by Rick Bragg
For his own shows, all he needed was the raw, stripped-down power of his piano and voice. He wanted as little fanfare as possible. “I never give ’em a chance to introduce me,” often just coming onstage during the warmup and starting to play. One look at the faces there, he says, and he would know what to play and how to play it. Playlists were for timid people. “I can read my audience like that. I can tell what they want and what they don’t want. If it’s there, if they really want it, if they got an addiction for it, so to speak”—he laughs—“I can deliver it to ’em.” He’d play the big hits, of course, but sometimes he’d give them whatever he felt like in the moment—a bit of Bob Wills, or Tom T. Hall, even a sip or two of Jolson. It seemed he could sing anything then, sing the water bill, and they would have given him a standing ovation. The women stood three deep at his dressing-room door, and the husbands left bullets on his piano lid, thinking they were clever, that such a thing had never been done before.
The only thing missing was a musical heir. His boy, Junior, the son he’d had with Jane when he was still playing the Natchez clubs, was now fifteen. He had learned to play the drums—was learning still—and moved out of his mama’s house and joined his daddy on the road and soon onstage. He was handsome even before he was old enough to drive, like his daddy on The Steve Allen Show. He was clean-cut, in the beginning, and wore his hair swooped up high on his head, like his daddy had done. He had a smile full of big, white teeth, and looked like he was getting away with something just sitting there. Born thirteen months after his wedding with Jane, Junior was every inch his boy.
“I loved him. . . . I loved my boy.”
At first he just banged a tambourine, for the fun of it, while he learned the drums. Then Jerry Lee decreed there was no reason why a band could not have two drummers, and Junior took a seat behind his daddy, keeping time. He traveled around the country and around the world, seeing and doing things most teenagers only imagine. He ate with rock stars and listened as his daddy swapped stories of the old days with other legends. He would prove to be a talented drummer, with his family’s ear for music. Jerry Lee knew the rock-and-roll lifestyle was seductive, dangerous, but to deny the boy a chance to experience it, him being a Lewis, would be like telling a Flying Wallenda not to walk a wire. “He done good” on the road and stage, and the excesses of the road, the drinking and drug use, were not preordained, though it would mean the boy would have to rise above not only temptation but the natural bent for addiction and wild behavior that had been in the blood of Lewis men since the Civil War. The Lewises made music, and they raised hell along the way.
But Junior was not his daddy, say the people who played with him. He was not a Killer, but a gentler soul, and he seemed to draw out a tender side in his father. Kenny Lovelace remembers how Jerry Lee would turn from the piano bench, watch the boy play, and when he would hit a particularly hot lick, would grin. “My boy . . .” Jerry Lee says now, and his eyes track away to a dark corner of the room, as if he can almost see him there. His other son, Steve Allen, had left the world so soon, so early, and there was so little to recall. But in this boy, this young man, he could see his own face. “My boy . . . Lord . . .” He will not talk of him for long, and it has been too long already.
His next album, There Must Be More to Love Than This, was full of cheatin’ songs, “Home Away from Home,” and “Woman, Woman (Get Out of Our Way),” and the title song. It was once again prophetic. Myra, left mostly at home as he chased his newfound stardom, had hired detectives to follow her husband on the road and by 1970 had evidence to support her suspicions of gross and prolonged infidelity. She filed for divorce while Jerry Lee was on tour in Australia. Her petition alleged cruelties without end, beatings, and threats on her life. Jerry Lee denied the worst of it—“I never hurt none of ’em”—but the other women were, as he once said himself, “hard to hide,” especially if you are not trying too hard. They had been married thirteen years, and while there had been love in the beginning, it was pretty well stomped flat by then. “Bogged down,” he says. “But she did try to get me back several times. She knew she made a mistake.” (Four months after the divorce was final, Myra married Peter Malito, one of the private detectives she had hired to gather evidence of Jerry Lee’s infidelity.) The new album also featured a song called “Life’s Little Ups and Downs,” Charlie Rich’s paean to marriage and forgiveness. But forgiveness was just one more pleasant fiction, sung in pleasant rhymes.
