by Rick Bragg
Go on and break, you crazy heart
He says of that time, simply, “We did some good records,” and even Billboard wrote that his releases might do well if they had some kind of promotion. Jud left Sun to start his own label, and while he would return as Jerry Lee’s manager and remain his friend, he would never be able to restore the magic of those early days.
Jerry Lee’s live shows were sellouts some nights and bitter disappointments the next—not because of the music, for the music was there, but because of the venues, and it would be that way for years. One night he might fill a coliseum, but the next he’d find himself in some supper club, playing for people who never liked him in the first place, who preferred big-band music and were hoping to hear some. It was a time of one-hit wonders, all now long gone with nothing more than an occasional spin on an oldie station to hang their whole life on, but Jerry Lee had never been that. He was a true star from the start, with a succession of huge and lasting hits built on a foundation of grit and talent. And as he fell, he snarled and growled and clawed on the way down, in a rise and fall unequaled in American music.
“I don’t blame Myra. She had nothing to do with it. . . . Well, she did later, with books and things, but not then,” he says, refusing as always to accept that his marriage was in any way something to be ashamed of, that he did anything wrong in marrying her. “We don’t get along too well, now, but it ain’t because of no grudge. She was my wife.”
And of his persecutors? “They just couldn’t comprehend it, really,” he says. “I think they were saying to themselves, Why can’t I do that? Why can’t I have that? Why can’t that be me?”
Elvis was reading a book on poetry in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, waiting for his flight to Germany and his assignment to the Third Armored Division, when he was asked what he thought of Jerry Lee’s marriage to a thirteen-year-old girl. “He’s a great artist,” Elvis said. “I’d rather not talk about his marriage, except that if he really loves her, I guess it’s all right.”
During his tour in Germany, Elvis met a beautiful fourteen-year-old girl named Priscilla Beaulieu at a party in the town of Bad Nauheim. She was the stepdaughter of a US Air Force officer stationed there. They dated until he returned to the States. Later, when she was in high school, Elvis got permission from her parents to bring her to live with his family, promising that they would be chaperoned by his father and stepmother. It was even arranged that she would attend an all-girls school, Immaculate Conception High School of Memphis. Her parents agreed to this with the understanding that Elvis would keep Priscilla chaste and marry her when she was older. Not long after arriving, Priscilla moved into Graceland proper with Elvis; she would deny that she and Elvis had intercourse, though she did admit they did everything but. Elvis continued relationships with Nancy Sinatra, Ann-Margret, and others, but kept his promise to Priscilla’s parents, marrying her when she was twenty-one, on May 1, 1967, at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. Colonel Parker had worried that Elvis was putting himself at risk by closeting the girl in Graceland, but the strategy worked, and his career was never really threatened.
It is one of the things Jerry Lee has trouble getting his mind around. He married Myra, lived with her openly, and was crucified. Elvis, with the help of Tom Parker, whom Jerry Lee and many others view as Elvis’s puppeteer, constructed a facade, a blind, and lived in sin inside it.
“He hid her in his house,” said Jerry Lee. “He wasn’t honest at all. He hid that little girl in there, and then he acted like he wasn’t doin’ nothin’. He flat-out lied. I’ve not lied about nothin’. When I got married to my thirteen-year-old cousin, I blew it out. I told the whole world.
“You know that movie,” he says, “that movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—that’s a great movie.” It’s the story of a mild-mannered and well-meaning man who takes credit for a thing he did not do, a thing that makes him seem heroic. The man, played by Jimmy Stewart, hid the truth for a lifetime.
“I . . . ain’t . . . hid . . . nothin’. Elvis, he hid. I didn’t want that, never that. I never had no desire to do the kind of music he did or the kind of movies he did. Me, I wanted to get out there among the people. I just needed to be out there, out there where the people was at. . . .”
Sometimes he would think of the screaming multitudes he had once reached, and a dark sadness would descend on him, but the truth is that that same cloud fell upon him even in the fattest times, a thing not of the outside world but in the blood, passed down. But his mama knew that it would always lift, like black smoke, and swirl away, and that a person had to just go on and live regardless, as he had to live now. She told him that if he wanted to quit, to lie down, she would lie down and die with him, and if he’d had even the slightest intent of giving up, that seared him, boy, the way old men used to light a fire under a half-dead mule that has fallen in a field with the job half done. “It wasn’t how I was raised,” he says again, repeating the only code he ever cared much about. “My people were still behind me, Mama, and Daddy, and them.”
