by Rick Bragg
“They didn’t understand . . . I play piano and sing songs. I loved that.”
He had proved that he could do it and make a dollar doing it, and nothing gave him more pleasure than showing people he could do a thing they thought was beyond him, too complicated for the country boy. But as Elvis had so feared, there is always a risk for a performer, if you disappeared for too long from your stage, from your true calling. But Shakespeare and Iago would linger in his mind. He left Los Angeles with a healthy respect for the words, and even months later, taping a TV show called Innocence, Anarchy, and Soul in London—Shakespeare’s own backyard—he was able to interrupt a scorching rendition of “Whole Lotta Shakin’” to smite the audience with Shakespeare:
Divinity of hell!
When devils will the blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows,
As I do now.
The crowd, at first flabbergasted, started to cheer as he continued, verse after verse.
From the wings, another voice calls the part of Rodrigo to him:
Thou didst hold him in thy hate.
Iago:
Despise me
If I do not! I have told you often
And I will tell you again and again,
I hate the Moor! Three great ones of the city,
In personal suit to make me his lieutenant,
Off-capped to him, and by the faith of man,
I know my price, I am worth no worse a place:
But he . . . :
“I have already chosen my officer.”
And what was he?
One Michael Cassio, . . .
That never set a squadron in the field
Nor the division of a battle knows
More than a spinster, . . .
But he, sir, he must be lieutenant—he!
Then he took his seat at the piano, the crowd still going crippled-bat crazy, and went back to singing about whose barn, what barn, my barn.
He has always wondered why the entire play was not recorded, perhaps for television—it was not—because he would like to see it all again. And he has often wondered about Shakespeare himself, what kind of man he was, what a conversation between them would be like. Were they not, in a way, both stylists? Shakespeare just took history, took Rome and Venice, and remade them to suit his own mind and to entertain the people.
“I wonder what Shakespeare would have thought of my music?” he wondered then and wonders still today.
His time with Shakespeare at a close, he returned to the South, a place where history truly does, now and then, repeat itself. He returned to find that the inertia that had held him prisoner for years had been shattered, been obliterated again, by the force of a single song.
Chairs are stacked all over tables
And it’s closing time, they say
He had to go back into his past to find his future.
I could wait here forever
If they’d only let me stay
“It was the kind of thing Hank Williams would have wrote,” he says, and so naturally the people felt it in their hearts. “Another Place, Another Time” was as strong as he hoped. The record had climbed into the country charts even as he spouted Iago’s treachery in the shadows of the Hollywood Hills. Soon “Another Place” was battling for the number one country slot, and his entry into mainstream country music was already in place before he even crossed the Tennessee state line. It was undeniably a tearjerking country song, but it had grit in it, and it had his piano, thumping the slow, steady heartbeat of the song. There were no pyrotechnics in the music here, nothing that would make a piano virtuoso even blink—and no sweeteners, for that matter, just the counterpoint of Kenny’s lonesome fiddle. It was the kind of song you would expect to hear on the very jukebox he was singing so mournfully about, the kind of song that was born in a honky-tonk where the air smelled like Winstons and Juicy Fruit. “It sounded real,” says Jerry Lee.
Producers at Mercury were anxious to get him back in the studio to record more of the same. He had barely landed in Tennessee when he was hustled back into the studio with sheets of lyrics for three new songs written by Glenn Sutton. These songs were of the kind they were starting to call “hard country,” not because it had a rock beat or crossed over into rock in any real way, but because it was more substantial than the cloying, overproduced mess out there on country radio.
For the follow-up single, he cut Sutton’s “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser out of Me),” another heartbreaking barroom anthem. His voice is so mournful, you believe him, and even after a thousand songs about a man trapped in a neon prison as a woman waits at home, it sounded somehow new.
Well it’s late, and she’s waiting, and I know I should go home
But every time I start to leave, they play another song
His voice cries out, not so much for sympathy as for some kind of company, maybe even some kind of second chance. These were not whining songs; it is hard to feel sorry for Jerry Lee Lewis in any context, in any era, and he doesn’t want you to feel sorry for him. They were, this new generation of Jerry Lee songs, simple ballads about losing, wanting, and walking on. Jerry Lee sang of shared misery, of a familiar pain, and knowing they were not alone made it easier, somehow, for his audience to get up the next morning, go back out in the world and do it all over again. As Hank Williams had sung it to them more than two decades before, Jerry Lee reminded them that a broken heart was common as dirt, and the could even be kind of pretty, neighbors, if the melody was sweet and the words all rhymed.
It was music for people who worked in the pipe shops and steel plants and cotton mills, who sold insurance and slung wrenches and drove taxis and trucks and wiped the tables at the Waffle House. Many of them were the same rock and rollers who had shook it till it hurt when the music was still new and dangerous, in the time of the two-tone shoe, but they had gotten a little older, saner. They had to get up early now; they had mortgages on two-bedroom brick ranches with chert-rock driveways, and payments on new Buick Rivieras every five years. Rock and roll had deserted them, with Top Forty playlists and all that magic-dragon crap. So they had simply gone home to the country, to country music and the country radio stations they had been weaned on; Jerry Lee merely joined them there, thanks to his own ear and the work of a few good songwriters.
“They wrote what people feel,” he said of the writers of those songs and the songs to come. “I sung it like people feel.”
He did it again in “She Still Comes Around (To Love What’s Left of Me)”:
I know I’m not a perfect husband, although I’d like to be
But payday nights and painted women, they do strange things to me
By the end of the summer of ’68, he was the hottest country artist in the nation.
He might even have worn a rhinestone or two in those heady days, he says, “but not like Porter Wagoner.” It was all coming together. “Songs were great. The words were perfect, the melody was perfect, the song was perfect. All I had to do was play it, sing it, be done with it. Go on to another one. Number one. Number one. Number one. ’Bout thirty-three number-one records in a row.”
He cut songs of great romance, like “To Make Love Sweeter for You”:
You’ve cleared the windows of my life, and now that I see through
I’ll do my best in every way to make love sweeter for you
It was perhaps the closest thing to a pure love song he would ever cut, and it would be his first number one on any chart since “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” a long, hard ten years before.
But if there is a song he was meant to sing, it was probably the sadly beautiful “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye”:
Once again, the whole town will be talking (yes they will)
Lord, I’ve seen the pity that’s in their eyes
It is not the song of a man wronged unfairly; it is a song about a man who deserves every heartache and knows it.
Baby’s packed h
er soft things and she’s left me, she’s left me, she’s left me
Some songs make people think they were written for them. This is the opposite: in this song, it’s as if Jerry were living inside the lyrics. “A couple of years later,” he says, he realized that “these people was writing songs for me all of my life. I said, They’re tellin’ me something.”
Finally, in the wake of “Another Place, Another Time,” Jerry was back at the top of the songwriters’ wish list—and they obliged with a slew of new material that fit perfectly with his voice and leather-worn persona. Some of them actually were created for him—like “Think About It, Darlin’,” written to capitalize on one of his catchphrases. “Songs like that,” Jerry Lee says, “that’s a masterpiece. I mean, that and ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ by Kris Kristofferson,” which was also covered by everyone from Elvis to Joan Baez. Jerry Lee did it with some blues. He took care to stick to the writers’ words on those great country songs, especially those of Kristofferson, who would become one of his dearest friends. “You don’t mess with Kristofferson,” he says. And his new country style was the perfect complement to these simple, plainspoken songs: It was familiar enough to slide easily onto country radio playlists but warmer, more intimate, and with a little more honky-tonk feel.
This new run of songs changed everything for Jerry Lee. “It put me back on top,” for the first time since 1958. And it made him richer than he had ever been as the firebrand of rock and roll. Gone were the days when he loaded his band into two dusty Cadillacs and sprayed gravel across the United States and Canada. Once the first few big records hit the airwaves, the hits came in a cascade, more than thirty in all, till Jerry Lee’s voice, singing new songs and covers like “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” leaked from the window of every station wagon, pulpwood truck, and Airstream trailer in the South and Midwest, in Bakersfield and Detroit City and, of course, Nashville.
“I played that good kind of country, not that other kind,” he says, and you only had to listen to Top 40 country radio for five minutes in almost any area to know precisely what he was talking about. When he played his live shows, he mixed his country hits in with the rock and roll and blues and his old, old music, his childhood songs, as he always had. He never considered himself a country music artist—labels were bridles to him—but rather a rock and roller who was reaching back into his roots. Nashville might have saved him, but it was Memphis that swelled his heart.
He lived for a while athwart the two, appearing in April 1969 with Little Richard and Fats Domino in a rock-and-roll revival TV show called 33⅓ Revolutions per Monkee, proving that a man with talent can survive anything, even the Monkees. Then it was back to Nashville, four more times that year: a duets session with Linda Gail that ranged from hard country to rock to soul, then a solo session in which he cut Jimmie Rodgers’s “Waitin’ for a Train,” one of his finest renditions of the white man’s storytelling blues:
I walked up to a brakeman, just to give him a line of talk
He said, “If you’ve got money, son, I’ll see that you don’t walk.”
The session with Linda Gail became an album (Together), and he would continue to feature his sister onstage and on television specials to come. She was a fine talent in her own right, he says—“It’s in the blood”—though some would call that evidence of his largesse, that he would do anything for blood.
Kenny Lovelace had as close a view as any as Jerry Lee rose out of the wasteland and into country stardom. Elvis must have seen it, too, had to have seen it, and in the summer of ’69 he made a historic comeback of his own.
“We were on the road at the time,” says Lovelace. “It was great, man. We was in Columbus, Ohio, and had three or four days off. Elvis found out where we were and called the hotel, but Jerry was asleep. When Jerry woke up, he tried to call Elvis, but he was in the sauna. Elvis called back and said, ‘If you have any time off, I’m gonna be opening at the International Hotel, and starting to tour again. I’d love to have you come out and see what you think of the show.’ He just liked Jerry’s opinion. So me and Jerry Lee and Cecil Harrelson and Dick West flew out there. They had a nice booth reserved. Elvis came out in the middle of the show and said, ‘I’m just so pleased that my good friend came out tonight. And I’d like to introduce you to my buddy, Jerry Lee Lewis.’ Everybody in the room stood up and gave him a standing ovation. After the show, we visited backstage. They had a piano in the dressing room. Elvis said to Jerry Lee, ‘Would you mind just playing a few notes?’ Jerry did some runs; he was just playing around. . . . Elvis leaned against the piano, watching him. ‘What a piano player.’”
