In time, Junior had straightened his life out, at least as much as a rock-and-roll drummer was allowed in those wild years, and was growing into a solid man with no true meanness in him; he was like Elmo that way. Jerry Lee saw in his son a good musician but increasingly his own man, not a spoiled kid. He would not be one more person who would just ride in the big man’s wake, a thing Jerry Lee never resented and in fact encouraged of the people he loved. He kept his blood kin close, because blood was everything; anything else was only paper. But it made him proud to see his son take charge of his life, become a capable man. Junior was not afraid to get his hands greasy, knew how to turn a wrench and how to rig a tow bar. He would not be one of those Southern men who stand helpless at the side of the road next to a broke-down car; he would raise the hood and start slinging wrenches.
On November 13, 1973, on a break from the constant tour, he drove to Cockrum, Mississippi, in his Jeep, a present from his father, to pick up a Ford and tow it back to his father’s house. Police investigators believe he was taking a curve on Holly Springs Highway when the car he was towing struck the abutment of a bridge and caused him to lose control of his Jeep. It flipped, killing him. He had just turned nineteen.
His funeral was on the fifteenth, in the Church of God in Ferriday, another of the churches Lee Calhoun had built. It was an open casket, but the undertaker covered the boy’s face with a cloth of satin. His father stood with the congregation at his back and looked down at his second dead son.
“I did pull that thing back from his face,” his father says, “and I kissed him on the forehead, and I spoke to him.”
They buried the boy in the cemetery at Clayton, which had been so much smaller when he was a boy. He heard the same songs again. He never shed a tear that anyone could see, not ever. But for a long time, when he closed his eyes, all he saw were passing coffins. “Seemed like I was always on my way to the graveyard. At one time, it seemed like I was burying somebody every week. If it wasn’t my mama, it was my boys . . . a steady stream, and it would just keep going, and going, and I would put on my suit and my tie and I would get it done. I buried my people, and I still didn’t break down, I still didn’t cry at the church.
“Because you got to be strong, don’t you? You got to be strong.”
He had the stonecutter fashion a heart-shaped headstone, and later, alone with the dead, he walked through the green of the lovely and peaceful place and read the words.
HIS LIFE WAS GENTLE, AND THE ELEMENTS SO
MIX’D IN HIM, THAT NATURE MIGHT STAND UP
AND SAY TO ALL THE WORLD, THIS IS A MAN!
“I lost my two boys. And I went on. I went on living.” He still toured, but the passing of the caskets had left him with a hole in his middle he could stand only when he was thoroughly numbed. It is the only excuse he has ever offered, and he does not care much if anyone accepts it or not. But whereas in the past it had seemed he didn’t care if he lived or died, now he seemed to taunt death, daring anything and anyone to take him down, even seeming at times to dare the audience to try. A brawl in a Memphis bar in ’73 was just one of several fistfights he welcomed then, though this one left him with a broken nose that never properly healed, one that would even affect his voice in coming years. He does not recall much about it, of course, just that he gave as good as he got. He had always loved his audiences, was always quick to shut up a drunk or call a heckler’s bluff, out of respect for the stage and for the people who came to hear the music, “people who paid their hard-earned dollar.” But now he seemed ready to rise to it, daring anyone to challenge him.
He hates to concede any weakness when his back is up; it is almost always up. But he says that his son’s death, so close to Mamie’s, “really knocked me off my feet. I didn’t know a thing could hurt that bad. It seemed like it was all I done, was bury my people. It seemed like all I did was stand and watch these people I loved . . .” There was a hopelessness in it, because what was it all for if the people he loved most were gone? His mama’s death was a thing of pure dread, something that wore him down, but his son’s death on the highway hit him with such unexpected force that he still feels it, like a physical thing, in his chest. His friends and bandmates and family wondered if he would recover. He was not a man who cared about a lot of things, and now much of what little he actually cared about was just stripped away.
In the spotlight, he would just stop sometimes in the middle of a song and glare balefully into the darkness at faces he couldn’t even see, as if inviting the audience to rise up against him.
“I walked the aisles back then,” said his daughter, Phoebe, “looking for a gun.”
13
THE YEAR OF THE GUN
Memphis
1974
The car was supposed to be a fine American driving machine, but he never could find a Corvette that would hold the road in those days. “Wrecked a dozen of ’em,” he says. “I was coming home one time—might have been drinking—and I run one up under the front porch of a house. A little girl come out, her eyes real big, and I don’t know why . . . I just said, ‘Top of the mornin’ to you,’ and she run back inside. And this woman stuck her head out the door and said, ‘Oh, Lord, it’s Jerry Lee Lewis.’”