Much has been written about how the divorce from Myra tugged him into a dark place, became the catalyst for some kind of decline, some escalation in his drinking or drug use that somehow tipped the balance he had found that allowed him to record, perform, and party. If people think that, he says, they were not paying attention for about two decades. It did not cripple him or stifle his creativity or sap his energy. His marriage to Myra had been so long in trouble that this end was inevitable; he behaved little differently in the wide-open days after the marriage than in the wide-open days before its slow death. It might seem right to say it knocked him to his knees, but that is not what happened, not what took his wind in the years to come. He is impatient when people tell him he should have felt something he did not. “Don’t no woman rule me,” he says again, what he always says when he is done talking about a woman or her hold on him. He is not saying he did not miss her at times—they were married a long time—only that he moved on. In the narrative of his breakup with Myra, the role of tortured, jilted spouse is not one he is willing to take on.
He took his happiness, as always, in the music—in a rocked-up version of the chestnut “Sweet Georgia Brown,” recorded since its inception in 1925 by everybody from Bing Crosby to the Beatles. It remains one of his favorite records—“one of the best things we ever done”—and in this case he gives much of the credit to Kenny Lovelace. “He did that fiddle break on that thing—it’s somethin’ else, isn’t it? I mean, you can never capture that again, like that. Oh man! What a record! It’s so far above—so far ahead of anybody’s thinkin’ in the music business that they could never comprehend the meaning of it. It had the flavor of everything.” Onstage he turned the song into a celebration, hands flying, fingers stabbing, his face, in those days at least, joyous. If you don’t like it, he likes to tell the audience, “you need to get yourself checked,” ’cause you might already be dead.
He could do anything, it seemed, except live the way people said he ought to, but even despite his foibles, he somehow soared. Pearry Lee Green, who’d almost gotten kicked out of Bible college when Jerry Lee rocked Waxahachie, never gave up his conviction that his piano-playing friend was born to bring people to the Lord. In 1970, he was at a conference of ministers called the Full Gospel Businessmen’s International in Sydney, Australia, when he learned that Jerry Lee was in town. Jerry Lee was drinking that night, but he asked Pearry Lee to sit on the piano bench with him in front of a well-lubricated, rowdy auditorium crowd of three thousand people. “You’re going to be surprised,” he told the crowd, “but I was going to be a preacher.” He told the crowd of the “singspiration” and how the organized church refused to accept his gift. Then he sang a hymn, an old one from his childhood. The rowdy crowd grew quiet.
“I’m going to tell you something, he had every kid in that place crying,” said Pearry Lee. “I don’t think in my life I’ve ever seen that many young people with tears in their eyes. Jerry Lee’s voice just melted their hearts. If I’d been preaching, I’d have given an invitation for salvation.”
Photographic Insert 2
The finale of his triumphant appearance in Granada TV’s Don’t Knock the Rock, March 19, 1964.
ITV/Rex/REX USA
In May 1963, he did a weeklong stint at the Star-Club, a raucous joint on the infamous Reeperbahn where the Beatles had lately cut their teeth.
On April 5 of the following year, he returned to record one of the greatest live albums of all time.
Pierre Pennone; K&K Center of Beat/Retna Ltd
; In the studio for Smash, 1965.
Robert Prokop
A Chicago live date captured for the cover of the Smash album
Memphis Beat. Robert Prokop
The wild man reborn as a seasoned country star.
REX/Dezo Hoffman
“No, never shall my soul be satisfied!” As Iago in Catch My Soul, 1968.
Backstage at the London Palladium, 1972.
Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns/Getty Images
At the London Rock and Roll Show, the first concert ever held in Wembley Stadium, 1972.
Chris Foster/REX USA
Bananafish Garden, Brooklyn, New York, 1973.
