It is nearly impossible to describe what followed without the music itself as a backdrop. Some critics have called Live at the Star Club raggedly recorded, but most would say that did not amount to even a little bitty damn. His music and voice are commanding, certain, but still wild. The piano sounds like it is actually breaking at times, like he is playing more with a tack hammer than flesh and blood. His blues has gut and bottom to it, just plain ol’ nastiness, and the single country song is plainly sung by someone who has lived it. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” has been called perhaps his most soulful and passionate Hank Williams performance ever, given even greater emotion by his piano break, more Haney’s Big House than Grand Ole Opry—a thing he had been doing to his country songs since his mama was feeding him cocoa and vanilla wafers. In just fourteen songs—he played more, but at least two weren’t properly captured by the recording—he covered miles of ground, from a scorching “Long Tall Sally” and “Good Golly Miss Molly” to “Hound Dog” and “Down the Line.” He did all his big hits from before the fall, except “Breathless,” then closed with a “Whole Lotta Shakin’” that sounds commanding and almost valedictory. The entire thing feels live, as if you yourself have made the trip across the ocean and through the streets of Hamburg to sweat and drink and be wrestled to the floor by Jerry Lee Lewis.
But as proud as he was of the music—he was backed by a British group, the Nashville Teens, who were neither from Nashville nor teens—he says it was not greatly different from what he did on the road night after night in the United States, not greatly different from what he would do every night of his life till the last night, the last note. He treated it like the live show it was, giving the engineers or even his backup band barely a clue ahead of time, but playing what he felt like, rolling into a riff and a song and expecting the rest of the world to fall in behind.
Asked about it now, he recognizes its impact on others but doesn’t dwell on it for long—because, like other great performances, it is tainted for him by the business dealings that surround it. At first, and for decades, the album was available only in Europe, held up by legal constraints; back on this side of the Atlantic where he really needed a power album, it was rarely heard.
But perhaps worse than that, he believes he was never properly reimbursed for the record. “They never paid me a penny,” he says, certain that he should have received the money directly. The record company that released it did tell him they wanted to once, but he believes they tried to short him. “Come up to my room one time,” he recalls. “I was doin’ a tour, and they had a check for, I don’t know, thirty-three or thirty-four thousand dollars, which was a pretty good little chunk of money back then.” But it wasn’t what he was owed, just a token sum. “I wouldn’t even let ’em in the room. They wasn’t livin’ up to the bargain. And they still owe me the money, and Mercury sold out to Universal, and Universal now owes me the money. I want them people to jar loose some of that money and give it to me.” The black and white of it, in the ledger, may never be known. But he feels it, he believes it, and it is a belief that most of the rock and rollers of this generation share about their own finances, and it colors their worldview to this day.
He does not worship money, he says again, but he also despises being cheated.
“I got it comin’ to me. It’s mine.”
In summer of ’64, he followed the Star-Club phenomenon with a live show in Birmingham, Alabama, that resulted in an album titled The Greatest Live Show on Earth. The show proved to an American audience in a large venue that, even in the midst of a recording downturn, Jerry Lee Lewis was still a hurricane force onstage. He played big Boutwell Auditorium, where the Memphis wrestlers went when they told their fans they were going on “world tour.” Every seat in the room was filled; people even stood along the walls to hear him rip through staples like “Mean Woman Blues” and “Hound Dog” and a few fresh tunes like Chuck Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go” and Charlie Rich’s “Who Will the Next Fool Be.” “A good show,” he says, though some fans would find it almost tame compared to Hamburg. But the big live shows—and the hundreds of smaller ones he continued to do to make a living—could not return him in any significant way to the stardom he had enjoyed before without new songs and the radio play he needed. Instead he slipped in and out of the public eye like a ghost, one who shook the house and wailed through the night but, in the morning, was gone.
In England, he was being slowly edged out by the act who preceded him at the Star-Club, the Beatles. “Boy, when they broke, they broke, didn’t they?” At home, where they had hit with great force in February of ’64, he couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing them:
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
“I never did care for the Beatles all that much, to tell the truth.”
