It was called “The Return of Jerry Lee,” and it didn’t work either.
Jerry Lee himself had always put his faith in the music, but the tide was still washing out, and even great performances couldn’t pull it back in. Charlie Rich, a new Sun artist, gave Jerry Lee a rueful raver called “Break Up”; it shot to number 50 on the Hot 100 but then slid quickly down. Its flip side, a mournful ballad called “I’ll Make It All Up to You,” hit the country charts for a blink in time. Then he reached back to Moon Mullican and covered “I’ll Sail My Ship Alone”—by now every song title seemed a self-portrait—but it went nowhere.
To Jerry Lee, it seemed like Sam Phillips had lost confidence in him almost overnight. He had been the artist on whom Sam’s hopes were pinned, he had played and sung his heart out, and for a time he’d been rewarded with Sun’s almost exclusive promotional attention while other artists smoldered. Now, only five hundred days since his first big hit, he was falling fast. Sam was a millionaire by this point, or close to it, and he was taking the money he’d made from Sun and his song publishing business and investing it elsewhere, in radio stations and zinc mines and other ventures. Jerry Lee kept recording singles, and Sun kept pressing them, but precious few radio stations would play them; he wondered whether Sam even sent them out to disc jockeys anymore. Sam would never again risk significant money on his prodigal son.
“People ask me what effect England had on me, and mostly the effect was on Sam Phillips and distribution,” Jerry Lee says now. “He just was not puttin’ my records out there.”
Sam was in a corner. In the eyes of his harshest critics, his boy had committed not one offense but two, simultaneously: bigamy and cradle robbing. Marrying a cousin was also frowned on by most in the wider world, even if it was a third cousin and even if it was culturally commonplace. Phillips could have simply fired him, of course, cut his losses, and moved on. Instead, he kept recording him. Sun had more than a hundred Jerry Lee recordings in the vaults by 1960, and in the years to come he would cut nearly a hundred more. But most of them would linger unreleased for years. Jerry Lee has long suspected there was some ulterior motive behind Sam’s fading interest, fueled perhaps by old loyalties.
“I’m not crazy by a long shot,” he says, but he wonders, sometimes, whether Sam was halfway glad his boy no longer posed a threat to Elvis’s throne. “I think that’s . . . a dead cat on the line, somewhere.”
Sam himself later tried to explain to Sun researcher Martin Hawkins why he kept so much of Jerry Lee’s work in the vault. “I was always very cautious about putting out a lot of product on my artists just to ensure a certain level of income. I think that opportunity has been abused, always has, by the major record companies. . . . You only have to look at some of the crap they put out on Elvis Presley, just because he was in some picture show or something. I think each record should be for the good of the artist’s long-term career, not for short-term gain, and didn’t want to wear Jerry out with an over-abundance of availability.”
Sam acknowledged—how could he not?—that Jerry Lee’s scandal stayed his hand. “When Jerry took a beating from the press it would have been stupid to try to cram product down people’s throats. Believe me, just before that happened, Jerry was the hottest thing in America. The press tore him up in England over his marriage to Myra and it rebounded back home. It was a devastating, unnecessary, stupid damn thing, but what could we do about it? I think Jerry’s innocence back then . . . backfired. They scalped him. It turned out to be a very ghastly and deadly thing. So many people wanted to do in . . . rock and roll, and this is just what they were looking for.
“It should never have played a role of such significance in Jerry’s life.”
Finally, Jerry Lee became so frustrated with Sam’s refusal to release and promote his records that he forced his way into Sam’s office. What happened next has been told countless times by countless people who were not there, but the one who was there, the one still alive to tell, tells it this way:
“People said I punched Sam. I never punched Sam. I snatched him across the desk by his necktie, and I told him, ‘You’re gonna release my record. It’s gonna happen, or I’m gonna whip your butt.’ He told Sally to call the law, and she called the law. He said, ‘Now wait a minute, I’ve got as much right to decide when . . .’ and I think I slapped him. But he released the songs,” or at least some of them.
Shortly after returning from England, he cut a session’s worth of solo performances at Sun, including a song Elvis loved, “Come What May,” the Hank Williams standard “Settin’ the Woods on Fire,” and several moving takes of the country ballad “Crazy Heart.”
We lived on promises we knew would fall apart
Go on and break, you crazy heart
He says of that time, simply, “We did some good records,” and even Billboard wrote that his releases might do well if they had some kind of promotion. Jud left Sun to start his own label, and while he would return as Jerry Lee’s manager and remain his friend, he would never be able to restore the magic of those early days.