He packed the trunk of his Cadillac and headed out into the great honky-tonk wilderness, filling the gaps between the rare big arenas with $250 shows. He did not want his career to wind up this way—he won’t pretend so even in his most contrary mood—but if what Elvis had was the best of everything, then he could keep it.
“I was goin’ out to play the piano and sing, and make the women holler,” says Jerry Lee. So he drove on, searching for neon, for those roadside signs blinking JERRY LEE LEWIS, ONE NIGHT ONLY. “And I’d hook them old pianos up and kick it off. . . .”
9
“WHO WANTS SOME OF THIS?”
Des Moines
1959
He might have been just a little drunk, might have had some pills to get him up and level him out, but that does not mean it was not pretty, what he was doing. His fingers knew where to go on the ivory and his voice was soaked in sorrow as he sang with the broken heart of an old man stitched up in a young man’s skin, because hadn’t he lived a whole lifetime already, roared and stomped and finally shot to the very highest, with tens of thousands chanting his name and clawing at his legs, before falling smoking into places like this?
His eyes were closed, in great deference to the music he played, but he knew every inch of this beer joint outside Des Moines, knew every breath of Early Times and Evening in Paris, every drunken laugh and curse, and every crash of long-necked bottles on a slick concrete floor, because it was not so long since he’d been here before—here or in a thousand other places like it—on his way up. He had started from nothing, from the colorless mud, and outplayed and outsang them all, till even Elvis, who was weak, came to him and handed him his crown, just handed it to him, as if he wasn’t going to take it anyway by force of will. But now the people who ran the music had turned on him, and even some of the people he played it for had turned on him, and here he was in a honky-tonk in Iowa playing a knee-high stage but by God playing still, fighting back, coming back, playing some big rooms for good money when he could, but if you had glimpsed him here through the dirty window, you would have thought it was a long way from Memphis.
He cannot be certain what he was singing, after so much time, but thinks it was probably Hank Williams.
This heart of mine could never see
What everybody knew but me
He was near the end of the tune, in the last few lovely, hopeless lines, when a drunk defiled the song, and tried to put his dirty and undeserving feet on his stage.
“You son of a bitch!” the drunk roared from the crowd.
It was loud enough to cut through the music and through the din of the beer joint itself, and then the man laughed, deep in his big belly, proud of himself. Jerry Lee stopped playing—he hated to stop playing—and looked out through the blue smoke and tightly packed bodies for the loudmouth who had ruined that lovely song. “I was still packin’ ’em in, still filling up them clubs,” he says, but since London in the spring of ’58, the louts had got
ten a little braver, and sometimes the bravest or drunkest of them would shout something from the audience about him or his young wife or something else with bile and ground glass in it, and he would have to find the nitwit right away and call him out for it.
He located the man, a big man, but soft-looking, a big country boy . . . no, a city boy. He had on a T-shirt. Country boys dressed better when they went to town. City boy for sure. This would be easy.
“I heard you,” Jerry Lee said. He saw his road manager and his boyhood friend, Cecil Harrelson, easing forward, looking at the man, then looking to Jerry Lee. Cecil was too willing to pull a knife back then, and Jerry Lee shook his head. The music died, and the place went quiet, as quiet as a room of drunks can.
Jerry Lee rose from his piano bench. He was twenty-three years old.
“Why don’t you march your dead butt up here,” he said, into the microphone, “and say that to my face.”
“I will!” the man shouted, and came on. He pushed his way through the crowd and came straight at Jerry Lee, put one foot on the edge of the knee-high stage and started to heave himself up.
Jerry Lee, still holding the long, chromed microphone stand in his two hands, lifted it from the floor and with one, quick, stabbing motion jabbed the metal rod into the man’s face. The heavy, weighted base of the stand struck the man mostly in the forehead, and he staggered backward, flailing, sliding on the floor to collapse on his back in the spilled beer. A knot the size of a baseball rose in the middle of his forehead, and one or two of the drunks wailed, “He’s killed him!” but drunks are always saying such as that.