Sometimes it seemed to him that the real troubadours were dropping away—even Patsy Cline was dead, killed in a plane crash in Tennessee—and he was forced to sit in purgatory while old Johnny Cash kept churning out number one country hits, as though Johnny was singing right at him:
I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher
As the arms of obscurity snatched at him, he kept recording, looking for a hit, and kept touring, taking gigs that would have killed his pride if he hadn’t so loved the simple act of playing. “Wasn’t no place too far for me to go to sing my songs,” he says. “Wasn’t no place too rough.” And when he didn’t have a gig, he played anyway, showing up at clubs around Memphis to commandeer a piano. No one was going to say no to the Killer. “I played Bad Bob’s, played Hernando’s Hideaway, played for the love of it, for the joy of playing.”
In December of ’64 he finally returned to American television, in what would become a series of appearances on the new ABC music show Shindig! But again it was too little, the return of a ghost playing the rock and roll that started it all. The nation’s popular music itself continued to weaken and simper into a cloying mess. Some days, spinning the dial on his radio on his way to another show in God knows where, it seemed like he was trapped in a perpetual never-ending loop of Herman’s Hermits and “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
At first the boys at Smash had little more luck with his records than Sam Phillips had. They released a retread album of his Sun hits, The Golden Hits of Jerry Lee Lewis, which made the charts briefly before vanishing. When “I’m on Fire” failed to catch, he tried the Ray Charles hit “Hit the Road, Jack,” an Eddie Kilroy country ballad called “Pen and Paper,” and a song called “She Was My Baby (He Was My Friend).” He rocked out on “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” a single lifted from the Birmingham album, but it barely made the charts.
People took to asking him, with irritating regularity, if the old Sun magic was gone. In 1965, he answered with what has been described as his first great album, The Return of Rock—a record that recalled the bravado and precision, the sharpness, of the Star-Club performance, and added a fleet-fingered swing. He did Joe Turner’s “Flip, Flop and Fly,” and the old, old blues “Corrine, Corrina,” and “Don’t Let Go,” the song Roy Hamilton had blown him away with onstage. He did three Chuck Berry songs, “Maybellene,” and “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Johnny B. Goode,” and proved he could still make people sweat and blush with his take on Hank Ballard’s “Sexy Ways,” which delivered what “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” only winked about:
Come on darlin’, now, I want you to get down on your knees one time
And shake for Jerry Lee Lewis, honey—yeah!
The album cracked the Top 200, but it peaked at 121, and it lacked the breakout song he needed to bring him back.
The problem, as always, was material, not technique. In a way, he believes now, his sound was better than it ever had been. The producer who cut The Return of Rock and most of Jerry Lee’s music at Smash was Jerry Kennedy, who understood the science of music and mechanics of sound, how it bounced and flew and settled into the ear and even into a person’s mind. Kennedy had been in love with music since he could walk, and as a child he’d been in the front row at Shreveport Municipal Auditorium to hear Hank Williams play one of his last shows. He had been a backup vocalist as a child, could play the guitar and dobro, had worked with Elvis at RCA and Jerry Lee at Sun, and as a producer at Smash was determined to get the best sound he could out of Jerry Lee’s piano. At Sun, the piano had sometimes been lost in the mix—even when Jerry Lee was beating it to death—but Kennedy knew how to bring it right up front. “Jerry Kennedy, he was gettin’ the piano sound he wanted,” says Jerry Lee. “It was a knockout. He’d take a quilt, a big, thick quilt he had, and cover the whole piano up—big grand piano—cover it up where nothin’ could get through it,” trapping the sound so that the engineers could highlight it in the mix. Jerry Lee believes now that the Mercury team were perhaps the smartest pure engineers he ever knew; the title “producer” might sound important, but to him Kennedy was like a great mechanic who made the car run sweeter, smoother. His critics would say he did not always make it run stronger, that once he hit on a formula, he stuck to it, and that sometimes he bled the spirit out of a record with too many strings and sappy backup vocals. Either way, for a decade or more, his handprint on Jerry Lee’s music and career would be plain to see.
Among other things, Kennedy recognized that his artist was at his best in front of an audience. One time, Jerry Lee recalls, they were recording at Monument Studios, on the “main strip” in Nashville. “Jerry said, ‘Do you mind if I just stop some people out here on the street and invite ’em in to hear you cut this song?’ I said, ‘Naw, that’d be great!’ And they set up about twelve chairs. And they come in, and they set down, and they were real nice, they never uttered a word. They just set there and they’s just . . . astonished.”
