excessive drinking and public profanity. Jane responded in a cross-claim that it was all untrue and asked for a divorce on grounds of nonsupport, inhuman treatment, and abandonment. She alleged that Jerry Lee had left them with no money and little to eat and that the baby was too his progeny, which led Jerry Lee, through his own lawyers, to say that was a crock, and the unhappy and violent marriage would eventually be dissolved—but, as was Jerry Lee’s habit, not in time.
But the messy divorce, miraculously, remained mostly an intensely local matter and did not torpedo his rise at the time, and he did rise, and rise again. Sam was so filled with the promise of Jerry Lee that he bought a full-page ad in Billboard, touting him and Jamboree. Jerry Lee took on a manager named Oscar Davis, a genteel old flack who had worked with his idol, Hank Williams, back in the day and had been a front man for Colonel Tom Parker, who handled Elvis.
He was not afraid of being handled right out of his natural self, as the Colonel had handled Elvis, handling him until he had wrung just about all the rock and roll out of his soul.
“Don’t nobody—nobody—manage Jerry Lee,” he says. “Don’t nobody handle Jerry Lee. I can’t be handled.”
But so far, he liked what was happening to him at Sun and in his career in general. The money kept getting better and better, and Jud had stayed on in his usual, vaguely defined role, to help guide the bookings. It was Jud, the gambler, who decided to wrench Jerry Lee from the stigma of hillbilly music altogether. It was not that he would not play country and western again—in fact, for the B side of “Great Balls of Fire,” he was about to record one of the greatest, most enduring country hits of his career—but Sam and Jud believed, as did the national magazines, that he was becoming the face of rock and roll. As if to seal the matter for good, they decided to send him to a place where no hillbilly would tread. They sent him to 253 West 125th Street, on the island of Manhattan. They sent him to Harlem.
“They sent me,” Jerry Lee said, “to the Apollo.”
“This boy can play anywhere,” said Jud to the theater’s promoters.
Then he crossed his fingers and had a tall drink.
It was not just the Apollo. It was the Apollo in the time of the Little Rock Nine. On September 4, 1957, members of the 101st Airborne Division walked nine black students into Little Rock’s Central High School as mobs outside screamed racial slurs and threatened murder in one of the ugliest public displays of racism in United States history. The South had shown its true self in Little Rock, thought black citizens around the country.
It was in this climate that Jerry Lee Lewis and his little band took off for New York.
“I walked out on that stage, me and J. W. and Russ, and there was not one white face in the whole crowd.” Their footsteps boomed in the place, as if the stage was a drumskin stretched tight across all the rich history here. “They looked,” Jerry Lee recalls now, “like they wanted to kill me.” No one yelled or booed; it was oddly quiet. Rock and roll might have been a bridge for the races, but right now the very sound of a Southern accent was shorthand for meanness and racism and even murder, and no one sounded more Southern then in modern music, perhaps, than Jerry Lee Lewis.
The old theater had been built in the Harlem Renaissance, as blacks in the Northern cities regained their footing in the wake of Jim Crow and World War I. Ella Fitzgerald sang here when she was seventeen. Billie Holliday sang here. Cab Calloway shouted here in his white tuxedo, great jazz combos arrived from Kansas City and Chicago and Paris, and big bands and orchestras made it the nation’s jewel of black music and music in general—a jewel that newer performers, Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson and Chuck Berry, could only polish.
Jerry Lee took his seat at the grand piano, a piano played by some of the greatest musical talents the world had ever known. When he said hello, his voice with its Louisiana accent filled the place. Confronted with the anomaly, he made a snap decision: rather than try to hide it, he decided to exaggerate it. He felt threatened, and a strutting rooster does not run out of the barnyard; he crows louder and scratches the ground. He says he meant no disrespect, but did not see how being apologetic of his Southernness would in any way help the tension. He decided to make himself and his band even more Southern, more unlikable. Most people would not have done such a thing, but they do not think with his head.
