The Killer Rocks On would be more than an album his fans would wear out from start to finish. It would mark an emergence from a country cocoon, his rebirth as a bona fide rocker.
Having made millions singing country, he spent them partying like a rock star. He had languished too long, touring and slaving and waiting for this rebirth, not to enjoy this ride when it came. “There wasn’t no time to lollygag around,” he says. “In one time around Nashville, there was more Jerry Lee Lewis stories than you could count. And, yeah, some of ’em was even true.”
It was a time of epic excess, but even the wildest rock stars of the 1970s learned that when it came to playing good music and then partying like there really was no coming dawn, they were milksop amateurs compared to Jerry Lee. He was even starting to look different: He had always considered long hair effeminate, but he’d enjoyed that beard he grew for Catch My Soul, and now he grew it out again and let his curls grow past his collar. He traded in his sport coats and two-tone shoes for boots and snazzier threads. Heading to England for a historic concert at Wembley Stadium, the first concert ever in that arena, he looked downright casual in his short-sleeved orange shirt and tight matching pants next to Little Richard and Chuck Berry. While he was backstage, he noticed a skinny, big-lipped kid on the stage, jamming like an over-excited teenager, waving a movie camera around. It was Mick Jagger.
“He was rolling on the floor with his camera,” says Jerry Lee. “He had every album I had ever made—with him. I told him, ‘I am not going to sign all them albums.’”
On a spring tour of Europe that year, he was wild onstage, wilder than perhaps he ever had been; the audiences loved him for it, because it was the persona come to life in front of them—not Jerry Lee Lewis, but the Killer. He was climbing the piano again at every show now, growling and threatening and clouding up and raining all over them. In Paris, he punched the air and climbed the piano to bump and grind, and the screams drowned out the music. Backstage, in interviews, he was exhausted, contemplative. He looked like what he was, a man with a troubled soul drifting out of control.
Or maybe, he says now, he just knew he had a role to play.
“I give my audience what it wants,” he said backstage as a French reporter translated. In the black-and-white video, his skin seems pale as bone, though maybe it’s just a trick of the light.
It may have been the role of a lifetime, but it took a toll.
“They want it that way,” he says now. “They want somebody that’s mean. That turns over pianos. That turns Rolls-Royces over. That gets married when he gets ready.
“That’s the Killer, you know? The Killer! Killer! Killer!”
In a blur, Jerry Lee and his entourage returned to London in January 1973 to cut an album with a cadre of gifted British musicians, including guitarists Peter Frampton and Albert Lee. Released as The Session . . . Recorded in London with Great Guest Artists, it was a contentious, hard-driven encounter in which the British would say they were driven like mules and many ass-whippings were threatened by an impatient and well-lubricated Jerry Lee. But the record was another hit, climbing into the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. The single was “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” proving that Jerry Lee could reach as far into his past as he wanted now, with this new momentum, and find a hit. He also cut another record that would be a kind of anthem for him, the Charlie Rich song “No Headstone on My Grave,” about a man defying death but promising to meet his mama in the by-and-by.
Jerry Lee would later say that the long-haired Brits in the funny bell-bottom pants were fine musicians and pretty good boys; they just needed some straightening out, like any band does sometimes. During the session he even tried giving them a little introduction to the long, long, long dead American songwriter and pianist Stephen Foster, leading them through “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Swanee River” in rock-and-roll time. “A lot of folks think he was a kinda . . . settled-type cat, you know,” he told them. “But he was a rockin’ muthahumper, Stephen Foster.”
His price per show, for concert halls, was back to $10,000. Elmo was traveling the world with him, now happy as a toddler with his mouth full of jawbreakers, calling down for room service and giggling at the grown men who brought it up in their silly pillbox hats. Phoebe could go to the finest schools, boarding schools, away from the craziness for a while, then return to the storm to watch her daddy rock and rave. Now, on silver wings, he floated above the mean little beer joints and honky-tonks and jukes where he had been forced to make his living. He had taken the riches from his country stardom and purchased his first airplane, a DC-3, with room for all manner of hangers-on and amiable drunks and pretty women with no particular place to go. He hired his own pilots to fly him in style to the big shows and TV specials, though “I never liked to ride on no airplane,” he says. He had lived his whole life swinging from one near-disaster to another, surviving crisis after crisis, fighting his way out or thinking his way out and sometimes just taking it like a man, but a man in an airplane had no power over anything, unless of course he was flying the thing himself and sometimes not even then. The wind could knock him out of the sky or he could get lost in a cloud or in a sheet of rain and never be seen alive again. “Airplanes don’t leave many cripples,” he says.
