He had played the Paramount on Forty-Third Street in New York City. He had played the storied Apollo, the Boston Arena, and coliseums everywhere. He had played Steve Allen, American Bandstand, and just about every other place a young legend would play, and he never lip-synched a word except in the movies. It was almost like bad luck somehow, doing that. And not long after that came London and the ugliness, then the long road that some people believed to be the only future he had left, the road that he believed—no, he knew—would bring him back to the top, to riches and fame again. It would not break him, this road, but once in a while, it would break his heart. In Newport, Arkansas, he walked into a club and saw that chicken wire stretched across the stage again, strung there to protect the band from a crowd that had so little respect for the music that they felt they could fling their contempt, spray it, at the musicians on the stage. He had seen it before, a screen like this, on the way up, but had it really been only a year or so before?
“Take it down!” Jerry Lee shouted.
The owner told him it was for his own protection. He’d need it if the bottles started flying.
“Take . . . it . . . down,” he hissed, “or I won’t go on.”
They took it down.
“It’s your funeral,” some smart aleck said.
That night he played Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers and some Moon Mullican, even some older music, pretty songs, ancient songs, songs that sounded almost like church, and he dared the people in the audience to do something, anything, to assault his stage or try to lessen his music, lessen him. Then he played some honky-tonk, to make them think about the women and the men who had done them wrong, to make them think about their mamas and cry about their daddies maybe just a little bit, and when they were halfway to redneck heaven, he hit them right between the eyes with some nasty, gutbucket blues, with the mess he’d heard sizzling in Haney’s Big House when he was still just a little boy, and he had them hollering for the blues and they didn’t even halfway know what it was. And finally, when he thought they were ready, when he decided they were deserving of it, he kicked that raggedy piano stool back so hard it slammed into the wall with a glorious snapping sound. He played and played through the evening and into the next day, played until the sweat ran down his face and blinded him, and when he whipped his golden hair back out of his eyes, the girls bit their lips and went against their raisin’. He beat the ivory till his fingers hurt, till he transcended this little honky-tonk in the hip pocket of Arkansas, till this one more bleak stop on a bleak and endless road was transformed into the night of a lifetime, not for him but for these pulpwooders and insurance men and waitresses and notary publics who danced and screamed and begged for more till finally there was no more and the screams filled the room and poured into the dark, till the nighttime fishermen on the White River and cars passing on Highway 67 must have heard it, surely, heard it emanating like the rings of some great explosion, till Jerry Lee dropped wearily into the passenger seat of a dusty Cadillac and rolled on. And as the wind rushed into his face in the small hours of the morning, as the pills and the liquor and passing miles finally rocked him to sleep, he was not sure exactly where he was headed or sometimes even where he had been. He was sure of only one thing.
“Jerry Lee Lewis don’t disappear.”
“People, seemed like, were comin’ to my shows with a chip on their shoulder.”
The days ground by rough and noisy. “Seems like we had to fight every night.” He was in the Midwest, again, he thinks in ’59, still, or ’60, doing one of those songs he used to play with a sandwich balanced on his knee back in Black River, but the audience was noisy this night—one of those crowds of people who might love the music but did not yet understand that it took precedence over drinking and fighting and cheating and too-loud talk about who was doing what with whose husband and the gross injustice of the water bill.
He kept a drink and sometimes a bottle on top of the piano now and then, to mellow him out, and he dissolved a pill or two in the glass to hold him up. But it was no big thing. They were just part of sundown.
“Iowa, again, a honky-tonk on a lake,” is all he can remember about the place where it happened. “It was an unruly crowd.”
He played for as long as four hours some nights, then played until the boys playing behind him began to wonder if he would ever stop. That night, in the break after a long set, he waded through the usual handshakers and backslappers and women who wanted a kiss and a squeeze, and past some people who just looked at him hot and mean. There were a few in every crowd who just wanted to see him on the way down, to sneer and relish it. “I got some dirty looks back then,” he says. How long had it been since they mobbed him, since he couldn’t get off a stage without having the fingernails leave trails on his arms and rip at his clothes? Some days it seemed like yesterday, and some days it seemed like such a very long time ago. But it was all just temporary, a hiccup, he was sure, then. . .
“Hey!”
It sounded like thunder down in the bottom of a well.
Jerry Lee looked up to see perhaps the biggest man he had ever seen. “Up steps this guy,” he says, remembering, “up steps this guy who had to be seven feet tall. He had on a sleeveless T-shirt, with arms about this big around,” and he takes his two hands and makes a circle about the circumference of a telephone pole. He did not know if he was a city boy or a country boy, or even if he was altogether from this earth.
