by Rick Bragg
That was hard to follow. But here came Sonny James of Hackleburg, Alabama, striding out in his Western suit, a thin, dark-haired man who had survived the Korean War, singing a love song of the ages. “Young Love” was the song, and it wasn’t the words that made it lovely but how he did it, like smoke on velvet.
Next came that good-looking Marvin Rainwater, who wore a fringed buckskin shirt and a headband onstage, because he was one-quarter Cherokee. He sang in deep baritone about how he was “gonna find him a bluebird, let it sing all night long.” He was a mellow singer, a balladeer, and smoothed out the crowd before the real headliners came on, the boys from the land of the rising Sun.
First came Carl Perkins, in his too-tight pants and pointy sideburns, and he let it rip:
Well, it’s one for the money
Two for the show . . .
Through force of will, Jerry Lee had climbed up the bill and over and straight through Carl, till now there was only Johnny Cash, in his elegant, somber black, hovering just above him on the marquee. That night, there had been the usual argument over who would close the show. Johnny, with the bigger name and a song on the charts, had the promoters on his side: he got top billing, which meant he had to follow Jerry Lee. But first Jerry Lee had to surrender the stage.
The stage had become a kind of laboratory for Jerry Lee, and he was the mad scientist. Onstage he mixed and matched songs and versions of songs, stitched together some parts and discarded others; because he was Jerry Lee, he did what he felt like in the moment, in a set that was supposed to be four or so songs, but he ignored that, too. He gave them “Crazy Arms” one minute and “Big-Legged Woman” the next, and they clapped to one and stomped and howled to the other. His show got wilder and increasingly wicked on that tour, and the audiences bellowed for encores. He had heard that Canadians were earnest, reserved people, but he must have heard wrong. More and more he was beginning to understand that, while the music was at the core, that was just the start of it. Putting on a show was like flipping the switch on Frankenstein’s monster, then watching it show the first twitching signs of life. “You got to dress right, act right, carry yourself right; it all had to come together.”
The good-looking part, well, God had handled that. But you had to use it. His hair, by now, had become almost like another instrument. Under the lights, it really did shine like burnished gold, and at the beginning of a show it was oiled down and slicked back, and he looked respectable, like a tricked-out frat boy or preacher’s kid. But on the rocking songs, he slung his head around like a wild man, and that hair came unbound; it hung down across his face, and that just did something to the women—and their screams did something to the crowd, and things just got kind of squirrely. As it came unbound, the waves turned into tangled curls and ringlets, and it seemed to have a life of its own, a wicked thing, like Medusa herself. Sometimes he would whip out a comb onstage and try to comb it back under control, but it was too wild to tame. “I was the first one in rock and roll to have long hair,” he says, thinking back to that night, “and I did shake it.”
These were the biggest crowds he had seen or heard, and he can see and hear them still.
“More!”
“More!”
“More!”
He did one encore, then two, and at the end he did “Shakin’,” in pandemonium.
“They wouldn’t let me off the stage.”
By the time he finished, the people were out of their seats and the constables were looking antsy. Jerry Lee swaggered off the stage, one arm held stiffly in the air, a salute more than a wave. “And I left ’em wondering who that wild boy was.”
Johnny Cash stood there, sweating and almost white, as the crowd screamed for more. As Jerry Lee remembers it, “he was like a statue. He never said a word.”
In the auditorium, a woman had fainted in the aisle.
Jerry Lee walked right on by Johnny. “Nobody follows the Killer,” he said over his shoulder.
The crowd was still yelling “Jerry Lee! Jerry Lee!” as Johnny came out onstage.
They quieted, respectfully, as he sang “I Walk the Line.”
I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.
I keep my eyes wide open all the time.
They loved Johnny in Canada, but it was like a lull after the storm. “Johnny wouldn’t follow me after that, said he wouldn’t never follow me again,” says Jerry Lee. “He said, ‘When he’s through, it’s done.’ Can’t nobody follow me.” That night, after the show, the girls came by not one or two at a time but in a crowd. “It was unavoidable, too,” says Jerry Lee. “The girls come by in the evening, even before the shows sometimes, when the sun went down. And I just told ’em to go on,” and then he smiles at that, at even the possibility of such a thing happening, of his sending away a beautiful girl.