But he was still trying to make tarnished gold shine again, still caught in a rut of recycled music. Remaking old songs was everyday business for him, but hits like “Great Balls of Fire” and “Breathless” had come from established songwriters who knew how to join a fresh catchphrase to a catchy riff and come out with a hit. Throughout the mid-1960s he cut one album after another full of other people’s music: Country Songs for City Folks in ’65, Memphis Beat in ’66, Soul My Way in ’67. He cut tough country songs like “Skid Row” and tough blues like “Big Boss Man”; he read the lyric of Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” like he was thinking out loud. But none of it was new, not really.
“That was a hangup for me,” he says, “tryin’ to do a song that’s already been a multimillion seller. You don’t tackle somethin’ like that. That wasn’t Jerry Kennedy’s fault. That was my fault. I said, “I wanna do ‘Detroit City.’ ’Cause I can beat the original on it.’” But later, he admitted, “Boy, I sure am wrong on this one!”
One of them almost was a hit: Porter Wagoner’s agonizing prison ballad “Green, Green Grass of Home,” which he cut for Country Songs for City Folks. “That should have sold fifty million records,” he says, but Smash dropped the single without any support. “They didn’t do nothin’ for it. It was number one in every station in Alabama. And nothin’ in Memphis. And nothin’ anywhere else. Nothin’. And that don’t make sense. . . . You got a record number one and sellin’ like crazy in Alabama,” he laughs, “but you leave Alabama and you ain’t never even heard of the song.” His hunch was justified when the Welsh heartthrob Tom Jones, who had worshipped Jerry Lee since boyhood, heard the album and recut the song, making it an international number one hit the following year. To Jerry Lee, it seemed like Smash was waiting on a sure thing to get behind, and he lost faith in the label—the business side, not the studio team—early in his time there.
His reliance on pills and whiskey again ratcheted up. Once he could eat them by the handful and they didn’t faze him, maybe gave him a little nudge in the late nights or a soothing pat on his fevered head when he needed to go to bed. He could still drink his three fingers and six fingers and drink until he couldn’t measure them even if he had to take off his socks and shoes, and though he maintains now that he never drank that much, the stories of his tolerance are legendary.
But as he entered his third decade, the late nights and pills and liquor finally began to show, not in his still lean body but in his face. He had a grown man’s face now, with a line or two, but more than that—he just looked like he had lived some heartache. The world had finally marked him. “I could still take care of my women,” he says, which was the real barometer of a man. But sometimes he took it so far, ate so many pills and drank so much, that it made him crazier than he was already prone to be, and when the dark moods that were part of his blood descended, the chemicals fed the rages and made the darkness even blacker, if such a thing were possible. He would rail at the world, stomp, rage, and scream, and it seemed there was always a reporter there, unbelieving of such good fortune, to chronicle the madness of Jerry Lee Lewis.
“That was blues and yellows time. . . . I tell you, greatest pills ever made,” he says. “People said it made me crazy, but I was crazy before the blues and yellows. That would keep me going. Desbutal. Man, you couldn’t beat the Desbutal. Went hundreds of miles a day on them . . . biphetamines [black beauties], Placidyls, up and down. I took ’em all.”
It seemed like everyone in the business was popping.
“Back in those days, people were desperate to get a pill. Man, amphetamines, we thought, was the real answer. They thought, psychologically, that it’s really helping you, you know? But it’s not. It’s a miracle that any artist that is still around got through that. It’s only by the grace of God. That’s about it, you know?”
But friends and longtime fans would marvel how all of it—the drugs and straight whiskey and the lack of sleep—seemed mostly like something he could slough away on command; he says it was because it was exaggerated to begin with. In family photos and publicity shots and even television interviews and footage of his shows, he is always tall and straight and steady, as if it were all something he could just switch off if he wanted to and be a regular man, the man he used to be. Some would theorize that he had just done so much of it from such an early age—from the days when truck drivers at the Wagon Wheel tipped him with big bags of amphetamines—that his body was able to somehow metabolize it, and maybe that was true, for a while. He was still the best-looking man in the room, and while he might have been a little drunk then, from time to time, he was rarely a sloppy one. Since he was a teenager, he had known that pills could do, for a long, long time, what food and rest were supposed to do, so he popped the lid off a bottle and made himself strong, and endeavored to persevere. He was Jerry Lee Lewis, the Killer, and he was nobody’s victim.