“It was the Giant,” said Cecil Harrelson, the road manager then.
They remember it, Jerry Lee and Cecil, the same.
“Which one of you guys is Jerry Lee Lewis?” the giant roared.
Jerry Lee thought that should have been obvious. Even people who didn’t like him knew who the hell he was.
The giant, impatient, bellowed again. “I WANT JERRY LEE LEWIS!”
That shut up even the most oblivious drunk. A beer joint never goes silent, but this was close.
“Well, I’m here,” Jerry Lee said.
The man stepped into the light. He was bigger in the light.
“I am gonna beat on your head,” the man growled.
Jerry Lee searched his mind for some offense he had made to this man the width and breadth of a chifforobe, and decided it had to be something about a woman, with an outside chance that, this time, he might even be innocent.
He had rarely taken a step backward when confronted by any man, except his daddy. But as this man came closer he seemed to block out the light itself, till Jerry Lee was staring into his Adam’s apple. The man pushed him not so much with his arms as with his whole presence, “and I remember he backed me all the way to the door, then out the door, and then all the way out to the car.”
Finally, his back pressed up against a door handle, he had nowhere else to go.
“So,” he says, with a certain amount of fatality, “I busted him in the mouth.” He did not throw the punch with just his right arm but with his arm and his shoulder and the weight of his body, used his hips to torque some force into it, the way Elmo threw a punch, and all the Lewises before him, the way daddies taught their sons to throw one: to hurt. But all the Lewises in every dustup and brouhaha since the Yankee War couldn’t have knocked that walking piece of furniture out with one lick. “He went down to the ground, and bounced right back up,” says Jerry Lee.
The man drew back a fist and aimed it at Jerry Lee’s head.
“Here come Cecil,” says Jerry Lee. Cecil leaped onto the man’s back, snaked one of his arms around the man’s throat, and tried his best to choke him to death, but the man didn’t even wheeze. But Cecil locked his own arms under the man’s big arms from behind, just enough to keep him from swinging free at Jerry Lee, and that was good enough. Jerry Lee, giving up on hurting the man about the head, started slamming his fists into the man’s body with everything he had. Cecil could hear bones break.
The man finally began to sag, and sank to his knees. He knelt in the parking lot, and ran his fingers over his rib cage. “I got seven broke ribs,” he said, thickly.
Jerry Lee and Cecil, exhausted, just stood gasping for air.
The man walked his fingers down his torso, counting off on the other hand.
“Seven,” the man said.
“Well, this didn’t have to happen,” said Jerry Lee.
The man nodded. “Where y’all from?” he asked.
“Louisiana,” Jerry Lee said.
The man nodded again.
“Well,” he said after a while, “I think I’ll call it a day.”
But he just kept kneeling there.
“He left in a big white ambulance,” recalls Jerry Lee.
He forgot to ask the man why he wanted to fight him. In time, it would be clear. Not in every town, but in a lot of them, men lay in wait to take a swing at the Killer, suspecting he might be just mortal enough to fold.
“They just wanted to whip Jerry Lee Lewis. Just wanted to beat on my head, like that feller did.”
The man seemed almost friendly as the paramedics took him off.
“He was a hoss,” Jerry Lee says.
“He was a giant,” says Cecil.
“Haven’t been back to Iowa since,” says Jerry Lee.
It was just a part of livin’ then. He did not enjoy the disruption of his shows, did not enjoy the reputation that preceded him in those days. But as it became inevitable, he embraced it, snarling. It would have been easy if they’d just been a bunch of young rogues making noise, but there was a legend at stake here, and this was real music, good music, “and the music always came first. We gave ’em a good show, and then it was time to move on.” He played Le Coq d’Or in Toronto and the Peppermint Lounge in Pittsburgh. He played Café de Paris in New York, the drive-in in Fayetteville, Georgia, and the Adel, Georgia, elementary school auditorium. He played an Alan Freed show in the Hollywood Bowl, and the Gator Bowl in Florida, and a club at Coney Island. He drove to Los Angeles from Memphis, then drove back to Montgomery, and filled up the space in between with whatever gigs he could find. He played a series of all-black clubs across the northern United States, paired again with the great Jackie Wilson in what promoters had billed as a kind of battle of the races for the soul of rock and roll. He played gymnasiums in Tennessee and Mississippi, and festivals in Arkansas where old men whittled ax handles and sold them for fifty cents apiece.
