In October 1991, a police officer in Indio, California, saw a man driving on the wrong side of the road in a Jaguar. It was Jimmy Swaggart, and he was with a prostitute, reported the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He was in California for a revival.
This time, he was not contrite. He told his congregation that God told him to return to the pulpit. “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.”
“And they lined up,” says Jerry Lee of his cousin’s flock.
It was just a power they both had, for being forgiven.
Jerry Lee needed it more often, in smaller doses.
“But I never pretended nothin’,” he says.
For Jerry Lee, it was the beginning of a period of withdrawal, in which the news he made was mostly in the National Enquirer. He did few shows, fewer recordings. Other, lesser performers would have called it retirement, but he was aching to get back in front of an audience, to get back in a studio and cut a new record.
“I don’t know where I’d go,” he says now, “if I didn’t have that stage.”
A year passed that way, two, three. In spring of ’93, he loaned his name to a short-lived Memphis nightclub called the Jerry Lee Lewis Spot. Then, with the IRS still dogging him, he fled, to become a tax exile in a country that knew how to treat its artists. He and Kerrie and Lee moved to Dublin, where musicians are exempt from taxes under Irish law.
Kerrie, on an Irish television talk show, said they loved Ireland and planned to make it their home, and that the womanizing, hard-living man now wanted to live quietly. “I caught him at the right time,” she said. She claimed that Jerry Lee was at peace in Dublin. “He loves the rain,” she said. It reminded him of sleeping under a tin roof at home in Black River. “The rain was very soothing . . . the drumming of the rain.”
While they were in Dublin, the IRS hired a locksmith to open the gates on the Nesbit house—he had title to the house only through a lifetime ownership agreement, so the house itself could not be taken—and started to empty the sprawling brick house of everything but children’s toys. Federal agents carried out two grand pianos, a pinball machine, a pool table, a box of Christmas decorations, a riding lawn mower, model cars, including a pink Cadillac, eight swords, a pen-and-ink sketch of Jerry Lee Lewis, a Sun Records clock, a poster signed by Fats Domino, every stick of furniture, two cases of Coke bottles, an empty gun cabinet, eight ceramic cups (one broken), a toothbrush holder, forty-eight records, twenty-five pipes, seventeen jackets (some leather), a candelabra, a Jerry Lee Lewis beer stein, a box of piano-shaped knickknacks, and one warped and buckled Starck upright piano.
Agents would say that the old piano was in “horrible condition” and without value.
The IRS set an auction date, but Kerrie was able to get a restraining order to delay it, and they bought back some of the items that were taken when Jerry Lee declared bankruptcy. The old Starck upright was returned.
After a year in exile, they came home. Jerry Lee missed his people, missed the river, missed it all. After decades of bitter enmity with the IRS, in July 1994 he agreed to pay some $560,000 of a $4.1 million tax bill, fourteen cents on the dollar. To earn the money, he would play music and open the Nesbit ranch to guided tours. “You have to do what you have to do,” said Kerrie, as she opened the house to fans.
He had not recorded in years, and his live shows had dwindled, but someone forgot to tell Jerry Lee that he was finished, if anyone had the nerve. He played another European tour in ’94, including a show in Arnhem, Holland, where he seemed, again, immune to all that life had thrown at him—that he had encouraged it to throw—and gave the fans their due. He was a little stooped now, and there was gray in his hair. Kenny Lovelace, still playing four feet behind him, helped him off with his jacket; Kenny’s ball of curls was graying now, too. But they played “Johnny B. Goode” like it was going out of style; Jerry Lee played all over the piano, and even yodeled a little, as if he was still needling Chuck from an ocean away. He did tell the Arnhem crowd he was glad to be in Amsterdam, but they cheered like crazy anyway.
In Memphis, in December, he was hospitalized after choking on some food.
He was fifty-nine.
“When I can’t play no more,” he says now, of that time, “then it will be over.”
Jerry Lee had only one place to go: back into his own fame. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences awarded Jerry Lee Lewis his second Grammy, this time a Lifetime Achievement Award. He went back on tour, no longer leaping onto the piano but still playing the hell out of it sitting down, as most mortal men have been forced to do it.
In 1995, he released a new album called Young Blood. It would not reach the charts, would not spark a comeback, though besides the soundtrack it was his most sustained work since the Elektra days. It was a mono album recorded with modern-day methods, and it seemed misplaced amid the country music of the time, the way a slightly dusty bottle of Early Times would be out of place in a bar that served fruit-scented vodkas and designer beer. He did Huey Smith’s “High Blood Pressure,” and the old country song “Poison Love,” and classics from Jimmie Rodgers (“Miss the Mississippi and You”) and Mr. Williams (“I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive”), and reviewers said they liked the way his voice had aged, but some of the songs were pieced together mechanically, and the whole seemed to lack his spontaneity, his spirit.