He remembers one trip in the 1970s, a trip from Las Vegas to Knoxville. The long flights often turned into mile-high drunks, and so it was this day. He was half-asleep on that flight when he glanced out the window and noticed “it looked like to me we were getting mighty close to the ground.”
He looked up to see one passenger come half running back from the cockpit.
“Jerry Lee, I don’t know if you know it, but your pilots are both asleep,” he said.
“Well,” Jerry Lee said, “I better go wake ’em up.”
He opened the door to the cockpit and looked inside. The men were asleep, and by now the treetops were almost brushing the wheels.
“They wasn’t drunk, just asleep,” he says. “They didn’t fly me again.”
It was a freedom he had never had before, even at the height of his rock-and-roll days. He could just go when wanderlust struck him. He would get off the phone at his house in Memphis and announce to whoever was lying around there, “Hey, y’all wanna go to Europe?”
“I reckon,” they would say, and off they’d go.
“It was the most perfect DC-3 in the country. It was beautiful on the inside. And it had everything you could want on a plane.” There was only one problem: “It was slow, slow, slow.”
He laughs about it now. “I remember one time, we was passing over San Antonio, Texas. And I looked down at the freeway and cars was passin’ us.” He asked the pilot, named Les, if that was normal. “Les, looks to me like those automobiles down there are passin’ us.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s true,” the pilot said. “We got a real bad headwind.”
“I said, ‘I want a plane that will go faster than this.’ So I got a Convair 640. It was made by the people out of Switzerland. . . . Nice bar, nice restroom . . . Had twenty-five seats on it—I mean, seats like this,” in his living room. “Anything you wanted, you know? Rolls-Royce engines on it. . . . And every time I’d leave town, my daddy—he didn’t mean anything by it, but there would be twenty-five people on that plane! People I didn’t even know.”
One time, they were slated to head over to London. “I got Les to fly us to Kansas City, catch a plane out of Kansas City. And some old guy sittin’ on the plane, he says, ‘Jerry Lee . . . I want you to know how much I appreciate this. I have never been overseas in my life. This is really gonna make my year.’
“I said, ‘Well, you just enjoy it, sir.’ He thought we was flyin’ to England. We’s just goin’ to Kansas City.”
The insanity of the lean years had continued, now with better and louder toys. They carried guns on the plane. They carried pills. After one transcontinental plane ride—he cannot recall exactly whether it was going or coming—Elmo, who had been drinking for several states, suddenly bolted out of his seat, leaped behind the wheel of a waiting limousine, and went squealing off over the tarmac, for all practical purposes stealing the car, only to crash it a mile or so down the road. Police arrived to see a gentle and frazzled old man sitting in the backseat, telling a tale of how he had been sitting there all along. He was Jerry Lee Lewis’s ol’ pappy, he said, and he’d just been waiting in the backseat when some guy stole the car with him in it and ran it into the ditch. What was most impressive was that Elmo was still limber and quick enough to switch from the front to the back before the law got there.
Gunfire was commonplace. He had a friend named Arthur who walked up to him drunk at a party.
“Jerry Lee, I think I might have ruined myself,” he said.
“What do you mean you ruined yourself?” Jerry Lee asked.
“I stuck my gun down the front of my pants and it went off,” he said.
“Well,” Jerry Lee said, “you might have ruined yourself.”
Sick of dealing with outsiders and certain that he could run his own business as smoothly as any carpetbagger, Jerry Lee had formed Jerry Lee Lewis Enterprises, Incorporated, located in a suite on Airways Boulevard, retaining as his manager the trusted Cecil Harrelson, who had backed him in ten thousand honky-tonks, and hiring as creative director Eddie Kilroy, who had brought him the Chesnut song that put him back on top. Cecil was in the family officially now, having married Linda Gail, who would divorce him and marry Kenny Lovelace, then divorce him and marry Cecil again on her way to eight marriages, a Lewis family record.