A lot of people had that reaction to him then. He was not yet forty, but already people seemed surprised to see him, or maybe see him alive after all the stories told. At another In Concert taping, the announcer introduced him as “a man who’s so unreal, it’s hard to believe he’s really here.” He took the stage in a black tuxedo, lean and tall and straight, older now, but otherwise not a mark on him. The scruffy beard was gone, his hair long but perfect. “Oh, yeah,” he said into the microphone, over the screams of the audience, then launched into “Haunted House,” the silly but catchy record from one-hit wonder Jumpin’ Gene Simmons, the story of a man who moves into a new house to find it occupied by a green-skinned monster from outer space, who eats a hunk of raw meat “right from my hand . . . and drank hot grease from the frying pan.” It’s a goofy song, no doubt, but also a song about defiance, of refusing to be run off from something that belongs to you, and Jerry Lee turned it into another snatch of autobiography:
Jerry Lee Lewis’ll be here when the morning come
Be right here, ain’t gonna run
Then he tore it up some more.
I bought this house and I am boss
The music dies.
If God’s wi’ me, they ain’t gonna run me off
His hands flew and stabbed, then he stood up and peeled off his coat, flung away his tie, and undid his cuffs so he could slap the piano unimpeded. He stood up to sing, sat down to play, and when he did play, he stuck the microphone into his waistband like a pistol.
He was supposed to be ravaged by grief, eaten away by pills.
“Tortured?” he says now, and smiles. “Me?”
He looked like the Jerry Lee of old, gun-barrel straight and bulletproof on the outside, though inside an awful corrosion was beginning in his stomach, where all the excess of his life had pooled. But as he sang that silly song, it was like he knew the next great comedown, the next big slide, was beginning, and somehow he wanted to tell everybody there on national television that he was not going quietly.
Jaren had filed for divorce by now, but no one seemed in much of a hurry to do anything about that. Jerry Lee saw her occasionally; usually some kind of narcotic or alcohol was involved. He did a few sessions, mostly tepid; nothing much came of them either. He played a stage for money almost every night somewhere, then came home and went to the bars to play some more. He had always taken refuge in his live shows; now he sank into the music deeper and deeper, till it was all that mattered, but even that would be affected. He was still a big star, and acted with impunity in public; the beauty of Jerry Lee was that he would have acted that way anyway. He threatened and howled, and dry-humped the piano on the big stages. At home in Memphis, in the smoke and two-drink minimums, he played still for the joy of it, and punished anyone who interfered.
In March of ’75, a waitress at Bad Bob’s lounge in Memphis said he attacked her with a fiddle bow. He was convicted of assault and battery and fined $25; she was fined $15 for malicious mischief, for breaking the bow after she took it away from him. She sued him for $100,000, saying that he “brutally and savagely attacked her,” but like most lawsuits involving Jerry Lee, he just ignored it till people got tired of bothering him. He does not recall attacking anyone, but if he did whack someone with a fiddle bow, he is sure it was because they were interrupting a song or made him mad or otherwise needed whacking. It was an ignoble event in an awful and ignoble year, and it was just fine with him.
He was hanging out then with his friend Mack Vickery, who, with a comedian named Elmer Fudpucker, had become the opening act for some of Jerry Lee’s live shows. Fudpucker, whose real name was Hollis Champion, would tell a few jokes, much the same rural humor that had become a staple at the Grand Ole Opry with Minnie Pearl, and then Vickery, an accomplished songwriter who could do a dead-on Elvis impersonation, would play some country and some old rock and roll. A native of Town Creek, Alabama, he had come to Memphis in ’57, too, to be a rock-and-roll singer but had discovered that his best chance at fame was in putting the words and rhymes in other people’s mouths. He had written for Faron Young, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Lefty Frizzell, and others. He had Jerry Lee’s irreverence about convention and the straight world—he recorded an album called Live at the Alabama Women’s Prison and sometimes went by the pseudonym Atlanta James. Articulate in both song and life, he would come to be viewed as Jerry’s Lee’s “speechwriter.” Jerry Lee saw in the man not just a drinking buddy but a true blue-collar poet, and many of the things he said onstage were things he first said to Vickery or heard back from him.
