by Rick Bragg
It felt, sometimes, like he was the only one who remembered, and he was not even in his late twenties yet. It seemed like the good songs were bound up in logging chain and padlocks. The cradle itself, the original Sun Studio, went still. Technically outmoded, it became a storage room for brake pads, fan belts, and antifreeze. Sam Phillips stayed in the business, building one new studio in Nashville and another on Madison Avenue in Memphis, but he would never regain such luster. Then again, as an original investor in a chain of Memphis-based hotels called Holiday Inn, he didn’t have to; he had gotten the best of it, anyway. Would there ever be another night when men drank great gulps of whiskey and argued about God?
He was playing Hot Springs, Arkansas, in late August 1963, when Myra went into labor again, this time with a baby daughter. Jerry Lee jumped in his Cadillac and headed south—not to be with his wife and new baby, but back home to Ferriday, where another family member was in need. “People got mad at me because I wouldn’t drive from Hot Springs to Memphis when she was born. . . . But my Uncle Lee was dying of stomach cancer,” and he went down, then.
Lee Calhoun had always been good to him, even if he’d let him sit and worry a little while in that St. Francisville jail; he had left a check on the table when Jerry Lee needed a car, and looked after his mama, twice, when his daddy was sent off for making liquor. He’d given them a place to land, his mama and daddy, when they were adrift in the Depression, when the whole country all but rolled over and died. He had to go home and pay his respects; his new life would wait till the old one was done, and was respectfully laid down.
Phoebe Allen Lewis was born on August 30, 1963. She would always say that her daddy would have been there if she had been a boy. “I was glad to have her,” says Jerry Lee. “I called her My Heart. She was beautiful. I picked her up and held her. She favored me.”
The little girl toddled through some of the darkest days of her father’s legend. At first, she was just too young to know. Having Jerry Lee Lewis as a father had, at times, great benefits.
“I had an enchanted childhood,” said Phoebe. She would creep out of her crib and later her bed and sneak into the bedroom of her parents.
“Get out of here, Phoebe,” her father would roar, “and shut the door and go to bed.” But he would always give in, and she would snuggle up between her mother and father.
“I slept every night between my mama and my daddy,” she said, between a mama who tried to raise her within the rules and a daddy who had never recognized, let alone followed, a rule in his life.
“I’d be drinking from a bottle and Mama would say, ‘Phoebe, you’re too big for that bottle,’ and took it away, and then Daddy would take it to the store and fill it with Coke or chocolate milk.”
She remembers living on bologna sandwiches on white bread with mustard, but her parents always watched her around the pool, made her stay out of the pool for at least thirty minutes after eating “so I wouldn’t get the cramps.” Their house outside Memphis was filled with famous and almost famous musicians, most of them in various stages of drunkenness or chemical dependency, people she came to know only as “Daddy’s drinking buddies.” The one constant was music; there was always music, pouring from the piano and the record players scattered throughout the house. Men, half drunk or fully so, picked guitars barefoot on the sofas, in the yard, all of them, every one, looking for a hit.
Late that summer, Jerry Lee did make it into Sam’s new studio on Madison to cut eight songs, this time reaching back to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Hong Kong Blues,” from 1939, and even further back, to “Carry Me Back to Ol’ Virginia,” a Reconstruction-era ballad by the African American minstrel performer James A. Bland. They were the last songs he would record for Sun Records. He was fed up with the label’s inability to move his records and needed a change. The Sun session was by that point just an obligation; he had already signed a five-year contract at Smash Records, a subsidiary of Mercury, which wanted to record him in Nashville, in the heart of a country music establishment he had despised since it first condescended to him as a younger man. Memphis, the beating heart of rock and roll, had given him everything, and now he was driving away from it, due east into the rising sun, into a place where people really did, here and there, hang steer horns on their Cadillacs.