That fall, there would be evidence on film to show how much mastery he had achieved. First he did the Toronto Peace Festival, in front of twenty-five thousand people, the same event where Alice Cooper was rumored to have bitten the head off a live chicken. Back on the bill with Chuck, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard, he played it smooth and loose and lovely, like he was in a church basement instead of a big stage in an arena filled with screaming peaceniks. Then just a few days later, he taped a series of short concerts on a small stage at the Memphis Holiday Inn for a television show to be called The Many Sounds of Jerry Lee. In one of his most diverse and impressive performances ever captured on film, he reached back, back into his Sun days for “Ubangi Stomp” and “Lewis Boogie,” did his big rock-and-roll hits and most of his country hits, and surprised the audience with an almost casual show of versatility, playing drums on Bobby Bland’s “Turn on Your Love Light” and strumming guitar on “He’ll Have to Go” and “Green, Green Grass of Home.” He even sang “Danny Boy” with just a microphone, like a genuine pop crooner. But what was most impressive about the Holiday Inn shows was that they were perhaps the first time a camera had truly captured his sheer talent on the keys, his windmilling hands on “What’d I Say,” showing everyone who’d never seen him live exactly what all the fuss was about and reassuring his oldest fans that going country had not turned him weak.
In October, with a pile of smooth country hits in the can, he loosened up in the studio and had some real fun with Merle Haggard’s “Workin’ Man Blues,” the old R&B ballad “Since I Met You, Baby,” and a new A-side, “Once More with Feeling,” all part of a continuing metamorphosis. He insists even today that there was never any real evolution in his art—“I was a master of the piano by age fifteen,” he says, preempting any such talk—but still there was a difference in these Mercury records that had nothing to do with genre. He was more mature—less wired, perhaps, but more assured, proving that he had not done the same thing over and over in those endless road shows but that they had been one long, roving practice session. He was also simply older. His spirit had not mellowed, not a bit, but his voice had, and his subtler delivery did justice to his far more mature material. Where once he had hollered through “Whole Lotta Shakin’”—and still could, of course—now he approached his ballads almost elegantly, though with that constant earthy undertone. He could sing a love song, and you still knew, watching him, that it was not one woman he had wronged or disappointed but one hundred, and you knew that if you messed up his song, he would come off the stage and kick your ass up to your watch pocket. As a pianist he had even more finesse and precision, yet he still loved to beat it to death for the sheer joy of it.
He was not just on top of the world again; in some ways, he was looking down upon it. On November 14, 1969, the astronaut Charles Conrad Jr. carried a collection of Jerry Lee songs with him to the moon on Apollo 12. “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” not only went to the moon, as he always said it would, but it landed on it—the only sound, at times, in that little spacecraft on that cold, distant orb. He would look at the moon sometimes, especially on the nights when it was big and full, and grin about that. Some of the old people at home in Louisiana said we never went to the moon, that they made all that stuff up, but he knows that we did, and that the astronauts heard a little boogie when they got there.
In
early ’70, he did The Johnny Cash Show; he was gracious to his host, and Johnny treated him like a long-lost pal. He was acceptable now in the world of country music, and in the wider one. All seemed forgiven. What had once seemed a slow, inglorious burnout was now a genuine comeback: you could tell by the Cadillacs that once again filled his parents’ driveways—though Mamie still stole his when she took a notion.
“I left the keys in it,” he says now, “so she wouldn’t have to ask for them.”
“Mama, you take my new car?” he asked when he saw a bare spot in the driveway about the size of a Fleetwood.
“All the way to Ferriday,” she answered.
“And I would have to buy her one just like it to get it back. I’d call the dealer and he’d say, ‘I happen to have one left.’ A salesman always has one left.”
The offers for live shows poured in. He even played Vegas, in an extended engagement at the International Hotel. Elvis was playing the main room.
“I was playin’ in the lounge. I mean the lounge was as big . . .” and he laughs. “It was as large as this whole house. Just the lounge. I mean, the main room would seat, like, three thousand people. And the room I was in would seat, like, twenty-five hundred. I was hittin’ [Elvis] tit for tat on that.” With its more casual atmosphere, the lounge was a better match for Jerry Lee. “You can really let your hair down there, you know. I was doin’, like, six shows a night. I didn’t mind. I loved it!”
He had watched Elvis’s show in the big room, but to him it was like he’d lost what made him great—the leanness, not in his body but in his performance. “I didn’t particular care too much for that,” he recalls now. “He had an enlarged band, with horns and violins, stuff like that, and I don’t think it ever come off that good. He was tryin’ to prove somethin’ that really didn’t need provin’. He was takin’ away from his old style.”