Jerry Lee’s live shows were sellouts some nights and bitter disappointments the next—not because of the music, for the music was there, but because of the venues, and it would be that way for years. One night he might fill a coliseum, but the next he’d find himself in some supper club, playing for people who never liked him in the first place, who preferred big-band music and were hoping to hear some. It was a time of one-hit wonders, all now long gone with nothing more than an occasional spin on an oldie station to hang their whole life on, but Jerry Lee had never been that. He was a true star from the start, with a succession of huge and lasting hits built on a foundation of grit and talent. And as he fell, he snarled and growled and clawed on the way down, in a rise and fall unequaled in American music.
“I don’t blame Myra. She had nothing to do with it. . . . Well, she did later, with books and things, but not then,” he says, refusing as always to accept that his marriage was in any way something to be ashamed of, that he did anything wrong in marrying her. “We don’t get along too well, now, but it ain’t because of no grudge. She was my wife.”
And of his persecutors? “They just couldn’t comprehend it, really,” he says. “I think they were saying to themselves, Why can’t I do that? Why can’t I have that? Why can’t that be me?”
Elvis was reading a book on poetry in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, waiting for his flight to Germany and his assignment to the Third Armored Division, when he was asked what he thought of Jerry Lee’s marriage to a thirteen-year-old girl. “He’s a great artist,” Elvis said. “I’d rather not talk about his marriage, except that if he really loves her, I guess it’s all right.”
During his tour in Germany, Elvis met a beautiful fourteen-year-old girl named Priscilla Beaulieu at a party in the town of Bad Nauheim. She was the stepdaughter of a US Air Force officer stationed there. They dated until he returned to the States. Later, when she was in high school, Elvis got permission from her parents to bring her to live with his family, promising that they would be chaperoned by his father and stepmother. It was even arranged that she would attend an all-girls school, Immaculate Conception High School of Memphis. Her parents agreed to this with the understanding that Elvis would keep Priscilla chaste and marry her when she was older. Not long after arriving, Priscilla moved into Graceland proper with Elvis; she would deny that she and Elvis had intercourse, though she did admit they did everything but. Elvis continued relationships with Nancy Sinatra, Ann-Margret, and others, but kept his promise to Priscilla’s parents, marrying her when she was twenty-one, on May 1, 1967, at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. Colonel Parker had worried that Elvis was putting himself at risk by closeting the girl in Graceland, but the strategy worked, and his career was never really threatened.
It is one of the things Jerry Lee has trouble getting his mind around. He married Myra, lived with her openly, and was crucified. Elvis, with the help of Tom Parker, whom Jerry Lee and many others view as Elvis’s puppeteer, constructed a facade, a blind, and lived in sin inside it.
“He hid her in his house,” said Jerry Lee. “He wasn’t honest at all. He hid that little girl in there, and then he acted like he wasn’t doin’ nothin’. He flat-out lied. I’ve not lied about nothin’. When I got married to my thirteen-year-old cousin, I blew it out. I told the whole world.
“You know that movie,” he says, “that movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—that’s a great movie.” It’s the story of a mild-mannered and well-meaning man who takes credit for a thing he did not do, a thing that makes him seem heroic. The man, played by Jimmy Stewart, hid the truth for a lifetime.
“I . . . ain’t . . . hid . . . nothin’. Elvis, he hid. I didn’t want that, never that. I never had no desire to do the kind of music he did or the kind of movies he did. Me, I wanted to get out there among the people. I just needed to be out there, out there where the people was at. . . .”
Sometimes he would think of the screaming multitudes he had once reached, and a dark sadness would descend on him, but the truth is that that same cloud fell upon him even in the fattest times, a thing not of the outside world but in the blood, passed down. But his mama knew that it would always lift, like black smoke, and swirl away, and that a person had to just go on and live regardless, as he had to live now. She told him that if he wanted to quit, to lie down, she would lie down and die with him, and if he’d had even the slightest intent of giving up, that seared him, boy, the way old men used to light a fire under a half-dead mule that has fallen in a field with the job half done. “It wasn’t how I was raised,” he says again, repeating the only code he ever cared much about. “My people were still behind me, Mama, and Daddy, and them.”
He packed the trunk of his Cadillac and headed out into the great honky-tonk wilderness, filling the gaps between the rare big arenas with $250 shows. He did not want his career to wind up this way—he won’t pretend so even in his most contrary mood—but if what Elvis had was the best of everything, then he could keep it.
“I was goin’ out to play the piano and sing, and make the women holler,” says Jerry Lee. So he drove on, searching for neon, for those roadside signs blinking JERRY LEE LEWIS, ONE NIGHT ONLY. “And I’d hook them old pianos up and kick it off. . . .”
9
“WHO WANTS SOME OF THIS?”
