He was not just on top of the world again; in some ways, he was looking down upon it. On November 14, 1969, the astronaut Charles Conrad Jr. carried a collection of Jerry Lee songs with him to the moon on Apollo 12. “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” not only went to the moon, as he always said it would, but it landed on it—the only sound, at times, in that little spacecraft on that cold, distant orb. He would look at the moon sometimes, especially on the nights when it was big and full, and grin about that. Some of the old people at home in Louisiana said we never went to the moon, that they made all that stuff up, but he knows that we did, and that the astronauts heard a little boogie when they got there.
In early ’70, he did The Johnny Cash Show; he was gracious to his host, and Johnny treated him like a long-lost pal. He was acceptable now in the world of country music, and in the wider one. All seemed forgiven. What had once seemed a slow, inglorious burnout was now a genuine comeback: you could tell by the Cadillacs that once again filled his parents’ driveways—though Mamie still stole his when she took a notion.
“I left the keys in it,” he says now, “so she wouldn’t have to ask for them.”
“Mama, you take my new car?” he asked when he saw a bare spot in the driveway about the size of a Fleetwood.
“All the way to Ferriday,” she answered.
“And I would have to buy her one just like it to get it back. I’d call the dealer and he’d say, ‘I happen to have one left.’ A salesman always has one left.”
The offers for live shows poured in. He even played Vegas, in an extended engagement at the International Hotel. Elvis was playing the main room.
“I was playin’ in the lounge. I mean the lounge was as big . . .” and he laughs. “It was as large as this whole house. Just the lounge. I mean, the main room would seat, like, three thousand people. And the room I was in would seat, like, twenty-five hundred. I was hittin’ [Elvis] tit for tat on that.” With its more casual atmosphere, the lounge was a better match for Jerry Lee. “You can really let your hair down there, you know. I was doin’, like, six shows a night. I didn’t mind. I loved it!”
He had watched Elvis’s show in the big room, but to him it was like he’d lost what made him great—the leanness, not in his body but in his performance. “I didn’t particular care too much for that,” he recalls now. “He had an enlarged band, with horns and violins, stuff like that, and I don’t think it ever come off that good. He was tryin’ to prove somethin’ that really didn’t need provin’. He was takin’ away from his old style.”
For his own shows, all he needed was the raw, stripped-down power of his piano and voice. He wanted as little fanfare as possible. “I never give ’em a chance to introduce me,” often just coming onstage during the warmup and starting to play. One look at the faces there, he says, and he would know what to play and how to play it. Playlists were for timid people. “I can read my audience like that. I can tell what they want and what they don’t want. If it’s there, if they really want it, if they got an addiction for it, so to speak”—he laughs—“I can deliver it to ’em.” He’d play the big hits, of course, but sometimes he’d give them whatever he felt like in the moment—a bit of Bob Wills, or Tom T. Hall, even a sip or two of Jolson. It seemed he could sing anything then, sing the water bill, and they would have given him a standing ovation. The women stood three deep at his dressing-room door, and the husbands left bullets on his piano lid, thinking they were clever, that such a thing had never been done before.
The only thing missing was a musical heir. His boy, Junior, the son he’d had with Jane when he was still playing the Natchez clubs, was now fifteen. He had learned to play the drums—was learning still—and moved out of his mama’s house and joined his daddy on the road and soon onstage. He was handsome even before he was old enough to drive, like his daddy on The Steve Allen Show. He was clean-cut, in the beginning, and wore his hair swooped up high on his head, like his daddy had done. He had a smile full of big, white teeth, and looked like he was getting away with something just sitting there. Born thirteen months after his wedding with Jane, Junior was every inch his boy.
“I loved him. . . . I loved my boy.”