“I’m happy to be here at the Apollo Theater with my boys,” he drawled, marbles in his mouth and sorghum on his tongue. “This here on drums is Russ Smith, from Newport, Arkansas,” he lied. Russ, taken aback, began to slightly shake his head; he wasn’t from dad-gum Arkansas but Biloxi, Mississippi. “And this here, on bass, is J. W. Brown. He’s from Little Rock, Arkansas, where’s it’s too hot to rock,” and J. W. did a double-take of his own, because he knew he was from Louisiana even if no one else did.
“Figured I’d just take the bull by the horns,” Jerry Lee says now. If they were going to be run off the stage and out of Harlem and out of New York, better get it over with. There was, for a moment, a deathly quiet. “But there was this big, fat feller sitting right down in the front row,” who got the joke, even if it was not a very good one, “and he just laughed out loud,” says Jerry Lee. He laughed at the guts it took, at these boys coming to play here straight out of the heart of darkness of the segregated and violent South. And that made people in the crowd smile, some even to laugh out loud themselves, and the tension just deflated, recalls Jerry Lee. Then he launched into his set, not into a blues song, which would have been expected, maybe, but into his boogied-up “Crazy Arms,” a country song this white boy had remade as a blues. The crowd clapped, politely, and then he hit the first few keys of “Mean Woman Blues,” and they started to move. “I knew what they were waitin’ on. I knew what they wanted,” and he gave them the new song, stabbing, beating.
I laughed at love ’cause I thought it was funny
But you came along and mooooved me, honey
I’ve changed my mind
This love is fine
Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire!
“And real quick, they got with it, and they started dancing.”
They came up out of their seats and out into the aisles.
He combed his blond hair at the piano stool and finished with the “Shakin’” song as hard as he had ever played it, and when he kicked back the stool, he tried to knock it halfway down to Amsterdam Avenue. Critics would say, of that show, he was an uncouth hillbilly with a certain animal vigor, but as he walked offstage, the crowd was clapping and screaming and stomping the floor, and the pretty girls were looking at him with that look, and he left the historic Apollo in a great storm of noise.
“Bet they didn’t see that comin’,” he said to himself as he left the stage.
It seemed like, in those days, he always walked downhill.
“‘Great Balls of Fire’ accomplished the mission and did a whole lot toward gettin’ me right to where I needed to be,” says Jerry Lee. “We knew early on it was a classic, that it would be the kind of song people wait on, and it would come down to a choice between that one and ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ as to which one I closed the shows on, and it didn’t matter, ’cause the people just went crazy either way.” He did it on The Steve Allen Show, slender and slick this time in a dark jacket and white slacks.
“I never looked at the song like it was risqué or anything. WHBQ, they had ‘Great Balls of Fire’ at number one. And it was number one on their station for six weeks straight . . . they couldn’t get it off number one. And they banned it! To get it off.”
By the holidays, “Great Balls of Fire” was the best-selling record Sun had ever had. It was not a deep record, no more or less than “Whole Lotta Shakin’” had been, but it was what rock and roll was then, before the crooners stole the music for a little while, when it lost its bottom. In a way, “Great Balls of Fire” was a love song, but a twenty-one-year-old Jerry Lee Lewis love song, a love song going a hundred miles an hour, not a moonlit drive by the beach but a man and woman fleeing the police and the entire disapproving world. Other people might have missed the meaning in it, lost in the rhythm and the beat, but not him. “It says a lot,” he said. “It says the truth.” Not everybody considers things from all sides or to any depth. Some people make lifetime decisions in the white heat of one moment, at least people like Jerry Lee do. The people who never have, he feels sorry for.
Rock-and-roll music, already, showed the first signs of what it would soon morph into, a kind of musical treacle, but he had no interest in that awful mess, and when he did try to do it, in the studio, he usually just goofed around, to show that such music was beneath him. Producers often wanted a contrasting song for a B-side to a record, but for Jerry Lee that had always meant going back to his roots. For the B-side of “Great Balls of Fire,” he had chosen exactly what he wanted, and he didn’t think the man who wrote it, forever rumbling in that ghost Cadillac down some Lost Highway, would mind.
Sam Phillips stood behind the glass that day and looked like he was about to cry. He had grown up with Hank Williams, like Jerry Lee but even more so. Hank Williams might have belonged to the world then, or to the Lord, but he began in Alabama.
