Memphis Rent Party

by Robert Gordon

  He sold vacuum cleaners and sewing machines, he played drums and piano with a local band, he auditioned in Shreveport for a country package tour in 1955. He tried his luck in Nashville, but Nashville was having none of the new sounds; Carl Perkins, another white singer who was mixing country and blues, had already been told by one corporate label rep there, “I like what you’re doing, young man, but I don’t know what you’re doing.”

  That unidentifiable mix was much more suited to Memphis than to Nashville, which the Lewis family realized when they heard Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins in the summer of 1955, both on Memphis’s Sun Records, home also to Elvis Presley. To finance the trip to meet Sam Phillips, Elmo Lewis sold eggs—33 dozen—along the 350 miles north.

  Working with Sam’s assistant Jack Clement, Jerry Lee cut “Crazy Arms,” his first Sun single. Though recently a country hit for Ray Price and a pop hit for the Andrews Sisters, “Crazy Arms” got infused with Jerry Lee’s personality, a country bounce that swings right to the juke house. His left hand played funky bass on the piano’s low keys, his right ran a lilting, wild-style melody. He quickly got good bookings, including a tour with Cash and Perkins.

  In mid-March 1957, Sun released Jerry Lee’s second record. With Clement, the band had spent a lot of time working up a rollicking number called “It’ll Be Me.” It was a Clement original—he’d come up with it while sitting on the studio’s toilet, pondering reincarnation; the line, “If you see a turd in your toilet bowl, baby / It’ll be me and I’ll be staring at you” was changed before it was recorded, and became “If you find a lump in your sugar bowl.” The song’s feel was well-suited to Jerry Lee, but getting the romp just right was proving difficult. “I said, ‘Why don’t we come back to this later, Jerry? Let’s do something else for awhile,’ ” Clement recalls. “And ole J. W. Brown spoke up, Jerry Lee’s bass player, and said, ‘Hey, Jerry, do that song we’ve been doing on the road that everybody likes so much.’ I said, ‘Well let me go in there and turn on the machine.’ I hit play and record, sat down there, and they did ‘Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On.’ No dry run, no nothin’. Blap! One take, there it was! Sprang forth full-blown from its mother’s womb. Then we went back to ‘It’ll Be Me.’ ”

  It was the frenzy of “Whole Lot of Shakin’ ” that made Lewis a star. In a summer 1957 appearance on Steve Allen’s national TV show, Jerry Lee didn’t kowtow as Elvis had—standing awkwardly in a tuxedo and singing “Hound Dog” to a basset hound. Whipped up by his own performance, Jerry Lee hurled his piano bench offscreen, Steve Allen threw it back, and “Whole Lot of Shakin’ ” shot from regional hit to number one country and number two pop (unable to shake Debbie Reynolds’s “Tammy” from the top spot). Jerry’s next child was named Steve Allen Lewis.

  A month after the “Twilight” session when B. B. Cunningham had escaped without getting slapped, Jerry Lee performs at a Christmastime benefit concert in Memphis. Hometown gigs are rare, especially in smaller venues like this club. His touring has picked up since his divorce proceedings began a couple years back. He can command sizable fees for an appearance; he and the band even flew to Switzerland for a single performance. In a Biloxi casino, he set a recent record. Tonight, he’s closing the show, and the audience stays late to see him.

  Numerous acts have preceded him, and a weariness has set in, but when he’s announced, the audience greets him with a standing ovation. His crowds trend toward older, but there’s always younger people making sure their lives will include seeing this legendary performer. Entering from the side, he does a fanny-shaking shimmy to great applause. He’s wearing a leather waistcoat that he doesn’t remove before sitting at the piano. But he’s got nothing to hide—he’s slender and looking fit. He kicks off with “Roll Over Beethoven” and that bleeds into Hank Williams’s “You Win Again.” The tempo changes, the feel, the emphasis—but it’s still distinctly Jerry Lee. His voice is full of power this night, and he performs both “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lot of Shakin’.” He’s conjuring the spirit from within, from the place where good meets bad and right meets wrong and the forces push and they pull and the tension is exhilarating so that you find yourself unable to stand still and unable to move—shake, baby, shake—and part of you feels like it might explode—easy now—until there’s a moment of liberation and what’s happening on stage is happening in the audience and no one can say who is leading because everyone together is joining everyone else in some kind of new freedom.

