The run ended in the late 1970s, when the individualism Jerry brought to his late-1960s hits was no longer appreciated. By then, the label was shipping syrupy, finished tapes to Memphis onto which Jerry Lee simply added his part, often only a vocal. He’d come to the studio—the same one where he’s cutting this new album—so rankled that Sam’s son Knox would load blank tape onto which Jerry Lee would pour out his wrath and anger before finally he was weary enough to give Nashville the saccharine they wanted. Those tapes—those documents of rage and sorrow—remain sealed in a dark vault.
He married Kerrie McCarver in the mid-1980s, and initially they ran a nice little Jerry Lee Lewis cottage industry. His fan club was thriving, she opened his home to tours, and she took over management of his career. But storm clouds appeared. Little Richard, with whom Jerry Lee has always gotten along famously, reported to several entourage members, “That fat white girl called me a nigger to my face.” After her first European tour, contracts reportedly began having “no-Kerrie” clauses in them; she was not welcome back. “It was a relief for us,” says one entourage member.
In 1985, Jerry Lee was fifty and soon to be a daddy. “I want my unborn son to have a drug-free daddy,” he said at the Betty Ford Clinic, but two days after checking in, he checked out. “Patients are supposed to clean bathrooms, take out garbage, sweep floors, and pick up after people. Hey, that may be fine for Suzie Homemaker, but it ain’t my style.” He fled.
The new family moved to Ireland during a protracted battle with the IRS. But over time, the partnerships—the marriage and the business—soured, until Jerry Lee basically quit performing. Kerrie was evicted from the house by a judge’s decree, but the divorce, with all its attendant court appearances, lawyers, and gag orders has been ongoing since summer 2003. (The marriage ended in 2005 after 21 years.)
Upon arriving at Phillips Recording Service, it’s immediately evident that this last session for the album—tentatively titled The Pilgrim, or possibly Old Glory (and ultimately Last Man Standing)—is going to be different. There’s a tour bus parked out front, and movie lights are glowing. The lobby, usually so quiet the echo of the 1950s can be heard, is a film crew’s staging area, with a full spread of snacks and coolers of cold drinks. “When I started doing this record, it was so low-key,” says Jimmy Rip. “For this to be the end, it’s wild. A studio full of people—I don’t know who anyone is.”
A couple weeks earlier, Jerry Lee had been in Los Angeles to tape a Willie Nelson & Friends TV special alongside Merle Haggard, Keith Richards, and Toby Keith—all guests (Nelson included) on Jerry Lee’s new album. (Other guests include Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Buddy Guy, and Bruce Springsteen.) Jerry Lee was slated to close the show, in a duet with Kid Rock. If the pairing was unexpected, it was spiritually right, and the music would follow.
Two days before the May taping, Jerry Lee had never heard of Kid Rock. Phoebe looked him up on the Internet and the first picture they saw was Kid Rock standing atop a grand piano. “I like him already,” Jerry Lee said.
They were slated to play “Whole Lot of Shakin’,” and there was the idea of working up a take of the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman.” Jerry had practiced the song, but under the eyes of five cameras, seventy crew people, and the song’s co-writer—Keith Richards—Jerry couldn’t get it. The idea was scrapped. But Kid Rock and the Ferriday Kid behaved like reunited father and son. Rock never left the Killer’s side, and Jerry was digging him right back.
And thus this last session: That’s Kid Rock’s bus out front, itineraries having been aligned to record “Honky Tonk Woman.” The film crew is from DreamWorks Nashville, the label releasing the new record. The label head is James Stroud, who played drums in Jerry Lee’s band in the early 1970s. He’s playing on tonight’s session. Before the evening’s out, he’ll have had so much fun that he declares he’s making this record the company’s number one priority.
The engineer is playing the Stones’ version of the song, and the backup singers—who sang on Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds”—are working up their “gimme gimme” vocal track—not realizing that Jerry Lee might change the song a bit, a lot—entirely.
Kid Rock is wearing black: jeans, T-shirt, hat. His cigar is brown, which matches his snakeskin boots. His gold cross is bigger than his large plastic cup of whiskey and cola. Waiting for Jerry Lee, he’s inviting people onto his bus, where the Detroit Pistons are playing on a TV the size of—the side of a bus. His people are easy to spot—they’re burly as bears and they’ve got electric coils coming out of their ears and going down their backs. They’re either looking for assassins or listening to the Pistons game (they’re up at the half).