I’m sorry for your victim now
’Cause soon his head, like mine, will bow
Jerry Lee closed his eyes, sometimes, when he played Mr. Williams. Usually, he didn’t even know he was doing it. When it was over, when it was a take, he saw Sam standing in the studio.
“You knocked me out,” he said, and walked away.
That side of the record was a hit, too, even in London. It augmented Jerry Lee’s legend and proved that he hadn’t forgotten his roots even as he made them scream for the rock and roll. But more important, he believes that somewhere Hank Williams looked down and tapped the toe of one boot. “I want to think so,” he says.
To not believe in heaven, in salvation, is to not believe in second chances, but the haunting question is in the tally of a man’s sin, the cost. Can all of a man’s sins be washed away? Can they if he has led the people away from Him in song? “That’s the big deal that me and Sam had that argument about. Well, we’ll know one day. That’s what worries me.”
Jerry Lee would continue to live in a kind of purgatory. Back home, his cousin Jimmy Lee had more and more come to see Jerry Lee not just as a lost soul but a kind of Pied Piper for the Devil himself, and he preached on it hard, on the wages of sin, railing against the bald wickedness of secular music, and not in some vague way but naming his cousin directly. He would make it a lifetime crusade, beating Jerry Lee like a tin drum, over decades. Then, when they met back in Ferriday, they would share some fried chicken, maybe even play a little piano together like they had as boys, as if it had never happened. It had always been an odd family that way, in its ability to turn the other cheek when kin were involved, but then they were descended from men who could take a long, hard pull of corn whiskey and, wobbling, preach the gospel until they passed out, two spirits in one body. If a man like that could live with himself, then surely cousins could live with cousins.
But as ’57 passed into ’58, the two men’s lives took such drastically different paths that Jerry Lee believes his success ate at Jimmy’s mind. While Jerry Lee was driving Cadillacs and all, their cousin Mickey Gilley was over in Texas trying to get a hit as a country singer, Jimmy was sitting in Louisiana in a wore-out Plymouth, twisting the starter and praying for Jesus to heal his car. He desperately needed the car to get to his revivals, but the valves were burned up, and it was finished. But he prayed and prayed, and suddenly the starter caught and the engine purred, and when he sold it later to a mechanic, the man told him the valves had in fact been healed, and Jimmy knew this was a sign.
Later, after preaching at a revival in Ferriday, Jimmy was invited by Elmo and Mamie back to the new house Jerry Lee had bought them, to have some supper and spend the night. He pulled up to the house to see a driveway covered in Lincolns and Cadillacs, to be told by Mamie that Jerry Lee liked to drive a different one every now and then. He went back into a guest room to take off his suit—he just had the one—to find a closet full of expensive suits that belonged to his famous cousin. He reached into his pocket to find the offering for that evening’s crusade, a single dollar bill and about a dollar fifty in change, and spread the money out on the bed. “Where are you, O Lord,” he asked aloud, and he felt God’s presence explode all around him, and he rededicated himself to the Lord right there next to Jerry Lee’s closet, saying that even if he had to put pasteboard in his shoes, he would walk a righteous path and not be tempted by the mammon that had brought his cousin low.
“At first, I think Jimmy was scared for me . . . really scared for me,” says Jerry Lee. “He saw the cars and the clothes, and he didn’t dig that.” But even as Jimmy’s fame and fortune as a minister grew—and it would grow, hugely—it seemed as though his identity as a man of God remained bound to his wilder cousin.
There was only one other person in the world who halfway understood what was happening to Jerry Lee. “Elvis knew,” he says, because he had lived it, too. They spent some evenings together at Graceland, Jerry Lee playing the piano. Sometimes he would play all night, Elvis just standing there by the piano, sometimes singing, sometimes lost in the past, lost in thought. He looked, Jerry Lee says now, like he was dreaming standing up. Like a lot of people who had all they thought they would ever want, he had to travel back to a time when he didn’t have it, didn’t have any of it, to be happy. One night, Elvis asked him to play a song called “Come What May.” Elvis “loved that song,” Jerry Lee says:
I am yours, you are mine, come what may.