Then Jerry Lee, his blond hair flying, leaped off the stage and into the audience and, still holding the microphone stand like a spear, screamed at them, at all of them: “Does anybody else want some of this? Do you? I’ll give you all some of it!”
“But they didn’t want none,” he says, from the distant dark of his room.
The bar owner called an ambulance, then called the law. In the movies, Jerry Lee would have sat back down and finished playing the song, but the crowd was angry, not at the drunken nitwit but at Jerry Lee; he was a lightning rod for that kind of thing in 1959 and was wounded just enough to make people think they could say anything they wanted, piling on. He watched the paramedics strain to put the big man in the back of the ambulance. Yeah, a city boy, he thought. He went down too easy for a country boy.
“You know, I can still see that boy’s face,” he says now.
It appeared the man would live, but he would likely carry the crescent imprint of the butt-end of the mike stand on his face for weeks. It would make a good story, though, to drink on later, about how he told that criminal, that baby-snatcher, that man who married his cousin, just what we thought of people like him up here, and how Jerry Lee knocked him ass over teakettle, sucker-punched him, really, when he wasn’t looking. Jerry Lee, telling his own story, would forever wonder what the man expected to happen when he cursed Jerry Lee Lewis and Hank Williams in one foul breath, then tried to despoil the sanctity of the stage—his stage. It might not have been much of a stage, might’ve been a pretty sorry excuse for one, to tell the truth about it, but it was one more step up on the way back to a place where they paid in thousands instead of hundreds and had some paid security in the joint, so a man didn’t have to thump these big whippers his own self.
The chief of police came, since it involved a celebrity and all, but there wasn’t much he could do. Jerry Lee was clearly defending himself; the fact he had baited the man up there with the intention of knocking a knot on his head was one of the finer points of the law that could not really be discussed at midnight in a beer joint full of people under the influence of a few fifty-five-gallon drums of Pabst Blue Ribbon. But the crowd milled, humming in anger like a gang of extras in some old movie show, some mob working up its courage right before Marshal Dillon rode in and stared them down.
The chief told Jerry Lee and his band they should maybe ease off toward their cars.
“Jerry Lee,” he said, “I don’t think you should stay here.”
“We were leaving anyway,” Jerry Lee told him.
“I mean,” the chief said, “I think you need to leave town.”
“It was just like a Western,” Jerry Lee says. Some of the people in the bar jumped into their cars and followed them back to the hotel—it had happened before—but they didn’t want none, either, just wanted to act like they did for a little while longer, only wanted a slightly bigger part of the tale.
He went to his motel room—a year ago, he had stayed in the finest hotels—and waited a little while, waited till it came: the knock, but soft, not hammering and angry. He opened the door to his room and there she was. She was often there, but with a different face, a different name in almost every town. He cannot remember the names after all this time; it’s unlikely he remembered them five miles down the road. “There’s been so many . . . too many, I guess.” But he remembers the fights. Some men just remember rage so much better, remember it better than softer things, as if anger was the only emotion that really mattered to them in the end. It’s why the rich men down here with the soft accents, the ones who know where their great-great-granddaddies came from, hang sabers from an old war over their mantels instead of pictures of their grandbabies and driftwood from the beach they walked on with their dead wives.
“I fought my way out of a bunch of beer joints,” he says. “Had Cecil with me then. I got where I could read an audience, read the meanness in ’em. Every now and then we’d just see a crowd we had to straighten out . . . cursing me from the audience.
“I enjoyed a good fight back then. We had some pretty good fights in Iowa.”
The next day, he and his band loaded their equipment into two Cadillacs shrouded in forty thousand miles of dust and rolled another five or six hundred miles, whatever it took to make it to the next date. Fifty-two years later, with that ill-tempered Chihuahua between his feet, he leans back and travels it again.