  For the audience, it’s thrills and chills to follow these nonstop twists, but on stage, it’s a workout. “I always keep my eyes right on his hands,” says Robert Hall, Jerry’s drummer since 1996. “There’s twenty regular songs he draws on, and sixty or eighty backups that could come in at any time, and a solid forty that I’ve never even heard. We still get a new one every now and then.”

  “He pushes you farther than you think you are willing to go,” says bassist B. B. Cunningham, who is so comfortable rolling with the punches that he once tuned Chuck Berry’s guitar to the A of a hotel telephone’s dial tone. “We try to recognize what key he’s in, then pick up what he’s doing. One night in Vegas he started playing something that even Kenny couldn’t follow, and he’s been with him for thirty-seven years. Nobody played anything, we just let him play. And all of a sudden he stopped, leaned into the microphone, ‘Are you boys going to jump in with me or just take my money?’

  “He has no set list, and I think the reason he does that is it gives him the freedom to do what he feels like doing. And it’s part of the mystique: What’s going to happen tonight?”

  It was a hot August day in 1957, before air-conditioning was common, when Sam Phillips gathered Jerry Lee and his band in the breezeless Sun Studio to record a follow-up to “Whole Lot of Shakin’.” Sam’s recent Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash singles hadn’t hit, and he’d sold Elvis to RCA, so Sam needed “Great Balls of Fire” just right. The song was perfect for Jerry Lee, built around the tension between sexual release and religious exaltation—two of Jerry Lee’s favorite pursuits (others include cars, motorcycles, tobacco pipes, and boots).

  Sam Phillips was a master of production psychology. (Had he not gone into records, he’d have made a helluva preacher, lawyer, or therapist.) As a warm-up for the song, he and Jerry Lee were discussing theology; Jack Clement hit the record button.

  “H-E-L-L!” the Killer exclaims, and he claps his hand on the piano for emphasis. “It says, ‘Make merry with the joy of God only.’ But when it comes to worldly music, rock ’n’ roll, anything like that, you have done brought yourself into the world, and you’re in the world, and … you’re still a sinner …”

  “All right,” responds Sam, maintaining a cool in the heat of Jerry Lee’s passion. “Now look, Jerry. Religious conviction doesn’t mean anything resembling extremism … Jesus Christ came into this world; He tolerated man. He didn’t preach from one pulpit, He went around and did good … When you think that you can’t do good if you’re a rock ’n’ roll exponent—”

  “You can do good, Mr. Phillips, don’t get me wrong—”

  “When I say do good—”

  “You can have a kind heart! You can help people—”

  Sam stunned him: “You can save souls!”

  “No! No! No! No! How can the Devil save souls? What are you talkin’ about? Man, I got the Devil in me; if I didn’t I’d be a Christian!”

  A few moments later, riled and primed by the record producer, this musician achieved one of the artistic high points of his life. With apocalyptic imagery, lascivious delivery, and unbridled energy, Jerry Lee Lewis cut “Great Balls of Fire” as if announcing the End of Days.

  The song was featured in a Hollywood teen-exploitation film called Jamboree; it was the movie’s only song to feature an electric bass player—Jerry Lee’s first cousin J. W. Brown.

  Cousin Brown—his mom and Jerry Lee’s dad were siblings—was an electrician who opened his Memphis home to Jerry Lee, his second wife, and his young name
sake. When the dads were on the road, Brown’s preteen daughter, Myra, saw that Jerry Lee Jr.’s mama was cavorting with other men. She already had a crush on her exciting older cousin, and after his divorce, the cousins eloped in December 1957. Myra had turned thirteen. Singing to her, perhaps, his next hits were “Breathless” and the forward-looking “High School Confidential.”

  While their love was blooming, the relationship between the entertainer and the press was about to wither. Reviewers, critics, and writers had helped launch his career, but with the revelations of his wife’s age, their blood relationship, and his past marriages, the press took to assaulting his character. Jerry Lee came to see all journalists as murderous, a stance that he maintains to this day: He has no interest in mixing with the press, no trust that they’ll do anything but create bloodthirsty headlines.