“He was one of my best friends,” says Jerry Lee, who rarely uses such language, even with people he has known all his life. “He was good, kind, gentle . . . he was one person I could depend on. We sat around and laughed and played music. It was like we were brothers.”
The shows they played together were legendary, Jerry Lee says, if for no other reason than their duration. He alone would take encore after encore, and not just in the paid shows but in the impromptu concerts he did for free in the Memphis clubs.
“Sometimes I’d play for four hours,” he says. “People remember things like that.”
He started to frequent a place outside Memphis called Hernando’s Hideaway, which some would come to jokingly call his office.
“It got so ridiculous that Kenny Rogers, the owner—we called him Red—he got to where he was making good money off of me. He said, ‘Stay around, ladies and gentlemen! Jerry Lee landed his Learjet out at the airport and he’ll be here in about thirty minutes.’ And that place was packed out, you know? You couldn’t get a seat. Nowhere! Not even standin’ outside!” No matter how late he was, the crowd never left. “They knew I’d show up sooner or later. And I said, ‘Boy, ol’ Kenny’s moppin’ up.’ I didn’t mind.”
The patrons at Hernando’s Hideaway remember him busting through the door with his entourage, sometimes still in his rock-and-roll clothes from the show. People would rush to bring him something to lubricate his voice; then he would take the piano by divine right and play until dawn.
“Never got tired.”
He fesses up to the pills, but the liquor, he swears, was exaggerated. It always had been.
“People thought I used to drink a fifth of whiskey a night,” he says. “I’d buy a fifth of Calvert Extra whiskey. And I’d keep it to myself—I hid it in my shaving kit, you know? I drank on that fifth of whiskey for about a week, a week and a half. And everybody thought I was drinkin’ a fifth of whiskey a night. That’s something that got started. They still think it.”
There were, of course, many, many exceptions; people just naturally loved buying Jerry Lee Lewis a drink. They would talk about it all their lives, how they bought the Killer a fifth.
In July of ’75, he went back into the Mercury studio to cut a song that was written for and about him. “A Damn Good Country Song” was by Donnie Fritts, a member of Kris Kristofferson’s band:
Well I’ve took enough pills for the whole damn town
Old Jerry Lee’s drank enough whiskey to lift any ship off the ground
I’ll be the first to admit it, sure do wish these people would quit it
’Cause it’s tough enough to straighten up, when they won’t leave you alone
My life would make a damn good country song
Maybe it’s just the nature of country music that a man sings his life out loud. They sing about broken hearts and loving their mamas and beer and babies and trains, of course, and watermelon wine. But sometimes a man sings it down to the bone, as real as a car wreck, or a cave-in.
The year of the gun, for Jerry Lee, was actually a rolling barrage of years and many guns, but since he and almost all the people who should have been keeping watch on him were not clear in the head, exact dates are hard to pin down. Jerry Lee was a Southern man, and therefore had never been far from a gun of some kind, requiring one the same way other men require a pocket watch or suspenders. Like most Southern men, he had been witness from boyhood to the awful mystery of guns, until the day his people placed one in his own hands and lectured him about the power, the responsibility, and he nodded and promised and remembered, for a while—for he had also been raised to know the awful mystery of liquor, and had long ago succumbed to the great temptation to hold the one while his blood swam with the other.
He had never needed an excuse to party, but now there was a wildness and a bald recklessness that set new standards even for him, and mixing with the other barroom smells was an almost regular reek of cordite. Lost pills and empty casings mixed in the shag carpeting. He carried a pocket pistol pretty much all the time now—pearl-handled automatics, dependable snub-nosed .38s and over-and-under .22 derringers. Southern men will tell you that there are really only two things you can do with guns, shoot them and look at them, and Jerry Lee did not like looking at them all that much.
In the drunken excess that was Jerry Lee Lewis Enterprises, Incorporated, on Airport Road, Jerry Lee became bored looking at his .38 one night and fired it into a wall. Then he reloaded and fired it some more.
“I was shootin’ people’s caps off their heads,” he says.
He is asked why.
He just stares blankly.
It was because he wanted to.
“Anyway,” Jerry Lee says, “I didn’t know the bullets was going through the walls. Just went right on through.”
The next day, his neighbor in the adjoining suite, a dental technician who fit and manufactured dentures, came to work to find twenty-five holes in the wall. Worse, a display case of dentures, some of them antiques, had been shot into scattered false teeth and shards of pink porcelain gums.