At first he just banged a tambourine, for the fun of it, while he learned the drums. Then Jerry Lee decreed there was no reason why a band could not have two drummers, and Junior took a seat behind his daddy, keeping time. He traveled around the country and around the world, seeing and doing things most teenagers only imagine. He ate with rock stars and listened as his daddy swapped stories of the old days with other legends. He would prove to be a talented drummer, with his family’s ear for music. Jerry Lee knew the rock-and-roll lifestyle was seductive, dangerous, but to deny the boy a chance to experience it, him being a Lewis, would be like telling a Flying Wallenda not to walk a wire. “He done good” on the road and stage, and the excesses of the road, the drinking and drug use, were not preordained, though it would mean the boy would have to rise above not only temptation but the natural bent for addiction and wild behavior that had been in the blood of Lewis men since the Civil War. The Lewises made music, and they raised hell along the way.
But Junior was not his daddy, say the people who played with him. He was not a Killer, but a gentler soul, and he seemed to draw out a tender side in his father. Kenny Lovelace remembers how Jerry Lee would turn from the piano bench, watch the boy play, and when he would hit a particularly hot lick, would grin. “My boy . . .” Jerry Lee says now, and his eyes track away to a dark corner of the room, as if he can almost see him there. His other son, Steve Allen, had left the world so soon, so early, and there was so little to recall. But in this boy, this young man, he could see his own face. “My boy . . . Lord . . .” He will not talk of him for long, and it has been too long already.
His next album, There Must Be More to Love Than This, was full of cheatin’ songs, “Home Away from Home,” and “Woman, Woman (Get Out of Our Way),” and the title song. It was once again prophetic. Myra, left mostly at home as he chased his newfound stardom, had hired detectives to follow her husband on the road and by 1970 had evidence to support her suspicions of gross and prolonged infidelity. She filed for divorce while Jerry Lee was on tour in Australia. Her petition alleged cruelties without end, beatings, and threats on her life. Jerry Lee denied the worst of it—“I never hurt none of ’em”—but the other women were, as he once said himself, “hard to hide,” especially if you are not trying too hard. They had been married thirteen years, and while there had been love in the beginning, it was pretty well stomped flat by then. “Bogged down,” he says. “But she did try to get me back several times. She knew she made a mistake.” (Four months after the divorce was final, Myra married Peter Malito, one of the private detectives she had hired to gather evidence of Jerry Lee’s infidelity.) The new album also featured a song called “Life’s Little Ups and Downs,” Charlie Rich’s paean to marriage and forgiveness. But forgiveness was just one more pleasant fiction, sung in pleasant rhymes.
Much has been written about how the divorce from Myra tugged him into a dark place, became the catalyst for some kind of decline, some escalation in his drinking or drug use that somehow tipped the balance he had found that allowed him to record, perform, and party. If people think that, he says, they were not paying attention for about two decades. It did not cripple him or stifle his creativity or sap his energy. His marriage to Myra had been so long in trouble that this end was inevitable; he behaved little differently in the wide-open days after the marriage than in the wide-open days before its slow death. It might seem right to say it knocked him to his knees, but that is not what happened, not what took his wind in the years to come. He is impatient when people tell him he should have felt something he did not. “Don’t no woman rule me,” he says again, what he always says when he is done talking about a woman or her hold on him. He is not saying he did not miss her at times—they were married a long time—only that he moved on. In the narrative of his breakup with Myra, the role of tortured, jilted spouse is not one he is willing to take on.
He took his happiness, as always, in the music—in a rocked-up version of the chestnut “Sweet Georgia Brown,” recorded since its inception in 1925 by everybody from Bing Crosby to the Beatles. It remains one of his favorite records—“one of the best things we ever done”—and in this case he gives much of the credit to Kenny Lovelace. “He did that fiddle break on that thing—it’s somethin’ else, isn’t it? I mean, you can never capture that again, like that. Oh man! What a record! It’s so far above—so far ahead of anybody’s thinkin’ in the music business that they could never comprehend the meaning of it. It had the flavor of everything.” Onstage he turned the song into a celebration, hands flying, fingers stabbing, his face, in those days at least, joyous. If you don’t like it, he likes to tell the audience, “you need to get yourself checked,” ’cause you might already be dead.