He would always blame Sam Phillips for failing to promote his music, for failing to pay him what he feels he was owed—a million dollars or more, he believes, though it would be nearly impossible to prove such a thing today. “Sun Records owes me a lot of money,” he says even today, long after the Sun catalog was sold off. “I mean, chunks of money. They were sending me some pretty good money there for a while, but they . . . they ain’t sent nothin’ in a long time.” But the teeth of that particular resentment have grown dull and flat with age, and it doesn’t hurt so much. “I had some good times, with ol’ Sam, with Mister Phillips. Him and Jud, we had some times.” Most of his Sun recordings were eventually released, after the company was sold, in a seemingly endless parade of box sets and compilations. Phillips would take his own place in the halls of rock-and-roll fame—sinking his teeth into it from the moment Elvis walked into his studio, assured of it when he signed Jerry Lee.
When asked about his place in it all—in the development of Jerry Lee Lewis—he would not demur. “I just believe I was the one person who could do that,” he said.
Jerry Lee does not believe that. But in a way Phillips did what he’d promised—made him rich for a while, long enough to fill the driveways with Cadillacs and keep his promises to his mama and daddy that he would be a star—and for that his onetime ward is grateful. Sam made him a star, yes, but a shooting one, and failed to do all he could, Jerry Lee believes, to hold him up in the sky where he belonged. “I would have had more hit records. I know it.” People can argue whether Jerry Lee did what he had to do, but it is Jerry Lee’s star and Jerry Lee’s sky, and he will decide his place in it. “I always knew I was gonna be a star,” he says, “but I never figured on the rest of it.” And he never wanted to understand it, this business beyond the stage. “Money hasn’t ever been my God, so to speak. But boy, I tell you, these people, when it comes right down to the dollar bill, that’s their goal in life—making money. . . . I never got into stuff like that. I just didn’t. I figured that if they owed me money, they would pay me.”
In one of the constant refrains of his rock-and-roll life, he would play in the coming year a small club in Germany, and for his performance there—called one of the greatest live albums of all time—he would also go unpaid. But for the people who truly love early rock and roll, there was no way to put a price on it, anyway.
He returned to England in March of ’64 for a Granada Television special called Don’t Knock the Rock, to run through his biggest hits and “I’m on Fire,” his first single for Smash. His golden hair was darker, longer, by now, and he was maybe a little heavier, the skinny kid now disappeared into a grown man in a somber dark suit. But from the first line of the first song, from the first ringing, crashing notes of a piano being beaten to death with absolute elation, it was clear this was Jerry Lee in his element. Seated at a piano perched atop a rickety-looking pedestal, he launched into “Great Balls of Fire” as the pedestal descended; when it reached the ground, he was swarmed by hyperventilating fans. At one point they mobbed the piano, and they reached out to touch his hair, his clothes. He stood on the piano, took off his jacket to screams, then pulled off his tie. “I would throw it out there,” he told them, “but there’s too many of you and I ain’t got but one.” The TV cameras scrambled throughout the show, shooting the performance—and the crowd’s reaction—as if it were some kind of news event.
“What happened with Myra,” he says, “it didn’t stop the women from screaming. They still come out, and they screamed more.”
But that made-for-television performance was nothing compared to what happened in a nightclub in Hamburg, Germany, a few weeks later. The scene was a hole-in-the-wall called the Star-Club,
lately famous for its role as a proving ground for a Liverpool quartet who were just now taking America by storm. “I went in behind the Beatles,” he says of the legendary performance he gave there on April 5. But the Beatles didn’t leave the place trembling, as he did. Live at the Star Club, the resulting live album, was one of the grittiest, most spectacularly genuine pieces of recorded music ever made. “Oh, man,” Jerry Lee says now, “that was a big monster record.”