The days of the Cadillac were done. He bought a Rolls-Royce; all the real rock and rollers had a Rolls. It had a twelve-cylinder engine and would outrun any police car in the states of Mississippi and Tennessee. The days and nights were wild and fat and rich, and he could take it, man, even feed on it, because he was Jerry Lee Lewis. He was taking pills again, had never really stopped. He had a never-ending supply of them, some even legal, from George Nichopoulos, the man who medicated Elvis, the man they called Dr. Nick. But he could not medicate himself effectively enough to dissolve the pain of his mother’s death; some days it could still find him, after so much time. Reeling, hurting, he did himself great harm in those days, but instead of crashing, he reeled on. He supported relatives when they fell on hard times and even when they didn’t, and if there was anyone keeping track of the money he spent or the money he owed or the money that was owed him, they were sleeping through it all. There were few records or no records, and that would haunt him one day. The rules, the laws, seemed silly still. He reeled toward the next stage, the next record, the next large payday. Like most episodes of his life, he sang his story from the stage, singing Creedence Clearwater like he meant it:
Don’t go around tonight
Well, it’s bound to take your life
His temper, always infamous, worsened. Graham Knight tells of a concert in England in ’73 when Jerry Lee became furious at a drummer who could not keep up or keep time. “He told the drummer to get off the stage, and if he told the drummer to get, the drummer would go,” he said. “After the drummer left the stage, Jerry continued playing the show, playing the melody on the piano with the right hand, and playing the drum with the left.”
Knight remembers it was the music, still, that sustained the man more than any chemical. Even in England, the end of a show did not mean the music was finished. “I liked the times when he would be in my Mini, sitting in my passenger seat, Kenneth Lovelace in the back. He’d be playing his guitar, and Jerry would sing. And we would drive a couple hundred miles that way, back to London. We’d stop at a truck stop, and Jerry would ask for a cup of beans. Truck drivers would come up to him in the middle of the night. ‘Are you Jerry Lee Lewis?’ they would ask. ‘The one and only,’ he said.”
But the demons even outran the music, and he found he could not run fast enough to beat them and still hold the road. Jerry Lee remembers smoking down the two-lane in his Rolls-Royce somewhere up around Bolivar, Tennessee, blue and red lights in his rearview mirror. “I’s moving on pretty swift,” he said. “Burnt up two more cop cars trying to catch me. I looked up and I saw that the road ahead of me was completely blocked with cop cars. Why, I thought, they must be waitin’ on me.”
Another time, he was blasting down the Tennessee blacktop, his tape deck blaring through custom speakers in a car that cost more than most of the houses he roared by. He tried to take a curve at a speed he can no longer recall, but one beyond the physical mechanics of even his vehicle. “I turned a Rolls-Royce over,” he says, “and it was layin’ up on its side. And this song—it was one of my favorites that was playin’, ‘One Rose,’ Jimmie Rodgers song. And I was listenin’ to that tape, and—boy, I was about half loaded, too, to be honest with you. And I was sittin’ there, and I guess the cops threatenin’ me, and everything, to get out of that car. I said, ‘I’m not gettin’ out of this car until that tape finishes playin’ ‘One Rose That’s Left in My Heart!’ And they just backed off and waited till it finished. It had warped the tape or somethin’ when it turned over. ‘Ooonnne rooossse, that’s left innnn, my heart, deeear . . .’”
At the station, “I was rantin’ and ravin’, and kickin’ and carryin’ on,” he laughs. “They had a time with me. They put me in a cell back there, and he said—the sheriff—‘When you settle down, Jerry Lee, and you quit all this cussin’ and rantin’ and ravin’ and carryin’ on, and threatenin’ us and everything, we’ll let you out and you can go home.’ I said, Maaan, you gon’ let me out, now . . .’ He said, ‘That ain’t gonna get it.’ So I ranted and raved about an hour or so, an’ I finally calmed down, kinda laid down on this bunk and took a little nap, I think.
“He come back by and said, ‘You through with all that rantin’ and everything?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m ready to go home.’”