He could do anything, it seemed, except live the way people said he ought to, but even despite his foibles, he somehow soared. Pearry Lee Green, who’d almost gotten kicked out of Bible college when Jerry Lee rocked Waxahachie, never gave up his conviction that his piano-playing friend was born to bring people to the Lord. In 1970, he was at a conference of ministers called the Full Gospel Businessmen’s International in Sydney, Australia, when he learned that Jerry Lee was in town. Jerry Lee was drinking that night, but he asked Pearry Lee to sit on the piano bench with him in front of a well-lubricated, rowdy auditorium crowd of three thousand people. “You’re going to be surprised,” he told the crowd, “but I was going to be a preacher.” He told the crowd of the “singspiration” and how the organized church refused to accept his gift. Then he sang a hymn, an old one from his childhood. The rowdy crowd grew quiet.
“I’m going to tell you something, he had every kid in that place crying,” said Pearry Lee. “I don’t think in my life I’ve ever seen that many young people with tears in their eyes. Jerry Lee’s voice just melted their hearts. If I’d been preaching, I’d have given an invitation for salvation.”
Photographic Insert 2
The finale of his triumphant appearance in Granada TV’s Don’t Knock the Rock, March 19, 1964.
ITV/Rex/REX USA
In May 1963, he did a weeklong stint at the Star-Club, a raucous joint on the infamous Reeperbahn where the Beatles had lately cut their teeth.
On April 5 of the following year, he returned to record one of the greatest live albums of all time.
Pierre Pennone; K&K Center of Beat/Retna Ltd
In the studio for Smash, 1965.
Robert Prokop
A Chicago live date captured for the cover of the Smash album
Memphis Beat. Robert Prokop
The wild man reborn as a seasoned country star.
REX/Dezo Hoffman
“No, never shall my soul be satisfied!” As Iago in Catch My Soul, 1968.
Backstage at the London Palladium, 1972.
Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns/Getty Images
At the London Rock and Roll Show, the first concert ever held in Wembley Stadium, 1972.
Chris Foster/REX USA
Bananafish Garden, Brooklyn, New York, 1973.
Bob Gruen
“Where’s Daddy at? Is he still cussin’?” With Elmo in Texas, 1970s.
Raeanne Rubenstein
After pulling into the gates of Graceland, early morning, November 23, 1976.
Memphis Commercial Appeal
In his private plane, 1970s.
Raeanne Rubenstein
Onstage with Linda Gail.
Raeanne Rubenstein
With Mick Fleetwood and Keith Richards for Salute!, a Dick Clark TV special, July 1983.
Richard E. Aaron/Redferns/Getty Images
The boys of Ferriday, Louisiana: with Mickey Gilley (left) and Jimmy Lee Swaggart.
? Christopher R. Harris
With his fourth wife, Jaren Pate, in 1978.
Memphis Press-Scimitar
At his wedding to Shawn Stephens, June 7, 1983.
Globe-Photos/lmageCollect.com
After Shawn’s death, on April 24, 1984, he married Kerrie McCarver.
Zuma Press
Getting his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. With him is Dennis Quaid, who played Jerry Lee in the 1989 motion picture Great Balls of Fire.
AP Photo/Doug Pizac
At home in Nesbit, Mississippi, with his Sun gold records.
LFI/Photoshot
With Chuck Berry and Ray Charles at the first Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, January 23, 1986.
? Lynn Goldsmith / Corbis
At the Great Balls of Fire premiere party, at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, 1989.
AP Photo/Todd Lillard
Back at the Hall of Fame, 1995.
Onstage with Levi Kreis at Million Dollar Quartet, 2010.
? Neal Preston/Corbis; Bruce Glikas/WireImage/Getty Images
Frankie Jean.
Linda Gail.
With Judith, 2014.
Steve Roberts