Love like ours remains divine, come what may.
Jerry Lee would finish, and Elvis would ask him to play it again and again, till the night passed into morning, like a tape stuck on a loop. “Over and over and over,” says Jerry Lee, “I just kept playing.”
He came to see Elvis as one of the loneliest and most insecure people he had ever known, at least among the famous people he had met. “He was just kinda damaged,” Jerry Lee says now. It seemed to Jerry Lee like he was acting out a script written for him by people like Colonel Parker, playing the rock-and-roll idol, when all he really had to do was be one. “He was a good person,” Jerry Lee says, but he was trying to please everybody, and that wore him down.
He had befriended him and accepted his friendship in return, and now, as his own career bloomed and his own records climbed the charts, was more determined than ever to take the crown. But in ’57, after he had gotten to know him, gotten to see the good, almost guileless person he was underneath the stardom and the insecure boy who lived even deeper inside all that, it was complicated. One night, Elvis asked Jerry Lee if there was a song of his he wanted to hear. “I said, ‘Yeah, “Jailhouse Rock,”’” half joking, because that was a big production number that a man does not begin to sing in a rumpus room. “But he did it live, did the whole thing. He did the dance and everything. All he was missing was the pole. And I was starting to think, Dang, how long is this gonna go on?” till finally Elvis had done the whole show, and there was nothing to do but applaud. It was one of the odder things Jerry Lee had ever seen, Elvis standing there, taking his bow in an almost empty room.
The tension that Jerry Lee sensed between them would never go away and would grow over the years as their lives, in both similar and wildly different ways, grew more and more bizarre. But they remained friends as ’57 vanished into history. Almost always, they wound up together at the piano; almost always, it was old love songs, generations old, or gospel that they sang. There was no tape this time. He was welcomed, Jerry Lee said, even after Elvis began to withdraw from the world of normal men, in part because among the armies of ass kissers who surrounded him, Jerry Lee never fit in.
“What do you think of my acting?” Elvis asked him.
“Well,” Jerry Lee said, “you ain’t no Clark Gable.”
They talked about everything young men talk about—everything but the one thing that, as it turned out, both of them wondered about in the deepest parts of the night. Finally, Jerry Lee asked him the same thing he’d been bothering Sam Phillips about: “Can you play rock music . . . and still go to heaven? If you died, do you think you’d go to heaven or hell?”
Elvis looked startled, trapped. “His face turned bloodred,” remembers Jerry Lee.
“Jerry Lee,” he answered, “Don’t you never ask me that. Don’t you never ask me that again.”
There is religion, and there is faith, in Jerry Lee’s eyes. Religion is just religion; anyone can put a sign or symbol on a door, and claim it as faith, pray to it. But true faith is beautiful, and terrible. He and Elvis understood that. “We was raised in it,” he says, “in the Assembly of God. . . . Him being Elvis, I thought he was the one person I could ask. Seems like sometimes we didn’t have no one to talk to but each other.
“You’ll be judged by the deeds you done. . . . And people don’t want to believe all this kinda stuff, ’cause they’re looking for . . . they’re searching for a way out.” But there is no way, he says. There is only the judgment, in the end.
“I think it stuck with him a long time. I fought that battle myself. I do know Elvis cared for me. I know.” They were true friends then. “He didn’t come around much, after that. I could tell he was scared. So I never did ask him that again. And I never did get an answer, neither.”
It would be hard to make up the life he briefly had, in ’57 and into ’58, a life ripped from the pages of one of his funny books, in which all the women were breathtaking, all the men heroic.
One day, on a trip to Los Angeles, he spent the afternoon with Elizabeth Taylor on the lot at MGM. She smiled at him with those otherworldly eyes, the most beautiful woman in the universe, and when he apologized for not being much of a talker, she told him it was all right, she was beset with talkers.
“Well, what do you think of it?” she asked Jerry Lee of the studio.
“I don’t know. . . . What do you think?” he asked.
“I think it’s pure shit,” she told him (though he spells out the word when he tells the story now).
“I’m glad my mama didn’t hear you say that,” he said.