As his car approaches, Jerry Lee’s jaw drops. He steps out, says, “I gotta go comb my hair. Looks like we got an audience already.” Road manager J. W. Whitten, who’s driven him, suggests he use the bus. Kid Rock bows to show his hospitality. “They got one inside,” Jerry Lee says. “I been paying for it for twenty-nine years.” He’s not wearing pajamas tonight but rather crisp black jeans and a black shirt with gold trim that will flash in his video—but he’s still got on the flip-flops. His skin looks pastier than usual, and he’s sucking on a tobacco pipe. “I like that crease in your pants,” Kid Rock says with genuine admiration. “That’s old-school. I ain’t coming near you, you’ll cut me.”
As Jerry Lee glides through the track, his “Honky Tonk Woman” sounds appropriate for a honky-tonk. “I’m bad about changing up songs,” Jerry Lee says. “But this I want to keep about right. The guy who wrote it is a personal friend of mine, and he gets mad if you change it.”
“Let’s change it then,” Kid Rock says, an eager student in the Jerry Lee school. He suggests starting it as a slow gospel thing.
He is full of ideas—he inserts a break for the drummer, then for the whole band. He modifies Jerry Lee’s verse again, telling the multiracial background trio, “Hit on the upbeat,” slapping time on his knee. They run the song down. Jerry Lee says, “Well, you might have an idea there.” The producer agrees—these pros are ready to recognize positive input. “It’s good,” Rip says. Kid Rock answers: “It’s rock and roll.” And Jerry Lee, out of the side of his mouth and a bit under his breath, says into his mic, his voice rising like a question, “That’s rock and roll?” It’s wry and contentious, just this side of snide, and there’s a weighty pause after he says it, everyone in the room reflecting on what’s just happened. It’s not a put-down, it’s just something that the granddaddy of rock and roll is allowed to say, and it’s laden with meaning and humor.
After the session, the Killer tells the Kid, “Don’t let nobody change your style,” and the Kid replies, “I won’t.”
There’s lots of jubilant photo taking, and Kid’s standing next to Jerry Lee when he says, “Show me something on the piano.” The two share the bench and Jerry Lee pulls out Fats Domino’s “Walking to New Orleans.” But Kid’s really too excited to pay attention, and they wind up doing a duet of Hank Williams’s “Lovesick Blues.” The talk leads to Hank, then to Louisiana. “Did you ever live near a paper plant?” the Killer asks. “Auto plants,” says Kid. “Detroit.” “Man, you should live near a paper plant. It stinks.” It’s been nearly half a century since Jerry Lee lived downwind of Natchez, but there’s a lot he ain’t forgot.
At eight P.M. on a summer’s night, the band congregates in a Memphis hotel parking lot. A luxury bus will cart us all to Nashville, where Jerry Lee is closing a star-studded night hosted by Marty Stuart at the historic Ryman Auditorium—the mother church of country music. Jerry’s due to play at one in the morning. The last one to arrive, he boards and heads directly to his suite in the back, son Lee in tow. He turns on the big-screen TV, settles onto the comfortable sofa, and sits slack-jawed, rapt with a three-quarter smile for the next three or so hours. It doesn’t matter that Ronald Reagan’s funeral is the only show on; television—sitcoms, a hemorrhoid commercial, Moses coming down from the mountain—makes him oblivious to the
world, and happy.
This performance is part of country music’s Fan Fair, an annual event at which fans from all over the world can meet their favorite stars. Jerry Lee’s never been totally comfortable with fans. 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. When his bus pulls into the alley behind the Ryman—the alley that Hank Williams used to cross during the Grand Ole Opry to get a drink at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge—fans swarm the vehicle. No one disembarks, but one elderly gentleman is let on. It’s Jerry Lee’s barber, and they talk about old times while Jerry gets a trim.
Outside, fans wait patiently and expectantly. Nashville is weird—there are no staggering drunks, no rowdy banter, just an orderly combination of grandmas, granddads, and young supple granddaughters. A ponytailed man in his sixties is holding a stack of albums (not CDs) that he’s dreaming of getting autographed. Many people have markers and pens at the ready, pick guards pulled off their guitars, autograph books open to a blank page. “Should we just get a picture of the bus?” asks one woman, tired of waiting. “Whose bus is that?” asks another. When she’s told, she repeats his name and stares, sounding surprised that he’s still living.