“He was very upset about that,” says Jerry Lee.
The man stormed over and told Jerry Lee he had shot his teeth off the wall.
It took Jerry Lee, who was hungover, a minute to process.
“What do you mean, I shot your teeth off the wall?”
He was relieved to realize they were not actually in someone’s mouth.
“I’ve had these teeth for forty years,” the man said.
There was great shouting and threats, and the police were summoned.
“I just got in my car and left,” Jerry Lee says.
The police needed to arrest someone. They waited for someone, anyone, to approach the door of Jerry Lee Lewis Enterprises. “Elmer Fudpucker drove up,” said Jerry Lee, “so they took him to jail.”
Elvis was also prone to shoot things in his seclusion. He shot at least one television, which went on display at Graceland. He was rumored to have shot more than one, but that would have made him a serial killer, so hard evidence of that, in his more carefully manicured image, is scarce. If Jerry Lee had shot a bunch of televisions, they would have piled them up and hung a sign on them that read THE KILLER WAS HERE!
Jerry Lee says now Elvis was just being a copycat.
“I started shootin’ things, so Elvis got out his gun and started shootin’ things.”
Well I know I’ve earned my reputation
Can’t they see I’ve found my salvation?
I guess they’d rather prove me wrong
My life would make a damn good country song
Again as his life got wilder, his time in the studio went dry. The old honky-tonk formula had worn itself thin, and country radio had gotten sweeter, and even when he found himself a damn good country song, it was only a marginal hit.
“You can only have so many hit records, and record so many, and do ’em different every time, every time, every time, you know?” he says. But he was still Jerry Lee Lewis, and he still did what he wanted. The euphemism muthahumper had begun creeping into the lyrics of his songs—a rare concession for the most dangerous man in rock and roll. His performances and even studio recordings were marked by a rotating repertoire of catchphrases and mannerisms:
Think about it
God almighty knows
I guarantee it
This is J-L-L, and I’m hell when I’m well
And always, always, his name, Jerry Lee, inserted wherever the lyric called for “me,” or even where it didn’t.
He tried what he could to personalize the endless parade of country songs. One day he decided to play the piano from the inside. “One record I had out, I said, ‘I wanna try somethin’ here.’ I reached inside the piano, and kinda moved the quilt back a little bit”—he laughs—“and I took my hand, and I said, ‘Let’s take a take,’ and I said, “‘I wanna hear this. I wanna kick it off with my fingernail right down the strings.’” It did not make music history. Another time, as a lark, he cut a bluesy parody of “Great Balls of Fire,” singing the words slow and low. “I was jus’ cuttin’ up on that. Jerry Kennedy . . . he never said a word. He just cut it. I was havin’ a ball! But even the musicians was lookin’ at me kinda weird.”
The harder he tried to find a hit, it seemed, the more complicated—and less like him—the music became. The new music had a sophisticated, almost Hollywood sound, a style called countrypolitan that had put Charlie Rich back on the charts. Hard country like Jerry Lee’s style was vanishing in a wash of saccharine strings, or so it seemed; the spontaneity of his recordings, the perfect imperfection Sam Phillips had sought, was being polished out by multitrack recording and overdubbing. He hated to sing in a booth over one of his own prerecorded backing tracks, but it was becoming routine.
In February of ’76 he had surgery to correct damage to his sinuses, the result of that broken nose. He believes his voice was never affected by the damage, that his body was fine and his hands were still “perfect.” He was not like other men. By now he had been recording music for almost two decades and was still viable, still spending the money he earned from his dream; few could say that, and even fewer could say they had been there for the very beginning of something and were still recording and playing it two decades later in anything more than nostalgia shows.
He found a kind of second residence at 6907 Lankershim Boulevard, at the Palomino Club in the San Fernando Valley. He had been playing the storied Palomino almost from the nightclub’s first days, watching as the onetime neighborhood bar grew into a hot spot for country, country-rock, and good music in general, on the West Coast and in the nation as a whole. It had been a destination for Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson; Patsy Cline did “Crazy” here, Buck Owens did “Love’s Gonna Live Here,” and Jerry Jeff Walker sang “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris stopped hearts here, and George Harrison jammed with Bob Dylan and Taj Mahal. It was a place where patrons could come in from the harsh California daylight and sip a beer in the cool dark as the musicians—famous and more obscure—played, rehearsed, or just jammed. Patrons wandered backstage for autographs. In its layout in the early 1970s, it could hold more than four hundred people. Jerry Lee packed the place and would play the Palomino at least once a year for three decades. He loved it.