Bob Gruen
“Where’s Daddy at? Is he still cussin’?” With Elmo in Texas, 1970s.
Raeanne Rubenstein
After pulling into the gates of Graceland, early morning, November 23, 1976.
Memphis Commercial Appeal
In his private plane, 1970s.
Raeanne Rubenstein
Onstage with Linda Gail.
Raeanne Rubenstein
With Mick Fleetwood and Keith Richards for Salute!, a Dick Clark TV special, July 1983.
Richard E. Aaron/Redferns/Getty Images
The boys of Ferriday, Louisiana: with Mickey Gilley (left) and Jimmy Lee Swaggart.
© Christopher R. Harris
With his fourth wife, Jaren Pate, in 1978.
Memphis Press-Scimitar
At his wedding to Shawn Stephens, June 7, 1983.
Globe-Photos/lmageCollect.com
After Shawn’s death, on April 24, 1984, he married Kerrie McCarver.
Zuma Press
Getting his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. With him is Dennis Quaid, who played Jerry Lee in the 1989 motion picture Great Balls of Fire.
AP Photo/Doug Pizac
At home in Nesbit, Mississippi, with his Sun gold records.
LFI/Photoshot
With Chuck Berry and Ray Charles at the first Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, January 23, 1986.
© Lynn Goldsmith / Corbis
At the Great Balls of Fire premiere party, at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, 1989.
AP Photo/Todd Lillard
Back at the Hall of Fame, 1995.
Onstage with Levi Kreis at Million Dollar Quartet, 2010.
© Neal Preston/Corbis; Bruce Glikas/WireImage/Getty Images
Frankie Jean.
Linda Gail.
With Judith, 2014.
Steve Roberts
12
JET PLANES AND HEARSES
Around the World
1970
The locust years had come to pieces on the ground. He had cast them down at the close of the last decade, along with everything else that reeked of small time. “I was still what they had been waiting for, and they still loved it, and they still knew I loved doin’ it.” He still fought the old devil, the one that swirled in the liquor and rattled around in pill bottles, the demon Satan who lived on the painted lips and swam in the made-up eyes. He still feared the cost, but not enough to cast down the music or all it had given him, and in a way, all it demanded in return. His mama had told him not to give up when things were bad, Mamie standing there in her always modest dresses, hair pulled back severely, still no makeup or lipstick on her face or lace at her neck or cuffs to offend her God. She had stood thus, her big black purse held before her like a shield, and told him to use his gifts to lift the people’s hearts, and if she had worries or doubts, she buried them deep down, like some lost hairpin in the bottom of that purse.
In the midst of his comeback, Mamie Lewis fell ill. The doctors said it was cancer, and he could not stand it. It is one of those things people often say, in heartbreak, but in his case it was true. He did not weep and he did not curl up in a ball and refuse to face the world, but he took every step, every breath, with the knowledge of her impending death. “I worshipped her,” he says now. “I didn’t even know a thing could be like that.” His kin said he could not even bear to see her weak and hurting, and so he went home less and less as her condition worsened. “You don’t question God. Whatever comes. I never did.”
But if ever a man had a right to believe he was being punished, to believe a terrible price was being exacted from him, it was Jerry Lee in 1970. He had conquered the world again, only to see what was most precious to him threatened by something he could not buy off or change. He had seen the ravages of the disease in the face and body of his uncle Lee Calhoun, seen the great man reduced to skin, bones, and pain, and now the same curse had taken hold of his mama, whose strength had carried the family through awful times, even death. He had once believed it was his daddy, Elmo, who had the steel in his spine, who could stand against the world and spit in its eye, but as he had gotten older, he came to see it was Mamie’s strength, more than anything, that bound the family together, even when the State of Louisiana through divorce said it was legally dissolved. He knew his Bible—it was the only book he had ever truly read—and knew it to be the Word of God and therefore the last word. He had lived his whole life in terrifying closeness to it, especially in those verses that warned of the cost, the parts that asked what it profits a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul. It is easier for a man to live in ignorance than in such closeness; the preachers say God will be more merciful to the ignorant.