At one forty-five, Jerry Lee disembarks and heads to the stage. Passing through the fans, he’s anything but fair, greeting the peasants cursorily, making no real contact; he seems repulsed by the idea of touching something of theirs. He’s there to perform on the stage, not anywhere else. Strolling directly to the piano—there is great applause—he begins to play “Roll Over Beethoven.” He sits three-quarters cocked to the audience. More than half-cocked, fully loaded, bangin’ ’em out.
Jerry Lee’s hands pound out a fury. Sometimes they seem barely to rise off the piano, and other times he’s all asses and elbows, his arms flailing like a roller coaster ride. The piano is an extension of his own being, and he commands it. He pounds and strikes the keys with the seeming randomness of a child, and he makes beautiful music. He’s been known to stomp on keys with the heels of his boots, to pound them with his fists, to place his butt squarely on the ivories—and always the piano sounds perfect. He’s declared that he can stare at the piano and make it play.
Jerry Lee Lewis, 1982. (Courtesy of Pat Rainer)
Within seconds of the thirty-minute set’s last notes, Jerry Lee is back on the bus, settled on the rear suite’s sofa, mouth agape, eyes looking at the TV. A couple hours later, five in the morning, rolling down the highway, I walk back to the bathroom on the bus. It’s the last door on the left, just before his suite. He’s reclining on the sofa, framed by the doorway, his hair newly trimmed, the TV uncomfortably loud. He’s slouched, his feet planted firmly on the floor, ready to kick anyone who dares cross the threshold, who mistakes his door for the bathroom door and tries to piss on him. He looks up as I near and glares—his eyes burning through an unhealthful pallor, but burning. His skin shines like wax, but the meaning in his look is real. He glares like the devil.
Jerry Lee’s glare is as intimate and arbitrary as Elvis Presley’s gifts of Cadillacs. It’s a way to retain control of the moment. When Elvis slurred that he was buying you—a stranger, a friend—a Cadillac, he was purchasing not just the moment, but his control of you. You say no, you piss him off and the relationship is over; you say yes, you’ve lost your power of independence. So it is with Jerry Lee’s glare. Respond to the glower with a challenge—“Yeah, what do you want to do about it?”—and get thrown off the bus; tuck tail and meekly go about your business, you prove yourself a candy ass. In a business of manipulation, the glare, the Caddy, these are masterful moves that make so much middle ground inaccessible. I fumble with the door.
The TV in the back of the bus is so loud—even over the noise of a tour bus barreling seventy miles per hour on the expressway—and the day has stretched so long that someone finally slides the suite door shut. Jerry Lee—rapt at the altar of TV—doesn’t notice. Bandmembers climb into bunks, an hour of shut-eye before they can go home and sleep.
The sky is pale purple, becoming the white of day, and the bus is on city streets when there’s an angry banging and someone shouts, “Open this door.” For a minute, I am seeing the Twilight Zone image of the gremlin outside the airplane window who has hung on through the whole flight. The banging continues; it’s from the back of the bus—someone’s locked in the bathroom?—and as we get oriented from half sleep, we realize it’s Jerry Lee. “I want this door open right now!” He’s saying it with such force, the door itself must cower before him. Blam! Blam! Blam! B. B. Cunningham hustles down the aisle, sees it’s a sliding door, feels everywhere trying to find a handle for it, takes a hit as the assault on the door happens right by his head. “Somebody open this door!” There’s panic in Jerry Lee’s voice, like he’s drowning near shore, each pounding blow as strong as a victim’s flailing. B. B.’s bent at the waist, trying to get his fingernails wedged between the metal frame and the side of the door to rip it open.