“Come out of there,” he says, “with more money than we could tote. And they got their money’s worth.”
He played what he wanted when he wanted, but in ’76 he played little of it cold sober. His shows achieved a level of wildness perhaps unequaled in his career—so much so that it nearly got in the way of the music.
One such performance from the Palomino was captured in All You Need Is Love: The Story of Popular Music, a seventeen-part television documentary chronicling performers as diverse as Bing Crosby and Bo Diddley. The filmmakers caught Jerry Lee in a kind of red-faced frenzy, standing on the keyboard in white loafers, keeping time by banging the fall board against the cabinet. It is not exactly anything new, any of it, but it seems uncontrolled and a bit joyless compared to some of his wild shows of the near and distant past. He wanders around the stage, shirt unbuttoned and tied at his waist, crashing through a rendition of “Shakin’” in which it’s hard to make out what he is saying; he stares briefly off into space, then sticks his face close to the camera, nose still swollen, and announces:
You know what I mean. . . .
And I’m lookin’ at every good-lookin’ thang in America right now. . . .
Meat Man! You know what I am. . . .
He doesn’t seem to notice the audience. Some called it one of his wildest performances; to others it seemed bleak, and a foreshadowing of darker things.
Celebrities still came to the Palomino every night then. One night, Phoebe came backstage to see her daddy. “She was pretty young at the time. And she come back cryin’, you know? And I said, ‘What’s wrong with you, girl?’
“Do you know who’s standin’ in line out there to get your autograph?” she asked.
“I have no idea, baby. There’s usually somebody standing in line to get it.”
“She started callin’ off their names. She said, ‘Keith . . . Ronnie . . .’”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “The Rolling Stones. They come around and see me quite often.”
“That,” he says now, “was when they were the hottest thing in the country.”
The Stones saw in Jerry Lee the same trailblazer that John Lennon had. But Jerry Lee connected somehow with the Stones, who lived the rock-and-roll life full tilt—but who always, first and foremost, played the music. They took old blues and introduced it to a whole new generation, as he had done with so many genres.
“We had some great times,” he says. “I used to flip a bottle of Crown Royal, flip it and catch it. Well, Keith then started doin’ it. They must have dropped fifteen bottles of Crown Royal whiskey—the best whiskey—lost it all! Busted all to pieces, you know? And they’d just reach to get another one. It was a trip! I laughed. I said, ‘Don’t do that no more. You’re wastin’ that whiskey.’”
Again he told people to do as he said, not as he’d done.
“I worried about ’em. I warned them. I talked to ’em. Just like I did John Belushi.”
Belushi was another regular, a fan of Jerry Lee and already well on his way to the addictions that would kill him.
“I could see he really wasn’t payin’ that much attention to what I thought was right and wrong. He was just like me; you wasn’t goin’ to tell him what to do. He was dead set in his ways. . . . He liked what he was doin’, and you wasn’t going to stop him from doin’ it.”
In September of ’76, probably not long after that Palomino performance, Jerry Lee was celebrating his forty-first birthday at the house he had purchased for Jaren in Collierville. They were still married, though Jaren had twice filed for separate maintenance so that she could remain married to Jerry Lee without actually living with him.
Butch Owens, his bass player, arrived with a friend, Dagwood Mann.
“Was there drinking going on?” says Jerry Lee. “Unconsolable drinking.”
Dagwood Mann pulled out a big .357 and handed it to Jerry Lee.
“Careful,” he said. “It’s got a hair trigger.”
“Whaddaya mean, a hair trigger?” Jerry Lee said, and laughed, pretending to look for a hair on it.
“It went off,” says Jerry Lee. “It hit a Coke bottle, and that Coke bottle flew into a thousand pieces.”
“I-I-I-I been shot,” screamed Butch Owens.
“It appears to be that way, Butch,” Jerry Lee said, too drunk to be overly concerned.
“Why?” asked Butch.
“ ’Cause you appear to be sittin’ in the wrong spot,” said Jerry Lee.
For reasons that only very drunk men could comprehend, the revolver was cocked when Dagwood Mann handed it to Jerry Lee. Jerry Lee still does not know exactly how it happened.
He will not even admit that he shot the man, not with a bullet, anyway. “I believe it was a piece of the Coke bottle that went into Butch,” says Jerry Lee. “He stuttered a lot when it happened, whatever it was.”