“I’ll tell you this, I never dropped no drink. Calvert Extra. I never dropped no drink.”
But underneath the chemicals was a plain streak of ornery, with bright flashes of outright crazy. He began to collect guns, nickel-plated .357s and even machine guns, carried them with him in the touring cars, on private planes, and even took pocket guns onstage, a habit that would continue for years and years. “I’d go up onstage, pull my pistol out, set it on the piano,” he says. There were threats, and rumors of threats, and they still had to fight their way out of the beer joints they played, and he used that trick with the microphone stand again and again, from the Midwest to Atlanta. He had learned to take the microphone off the stand and fling it out like a rock on the end of a rope at a rude fan or a drunk, holding to one end of the cord so he could snatch it back if he missed and fling it at the offending target again.
His bandmates, playing with the great Jerry Lee Lewis, on the ride of their lives, soaked up the crazy and spat it back at the world.
“It was Buck Hutcheson with me then, on guitar. He could pick, but he couldn’t drive. Tarp Tarrant played drums. Tarp did a lot of my fightin’ for me. Herman ‘Hawk’ Hawkins played bass. Danny Daniels played the organ for me. Me and him fought once, over a woman. I had him whipped but I just went weak, just lost my strength. . . . Don’t know what happened. I never got tired.”
In Grand Prairie, Texas, in 1965, members of his band—Tarp Tarrant, Charlie Freeman, and Hawk Hawkins—were arrested, along with a teenage girl who was just along for the ride, for possession of prodigious amounts of prescription pills. But the pill-and-whiskey-rich atmosphere of the mid-1960s made them invincible and unstoppable—as long as there was bail money. They didn’t just play music but played it strong and hot and tight and a little bit wild, in town after town, and then they moved on to some place beyond the blurry horizon where they were some other sheriff’s problem.
“The women?” Jerry Lee says. “Well, they were always sympathetic with me.”
They all wanted to heal the wounded artist. He let them try.
“I’d have ’em go to bed with me, and they’d wake up the next morning and I’d be gone. But I remember once . . . It happened in El Paso. I remember we’d been to Juárez and watched some dirty movies. . . . Anyway, there was this girl, this beautiful girl. Blonde. I met her backstage. She never even mentioned her name. The next morning I woke up and I reached out to put my arm around her and she was gone. I wondered what happened to that girl. I always did. I kinda hated to see her leave. I bet she was married.”
There was not a lot of romance in it.
“I’d just say, ‘Wake up, baby, it’s time to rock again,’ and they’d be ready to rock,” he said. “If we was flying, I always kept an empty seat on the plane, in case there was somebody.” The faces usually changed with the zip codes. “But I gave ’em a plane ticket home,” he says.
If this was exile, he could stand it for a good while longer.
“Really, man, I lived it all,” he says. “I guess my reputation for all that stuff went ahead of me, too, and I had to live up to it, had to travel hundreds and thousands of miles a day, play good music, and take care of the women, too,” and he grinned at that, at the burden.
But Jerry Lee did not want anybody’s sympathy, certainly not a beautiful woman trying, as the country song goes, to catch a falling star. He hungered to be back on top again, on top of everything.
He took care of business, one little radio station at a time. He confronted disc jockeys who had banned his records and pumped the hands of the ones who had stuck with him, and sometimes there was a hundred in his hand as he did it.
“Greased them pockets,” he said. “I learned it from Jud. And I started gettin’ my albums on the air. . . . Three hundred, five hundred, whatever it took. ‘Money makes the mare trot,’ Mama said. It had to be a good song, but the money didn’t hurt. It wound the clock up every time,” giving him a little more time to record, to search for that big hit.
But for now it was small-time, still. Sometimes they dragged trailers behind their Cadillacs to sleep in, a kind of gypsy caravan rattling across the country. Once he was riding with songwriter Bill Taylor as his wife, Margaret, slept in another vehicle. The two men were riding, drinking, when suddenly one of the trailers broke free of its hitch and came whizzing, freewheeling, past them in the adjoining lane.
“That looked just like my trailer,” Bill said.
“That is your trailer,” Jerry Lee said.
They watched it roll down the highway.
“Wonder if Margaret’s in there,” Bill said.
It coasted to a stop.
“Guess I better go see,” he said.
It was an unusual time but a kind of life that would become less unusual over the years. He was still wandering, playing music that still made people glad to be alive. At a show in Arkansas, “my dressing room was one of those trailers, out in the back somewhere,” he says. He signed autographs there, including one for a college-age boy he would later recognize, some three decades later, on television. “He was runnin’ for president. Bill Clinton. Stood in line to get an autograph. . . . I knew I knew him.”
To his musicians, it seemed like Jerry Lee was determined to play and party his life away without interruption, and even when they saw the Memphis city-limits sign, it was no guarantee that he would turn them loose and let them return to their homes, to their own lives. He would insist on playing on and on and on into the next morning at his house outside Memphis, drinking and hopped-up, as his band’s families wondered if they would ever come home. It wasn’t so much the need to party that was driving him, but that hunger for a hit, the key to his comeback, and he believed the best way he could accomplish that was inside the craziness, singing and drinkin’ whiskey and searching for chords and taking pills and listening almost desperately for the song that would change everything. Phoebe, a little girl then, remembers it this way.
“He’d be on the road, going, going, going . . . and then he would come home and go to his office, and I’d hear records playing.”
Back in Ferriday, the hateful old racial order had begun to smoke and curl. Firebugs and bomb throwers, careful to hide their faces and not set their sheets ablaze, would turn parts of black Ferriday into kindling—which was odd, because there had been little agitation here. In ’64, Will Haney’s friend Frank Morris was burned to death in his shoe shop. The FBI descended on Ferriday, but his murderers never went to trial. Three years later, Haney’s Big House, the landmark blues club that had helped transform Jerry Lee from a talented church piano player into something more, burned to the ground. It would never be rebuilt; Haney would soon succumb to old age, and the great days of blues and R&B would drift away like smoke. It was as if the ground on which he’d built his musical life was turning to soot and ash.
The Smash label vanished, absorbed into Mercury. But Mercury, under any name, could not find him a hit, and he could not find one on his own. By the late 1960s, he was referring to his label mostly with disdain. The Beatles had drawn more than fifty thousand to Shea Stadium while he played for hundreds in auditoriums or less in the bars. Television producer Jack Good kept signing him for more episodes of Shindig!, and Jerry Lee got them to put Linda Gail on, too, to help her get her own career started. But what was there for him to play? One day he found himself on TV playing the Huey “Piano” Smith song “Rockin’ Pneumonia” on a harpsichord.
Pills melted in whiskey, whiskey infused blood, till the road and home and the rest of it were indistinguishable. Smoke, blue and swirling, shrouded it all. He had always liked a good cigar but now smoked big Cubans, the biggest and richest he could find, procured from his British contacts now that Castro was cozy with the Russians. Now and then he would stroll from his office with a bottle of whiskey in one fist, a fat Cuban in his teeth, and a big .357 or .45 in his other hand. He would aim it at the stars and fire and fire until there was just an empty click.
Jerry Lee’s marriage to Myra, and his home life in general, was strained at best. “Myra had a bad habit of surprising me. I’d look up, and she’d be at the show,” he says. “In Atlanta, in sixty-seven, after a show, someone told me, ‘Jerry Lee, Myra’s in the next room.’ And I said, ‘Well, tell her she’ll have to wait her turn.’ I was taking a lot of them pills then. Another time they said, ‘Watch out—Myra’s hiding behind the curtain in a polka-dot dress.’”
But as in most things having to do with love, he has a blind spot for his own infidelity. He does not pretend it did not happen, only that, somehow, it should have been forgiven because it was his. “I never seen a woman wasn’t jealous. I used to be jealous, but I pushed it aside. But that ol’ green-eyed monster can do a lot of damage.”
Myra would threaten to leave him, even see a lawyer, and would allege gross infidelity, physical and psychological cruelty. Worst of all, she felt, Jerry Lee blamed her for the death of their son, had never forgiven her, and never would. There was love there in spite of it all, but there was no hope, not even a chance for it, as he played a show somewhere almost every night of the year.
In the midst of all these bad times, of the awful drought, fate did send him one kindness: a guitar man who would stick with him to hell and gone.