For some four years now, he had been the most bankable country star in the world. He lived the heartache in his songs every day, but he did not ask for the sympathy of the people who bought his records. How do you ask that of men and women who counted every penny, who prayed to make their payments and pay their power bill? They gave it to him anyway, and the fan mail poured in. People said they prayed for him and thanked him for the happiness he brought them. “I hope it lifted people’s hearts,” he says, and he believes it did. He even still played a city auditorium or high school stage once in a blue moon to stay in touch with those people; three days after the massive concert in Wembley Stadium, he played a school in Indiana. But the love that people gave him, from the factory floor, from the sweatshop sewing plants and typing pools and the double-wides and dirt roads, had not reached as far as the Ryman, the members-only institution that had rejected Hank Williams and been cool, at best, when Elvis took the stage. Once, a long time ago, when his mama was alive, he would have liked to have played there, because it would have meant so much to her. He had seemed such a natural choice back when he did “Crazy Arms” and “You Win Again,” but no one called, and then the Opry banned him outright, because of his rock-and-roll reputation, forbade him to play the show that his mama had hoarded a battery all week to hear on her transistor radio. And now it was too late.
Then, as if to prove how fate messes with a man, in the midst of the heartache and craziness and self-destruction, he was asked to play the Ryman, with all that it implied.
“They asked me to play the Opry,” he says, “and I only did it because this time they begged me to.”
It was January of ’73. It was still the same Opry, with the same austere old men glaring from backstage as if they had been hacked out of hickory and nailed to the Ryman walls. Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow and Roy Acuff, the ageless men who had looked right through him when he was a big-eyed boy standing backstage, stood there in the same suits that hung straight down from their skeletal frames like they were draped on crossed broom handles. Some of the acts had changed, but the act remained: Minnie Pearl, a tag still flying from that same silly hat, still shouted, “Howdeeeeee!” and told stories that depicted country folk as backward but somehow wise at the same time; the Opry regulars did bluegrass and old, old country, and newer, younger guests did some safe music that fit the mold. Little Jimmy Dickens still walked around under that massive white Stetson, like he had a bathtub on his head.
As Jerry Lee stood there in the wings, waiting, he shook hands and nodded and was polite, but he had not forgotten. He remembered the last time he had stood here, invisible unless he was in someone’s way. And then a sweet voice had asked him, “Son, are you lost . . . ?” And then he heard his name announced, and he strolled to his piano, across those scarred but historic boards, to great applause.
The old, thin men in the fine, glittery suits and Stetsons stared from around the curtain, uncertain. What heresy would he unleash?
Instead he did “Another Place, Another Time,” a song written to be played here, expected to be played here, and when he was through, the people began to applaud, warmly, loudly. But almost before they could bring their hands together, he blistered into Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say” and a medley of “Break My Mind” and “Mean Woman Blues,” followed by “I Can’t Seem to Say Goodbye” and “Once More with Feeling,” and the Singing Brakeman’s “Waiting for a Train,” and the people in the polite crowd whistled and roared.
“Played right through the commercials,” he says, ignoring the broadcast schedule, any schedule. They could work around him. Then he looked into the wings and motioned for Del Wood, the one member of the Opry who had been kind to him when he was here as a teenager wandering Music Row.
“Ladies and gentlemen, many years ago, I had the privilege of meeting a fine lady. Her name is Del Wood. . . . I was just a kid at the time, about nineteen years old. I came backstage—I don’t know how I got in, I just slipped in—and she treated me with the most . . . I don’t know, she was so courteous. I’ll never forget for as long as . . . I live. This meant so much to me. And I’m gonna ask Miz Wood if she would come out. . . . No one has asked me to do this in any way, shape, form, nor fashion. . . . I just talked with her backstage, and I said, ‘Honey, I want you to come out, and let’s me and you just sit down to the piano and play “Down Yonder.”’”
The crowd whistled and cheered as she walked out.
“This is a privilege to Jerry Lee Lewis,” he said.
“Took the words right out of my mouth,” she said. “It’s a privilege to me.”
And the piano started to ring. She could play anything, that woman, ragtime or gospel or honky-tonk. They’d called her the Queen of the Ragtime Pianists when she toured with the Opry for the soldiers in Vietnam, but she was a star only in memory now. Now she sat with the still-young Jerry Lee, and they played together, sometimes laughing out loud.
“I’m gonna tell you one thing about that lady,” Jerry Lee said, as she walked off to thunderous applause. “If she can’t get it, you can forget it, because it couldn’t be got.”