Blam! Blam! Blam! “Somebody open this door right now.” There’s a syncopation to the banging and the shouting—it’s not something you’d dance to, but it sure gets your attention. The bus driver hears the commotion and yells to the back, “It’s pneumatic.” Bang! Bang! “It runs on air,” he yells, “push the button.” There’s a crowd at the door when the message reaches the back: “Push the big black button to the right of the door.” Like Batman, like Austin Powers, like Indiana Jones—the door disappears inside the wall and reveals Jerry Lee Lewis, an everyday miracle, stunned but with an aura of fire burning like a voodoo candle, a voodoo bonfire. He is silent, he speaks, he steps out of the room, back in. What he does and says is nothing to how he appears: a ball of fire, of pent-up rage. He’s a warm front of vulnerability, a cold front of anger and mistrust, the thundering fury that is Jerry Lee Lewis. Life is hell, and Jerry Lee is still paying.
CAT POWER
Sonic Youth made Washing Machine at Easley-McCain Recording, and I hung around a bit. Drummer Steve Shelley liked the studio’s vibe and was back within a few months to produce What Would the Community Think, the third album by Cat Power, whose given name is Charlyn Marie Marshall, though she likes to be called Chan (pronounced “Shawn”). I took Steve, Chan, and pal Tim Prudhomme for some soul food and during the meal, Chan wandered out the front door and didn’t return. The neighborhood was dicey and after a bit, I went out front. She wasn’t there. A couple doors down I poked my head into a divey blues joint, let my eyes adjust. She was at the bar talking to someone I knew: James Carr. Memphis had drawn them together.
A decade later she called me, remembering an offhand comment I’d made over sweet potato pie. She was conceiving The Greatest, her seventh album, and wanted that silky, sensuous Memphis sound, so could I connect her to the Hi Records players?
The Hi Rhythm Section is the backbone, the core, the soul of the Hi Records sound from the early 1960s to the latter 1970s. That’s the era spanning Willie Mitchell’s rise as a star recording artist through his ascension to producer and label co-owner, and it includes just about everything Al Green recorded at Hi. There’s three blood brothers in the Hi Rhythm Section—Leroy, Charles, and Teenie Hodges—and two soul brothers—Howard Grimes and Willie’s stepson Archie “Hubbie” Turner. That sly funky feel that evokes soft sheets, lava lamps, and close talk? That’s the Hi Rhythm Section; they moved soul music from the dance floor to the boudoir.
In the mid-2000s, they weren’t getting a lot of work. Some had day jobs, some were scraping by with low-paying bar gigs. I’d heard them recording together and knew they still had the feel. Chan’s request was a reminder that the Memphis ghosts still haunted. Work picked up for the band, and when Willie’s grandson Boo Mitchell took the studio’s reins (Willie died in 2010), the band got a solid shot in the arm. (The studio—its name is Royal Studios but it’s often also called Hi—has remained unchanged inside since 1969 when Willie got it sounding like he wanted; gear has been updated, but the facility feels like be
ll-bottom jeans and sounds like a hit.) The Memphis past is such good business that it fuels much of the present commerce. Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk,” featuring Bruno Mars, is the most popular of the recent successes recorded at Royal, and it has also attracted Keith Richards, Robert Cray, Frazey Ford, and Melissa Etheridge, among many other notables. And the Hi Rhythm Section players are so good, they transcend time. Their sound is thoroughly modern, deeply rooted, always hip.
Chan and Teenie developed a special connection. Teenie (who died in 2014) was a master of the beautiful and spare guitar line, and her vocals allowed space for his small strokes to play large. On stage, his laid-back self would cuddle up with her sensitive and unfiltered self, and seeing the two together was like witnessing old friends share a blanket while watching the Saturday afternoon movie on TV.
Chan “Cat Power” Marshall, left, and Mabon “Teenie” Hodges. (Courtesy of Rachel Hurley)
Chan gets really personal in this interview. There’s not much protection of the private person behind the public one. Despite her years in the biz, these calluses have hardly developed. She hasn’t let them, preserving a forthright innocence. (I’m always surprised when she’ll toss into the conversation, “Are you mad at me?”) She mines feelings and territory most adults have managed to bury, foregrounding her fragility, expressing it intensely, making herself vulnerable. I worried at the time that I shouldn’t publish this and I contacted her longtime press agent. “She’s very conscious of being on microphone, and she knows what she’s saying is for publication,” he told me. “She’ll tell you if she wants something off the record.” Another mutual friend put it like this: “She is not one to hide her past from her fans, and that is why people love her.” I’ve come to think of her words here, then, as akin to her songs: revealing, sometimes untidy, powerful.
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