To a roaring greeting from the crowd, he opened with a growl and a flourish:
Mmmmmmmmm, I got a woman mean as she can be
It is nearly impossible to describe what followed without the music itself as a backdrop. Some critics have called Live at the Star Club raggedly recorded, but most would say that did not amount to even a little bitty damn. His music and voice are commanding, certain, but still wild. The piano sounds like it is actually breaking at times, like he is playing more with a tack hammer than flesh and blood. His blues has gut and bottom to it, just plain ol’ nastiness, and the single country song is plainly sung by someone who has lived it. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” has been called perhaps his most soulful and passionate Hank Williams performance ever, given even greater emotion by his piano break, more Haney’s Big House than Grand Ole Opry—a thing he had been doing to his country songs since his mama was feeding him cocoa and vanilla wafers. In just fourteen songs—he played more, but at least two weren’t properly captured by the recording—he covered miles of ground, from a scorching “Long Tall Sally” and “Good Golly Miss Molly” to “Hound Dog” and “Down the Line.” He did all his big hits from before the fall, except “Breathless,” then closed with a “Whole Lotta Shakin’” that sounds commanding and almost valedictory. The entire thing feels live, as if you yourself have made the trip across the ocean and through the streets of Hamburg to sweat and drink and be wrestled to the floor by Jerry Lee Lewis.
But as proud as he was of the music—he was backed by a British group, the Nashville Teens, who were neither from Nashville nor teens—he says it was not greatly different from what he did on the road night after night in the United States, not greatly different from what he would do every night of his life till the last night, the last note. He treated it like the live show it was, giving the engineers or even his backup band barely a clue ahead of time, but playing what he felt like, rolling into a riff and a song and expecting the rest of the world to fall in behind.
Asked about it now, he recognizes its impact on others but doesn’t dwell on it for long—because, like other great performances, it is tainted for him by the business dealings that surround it. At first, and for decades, the album was available only in Europe, held up by legal constraints; back on this side of the Atlantic where he really needed a power album, it was rarely heard.
But perhaps worse than that, he believes he was never properly reimbursed for the record. “They never paid me a penny,” he says, certain that he should have received the money directly. The record company that released it did tell him they wanted to once, but he believes they tried to short him. “Come up to my room one time,” he recalls. “I was doin’ a tour, and they had a check for, I don’t know, thirty-three or thirty-four thousand dollars, which was a pretty good little chunk of money back then.” But it wasn’t what he was owed, just a token sum. “I wouldn’t even let ’em in the room. They wasn’t livin’ up to the bargain. And they still owe me the money, and Mercury sold out to Universal, and Universal now owes me the money. I want them people to jar loose some of that money and give it to me.” The black and white of it, in the ledger, may never be known. But he feels it, he believes it, and it is a belief that most of the rock and rollers of this generation share about their own finances, and it colors their worldview to this day.
He does not worship money, he says again, but he also despises being cheated.
“I got it comin’ to me. It’s mine.”
In summer of ’64, he followed the Star-Club phenomenon with a live show in Birmingham, Alabama, that resulted in an album titled The Greatest Live Show on Earth. The show proved to an American audience in a large venue that, even in the midst of a recording downturn, Jerry Lee Lewis was still a hurricane force onstage. He played big Boutwell Auditorium, where the Memphis wrestlers went when they told their fans they were going on “world tour.” Every seat in the room was filled; people even stood along the walls to hear him rip through staples like “Mean Woman Blues” and “Hound Dog” and a few fresh tunes like Chuck Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go” and Charlie Rich’s “Who Will the Next Fool Be.” “A good show,” he says, though some fans would find it almost tame compared to Hamburg. But the big live shows—and the hundreds of smaller ones he continued to do to make a living—could not return him in any significant way to the stardom he had enjoyed before without new songs and the radio play he needed. Instead he slipped in and out of the public eye like a ghost, one who shook the house and wailed through the night but, in the morning, was gone.
In England, he was being slowly edged out by the act who preceded him at the Star-Club, the Beatles. “Boy, when they broke, they broke, didn’t they?” At home, where they had hit with great force in February of ’64, he couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing them:
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
“I never did care for the Beatles all that much, to tell the truth.”