Bad luck literally flung itself at him. “I was comin’ back from the Wagon Wheel, me and Doc Herron,” he says, of a trip home from the road. “I had this big ol’ Limited Buick. Piece of junk. I was doin’ seventy-five, eighty miles an hour. And I was cruisin’ along. It gets foggy over there, sometimes, in Louisiana—off of Natchez, comes off that hill, that fog does. And Doc says, ‘Watch that horse!’” The horse was launched across the hood of the Buick, through the windshield, and into the front seats. “And I just fell right down, right in [Herron’s] lap. And that’s the onliest thing that saved me. The horse hung on to my car.
“Finally got stopped, and the horse just fell off on the road. Wasn’t supposed to be out. Against the law, horse to be out. What you gonna do, though, you know?” Some people would have sued, to get their car fixed. “I don’t sue nobody,” he says, and he would have felt silly, anyway, making such a big thing about a Buick. Besides, a “poor old colored guy owned it, that horse. Wasn’t nobody gonna speak up for the guy.”
He shakes his head at the memory. “I had a lot of hair—long, blond hair, you know. I got out of the car and I shook my head for . . . must’ve been like three hours, and I just kept gettin’ glass, just kept fallin’ out of my hair. Shattered glass.”
On February 27, 1959, Myra Gayle gave birth to a seven-pound baby boy, Steve Allen Lewis. Little Stevie came into this world with a fine head of hair, like his daddy. Jerry Lee named him for the man who had been kind to him and straight with him and took a chance on him when no one else would, a man he would never say a mean word about, no matter how grim things might get. Photographers pushed their way into Myra’s hospital room to record mother and child. Jerry Lee was no longer collecting $40,000 checks, but he was working almost every night and still drawing a rare fat payday from some big shows, so he bought Myra and Steve Allen a new house in Coro Lake, with white shag carpeting, a small waterfall in the foyer, a white grand piano, and a swimming pool in the back. He rarely saw any of it. He truly believed that if he ever slowed down, he would just vanish, so he fought back one road trip, one little club at a time.
He recorded almost every time he landed back in Memphis, many of them good songs, but it was as if he was singing them into the wind. He had twenty-one recording sessions at Sun between ’59 and ’63, resulting in eighty-five songs, but few of them were potential breakout singles. He cut a hot, “Breathless”-like single called “Lovin’ Up a Storm,” and a novelty song called “Big Blon’ Baby,” and another Otis Blackwell tune, “Let’s Talk About Us.” He even cut his father’s signature song, “Mexicali Rose.”
It was just the beginning of what writer Colin Escott would call “the locust years,” a quagmire that just sucked him down deeper no matter how many miles he drove or how many shows he played. As if in some cruel joke, his music grew in popularity in England and Europe, where young people continued going wild for each new record he released. Yet in the States the taint of scandal was slow to dissipate, and while at one show he might have standing room only, others, unpromoted, left him staring into empty seats. “I played for two old ladies one time in Kansas,” he says. “I told ’em, ‘Y’all don’t owe me nothin’ for this show.’”
But he was also facing a bigger problem: the changing style of rock and roll. The truth is that the American music scene was morphing around him, changing into something he did not recognize and could hardly stand. It was losing its guts, its backbone; the day of the country boogies and the hard rockers was blinking out almost as soon as it arrived. You could listen to the Top 40 all day and not hear a lick of Hank Williams in it, or Junior Parker or Moon Mullican or Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. As the 1950s died, the great roar of rock and roll faded to a kind of simpering sigh. In late 1957, after an airplane engine exploded into a fireball on one of his tours, Little Richard announced that he’d been saved, had joined the clergy, and was preaching of the end of time. Elvis had been overseas since the fall of 1958. In 1959, Richie Valens, J. P. Richardson (known as the Big Bopper), and Jerry Lee’s good friend Buddy Holly died in a plane crash. And in December 1959, the great Chuck Berry was sentenced to three years under the Mann Act for transporting a fourteen-year-old girl across state lines.
Into the breach flooded a wide array of music for twelve-year-old girls. It was the time of Ricky Nelson, and Fabian, and Frankie Avalon, the time when Chubby Checker replaced Fats Domino at every hamburger stand in the nation. It was the dawn of surf rock, ushered in by the Ventures’ “Walk—Don’t Run” and culminating in two years with the arrival of the Beach Boys and songs like “Surfin’ Safari.” It was the time when indies like Sun Records were being eclipsed by new labels: Berry Gordy’s Tamla/Motown, with the Marvelettes and the Miracles and the Supremes; Phil Spector’s Philles, with the Crystals and the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers. It was all very catchy and pretty, but it was a long, long way from Haney’s Big House.
As if in disgust, great black musicians with heart and grit went their own way with a music called just “soul,” and Sam Cooke, Solomon Burke, James Brown, and Ben E. King did their thing without great regard to the once grand experiment of rock and roll. It was not that there was no good music on the air—Roy Orbison finally broke through with “Only the Lonely” in 1960 and proved that soft rock could still be rock—but it was clear that great change was upon the industry. By the time Del Shannon’s relatively stripped-down “Runaway” broke in 1961, it was treated as a rare return to rock and roll. Carl Perkins had long since faded away. Johnny Cash had gone all the way over to country. Elvis returned from the army with what critics called “less menace” and “more maturity”; he cut one decent album for RCA, did a TV show with Frank Sinatra, then gave one last live show in ’61 and did not perform again live for eight years. And somewhere out there, somewhere at the end of some gravel driveway in a club with a two-drink minimum, Jerry Lee Lewis gave them the boogie-woogie and the lowdown blues, and when it came time to slow it down and sing them something pretty, he sang them Ray Price or Gene Autry, which was about as sissy as he was willing to get.
“It seems,” he says, “like they let rock and roll wither, a little bit.”
Jerry Lee himself was still calling the tunes, and with the well of new songs drying up, he dug back into the bottomless bag of classic American music. In the fall of ’59, he cut takes on Chuck’s “Little Queenie” and Hank’s “I Could Never Be Ashamed of You,” and released them as a single, to little commercial effect. Six months later, he backed a throwaway new song—“Baby Baby Bye Bye”—with a Stephen Foster song, “Old Black Joe,” which was more than a century old. The stations that no longer boycotted his music outright simply didn’t play the new records much. He was rumored to be starring in a movie in Hollywood, but it was never made. He was rumored to be a sure thing for another film, something called Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys, but that went to some guy named Paul Newman, who couldn’t even sing. At Sun, his star was dying. Sam Phillips was building a new $400,000 studio and pushing records by Charlie Rich and others, but not Jerry Lee. Sam had started to refer to him as a tragic figure, said he wouldn’t throw “good money after bad.” The musicians union was boycotting him for transgressions that had occurred with backup musicians before Oscar Davis went on the lam with the payroll.
It wasn’t that Sun didn’t try to rescue his career; it was just that what they tried had almost nothing to do with Jerry Lee Lewis. His single for the fall of 1960, “When I Get Paid” backed by “Love Made a Fool of Me,” matched a midtempo pop number with a generic ballad and had a piano part that sounded suspiciously like Charlie Rich. In a bid to get around any lingering discomfort over his name, Sun even had Jerry Lee record an instrumental take on the old Glenn Miller hit “In the Mood” under the pseudonym The Hawk, believing that great talent would find an audience even without the name attached, but since no one in the known universe played piano like Jerry Lee Lewis, it was laughably clear who it was, like a football in Christmas wrapping.
One dilemma seemed to intersect with another till it all just wrapped around itself in one suffocating ball. The radio stations wouldn’t play him, so the songwriters wouldn’t bring him good material. Without the songs, his records suffered. He remained the wildest live show around—still explosive, still dynamic, still the fierce, good-lookin’ devil he’d been in ’57, when it seemed like the collective police departments of the Eastern seaboard couldn’t contain the people who wanted to love him to death. People still walked out the doors of the auditoriums or out the gates of the county fairs shaking their heads, stunned, some of them, and amazed, some of them—and almost every one of them mightily entertained. “The day I don’t see that look in their faces, that’s the day I quit. Not before.”
In the midst of this, one of his rocks, his foundation, split in two. His mother and father had always been quietly at war, against each other and both against the world. Mamie and Elmo, leaning on each other, balancing each other, had survived the Depression, the ordeal of prison inside and outside the walls, and the death of a child; one of them was strong as iron inside, the other like steel outside. Mamie’s faith had never weakened, but Elmo’s had never really been strong enough to suit her, and as he drank and caroused into middle age she finally told him to go on about his sorriness without her, though she loved him anyway and always would. They separated in 1961 and later divorced, and the one thing that Jerry Lee depended on more than anything in this world had come apart beneath his feet.
“I tried to make them both happy,” he says now. “I never took sides. I imagine Mama had it pretty rough. Daddy? Daddy was up and goin’.”
His daddy would continue to follow him on the road when he could, and they would open a bottle of whiskey, kill it together, and speak of finer days. “Sometimes you just need to drink a little whiskey with your daddy,” he says. Elmo even went into the studio at Sun and recorded his own version of “Mexicali Rose.”
“He finally got to be me,” his son says.