“I never stopped praying for her,” he says. “Never was a time I didn’t pray for her.” He did wonder if his prayers had the weight they might have had if he’d lived as a better man, but still he prayed on. Jesus washed the feet of a beggar and forgave a whole world of sin; surely he would hear Jerry Lee pray for his mama.
His cousin Jimmy continued to remind him of the cost of his sins in front of untold thousands. His ministry was growing. He had gone from a traveling tent preacher in a two-tone ’58 Oldsmobile to a man whose words challenged and condemned sin across the land, his voice thundering from a syndicated radio show called The Camp Meeting Hour. He told the faithful and the seekers, their hands pressed to the warm plastic of their Philcos, that they could be healed if they prayed and if they believed, and they did believe, not just in the Word and the Law but in the man who came to them through the electric air, and they rewarded him with an ever swelling audience and did send him money so that his ministry could grow. Now he rode in new leather, and his own closets poured forth fine garments. The Camp Meeting Hour had swelled to include more than 550 stations, the largest daily gospel program on earth. He was destined for television, the key to the whole world, where his charisma would be as a sounding bell.
It did not hurt that Jimmy Lee was tall and good-looking, with a voice that seemed to drop from the pages of Deuteronomy itself, or that he could play the unabashed hell out of a piano. By the 1970s, he was already a force among Assembly of God officials, who had once refused to ordain him because, he believed, his cousin was that rascal Jerry Lee Lewis. He was a recording star in his own right now, with hit after hit album of gospel, many comprised of songs he had played with his cousins back when you could hear the pianos ringing halfway across town. He told his listeners that God spoke to him directly, and so his flock knew he was a prophet, because God did not often speak to them in that way. Jimmy preached both for Jerry Lee and against him, warned of the wages of sin, and wept.
Jerry Lee had always thought that at least part of Jimmy’s antagonism came from their old, lingering jealousy. But now both men lived in great wealth, so it couldn’t be that alone. The sin of it all was still in the songs and in the lifestyle.
But it was hard for Jerry Lee to stay angry at his cousin, even when it seemed like his life, his sins, were the stanchions upon which Jimmy’s sermons rested. “We were always just like brothers,” he says now, “and he was a great preacher, and a great person. But he had enough sinners out there to preach about without worryin’ about family, about ol’ Jerry Lee. He probably says he was doing it for me, and, well, maybe he was.”
He did, over time, begin to fe
el used.
“He’s never said that he was sorry. I don’t think it would hurt him to apologize. But he won’t.”
But he also knew that his cousin was not preaching from the wind but from a Bible they both knew and believed.
“I forgave him, as it happened.”
Later, Jimmy would write that Jerry Lee’s fame was built on “glitter and glamour” and smite him with Proverbs 14:12: “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”
He knew his mama made exceptions for him, from love. He knew she never approved of the rock-and-roll lifestyle, but he saw it more in how she reacted to others. “Waylon Jennings took one woman with him to the airport and brought another woman back with him on the plane,” he recalls. “Mama never got over that. Waylon told her, ‘I’m so sorry, Miz Mamie, that you had to see that.’” But she never called her son on his own behavior. He was her boy and always would be.
He could not bear to think of her in the hospital bed, wasting, hurting. He tried to think of her as she was when he was a little boy, when he was always running off to Natchez or Vicksburg or farther places, and how relieved she would be when he came sauntering up in the yard licking on a nickel ice cream. “I charged it,” he told her, when she asked where he found the money for such extravagance as that. He could tell she was always at war with herself, in moments like that, wanting to pinch a welt in his arm or knock a knot on his head, but before he made his last step up into the old shanty house, she would gather him up in her arms and squeeze him till he could barely breathe. “My baby,” she always said.