He met her because her husband, Mike Todd, knew his agent, Oscar Davis. The four of them went to dinner, and afterward, in their hotel room, “Elizabeth was sittin’ right by me. . . . I ain’t never seen a woman that beautiful in my life. I’ve seen a lot of other women, but that one took the cake. And Michael Todd said, ‘Jerry, would you mind settin’ here with Liz while me and Oscar go downtown here to a bar I know? We’ll go have a couple drinks. We’ll be right back.’ He says, ‘Will you kind of, just, look after her for me?’
“There I was, a boy from Louisiana, I didn’t even know what was goin’ on. All I knew was, Elizabeth Taylor was sittin’ right by me. And I was her guardian. I don’t think I had enough sense at that time to be nervous. We talked for a long time.”
He shared a marquee with Sam Cooke, who called him “cousin,” a pure singer whose words seemed to linger on the stage even after he took his bow, like smoke rings in the air. He toured a circuit of all-black venues with Jackie Wilson, watched him glide across the planks like there was Crisco underneath his alligator shoes. “Jackie Wilson could blow you away, I tell you. He could do anything. Oh, man, what a singer.” The two of them stayed friends till Wilson’s death.
On the road, Patsy Cline pushed him into a bathroom and told him a dirty joke, sang “Walking After Midnight” like a honky-tonk angel just before he went onstage, then took a seat in the front row and wolf-whistled like a sailor. He saw a man named Ellas Otha Bates tuning an odd, box-shaped Stratocaster guitar with more unnecessary mess on it than a Shriner’s hat turn into “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Bo Diddley” and lay down a beat onstage that was the bedrock of rock and roll. And he heard it, right there.
He heard “Wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom” through a dressing room wall, screamed out by a man known as Little Richard, who wore more mascara than Cleopatra, who sang every breath like it was going down in history, like he would never have that chance again. “He was a trip,” Jerry Lee says. “He was somethin’ else.” He was a great singer and wailer, but mostly a showman to his bones. “His voice was rock and roll.”
He heard Ray Charles. “An utmost, really, genius. His personal knowledge was—it was incredible. He was just so great . . . such a good man. I’d go see him, he’d say, ‘Hey, Jerry Lee, you’re looking good!’” He still takes offense at the indignity Charles suffered when he was arrested for carrying heroin, “which he had been doin’ for years. And they come down pretty hard on him for that. They didn’t understand, you know?”
He met the greats, and some even cooked him supper. He chatted with Fats Domino, and wondered, “Why do they call him Fats? He ain’t fat. He just kinda looked fat. But he was a great piano player . . . humble as he could be. Cooked me beans and rice.”
He marveled at the smooth vocals of the man they called Gentleman Jim Reeves, and sat with a despondent young man named Michael Landon after the moneymen tried to twist him into a teen idol. “I give up, Jerry Lee, ’cause I just ain’t a singer,” and the next time Jerry Lee saw him, he was riding across the Ponderosa in the same gray pants and green jacket every week, shooting the bad men with Hoss and Adam and Pa, and trying not to tick off Hop Sing.
He finally met one of the music’s true beacons, the man who called on Beethoven to roll over and Johnny to be good—watched him take the stage, long and whipcord lean, moving with that easy grace, long arms and big hands dangling at his side, his anger at the white man still smoking because of the way they tried to box him out. That man took one look at Jerry Lee and his spine went stiff as a ladder-back chair, and promoters whispered, yes, there would be trouble here. “Chuck . . . Chuck Berry,” says Jerry Lee, and shakes his head, smiling. And the promoters were right.
He stood in the wings as Buddy Holly, “who was a rocker, too, oh, yeah,” screamed “all my life, I been a-waitin’” with as much raw passion as he had ever seen. Holly finally yielded the stage to him only after four encores but stayed backstage to watch and dance and whoop like a fan, yelling out, “Man, this is almost as good as Texas!” He was especially fond of Buddy. “A real champion,” he says. “He was hotter’n a pistol, yeah. He done a great show. And he could play the guitar . . . as good as Chet Atkins. He was a gentleman, and he never lied, he never cheated or anything like that on his girlfriend.”