Sometimes it seemed to him that the real troubadours were dropping away—even Patsy Cline was dead, killed in a plane crash in Tennessee—and he was forced to sit in purgatory while old Johnny Cash kept churning out number one country hits, as though Johnny was singing right at him:
I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher
As the arms of obscurity snatched at him, he kept recording, looking for a hit, and kept touring, taking gigs that would have killed his pride if he hadn’t so loved the simple act of playing. “Wasn’t no place too far for me to go to sing my songs,” he says. “Wasn’t no place too rough.” And when he didn’t have a gig, he played anyway, showing up at clubs around Memphis to commandeer a piano. No one was going to say no to the Killer. “I played Bad Bob’s, played Hernando’s Hideaway, played for the love of it, for the joy of playing.”
In December of ’64 he finally returned to American television, in what would become a series of appearances on the new ABC music show Shindig! But again it was too little, the return of a ghost playing the rock and roll that started it all. The nation’s popular music itself continued to weaken and simper into a cloying mess. Some days, spinning the dial on his radio on his way to another show in God knows where, it seemed like he was trapped in a perpetual never-ending loop of Herman’s Hermits and “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
At first the boys at Smash had little more luck with his records than Sam Phillips had. They released a retread album of his Sun hits, The Golden Hits of Jerry Lee Lewis, which made the charts briefly before vanishing. When “I’m on Fire” failed to catch, he tried the Ray Charles hit “Hit the Road, Jack,” an Eddie Kilroy country ballad called “Pen and Paper,” and a song called “She Was My Baby (He Was My Friend).” He rocked out on “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” a single lifted from the Birmingham album, but it barely made the charts.
People took to asking him, with irritating regularity, if the old Sun magic was gone. In 1965, he answered with what has been described as his first great album, The Return of Rock—a record that recalled the bravado and precision, the sharpness, of the Star-Club performance, and added a fleet-fingered swing. He did Joe Turner’s “Flip, Flop and Fly,” and the old, old blues “Corrine, Corrina,” and “Don’t Let Go,” the song Roy Hamilton had blown him away with onstage. He did three Chuck Berry songs, “Maybellene,” and “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Johnny B. Goode,” and proved he could still make people sweat and blush with his take on Hank Ballard’s “Sexy Ways,” which delivered what “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” only winked about:
Come on da
rlin’, now, I want you to get down on your knees one time
And shake for Jerry Lee Lewis, honey—yeah!
The album cracked the Top 200, but it peaked at 121, and it lacked the breakout song he needed to bring him back.
The problem, as always, was material, not technique. In a way, he believes now, his sound was better than it ever had been. The producer who cut The Return of Rock and most of Jerry Lee’s music at Smash was Jerry Kennedy, who understood the science of music and mechanics of sound, how it bounced and flew and settled into the ear and even into a person’s mind. Kennedy had been in love with music since he could walk, and as a child he’d been in the front row at Shreveport Municipal Auditorium to hear Hank Williams play one of his last shows. He had been a backup vocalist as a child, could play the guitar and dobro, had worked with Elvis at RCA and Jerry Lee at Sun, and as a producer at Smash was determined to get the best sound he could out of Jerry Lee’s piano. At Sun, the piano had sometimes been lost in the mix—even when Jerry Lee was beating it to death—but Kennedy knew how to bring it right up front. “Jerry Kennedy, he was gettin’ the piano sound he wanted,” says Jerry Lee. “It was a knockout. He’d take a quilt, a big, thick quilt he had, and cover the whole piano up—big grand piano—cover it up where nothin’ could get through it,” trapping the sound so that the engineers could highlight it in the mix. Jerry Lee believes now that the Mercury team were perhaps the smartest pure engineers he ever knew; the title “producer” might sound important, but to him Kennedy was like a great mechanic who made the car run sweeter, smoother. His critics would say he did not always make it run stronger, that once he hit on a formula, he stuck to it, and that sometimes he bled the spirit out of a record with too many strings and sappy backup vocals. Either way, for a decade or more, his handprint on Jerry Lee’s music and career would be plain to see.