“My gosh, what a time.”
Some legends begin like that, in great drama, and others are purely accidental. Somewhere on the road, in another place he cannot really recall, he got sick and tired of playing sitting down while everybody else in the place was on their feet, so he just rose up to play standing. He loved the piano, but it did anchor a man and give him feet of clay. But as he rose, the piano bench was in the way. “So I decided I would just take the heel of my boot and push the piano bench back just a little bit, to make some room, but my boot got caught and I gave the bench a flip across the stage, and man, it tore that audience up. And I said, ‘Well, so this is what they want.’” If they liked it when he just tumped it over, what would they do if he hauled off and kicked it across the stage? So he did, and they howled and hooted and the women screamed, so he had to do it every time now, every blessed time.
“Oh, yeah,” says Jerry Lee, “I was a little bit out of control.”
Performers came and went on the tour, but Jerry Lee spent most of his time with Johnny and Carl despite the tension between him and the other two. It seems almost sweet now, to think of them as a fraternity of young men playing jokes and scuffling in the dirt and acting like spoiled children on the road, as they hammered out their craft. But the road was a good bit darker than that. Everyone was addicted to something. Carl drank hard, most nights and some days, and Johnny was hopelessly hooked on pills, always talking about deep things like man’s inhumanity to man, and prisons, and whether or not pigs could see the wind. And there was Jerry Lee, flying high on all of it and running hot.
“I liked Carl,” says Jerry Lee. “He became my friend. He was a great talent. He could sing, had a real good voice, and he could play that guitar. He could play all over that guitar.” His feelings about Cash are more complicated. “Johnny, well, I just didn’t think he could sing. Wrote some real good songs . . . but let’s just say he wasn’t no troubadour.” He and Cash would be friends off and on and even record together as older men, but in the cold northern spring of ’57, the man in black was one more obstacle in his way.
Oddly enough, when things finally boiled over, it was not Cash he had to fight. One night, in a town he cannot really recall, he and Carl Perkins sat in some lounge chairs outside a small motel, just cooling it in the chill air. Springtime temperatures in the Canadian mountains were about zero some days, but they hated being cooped up in the tiny hotel rooms. At some point in the evening, there had been a quart bottle of brown liquor in their proximity, but no one could remember exactly where it went.
“Carl was pretty well drunk,” recalls Jerry Lee, “and I was just drinking, a little bit.”
That night, Perkins was wearing a fancy shirt from Lansky’s in Memphis, where Elvis got his clothes. “Does this shirt look good?” he asked Jerry Lee.
Jerry Lee did not care if Carl was wearing a burlap sack tied together with fishing line. He only cared what he looked like, and he knew he would be elegant standing in a mudhole.
“Don’t I look good?” Carl asked.
Jerry Lee felt like spitting. He snarled, “You an’ Elvis, always walking around in these fancy clothes, always worried about how you look
. . .”
Jerry Lee may have been slightly more drunk than he recalled. “Carl come out of that chair ready to fight, and the next thing I knew we were fighting across the trunk of that Buick.” It was not, he says now, an epic battle. “I wasn’t throwing no good punches, and Carl wasn’t, either.” He does remember getting in one good backhand, and then it was over, and they were friends again, but the jealousy would continue. “It was unavoidable. I would get encores in front of twelve thousand people, two encores, three encores. . . . They knew. They knew, even then, they were seeing the greatest thing.”
He played one stage that was built on a giant turntable that spun slowly around as he played. “I didn’t like that. I liked to stay in one spot, so I could keep my eye on certain people.” He would lose sight of a pretty girl, he said, if he was spinning, spinning. “And then I just had to get my eye on ’em all over again. I could always spot my girl then. Wasn’t no problem, finding a beautiful girl. Look, I’d say to myself, there’s a couple. I’d say, Look, there in the third row.” In Quebec, he almost fell in love. “They pulled them dresses up, and I hollered, ‘Pull it up a little bit higher, baby,’ and they did. Man, they just laid it on you. And they kept on just layin’ it on you, night after night, city after city.”