Then someone in the crowd screamed out “Johnny B. Goode,” and he got back down to it. “Yes, yes,” he said, and played it for them, then went into another medley of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Workin’ Man Blues” and “Rock Around the Clock,” and then finished with a red-hot second round of “Shakin’.” He slowed down to do “Me and Bobby McGee,” played “Chantilly Lace,” then another medley of “Good Golly Miss Molly” and “Tutti Frutti.” The crowd screamed and whistled and shook the ancient floorboards. They behaved in a way that this old place had not seen since the last inappropriate boy had climbed the stage, the one who said he could throw his hat onto the stage after singing “Lovesick Blues” and his hat would get three encores. They hollered and stomped like they’d hollered for no one but him, not even that boy Elvis.
“Elvis,” he says now, “was not ready.”
He looked around at the old, worn building, so ragged to hold such gilded history.
“It was a barn,” he says now.
Then Jerry Lee looked out across the seats and played. . .
Hear that lonesome whip-poor-will
He sounds too blue to fly
Two months after the Opry show, he gave a thunderous performance in Brooklyn, backed by a full set of horns, that was broadcast nationally on the ABC series In Concert. Then, in September, he returned to Memphis to cut a new album, Southern Roots. During these sessions, he insulted the producer, threatened to kill a photographer, and drank and medicated his way into but not out of a fog. In that haze, he did the raunchy classic “Meat Man,” written by his friend Mack Vickery, a song that needs little explanation:
I got jaws like a bear trap, teeth like a razor
A Maytag tongue with a sensitive taster
He seemed still unstoppable, making repeat engagements on the now classic late-night TV series The Midnight Special. The show brought him into even greater numbers of living rooms, carrying him even higher into that odd place where legends and stars of the here-and-now breathe the same rare air.
He was in Los Angeles that October playing the Roxy, when a scruffy, nearsighted young man appeared backstage, almost breathless.
His son punched him in the arm, excited, then kept punching him.
“Daddy,” Junior said, “ain’t that John Lennon?”
“Yes, son, that’s John Lennon,” he said.
Lennon rushed up to Jerry Lee and dropped to his knees.
He bowed, and kissed his feet.
“Thank you,” Jerry Lee said, not knowing what else to say.
“I just wanted you to know what you meant to me,” said Lennon. “You made it possible for me to be a rock-and-roll singer.”
“He was very sincere,” Jerry Lee remembers. “He said, ‘I just wanted to show you and tell you how much I appreciate what you done for rock and roll.’”
Jerry Lee had not thought much of the Beatles’ music, but it turned out they were decent boys—at least this four-eyed fellow with the scraggly sideburns and sissy-looking hair.
“He was real nice,” Jerry Lee said. “He was serious. I didn’t know what to think. I guess it is flatterin’, when you have people kissin’ your feet.”
He does not know if any of the other Beatles were there that night in the entourage. “They were in a box of seats, and they were diggin’ the show. I know that. I don’t know what they were smokin’, but there was a lot of smoke comin’ out of that box.”
He purchased that year a big brick house in the country in Hernando County, Mississippi, framed by a beautiful lake, with stables, green pastures, and lush, dark trees. There, about fifteen minutes south of Memphis, inside the pastoral limits of the hamlet of Nesbit, a man could take a swim in his piano-shaped swimming pool or step out his back door and fire his hogleg unmolested at snakes or clouds or the moon and stars, and it was nobody’s business but his. He had envisioned it as a place where he and his daddy and his children, and maybe even boy grandchildren, to carry on his name, would live, perhaps not in serenity, not exactly Walton’s Mountain but still a good place, their place. It was the anchor, a place to come home to.
But he rarely saw it. In 1973 alone, he traveled to eighty cities to play and sing his songs, often doing more than one show in each locale. That fall, he crisscrossed the country west to east and north to south. He started in Syracuse, then Nashville, then off to Europe for a couple of whirlwind dates, then a week in Los Angeles taping an episode of the television drama Police Story, then off to Memphis for Southern Roots, then Oklahoma City and Corpus Christi, then Kentucky, Florida, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, L.A. again, and Indiana. He closed the year in relatively sane fashion, playing five nights apiece at nightclubs in Birmingham, Atlanta, and Fort Lauderdale, wrapping up on Christmas Day.
Sometime that October, between Texas and Kentucky, he put in one more appearance on The Midnight Special, this time electing to give the audience the century-old “Silver Threads Among the Gold,” which he’d just recorded for Southern Roots.
Plant a kiss upon my brow today
Life is fading fast away