“I never shunned a show. If I had to cut my price down to nearly nothin’, I’d take it. To keep workin’. . . . It was brutal strength was what it was, what it took. I played a show every night. Wasn’t no freeways then. We seldom hit a two-lane. Akron . . . Cincinnati . . . Louisville. We’d do little towns and big towns. We’d do one in Ohio, leave for New York, then do one in Ohio, again. . . . Wore out more Cadillacs . . . But wasn’t no choice. We made the dates. Wasn’t no stopping me. We’d pull up just in time, go in and get with it, and then we got back in the car, and we moved on down the road. But we made the dates. Some smart aleck sucker-punched me here in Memphis . . . another in Alabama. He was a big man, too. I musta knocked him fifty feet. Happened again in—where was it? I couldn’t get to him, but Cecil got him. Fight our way in. Fight our way out. I came home once, had the Hong Kong flu. I got up, went to Dallas. Got up, played a show. They said to me, ‘I don’t think you’re gonna make it.’ I made it. . . . Texas. Played all over Texas. Birmingham . . . the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen. The band hung in there with me. I don’t know what I’d done, if they’d given up. . . . Pull up to them ol’ clubs, and rock ’em right on down. Got to where we made them furnish our drum sets. But we never stopped. I never stopped packing the clubs, the auditoriums. . . . Went on for eight or nine years like that, be gone months at a time. Tough on a family, I guess. But I kept going. Back then you could get them real good pills. . . . I’d sleep when I could. We’d see a motel on the side of the road and I’d say, ‘Boys, pull in here, get me a room,’ and I’d get up and barely make the show. Sometimes they’d be five, six of us in a car. . . . I finally got the boys a ’63 Ford to use on the road. They drove it so hard, they melted the head. . . . Played this one club, Mama and Daddy came, out walks this woman without a stitch on, and I just said, ‘She’s just workin’, Mama, same as me.’ But I built my audience back up again, rebuilt my whole foundation. I went in them honky-tonks and them nightclubs, and I went on with it. . . . Had to keep on go
in’, ’cause if you quit, you die, and I wasn’t raised to quit.
“It was brutal, I tell you. It was killin’. . . .
“It was beautiful.”
He had played the Paramount on Forty-Third Street in New York City. He had played the storied Apollo, the Boston Arena, and coliseums everywhere. He had played Steve Allen, American Bandstand, and just about every other place a young legend would play, and he never lip-synched a word except in the movies. It was almost like bad luck somehow, doing that. And not long after that came London and the ugliness, then the long road that some people believed to be the only future he had left, the road that he believed—no, he knew—would bring him back to the top, to riches and fame again. It would not break him, this road, but once in a while, it would break his heart. In Newport, Arkansas, he walked into a club and saw that chicken wire stretched across the stage again, strung there to protect the band from a crowd that had so little respect for the music that they felt they could fling their contempt, spray it, at the musicians on the stage. He had seen it before, a screen like this, on the way up, but had it really been only a year or so before?
“Take it down!” Jerry Lee shouted.
The owner told him it was for his own protection. He’d need it if the bottles started flying.
“Take . . . it . . . down,” he hissed, “or I won’t go on.”
They took it down.
“It’s your funeral,” some smart aleck said.
That night he played Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers and some Moon Mullican, even some older music, pretty songs, ancient songs, songs that sounded almost like church, and he dared the people in the audience to do something, anything, to assault his stage or try to lessen his music, lessen him. Then he played some honky-tonk, to make them think about the women and the men who had done them wrong, to make them think about their mamas and cry about their daddies maybe just a little bit, and when they were halfway to redneck heaven, he hit them right between the eyes with some nasty, gutbucket blues, with the mess he’d heard sizzling in Haney’s Big House when he was still just a little boy, and he had them hollering for the blues and they didn’t even halfway know what it was. And finally, when he thought they were ready, when he decided they were deserving of it, he kicked that raggedy piano stool back so hard it slammed into the wall with a glorious snapping sound. He played and played through the evening and into the next day, played until the sweat ran down his face and blinded him, and when he whipped his golden hair back out of his eyes, the girls bit their lips and went against their raisin’. He beat the ivory till his fingers hurt, till he transcended this little honky-tonk in the hip pocket of Arkansas, till this one more bleak stop on a bleak and endless road was transformed into the night of a lifetime, not for him but for these pulpwooders and insurance men and waitresses and notary publics who danced and screamed and begged for more till finally there was no more and the screams filled the room and poured into the dark, till the nighttime fishermen on the White River and cars passing on Highway 67 must have heard it, surely, heard it emanating like the rings of some great explosion, till Jerry Lee dropped wearily into the passenger seat of a dusty Cadillac and rolled on. And as the wind rushed into his face in the small hours of the morning, as the pills and the liquor and passing miles finally rocked him to sleep, he was not sure exactly where he was headed or sometimes even where he had been. He was sure of only one thing.