He was still married, of course, to the volatile Jane, who was still in Ferriday with his son and his parents’ family, but the truth is that he tried not to think about her that much, anymore. It had been a marriage of necessity, and it seemed less necessary two thousand miles away. “I was living the dream,” he said, even if the reality it was based on was, for the time being, more than a little thin.
They drove on for nearly two months, doubling back for even more shows in more remote places, wide-open during the day, wide-open at night, smelling of sweat and whiskey and gunpowder. He was off his leash completely now and, it seemed to some people, almost a little out of his mind. He had taken to playing the piano sometimes with his feet, his size 9½ loafers, and the crowd roared for that, too. “I played it with my feet, in key. It can be done, if you know what you’re doing. It wasn’t just no stunt. I played it.” He was showing off and showing people up, and the crowd was in love with all of it, and by late spring his lightning was bouncing around the airwaves, just weaker and more distant than he would have preferred.
The musicians who played with him remember any encounter with him as a kind of validation, a kind of certificate of authenticity. Guitarist Buzz Cason would later write how he walked out of a theater in Richmond and saw Jerry Lee, the great Roland Janes, and Russ Smith, his pint-size touring drummer, dancing after a show on the roof of a ’58 Buick, just dancing, because the time onstage was never quite long enough. He remembers traveling with Jerry Lee to Buffalo, and that Jerry Lee wanted to make a side trip to Niagara Falls. He stood on a wall overlooking the great cascade, his blond hair whipping in the wind, and stared down into the abyss for maybe thirty seconds, then jumped to the ground. “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niag-uh Falls. Now let’s go home, boys.”
Once on a swing through Texas, he saw two singular-looking individuals sitting at a table in a big nightclub. One was his onetime piano hero, Moon Mullican. The other was the homely but melodic Roy Orbison, another Sun artist. “It was in Odessa, Roy Orbison’s hometown. Roy, his point was, he wanted to borrow fifty dollars from me, so he could get out of that town. . . . He said he knew he could cut a hit record if he could ever get out of that town. And I said, ‘Well, I’ll be glad to loan you fifty dollars.’” Orbison quickly grew jealous of Jerry Lee at Sun, believing that Sam Phillips was devoting too much of the label’s energy to one man. It wouldn’t be the last time that happened. “He got a little upset,” says Jerry Lee, but at least he got out of Odessa.
“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” was finally on the radio, not just in Memphis but nationwide, and according to Billboard, “taking off like wildfire” in country, rhythm and blues, and pop. By the time he got back to the South, it had become a constant on Memphis radio. “They were playin’ it in all the hamburger joints,” he says, and he would ride down the streets of Memphis in his red Cadillac with the top down and hear his own genius wash all around him and into the almost liquid air that is Memphis in summer. Sometimes he’d take his cousin Myra, who made goo-goo eyes at him under her dark-brown bangs.
Earlier that year, Elvis had reported to Kennedy Veterans Hospital in Memphis for a preinduction physical to see if he was fit to serve his country if he was drafted, though of course there was no war anymore, and surely they wouldn’t take the monarch of rock and roll. He went straight from there to catch a train to New York for his final appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, where the cameramen were directed to show him only from the waist up. Knowing that some Americans still were scandalized by his lewd behavior, Sullivan took Elvis by the arm, looked directly into the eye of the camera and the conscience of the nation, and called Elvis “a real decent, fine boy.” Then Elvis left for home, where Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, presented him with a suit made of gold lamé, but Elvis kept dropping to his knees onstage and wearing off the gold, which was expensive, so Parker told him not to do that no more. Elvis stopped wearing the pants. He went out to Hollywood and made four movies in two years, one called Jailhouse Rock, and recorded more songs in a Hollywood studio than he could even remember. When he came home to Memphis, he moved his mama and daddy into a white mansion called Graceland, which had walls and high gates to keep out the fans who had taken to sleeping on his mama’s lawn back on Audubon Avenue. Chuck Berry, who had been there at the beginning of everything, had written the Bible of rock and roll almost single-handed, but by the spring of ’57, the white boy from a shotgun house in Tupelo had ascended high above everyone else in music, so that when people thought of rock and roll, they thought of him and only him.