  “He’s a man of a great, contrite heart who’s just maybe messed himself up from time to time,” Sam Phillips said a quarter of a century ago. “It’s a shame he doesn’t have anyone to direct his talent—he is one of this century’s great, great talents. But he feels a lonesomeness in his talent, extreme lonesomeness, for somebody to be strong around him.”

  Even at his lowest point, he still had the demeanor of an angry god. When touring in the 1960s, playing state fairs and dive bars before his Nashville comeback, he got an engagement in a Miami nightclub following a two-week stint by Conway Twitty, who’d known Jerry Lee since they were both at Sun. Twitty warned the club owner of Jerry Lee’s pounding piano style, so the owner bought a beaten upright for the gig. “Jerry showed up the afternoon he was supposed to open,” Twitty recalled, “took one look at the piano and kicked it off the stage onto the floor. He kicked it all the way out of the building, across the parking lot, and into this lake. Then came back in, blew cigar smoke in this mobster’s face, and said, ‘Now get me a goddamn piano.’ ” He got his piano.

  Jerry Lee Lewis, 1995. “At a show not long ago, someone passed a request to him on a cocktail napkin; without a glance, he blew his nose on it.” (Courtesy of Trey Harrison)

  There’s another recording session for the new album. Jimmy Rip has flown to Memphis from Los Angeles, but there’s no band this night. They’ll record three songs, piano and vocals only, and add guest vocals and backing tracks later: “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)” will get a visit from Rod Stewart; Jerry Lee’s first ever recording of Hank Williams’s “Lost Highway” will be bolstered by Delaney Bramlett’s raspy vocal; and “Miss the Mississippi and You,” a yodeling classic by Jimmie Rodgers that won’t make the album.

  He’s brought to the studio by his daughter Phoebe. She drove. Used to be, he’d drive her to grade school in his Rolls-Royce—until one day he flipped that car (walking away unscathed) shortly after dropping her off. Now Phoebe’s in her early forties and, since her father’s divorce proceedings, she has stepped up to help manage his affairs.

  Phoebe has long blonde hair and her father’s spirit. She speaks with a deep Mississippi twang and smokes a corncob pipe, and she’s excited about this new album. “I couldn’t believe I was hearing Led Zeppelin’s ‘Rock and Roll’ cranked up full volume blaring out of my dad’s bedroom. He was learning the song. And of course he cut it totally different.”

  Rip is pleased to have Phoebe at the session. Jerry Lee is not allowed to go anywhere alone. He drinks hardly any alcohol these days, and pills, reefer, and all drugs except those prescribed by his physician are out of his life. (At a recent doctor’s visit following a teeth transplant, Jerry Lee was pronounced in perfect health. The new teeth have not affected the peculiar wet slur that has always made his speech an effort to understand.) It may be whatever he’s taking to keep him from taking anything else, it may be a life of being doted upon, or it’s that Jerry Lee feels like he owns every damn place he finds himself—but Jerry Lee needs looking after. In a hotel not long ago, he wound up alone in his room. “Hey!” he shouted, because he needed something, but there was no answer, so he shouted “Hey!” louder, and then again and again, louder and louder, until he left his room in his socks and underwear, wandering the hotel hallway, directionless, shouting, “Hey!”

  Jerry’s out at the piano noodling around and without pause or introduction, he breaks into “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous.” The engineer is Roland Janes, who, besides being the house engineer at the Sam Phillips Recording Service, was Jerry Lee’s guitar player from the glory days—Roland can read Jerry and he’s missed nothing—had the tape rolling in plenty of time.

  Jerry moves on to the Hank song. He’s reading the lyrics off the piano, but he’s singing with fervor. (He was reading the lyrics when he recorded “Great Balls of Fire” at Sun.) “I’m a rolling stone, all alone and lost / For a life of sin, I have paid the cost …”

  “I tried to find songs that pertain to his life, things that will allow him to be really emotional and expressive and tell the story of what he’s gone through,” says Rip.

  Jerry has switched from rehearsing to recording without telling anyone, and even Roland misses the turn. “Hold it,” his old friend says into the talkback, “wasn’t rolling.”

  “Aww now,” says Jerry Lee. “You ruffled my feathers. Let me go get my pistol.”

  A visitor in the control booth gasps and says, “Oh no, not the pistol.” After waiting a couple beats, as if he could hear the fear, Jerry adds, “Only a joke. I ain’t got a pistol.”