Jerry Lee was charged with discharging a firearm within the city limits, but the shooting was, in criminal terms, judged to be accidental. But Butch Owens sued Jerry Lee for $50,000 and won, claiming that just before he was shot, Jerry Lee told him, “Butch, look down the barrel of this,” and then aimed at the Coke bottle next to him. As he lay there bleeding, Jaren yelled at him for ruining her white shag carpet.
“I just know it took him a couple days to talk right,” says Jerry Lee.
He was being sued by everybody, for broken contracts and such. Jaren had lawyers after him, to pay her for not being his wife and not being divorced from him either, which was a whole new level of marital hell he had not even known existed. In Memphis, people talked bad about him, and talk bad about him today, how he let his wife and daughter live on welfare, how he ignored their needs while he partied the night away at Hernando’s and Bad Bob’s. In the clubs, it seemed like even cocktail waitresses were waiting to pick fights with him, then send in their lawyers to collect. The airports wouldn’t sell him fuel for his plane unless he paid in hundred-dollar bills. Band mates quit him and sued him for back wages. Myra sent lawyers for not meeting the commitments of their divorce. He had to keep a close eye on Elmo, who had somehow gotten himself married during all this. At the Denver airport, drug agents in black Ninja outfits stormed his plane, and their hellhounds sniffed out every pill in the fuselage. He was interrogated about an international drug cartel, which was preposterous, as trying to hide drugs on Jerry Lee’s plane would be like trying to hide a pullet in a chicken house; drugs spilled from the seat cushions.
One night, going home to Nesbit in his white Rolls, feeling no pain, he felt the liquor run warm through his blood. He had never seen anything wrong with going out and driving off a good drunk. The exits whizzed past him like fence posts, and as he pulled off the highway on his exit he noticed a long line of trucks in front of him. “I’d pulled into the weigh station,” he said. “People were looking at me, all them guys in their big trucks, like I was crazy.” He pulled onto the scales and waved.
His physical health continued to deteriorate, but again it did not show that much on the outside. The whiskey and chemicals had eaten a hole in his stomach, and it burned night and day, but he medicated himself and went on. By the fall of ’76, it seemed like the only person who halfway understood him was his old buddy Elvis. They had seen each other off and on over the years, but Elvis had withdrawn from everyone lately. His weight had ballooned. “He had got big, boy, real big,” said Jerry Lee, and Elvis was ashamed of that. Instead of going out, like Jerry Lee did, he hid in his mansion, eating pills. The music had saved both of them, and now fame was doing its best to kill them both. The larger, pill-ravaged Elvis slowly devoured the slim, pretty boy, and in ’76 he watched the outside world pass on the gray blacktop on the black-and-white screen of his closed-circuit televisions. They didn’t see each other in those days but talked on the telephone, mostly about times different from these.
Jerry Lee was a little weary of the way their legends had diverged. Elvis’s legacy had been carefully groomed and handled, and little ol’ ladies prayed for him and bought clocks with his face inside the glass, while Jerry Lee’s legend had run amok, a tale of crashed cars, pills, liquor, gunfire, divorce, lawsuits, and sexual profligacy. They had both loved their mamas.
On Monday, November 22, 1976, during one of the many reconciliations—or cease-fires—with Jaren, Jerry and his still-wife were speeding through Collierville in his Rolls-Royce when somehow he managed to turn it upside down. They were not badly hurt, but Jerry Lee was charged with driving while intoxicated and reckless driving, though the Breathalyzer would show that whatever was wrong with Jerry Lee’s faculties that day, alcohol was not involved. He was arrested and bailed out later that day, and when reporters approached him, he lashed out. He wanted to know why the press always hovered around him in the worst of times, while they always gave Elvis a pass. “Y’all hate my guts or something,” he told the Commercial Appeal. “I’m no angel, of course, but I’m a pretty nice guy.”
The Rolls was pretty well finished. He bought a brand-new white Lincoln Continental. He had always liked a good Lincoln.
The next day, Elvis called him.
“Come out to the house,” he told Jerry Lee.
Jerry Lee said he would if he had time. Elmo had managed to get himself arrested for driving drunk in Tunica, and that would require some straightening out. Later that night, Jerry Lee went looking for a drink himself, at the second-swankiest nightclub in Memphis, and for some reason he settled on champagne. He never did have much luck with champagne.
Walk on, Killer