Some have suggested that there was malice in Jerry Lee’s heart where Elvis was concerned, but there was none, not then especially. He would say, well into old age, that he worshipped Elvis as a teenager and as a young man had become his friend. But it would be a lie to say he did not want what Elvis had, and there would be nothing sneaky or underhanded about him when he came for it.
Elvis had many friends but few, Jerry Lee says, whom he had not bought and paid for, fewer he could truly identify with. In those early years, they became close friends. He played the piano for hours—Elvis liked to hear the gospel standards, mostly—and it has been rumored that they caroused around Memphis in those days in various stages of craziness. They both owned big Harley motorcycles and tooled around town side by side. The most outrageous story was that he and Elvis once went riding around town buck naked, a story Jerry Lee refuses to confirm—or deny.
“I knew you’s goin’ to say that,” he says now. “I’d just rather not get into that. I don’t think Elvis would appreciate that,” and he laughs. “And he’s not here to defend himself.”
One day, soon after he released a blistering remake of one of Elvis’s movie songs, “Mean Woman Blues,” he ran into Elvis on the streets of Memphis—almost literally.
“He had a black Eldorado, a fifty-six. I had a white Eldorado, fifty-six. I was comin’ up to Sun Records and he was comin’ down the street.” Suddenly Elvis swerved into his lane. “He was goin’ to hit me head-on. And I stopped, and I said, ‘What the hell are you doin’, boy?’”
“I’m gon’ sue you.”
“For what?”
“For ‘Mean Woman Blues.’”
He laughs about it now. “Them were good days. He didn’t have a jealous bone in his body. With me, he didn’t.”
On a trip home to Concordia Parish, the blond-haired boy had received a notice much like the one Elvis had, telling him to report for his medical exam. “It said on it I was to report to my recruiting officer,” said Jerry Lee. “I wadded it up and threw it in the Black River.” Then he got back in his Cadillac and screamed up Highway 61 toward Memphis. There, in his V8 chariot, he circled and circled the throne with his hit
song, his lightning, like a javelin in his hand, and waited for the power in it to build and build, to crackle and spit deadly fire, waited till the King turned to face him man to man, because when he took his crown, he wanted him to know who was taking it.
He did not need a song to make him inappropriate. Jerry Lee had always been inappropriate, and being a little bit famous did not change it; you can paint a barn white a thousand times, but that won’t make it a house. It wasn’t just what words he sang; it was how. Anybody can sing about sinning, but when he sang, it sounded like he knew what he was talking about and would show you if he had a minute. Pat Boone did Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and incited not one riot, even among the Presbyterians.
“Them days are gone, have disappeared,” says Jerry Lee, “but I had a real good time.”
For a thin slice of spring and summer, he and his hit song smoked across the airwaves, first in Memphis but spreading fast across the country, and Dewey Phillips even had him on Red, Hot & Blue, talking like the words were burning his mouth. “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” sold more than one hundred thousand records by midsummer, five thousand in a single day.
And teenage kids weren’t the only ones who noticed the new talent. So did songwriters.
“Fella named Otis Blackwell, fella said he wrote songs, said he wanted to write me a song, and he’d write Elvis a song, then write me a song,” said Jerry Lee. Blackwell, a black songwriter from New York, was a hot ticket—the man who wrote “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up” for Elvis.
“‘Surely you ain’t a white boy,’ he said to me, the first time he ever saw me, and I said to him, ‘Why, yes, sir, I am white.’”
That alone worried people a great deal. Elvis had fooled them for a while, had them guessing, and when they found out he was a white man, some of the moral gatekeepers cried blasphemy, and when their daughters wept and screamed and drooled over him, the preachers and politicians railed anew against rock and roll. When Elvis went on The Steve Allen Show, the producers put him in a tuxedo, then had him sing “Hound Dog” to a trembling, unhappy basset hound. But Elvis, being a good boy, petted it and even smooched the dog a time or two, and young Jerry Lee watched it all with that half snarl, thinking to himself, If y’all think that’s dangerous, wait till you get a load o’ me.