In 1996, on February 24, at the Sports Arena in Goldston, North Carolina, he took the stage, ready to raise hell, and didn’t leave it until he had barreled through “Meat Man,” “Over the Rainbow,” “Memphis, Tennessee,” “When I Take My Vacation in Heaven,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Lucille,” “Mean Woman Blues,” “Mr. Sandman,” “What’d I Say,” “To Make Love Sweeter for You,” Hank Williams’s “You Win Again,” “Room Full of Roses,” a medley of “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “You Belong to Me,” “White Christmas,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” a snatch of “Peter Cottontail,” “Mexicali Rose,” “Seasons of My Heart,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Thirty-Nine and Holding,” a few bars of the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream” and the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” Al Jolson’s “My Mammy” and “April Showers,” “Boogie Woogie Country Man,” one verse of Johnny Horton’s “Honky Tonk Man,” “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye,” a medley of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “I’ll Meet You in the Morning,” and “On the Jericho Road,” “Great Balls of Fire,” “The Last Letter,” “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” “Money,” “Lady of Spain,” “Who’s Gonna Play This Old Piano,” “Lewis Boogie,” “Crazy Arms,” “Goodnight Irene,” Jimmie Rodgers’s “In the Jailhouse Now,” Harry Belafonte’s “Jamaica Farewell,” “Chantilly Lace,” a few improvised lyrics (“You’re from the center of Alabama/I’m the center of attention”), “In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town,” “Bye Bye Love,” a medley of “Trouble in Mind” and “Georgia on My Mind,” “Me and Bobby McGee,” two lines of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “I Wish I Was Eighteen Again,” and an encore of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Folsom Prison Blues,” 160 minutes later.
In 1998, after a long but fractious marriage, Kerrie filed her initial complaint for a divorce, citing irreconcilable differences, alleging that he had been unfaithful—he suspected the same of her—and that he had hidden financial assets from her. It was the most benign complaint he had ever encountered, but the divorce would take years to finalize. Court records were sealed, but the Commercial Appeal reported that Kerrie received a $250,000 lump sum, $30,000 a year for five years, and $20,000 for child support for Lee, by then a teenager.
Jerry Lee spent more and more time at the ranch, but it was quieter now; music no longer poured from the place when he came home from a show. “She took my records,” he said, in the divorce. The tours of the house ceased, at least. He could roam the dark halls in peace, still in lingering addiction, still hoping for another comeback, and why not? The last time he looked in the mirror, it was still Jerry Lee Lewis he saw looking back.
The pills were no longer as easy to obtain. Dr. Nick had finally been censured and lost his license after a review by the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners. In the late 1990s he tried for a third time to regain his license, but officials of the Board of Health evoked the ghost of Elvis and the ruin of Jerry Lee as evidence against him, and he was denied.
Jerry Lee had somehow passed into the realm of the old master, and more than ever the younger stars—some of them legends themselves—wanted to be close to him, to reach out and touch history. Some of that attention he welcomed; some, he resented. It depended on the musician. He had seen his life mirrored—though that mirror was sometimes cracked—in every corner of pop culture. He had misbehaved badly, and if he had any regret, it was that some of those who followed him believed that was all there was to it. “I’ve seen ’em, these new so-called bad boys. They try. They really try. I see it, and it’s as phony as can be.” He has seen them trash their hotel rooms in celebration, because they can afford to smash as many hotel rooms as they want, at least until the money runs low. “Well, it just don’t work that way. You got to feel it, boy. Be what you are. If you feel it, you can jump up on that piano, kick the stool back, beat it with a shoe. But you got to feel it. The music has to be there. It has to be there, first.”
Sam Phillips died in the dog days of summer, July 30, 2003, of respiratory failure, two days before the little studio at 706 Union was declared a national historic landmark. He had been a smoker much of his life. Jerry Lee was sad when he heard the news, of course, despite their stormy time together. But it was not only that institutional, historical sadness people feel when someone of importance has passed. Jerry Lee also understood what Sam had done for American music, and so for the music of the world. By taking white music and black music by the hands and joining them together, Sam Phillips not only helped make way for rock and roll but broke down some barriers between those two peoples, made the world a little better to live in, and certainly more joyful. He would record anything, if he felt it, if it moved his soul even a little and made him tap his toes, and he did not give a damn what color the man’s skin had; whether it was a towering black man from the Delta, like Howlin’ Wolf, or a brooding Arkansas cotton picker, like Johnny Cash. He stamped it all in hot wax and sent it to a pasty-white teenager in Middle America, so he could feel everything they felt—and more, for the distance it traveled. And if that was the so-called danger in rock and roll, then he was a thoroughly dangerous man.