He saw everyone, played with everyone, and it seemed that no matter where he played, he outdrew the big names who had played before him—even Sinatra, even Elvis—till he was at the top of every billing every day, which is where he should have been all along.
He is asked, after all this time, if there was ever anyone he was afraid to follow onstage—though afraid is probably too strong a word. He says there was one man.
“The only person I ever had a problem with, was Roy Hamilton.”
Hamilton was a good-looking, lantern-jawed rhythm-and-blues singer from Leesburg, Georgia, who could croon and deliver some rockin’ soul. He’d had operatic and classical voice training, had been a Golden Gloves boxer, and, like Jerry Lee, had started off singing in church. He influenced everyone from Elvis to the Righteous Brothers and sang his heart out onstage, from lungs already infected and weakened by the tuberculosis that would help kill him by age forty.
“He had some great songs—I mean, ‘Ebb Tide,’ ‘Unchained Melody.’ He had that record ‘Don’t Let Go.’ He was just beginning to hit. We both were, really. I was doin’ a show somewhere, and I was the star of the show. I was closing the show. And I heard him do his show. He closed his part of the show with that ‘Hear that whistle? It’s ten o’clock! Go, man, go! Go, man, go!’ And he had these boys backing him up, singers—Get-a-Job Boys, they called themselves.” (This was the Silhouettes, whose record “Get a Job” was their only hit.) “And they backed him on that, and it was tremendous.
“And I said, ‘Man, I got to follow that cat on the stage? I didn’t like that at all. I said, ‘That’s an impossibility, to follow him onstage.’ And his manager said, ‘You’re right, Jerry. You got your work cut out for you tonight.’ I went out there and I opened up with ‘Great Balls of Fire” and immediately went into ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.’” He usually closed the shows with those records.
“I finally got their attention pretty good. But he . . . really done it. He should have closed that show.”
But there was no time to be humble in ’57. A great and fearful void had suddenly opened in rock and roll as Elvis prepared for his induction. And swaggering into that frightening place came that boy from Black River, playing his piano on a flatbed truck, but this time on a Hollywood set, and it all made the fans fall out on the floor and the promoters smile that crocodile smile, till it was clear that the only person who could stop Jerry Lee from ascending the throne was Jerry Lee himself. The acclaim was not universal, but detractors were hooted down or their criticism dismissed as snobbery. Some critics sneered at him outright—not his music, but him, chided him for combing his hair onstage and other loutish behavior, while admitting, even though he beat the piano to death, he beat it in perfect key. “I didn’t care one way or another, ’cause I wasn’t doin’ the show for them, anyway,” he says.
Even Liberace, who could play the instrument with great skill beneath all that Old World lace and powder and Vegas glitter, marveled at this untrained boy’s native ability. “He said, ‘Nobody can play a piano, that fast, and hit the right notes . . . and sing at the same time,’” Jerry Lee remembers. “He said there must be another piano somewhere, hid.” Finally, in Hot Springs, he came to see for himself. “He went backstage, where I was playing, and he set back there and watched and listened to me play. He didn’t believe it till he saw it with his own eyes.”
At Sun, the usually tightfisted Sam Phillips packed up thousands of records to give away at disc-jockey conventions, and Jud laid the groundwork for promoting the next record, another Otis Blackwell sure thing called “Breathless,” with a campaign unlike anything the industry had ever seen before. They were men he trusted then, handling parts of the business he could not even pretend to care about. “I was paid to play piano and sing,” he said, repeating another mantra he would hold to all his life, “not any of that other stuff.” The business part of it—the production and bookings and all that junk—took something natural and bled the fun out of it. Playing piano, he would stress, was like making love to a woman, but he seduced everybody.
“Elvis, he charmed the women, and he leaned more toward the women in his music,” he says. “The women was his deal. But I had the women and the men going crazy for me, because my music had guts.”
In Graceland, Elvis watched Jerry Lee’s hits march relentlessly past his on the charts, and when hangers-on talked a little too much about the new boy, because they had all come to think of Jerry Lee as Elvis’s friend, Elvis said to shut up.