  “Boys don’t start that stupid rambling ’round,” he’s singing, his back straight, his face stern beneath eyeglasses, beady eyes focused on the page. His profile is sharp, like a hawk’s. The piano hides his flip-flops and pajamas. Jerry Lee could be a preacher alongside his cousin Swaggart. “Take my advice …”

  Jimmy Rip steps out to the studio between takes, says, “One more?”

  “One? At least ten more.”

  “I think one more will be enough.”

  “Too bad you don’t know me,” says Jerry Lee, “as well as you think you know me.” The honesty is startling, said without pretense. With each take, he’s peeled at the song, to simplify and complicate, to reveal more of his terrifying, terrified soul.

  “If you let me get this down right, you’ll have a million seller on your hands. Twenty or thirty more takes.” Jerry’s pushing, but the producer resists. Jimmy explains that from the three keeper takes he can build a single solid one on the computer. “Play it back then,” Jerry snaps. He’s willing to listen to what they’ve got, to be happy if Jimmy’s happy, but he really doesn’t feel like he’s hit his lick yet. “Don’t cover up my mistakes with the band,” he protests. “Let me get it right. He writes everything you do in the Book of Life, and He’ll hear it. Dim the lights.”

  Jimmy says, “Lighting is everything.”

  Jerry corrects him. “Naw, it’s a little part of it, but it means a lot.” He begins one more take—it opens completely differently from all the others. “One more,” he says again, but no longer means it, having heard what’s there and realizing he’s done a good job.

  After the session, there’s small talk in the control room. Jerry’s bought his seventeen-year-old son, Lee, a big SUV and he laughs when he complains about the cost of the insurance. Phoebe laughs, then says her dad recently set his Harley-Davidson inside the living room of his ranch, where he can admire it. After several days of looking, he could resist no longer. He opened the sliding glass door so the exhaust wouldn’t kill him, mounted the beast, kicked—and unleashed mayhem. The machine roared throughout the house, the dog went crazy barking, and the fumes set off the smoke alarm.

  Jerry Lee’s Nesbit home is a sprawling ranch built on thirty acres with its own lake. It’s got six bedrooms and six bathrooms, and plenty of living space. He’s lived there since 1973 and it suits him just fine. Phoebe occupies one of the suites, and their longtime helper Carolyn is often around. She cooks like Jerry’s mama—Phoebe’s given her the family recipes. He eats only one real meal a day, dinner around eight, but he’ll snack
. A night owl, he’s got a suite in the back where he sleeps, bathes, and watches a big-screen TV—big, like IMAX for the home. His collections are on display there—model cars, tobacco pipes (his many boots are kept in his closet)—and so are his prizes and awards, his Grammy (not bestowed for his hits, but for Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Recording, 1986, an album entitled Interviews from the Class of ’55 Recording Sessions), and some of the gifts he’s been given. “Little bitty things mean the most to him,” says J. W. Whitten, the road manager. “A friend will get him something and he’ll cherish it.”

  Studio talk turns to Gunsmoke, an indication that the evening is going great. Gunsmoke is Jerry Lee’s favorite subject in the world. He loves television, and westerns are his favorite. Of all the westerns, he loves Gunsmoke. Of the two kinds of Gunsmoke, he prefers the episodes with Chester, the Dennis Weaver character, over the ones with Festus, his replacement. When asked why he likes Gunsmoke so much, Jerry Lee answers, “Because it’s unique, perfect, and great. I got tapes going back to 1954—Kitty was beautiful. Matt Dillon is my hero.” He freely admits that he cried when Harry Dean Stanton’s character died in the show.

  Jerry Lee is legendary as a rock and roller, so it’s often forgotten that when he came to Sun, he was playing George Jones and Ray Price songs, a Carter Family number, and Jimmie Rodgers. And it was to country he turned in 1967, a decade after his meteor burned up. He signed a deal in Nashville, made classic honky-tonk comfortable in the modern era with “Another Place, Another Time,” and began a string of country hits—many in the top three, and more than several that crossed over to pop—that ran all the way through the 1970s and included “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous,” “She Still Comes Around (To Love What’s Left of Me),” “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye,” “Would You Take Another Chance on Me,” “Middle Age Crazy,” and “Thirty Nine and Holding.”