“Sam seen it in me,” Jerry Lee says, and he does not care that dollar signs were flashing in Phillips’s eyes. He knew Sam was a businessman—all their problems stemmed from that—but also a true believer in the cause, which was why it hurt Jerry Lee when he hesitated over “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” and seemed to turn away from him when the debacle of London knocked them all out of the clouds. People always talked about the almost religious fervor they saw in Sam Phillips when he heard something he loved, something brand-new or sometimes something very old. Jerry Lee saw that fervor, veiled in tears, when Sam Phillips walked from the room after hearing him play Hank’s “You Win Again.”
But the sadness Jerry Lee felt pushing down on him that summer was more than that. The old kings were dying, one by one: Roy Orbison in 1988, Charlie Rich in ’95, Carl Perkins in ’98, Johnny Cash in ’03. And the music itself—as much as people remembered, as much as they loved it—seemed to be more and more a thing of museums, of a bygone day.
“We had such a good time,” he says.
In 2004, Rolling Stone, the magazine that had once all but accused him of murder, placed him on its list of the top one hundred artists of all time. He was about to enter his eighth decade, and he was still looking for a record deal. It was not that he believed he had anything left to prove, he says, or even that he longed for some new validation. It was not even the money, though he knew he had to work, had to earn. It was simpler than any of that: He truly did not know what else to be, other than a rock and roller, a country singer, a piano player, driving his band across the country and around the world, with one eye on the audience the whole time.
“I train my boys to follow me,” he says. “I build up a show. I build it up. And I pick my tempo up at certain times, like I want it. And it brings the crowd up.”
He takes his thumb and jacks it into the air, once, twice, three times.
“When I do that, it means pick up, or else. It means pick it up, or get off the stage.”
He knows he has slipped below that perfection, in the harshest times.
But it can be that way again. He knows it.
“I want that show to be right. And I want that song to be right, when I play it on the piano and sing it. And I want that band to back me up like they’re supposed to.”
He says all this, thinking back to that time, as he recovers from a litany of ailments that prevent him from standing still, or even sitting still, for more than a few minutes at a time.
But there is no other place for him.
“Where would I go?” he says again. “I wouldn’t know where to go.”
16
LAST MAN STANDING
Nesbit
2000S
He had never much cared what other people thought, or at least that was the armor he wore. He probably did care, some, or he would have given up, would have stopped playing his piano and singing songs, but he never did. But you will play hell getting him to concede it. He played from love, the same love “my mama and daddy had. They loved music.” He had risen from professional and personal ruin, from death itself, and public infamy, so many times; could anybody even keep track of how many? He would be lauded onstage, honored with his industry’s highest acclaim, and go home to a house he did not own, which he arranged to be filed under another man’s name, so that the government could never take it away. He was seventy-one years old, in wretched health, his body still polluted by the painkillers he had battled across the second half of his life. And as he sat in the gloom of his big house in Nesbit, there beside the tranquil lake, he was not thinking retirement, or even death, though death had begun, naturally, to creep into his thoughts. He was thinking comeback. He just needed a record, needed a hit. Some things, he says, smiling, “don’t never change.”
He knew it was time to cast off his worldly demon, his addiction, or that comeback was unlikely. He was too far into his life to choke that demon down, and still pour out his songs.
He also knew that if he did not beat it, he would probably die.
He was the last man standing, quite literally, the last of the big Sun boys from the beginning of rock and roll.
Others were still alive, but time had taken either their legs or their will.
Chuck Berry was even older than he, and frail, though still playing.
Little Richard had bad legs, found it hard to walk. He would talk of retirement, but Jerry Lee would dismiss it. “He’ll not retire,” he said. “Not Richard. As long as they make wheelchairs, he’ll be onstage.”
Fats Domino had vanished into his house in Louisiana.
“Fats is, is kind of . . . funny about things. I don’t know. He’s a hard cat to figure out, sometimes. He’d like to do him some more shows, really, but he’s—he’s too nervous about it. He says, ‘I don’t think them people really want to see me.’ I said, ‘I think you’re wrong there, Fats. They want to see you. They love you, man.’”
He did not believe in his own passing, his fading, as Fats did.
“I just needed a record,” he says.