Des Moines
1959
He might have been just a little drunk, might have had some pills to get him up and level him out, but that does not mean it was not pretty, what he was doing. His fingers knew where to go on the ivory and his voice was soaked in sorrow as he sang with the broken heart of an old man stitched up in a young man’s skin, because hadn’t he lived a whole lifetime already, roared and stomped and finally shot to the very highest, with tens of thousands chanting his name and clawing at his legs, before falling smoking into places like this?
His eyes were closed, in great deference to the music he played, but he knew every inch of this beer joint outside Des Moines, knew every breath of Early Times and Evening in Paris, every drunken laugh and curse, and every crash of long-necked bottles on a slick concrete floor, because it was not so long since he’d been here before—here or in a thousand other places like it—on his way up. He had started from nothing, from the colorless mud, and outplayed and outsang them all, till even Elvis, who was weak, came to him and handed him his crown, just handed it to him, as if he wasn’t going to take it anyway by force of will. But now the people who ran the music had turned on him, and even some of the people he played it for had turned on him, and here he was in a honky-tonk in Iowa playing a knee-high stage but by God playing still, fighting back, coming back, playing some big rooms for good money when he could, but if you had glimpsed him here through the dirty window, you would have thought it was a long way from Memphis.
He cannot be certain what he was singing, after so much time, but thinks it was probably Hank Williams.
This heart of mine could never see
What everybody knew but me
He was near the end of the tune, in the last few lovely, hopeless lines, when a drunk defiled the song, and tried to put his dirty and undeserving feet on his stage.
“You son of a bitch!” the drunk roared from the crowd.
It was loud enough to cut through the music and through the din of the beer joint itself, and then the man laughed, deep in his big belly, proud of himself. Jerry Lee stopped playing—he hated to stop playing—and looked out through the blue smoke and tightly packed bodies for the loudmouth who had ruined that lovely song. “I was still packin’ ’em in, still filling up them clubs,” he says, but since London in the spring of ’58, the louts had gotten a little braver, and sometimes the bravest or drunkest of them would shout something from the audience about him or his young wife or something else with bile and ground glass in it, and he would have to find the nitwit right away and call him out for it.
He located the man, a big man, but soft-looking, a big country boy . . . no, a city boy. He had on a T-shirt. Country boys dressed better when they went to town. City boy for sure. This would be easy.
“I heard you,” Jerry Lee said. He saw his road manager and his boyhood friend, Cecil Harrelson, easing forward, looking at the man, then looking to Jerry Lee. Cecil was too willing to pull a knife back then, and Jerry Lee shook his head. The music died, and the place went quiet, as quiet as a room of drunks can.
Jerry Lee rose from his piano bench. He was twenty-three years old.
“Why don’t you march your dead butt up here,” he said, into the microphone, “and say that to my face.”
“I will!” the man shouted, and came on. He pushed his way through the crowd and came straight at Jerry Lee, put one foot on the edge of the knee-high stage and started to heave himself up.
Jerry Lee, still holding the long, chromed microphone stand in his two hands, lifted it from the floor and with one, quick, stabbing motion jabbed the metal rod into the man’s face. The heavy, weighted base of the stand struck the man mostly in the forehead, and he staggered backward, flailing, sliding on the floor to collapse on his back in the spilled beer. A knot the size of a baseball rose in the middle of his forehead, and one or two of the drunks wailed, “He’s killed him!” but drunks are always saying such as that.
Then Jerry Lee, his blond hair flying, leaped off the stage and into the audience and, still holding the microphone stand like a spear, screamed at them, at all of them: “Does anybody else want some of this? Do you? I’ll give you all some of it!”
“But they didn’t want none,” he says, from the distant dark of his room.
The bar owner called an ambulance, then called the law. In the movies, Jerry Lee would have sat back down and finished playing the song, but the crowd was angry, not at the drunken nitwit but at Jerry Lee; he was a lightning rod for that kind of thing in 1959 and was wounded just enough to make people think they could say anything they wanted, piling on. He watched the paramedics strain to put the big man in the back of the ambulance. Yeah, a city boy, he thought. He went down too easy for a country boy.
“You know, I can still see that boy’s face,” he says now.
It appeared the man would live, but he would likely carry the crescent imprint of the butt-end of the mike stand on his face for weeks. It would make a good story, though, to drink on later, about how he told that criminal, that baby-snatcher, that man who married his cousin, just what we thought of people like him up here, and how Jerry Lee knocked him ass over teakettle, sucker-punched him, really, when he wasn’t looking. Jerry Lee, telling his own story, would forever wonder what the man expected to happen when he cursed Jerry Lee Lewis and Hank Williams in one foul breath, then tried to despoil the sanctity of the stage—his stage. It might not have been much of a stage, might’ve been a pretty sorry excuse for one, to tell the truth about it, but it was one more step up on the way back to a place where they paid in thousands instead of hundreds and had some paid security in the joint, so a man didn’t have to thump these big whippers his own self.
The chief of police came, since it involved a celebrity and all, but there wasn’t much he could do. Jerry Lee was clearly defending himself; the fact he had baited the man up there with the intention of knocking a knot on his head was one of the finer points of the law that could not really be discussed at midnight in a beer joint full of people under the influence of a few fifty-five-gallon drums of Pabst Blue Ribbon. But the crowd milled, humming in anger like a gang of extras in some old movie show, some mob working up its courage right before Marshal Dillon rode in and stared them down.
The chief told Jerry Lee and his band they should maybe ease off toward their cars.
“Jerry Lee,” he said, “I don’t think you should stay here.”
“We were leaving anyway,” Jerry Lee told him.
“I mean,” the chief said, “I think you need to leave town.”
“It was just like a Western,” Jerry Lee says. Some of the people in the bar jumped into their cars and followed them back to the hotel—it had happened before—but they didn’t want none, either, just wanted to act like they did for a little while longer, only wanted a slightly bigger part of the tale.
He went to his motel room—a year ago, he had stayed in the finest hotels—and waited a little while, waited till it came: the knock, but soft, not hammering and angry. He opened the door to his room and there she was. She was often there, but with a different face, a different name in almost every town. He cannot remember the names after all this time; it’s unlikely he remembered them five miles down the road. “There’s been so many . . . too many, I guess.” But he remembers the fights. Some men just remember rage so much better, remember it better than softer things, as if anger was the only emotion that really mattered to them in the end. It’s why the rich men down here with the soft accents, the ones who know where their great-great-granddaddies came from, hang sabers from an old war over their mantels instead of pictures of their grandbabies and driftwood from the beach they walked on with their dead wives.
“I fought my way out of a bunch of beer joints,” he says. “Had Cecil with me then. I got where I could read an audience, read the meanness in ’em. Every now and then we’d just see a crowd we had to straighten out . . . cursing me from the audience.
“I enjoyed a good fight back then. We had some pretty good fights in Iowa.”
The next day, he and his band loaded their equipment into two Cadillacs shrouded in forty thousand miles of dust and rolled another five or six hundred miles, whatever it took to make it to the next date. Fifty-two years later, with that ill-tempered Chihuahua between his feet, he leans back and travels it again.
“I never shunned a show. If I had to cut my price down to nearly nothin’, I’d take it. To keep workin’. . . . It was brutal strength was what it was, what it took. I played a show every night. Wasn’t no freeways then. We seldom hit a two-lane. Akron . . . Cincinnati . . . Louisville. We’d do little towns and big towns. We’d do one in Ohio, leave for New York, then do one in Ohio, again. . . . Wore out more Cadillacs . . . But wasn’t no choice. We made the dates. Wasn’t no stopping me. We’d pull up just in time, go in and get with it, and then we got back in the car, and we moved on down the road. But we made the dates. Some smart aleck sucker-punched me here in Memphis . . . another in Alabama. He was a big man, too. I musta knocked him fifty feet. Happened again in—where was it? I couldn’t get to him, but Cecil got him. Fight our way in. Fight our way out. I came home once, had the Hong Kong flu. I got up, went to Dallas. Got up, played a show. They said to me, ‘I don’t think you’re gonna make it.’ I made it. . . . Texas. Played all over Texas. Birmingham . . . the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen. The band hung in there with me. I don’t know what I’d done, if they’d given up. . . . Pull up to them ol’ clubs, and rock ’em right on down. Got to where we made them furnish our drum sets. But we never stopped. I never stopped packing the clubs, the auditoriums. . . . Went on for eight or nine years like that, be gone months at a time. Tough on a family, I guess. But I kept going. Back then you could get them real good pills. . . . I’d sleep when I could. We’d see a motel on the side of the road and I’d say, ‘Boys, pull in here, get me a room,’ and I’d get up and barely make the show. Sometimes they’d be five, six of us in a car. . . . I finally got the boys a ’63 Ford to use on the road. They drove it so hard, they melted the head. . . . Played this one club, Mama and Daddy came, out walks this woman without a stitch on, and I just said, ‘She’s just workin’, Mama, same as me.’ But I built my audience back up again, rebuilt my whole foundation. I went in them honky-tonks and them nightclubs, and I went on with it. . . . Had to keep on goin’, ’cause if you quit, you die, and I wasn’t raised to quit.
“It was brutal, I tell you. It was killin’. . . .
“It was beautiful.”