His daughter, Phoebe, had come to live with him. She has said many times that she has devoted her life to him, even forfeiting her own personal life, even children, to help care for him. She had seen her daddy rise and fall many times across her life, like some yo-yo, so quick, at times, that it seemed almost impossible in a waking world, more like a dream. Kerrie had redecorated the house—the Coca-Cola wallpaper is still there in the kitchen—but had not, despite her very public accounts of Jerry Lee’s clean living, cured him.
Phoebe took a hand in her daddy’s professional life, searching for a way he could reenter the business beyond the occasional, weary nostalgia show, the tiring European trips, and small events closer to home.
Jerry Lee went searching for a cure of another kind.
He prayed.
He prayed for God to cast off his demon.
“If you’re not in the hands of God, you’re over,” he says, not with the desperation that some men find as old age advances and death stands at the foot of their bed, but with a lifetime of conviction that in the end God would decide his fate in this world and the next. This time, he is certain God gave him another chance to make music, a little more music.
“He calls the shots,” he says. “Broke me from my habit. I’m a very hardheaded person. I had to really be proven to.”
He laughs. “I was proven to.”
Now he calls it one of the hardest things he has ever done. It was not just a rolling addiction, but a lifetime accumulation, sixty years of rattling pills and needles, that he had to relinquish.
“I have myself pretty well straightened out,” he says, looking back on that time. “It’s been a real uphill climb, I tell you. Never be enough money to make me do that again.”
He remembers the usual pain of withdrawal, the shakes and chills that others live through, but he met that with prayer. In the end, he conquered it there in the dark of his bedroom, but not alone.
“God did,” he says.
He was still frailer than he would have liked. But he was ready to take the stage.
His professional deliverance, when it finally came, seemed almost heaven-sent.
Steve Bing, the businessman, film producer, and philanthropist, had inherited some $600 million from his grandparents when he was a teenager, and by 2008 had most of it left. He had written movies like Kangaroo Jack, produced the Stallone remake of Get Carter, and invested in the wildly successful animated film Polar Express. He had a love for rock and roll and produced and financed the Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light, which was directed by Martin Scorsese. He put his money to work for causes he believed in, investing millions in congressional races around the country. And one such cause was the music of Jerry Lee Lewis.
In the early 2000s, Bing decided to finance and coproduce a new record featuring Jerry Lee, in duet with—or backed musically by—some of the most legendary performers in rock and roll and country music, as well as some others who just badly wanted to be part of the project.
With Bing’s money as a machine and Jerry Lee’s reputation as an enticement, the project, coproduced by Jimmy Ripp, drew a host of famous fans: B. B. King, Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Jimmy Page, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Eric Clapton, John Fogerty, Buddy Guy, Don Henley, Kris Kristofferson, Neil Young, Robbie Robertson, Little Richard, and Rod Stewart. It also drew country singer Toby Keith, and the modern-day bad boy Kid Rock. Some of the tracks were laid down using the expedient ways of modern music, with voices spliced and married by machines. But some were done the old-fashioned way, with men looking at each other across a microphone.
It brought live performances and even a made-for-video concert show, joining Jerry Lee with great performers in their own right, like Springsteen on “Pink Cadillac.” In one of the most interesting pieces of film from the making of the album, Springsteen sings backup, and seems glad to do it. His line at the beginning of the song, “Go on, Killer!” made people smile with a kind of goofy joy. When he and George Jones sang “Don’t Be Ashamed of Your Age,” he actually yodeled so high that Jones had to warn him not to hurt himself. When he and Willie Nelson sang the sweet “A Couple More Years,” it was with a wink and a grin. When he did “Hadacol Boogie” with Buddy Guy, you knew they spanned a time when that song was more than trivia, when broke-down guitar pickers throughout the South had it in their repertoire. Guitar licks from players like Buddy and Jimmy Page meshed with his piano and voice—which showed its age, surely, but how could it not? It was still Jerry Lee Lewis and all that that implied.
And some of it was music that just stuck in your head. His duet with B. B. King sounded like the two old men were singing on barstools on Beale Street, finally equals, so long after Jerry Lee had to sneak into Haney’s to hear the man play. “‘Before the Night Is Over,’ you gonna be in love,” says Jerry Lee. “That was a song. I liked that.” He did “That Kind of Fool” with Keith Richards, “Traveling Band” with John Fogerty, “Sweet Little Sixteen” with Ringo Starr, and “I Saw Her Standing There” with Little Richard.
Recorded mostly at Sun Studio, it was called, of course, Last Man Standing.
“Who would have believed it?” said Jerry Lee.
He emerged from the gloom of his Nesbit ranch with, if not renewed vigor, at least a new purpose. Jerry Lee Lewis had not just become relevant again, he was back in the charts. Last Man Standing rose to number 26 in Billboard’s Top 200, number 8 in country, number 4 in rock, and number 1 among independently produced albums.
“Was I surprised? Naw, I wasn’t surprised,” he says, slipping back into the confident old Jerry Lee like he was never missing. He is asked if he enjoyed making some of the songs more than others, and he just says “Enjoyed ’em all,” that all of his guest artists, some of them in their sixties, were “pretty good boys.”
Asked later if he could choose to play music with anyone, anyone in the world—the Rolling Stones, B. B. King, Hank Williams—who would it be, he didn’t miss a beat.
“Kenny Lovelace,” he answered immediately.
Last Man Standing would have been a fine album to go out on, if he was planning on going out.
He was not.
“Am I satisfied with how it’s all gone? I don’t think so. I yearn to be satisfied. I do a song and I know I can do it better. And so I seek it.” He thinks only of the music as he ponders that question, not the life that frames it. By the late 2000s, he knew that his voice was changing, ever changing, but it still sounded like him, and his hands were still able to do many of the acrobatic moves of his youth. If it looked a little slower, well, that was his intent. As he had moved closer to the Lord, the old R-rated versions of his shows were fading away. He eased up on the word muthahumper, though it would creep into a recording here and there, out of habit.
In 2007, after being feted by Kris Kristofferson, Wanda Jackson, Shelby Lynne, and others for the American Music Masters series at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, on came a surprise guest: Jimmy Swaggart, who played “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” and told his cousin he loved him. At the end of the program, Jerry Lee took his award and instead of making a speech, walked to the piano, sat down, and played “Over the Rainbow.”
Two years after that, he returned to the Hall of Fame for its twenty-fifth anniversary, this time at Madison Square Garden, as its guest of honor. He opened the two-night celebration alone in the spotlight with a solo rendition of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” The following night he did the same thing with “Great Balls of Fire,” and rose to kick the piano bench away. Then, walking offstage, he picked it up and heaved it farther across the floor. He was seventy-four.
Even well-meaning people believed he was surely done by now; surely he would soon succumb to all that hard living, or at least, growling in disgust, finally retire. Still, when he walked into a hotel room for an interview, reporters seemed surprised somehow that he had actually gotten old. They described his face as wattled, his voice as high and thin; they described a newfound humility when he performed onstage, an increased carefulness with music that now suddenly was not a guarantee. Some reviewers seemed almost let down when he played like a grown-up and relieved when he slipped back into his occasional indulgences.
But he kept showing up, even as the world enlisted yet one more young pretty face to retell his story, now more than half a century old. In early summer of 2010, the musical Million Dollar Quartet opened on Broadway, with the actor and musician Levi Kreis stealing the show in the role of the young upstart piano player.
The show, a fanciful re-creation of that long-ago December day in 1956, was the brainchild of Sun historian Colin Escott, who had written with authority about Jerry Lee for decades, and director and writer Floyd Mutrux. In giving the role to Kreis, the show’s creative team selected a Southerner from Oliver Springs, Tennessee, and a piano pounder who had grown up on Jerry Lee’s music after his mother handed him a stack of Jerry Lee Lewis 45s when he was still in elementary school. “I cut my teeth . . . on Jerry Lee Lewis music,” he told one interviewer. He also played the hymns of Jimmy Swaggart, and was at the time enrolled in ministerial school, as Jerry Lee had been. It was almost like fiction, how his story dovetailed with Jerry Lee’s own.
The story of Million Dollar Quartet revolved around a few slender subplots—Johnny Cash’s departure from Sun, Sam’s dream of luring Elvis back from RCA—but all the energy came from the blond-haired figure behind the piano. He had never been an appropriate man, but in old age much had been forgiven, it seemed, and the very idea of Jerry Lee Lewis was enough to carry a show in what they used to call the legitimate theater. And besides, everyone said the music was the true star, just as it had been in 1956.
On a visit with his younger self in New York, Jerry Lee showed none of his characteristic gruffness or ego at the idea that someone else could play him. Wearing slippers on his feet, he merely told the young man he did a splendid job.
Then, in an almost surreal time-machine moment, the real Jerry Lee later joined the actors playing his now-departed friends onstage for an encore after the final curtain. He played “Shakin’,” rewriting the lyrics there, too, as he liked, without telling anyone beforehand. Kreis just sat close by and watched.
“There’s no stopping him,” he told the interviewer. “I want to be kickin’ ass and takin’ names at his age, like he is.”
In covering the meeting between Lewis and Kreis, the New York Times noted that it was made poignant by the older man’s “unmistakable frailty.” It was true: he was weaker that year, even as a man playing his younger self took home the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical.