by Rick Bragg
“Family,” he says, shaking his head. “If you ain’t got family . . .” It was the one place you could go, could retreat into, when no one else would have you. There were days when he wondered if, when his mother left him, there would be anything left at all.
As his mother’s flesh weakened, he saw his own son, Junior, succumb to the same appetites, the same temptations, that his cousin had long preached about from his gilded ministry in Baton Rouge.
It was a time when pills of every kind were almost as easy to obtain as a fast-food hamburger, easier, because they rode in guitar cases and shaving kits and overhead bins, rattling, always rattling. Drugs were a kind of cultural currency, now—not just for touring musicians but for the most sheltered middle-class child on a tree-lined street. Jerry Lee watched, haunted and overmedicated himself, as his son slipped into a set of habits that was as much a part of the music as guitar strings and drumskins. It just seemed like people had to have them to make the music, and by the time he was sixteen, Junior did, too. Jerry Lee tried to tell the boy to quit all that, his band members recall, to spare himself the demons his daddy lived with. Not everyone could take the demons into their body and survive like Jerry Lee. Not everyone could just absorb them, dilated eyes hidden by dark glasses, and walk tall. The drummer, Tarp Tarrant, later said that Jerry Lee blamed him for it, for giving them to Junior, and put a knife to his throat as a warning. Jerry Lee would have killed anyone who threatened his son in any way, and not worried about the rightness or lawfulness of the act until later. He may have never even considered what role he himself played in it by bringing his son into this world. But it was the life his son hungered for and the only life Jerry Lee had to share.
With his mama sick and suffering and his only living son at risk, Jerry Lee decided on a change. He did not, as many have said, renounce rock and roll. He never renounced the music. He did renounce the lifestyle and its most common venues, the bars and clubs where it was played beside a running fountain of whiskey and beer and other substances. He told reporters in early December 1970 that he would play no more shows in places where liquor was served, and would play only at coliseums, theaters, and fairs, and would end his shows with gospel music, and would even give testimony. He swore off drinking and cursing and fighting and wild parties and rejected the attentions of loose women. He would do a clean show and live a clean life, and he would ask God to help the people he loved. He told the Tennessean of Nashville that he had made a stand for God. “I’m just letting the people know. . . . I’ve gone back to church and I got myself saved, and the Lord forgave me of my sins and wiped them away.”
He prayed for his mama.
He prayed for his son.
He prayed his promise and said he would do anything if God would spare his mama.
Later that December, Jerry Lee and his band performed at a Sunday service at a country church on Highway 61 South outside Memphis. In a live recording of the show, he sounds happy, at ease, as if some great burden had been lifted, and maybe that was true.
“First song that I ever sang in church, neighbors, was an old, old song that my mother taught me back when I was just a kid about eight years old,” he told the congregation. “That’s been a while ago, but I can still sing it.”
What will my answer be? What can I say
When Jesus beckons me home?
“Very true song,” he says.
He sang “I’ll Fly Away” and “Amazing Grace” and “Old Rugged Cross” and “Peace in the Valley,” preaching all the while: “Hallelujah, glory to God, there will be peace in the valley too, brother. I’m looking for that day, I guarantee you.” Then he introduced his band: Edward DeBruhl (“He’s a good boy, a good Christian-minded boy. Me and him have set around the motel room many nights playing religious records and crying”), Kenneth Lovelace on electric guitar and fiddle (“one of the finer musicians in the United States . . . an all-around musician and an all-around guy”), “and Jerry Lee Lewis Jr. is playing on the drums tonight,” said his father, proudly. “Junior comes from Ferriday, Louisiana, and you know, he kinda likes to wear his hair long, and I told him yesterday, I said, ‘Son, y’oughta get a haircut, you know, and he wouldn’t do it. He’s a little bit too big for me to try to make him get a haircut—bigger than I am—but I’m not really worried about his hair. He’s a good boy. I’m just worried about his soul, him being saved. I appreciate Junior very much, and I love him with all my heart. He’s my only boy.” And the boy looked at his daddy and grinned and laid the beat down in perfect time.
It was the rockingest day in the history of Brother E. J. Davis’s church, though he was a little scandalized when Jerry Lee got so full of the spirit that he played part of “I’m in the Glory-Land Way” with his boot.
The congregation shook the boards. Jerry Lee laughed with joy. “Thought I’d better do that just to show you I could still do it,” said Jerry Lee. “I didn’t hurt it, Brother Davis. Brother Davis got an evil eye on this piano tonight. I’m not gonna jump up on it, Brother. I guarantee you. Not tonight.”
He followed up that date with a studio gospel album titled In Loving Memories, and even had Mamie come in and sing in the chorus on the title track.
Well, I stand here so solemn, with a blank look on my face
As you lay there dressed in pure white lace
It was clear that her sickness consumed him, too, say the people who watched him suffer through the winter of 1970 and on into the spring of ’71. It also seemed that he had in some ways blamed himself, as if her death was somehow the cost he had to pay for his success and his sins. As she was beginning to fail, he recorded Jimmie Rodgers’s “Mother, the Queen of My Heart,” a parable of a prodigal son who promises his dying mother that he will “always go straight,” a promise he cannot keep.
Ten years have passed since that parting
That promise I broke, I must say
I started in drinkin’ for pastime
Till at last, Lord, I was just like ’em all
Mamie died two weeks later, at midnight of April 21, at the hospital in Ferriday. As with the death of his little boy, he did not cry in front of his family, not in the church in Ferriday as the preacher stood over the specter of death and warned that time was nigh, nor at the little cemetery in Clayton. He stood straight and silent, like his mama used to do, and watched the earth take her. “I’ve learned,” he says. “I’ve learned to do it.” The preacher preached again, and then, with those lovely voices, her kin sang her favorite hymns. They call it “singing them into heaven,” but his mama didn’t need no help.
“She was the best mama in the whole world,” he says. “I took care of her. She took care of me.”
She had dragged a cotton sack all day, in the rising dust, to buy him a shirt to wear, to sing a song.
“I miss her,” he says.
His kin would say he would never recover. Some would say he wanted to die, that he tried to kill himself with all the excesses of his fame, with all the weapons of destruction his money could buy, but then, had it not always been that way? Some would say he blamed himself for refusing to give up rock and roll and play only church music, only gospel, or at least something tamer, easier. But then he would have had to have been another man entirely, and he doesn’t believe his mama wanted that. “Mama was always with me,” he says, again and again. It might be dramatic to say she condemned her son for his music, but that is just a lie. “My talent was a gift from God, not from Satan.” His mama was the first to tell him that and would remind him of it in his moments of doubt, he says fiercely. “If my mama had not been for me, she never would have accepted any of the things my music got for her.” She would have refused houses and cars and cast the other presents from her. He holds to this belief in his lingering doubt.
“A man ain’t meant to be alone.” He says it, and the Bible says it.
In ’71, for once actually legally divorced before remarriage, he married a twenty-nine-year-old divorcée named Jaren Elizabeth Gu
nn Pate, a secretary in the Memphis sheriff’s department. They separated two weeks later, and would not live under the same roof again. He would later say that he married her at least in part because she was pregnant, though not with his child. Five months after the wedding, Jaren gave birth to Lori Leigh Lewis, and listed Jerry Lee as the father on the birth certificate. He disagreed, but quietly. He has long refused to air the matter in public, a choice his kin view as a kindness. But people close to him, including some in his own family, say that one of the reasons the marriage was in name only was that the child was not his.
It was not a happy marriage, but at least it was a long one; she moved out of his house and into a house he paid for in Collierville, Tennessee, and they would live that way indefinitely, separated but still legally wed, seeing each other now and then. It would seem an odd arrangement, but Jerry Lee did not want to live with her and he did not want the or-deal of a divorce, and there was no one then he wanted to marry in her place. So he let it limp along for eight years. The marriage was mostly invisible, coming to light only in court records when she filed for nonsupport for herself and the child; most people had assumed the union had just dissolved years ago, and the ones who knew better accused him of abandonment. When the marriage did end, it would not be in a courtroom but in another tragedy.
In the meantime, he had unrenounced rock and roll and all that it implied, including its enticements. Now, instead of recording any more new country songs, he went back in time to a song that seemed to have little or no room in its history for a remake—and found a hit in that, too, in fact his biggest hit in years. The song was “Chantilly Lace,” a signature song for the Big Bopper, recorded on the Mercury label in ’58, a novelty song that rode the Top Forty at the time, and deposited the punch line “Oh, baby, you know what I like!” in the public consciousness for good. The original version was so recognizable and such a novelty that Jerry Lee wasn’t sure there was room on the airwaves for a new version. He had to be talked into it by someone he trusted.
Jud Phillips had rejoined Jerry Lee’s life as a kind of ad hoc adviser, because he was one of the few people on earth who could hang with Jerry Lee on an all-nighter or three-day binge. Jud had not renounced anything, and he had some of his best ideas when he was flat on the carpet. “Jud was the man that was callin’ the shots on those records,” recalls Jerry Lee. One day, Jerry Lee says, they were sitting around, trying to find a hit, “and he was so drunk that he couldn’t stand up. He’s just layin’ there on the floor. And he said, ‘It’s time to do ‘Chantilly Lace.’”
Jerry Lee was skeptical, he says, but “I never called Jud wrong.”
“Jud,” he said, “I don’t know the song. I don’t even know the words to it.”
But he already knew what Jud would say. “Then just fake it.”
Jerry Kennedy remembers what followed as a wild session, with Jerry Lee pounding through chorus after chorus. What Jerry Lee remembers is what it took to get started.
“I had never played it before,” he recalls. He knew he’d have to do something different to it: “I took the song, and put my style to it. And rewrote it word for word,” putting his own sly spin on the ball:
Helllllooooo, you good-lookin’ thing, you
Yeah—huh? This is the Killer speaking . . .
But the real problem wasn’t what he would do with the song—it was making sure a huge room full of studio musicians, including a full complement of strings, wouldn’t kill the spontaneity with sweetness. “I went in and told Jerry Kennedy, I said, ‘You turn on the red light, like we’re not recording.’” Like Sam Phillips, he believed that sometimes the best performances came when everyone was relaxed. “But we were recording. I told him to just leave it, leave the tape running, and capture that first take. I said, ‘Don’t worry about the band hittin’ a bad note or anything, because they know the song.’ And we nailed it. One take.”
Afterward, the conductor of the string section came over to Jerry Lee, happy with the rehearsal.
“I think we can do it again. We got it.”
“You just cut the record,” said Jerry Lee.
“Aw, no, it couldn’t be!”
“Oh, yeah it is,” Jerry Lee said. “That’s a hit.”
He was right. “Chantilly Lace” spent three weeks at number one on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart; it was a Top 50 pop hit in the States and a Top 40 hit in the United Kingdom. For many loyal fans, the record captured everything they loved most about him. When he sang the old rock and roll, it reminded them of a time when there would have been no such music without that little bit of hillbilly in it; and so it reminded them of being young. But where the jolly, unthreatening Bopper had sounded only mildly lecherous singing about that “ponytail, hangin’ down,” Jerry Lee breathed a different kind of attitude into the song.
Do I like what?
I sure do like it, baby. . . .
“Chantilly Lace” was a highlight of a new album, The Killer Rocks On, along with his cover of a Kristofferson song that Janis Joplin had made famous not long before, “Me and Bobby McGee.” With its rueful, retrospective quality, “Bobby McGee” fit him perfectly, and from then on, people would call for it at his live shows. “That’s a song,” he says now.
Jerry Lee’s friendship with Kristofferson was a kind of mutual admiration society. Jerry Lee had always responded to strength and confidence in real men, and in Kristofferson he saw all of that. This was a man who had finished the army’s ranger school, flown helicopters, and boxed at Oxford, and yet who still wrote gentle songs like “For the Good Times.” More than that, he seemed to not give one damn what the music establishment—or anyone, for that matter—thought of him. And like Jerry Lee, he had made it work for him. A Rhodes Scholar, he would always hold to the teachings of William Blake, who believed that if a man had a God-given talent, then he should use it, or reap sorrow and despair. Jerry Lee just knew the man wrote songs—words—that stuck in people’s hearts like fishhooks.
Even with Jerry Kennedy’s strings sweetening the sound, The Killer Rocks On was his grittiest album since The Return of Rock. He took the occasion to blow through Elvis’s “Don’t Be Cruel,” Charlie Rich’s Sun hit “Lonely Weekends,” and Fats’s “I’m Walkin’” at double time, but also contributed a soulful reading of the old blues song “C. C. Rider,” and takes on two recent Joe South songs, “Games People Play” and “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” that fit his voice—and country radio—perfectly. The old men in overalls called it “that long-haired country,” but he made it rock.
If you could see you through my eyes, instead of your ego
I believe that you’d be surprised to see that you’d been blind
The Killer Rocks On would be more than an album his fans would wear out from start to finish. It would mark an emergence from a country cocoon, his rebirth as a bona fide rocker.
Having made millions singing country, he spent them partying like a rock star. He had languished too long, touring and slaving and waiting for this rebirth, not to enjoy this ride when it came. “There wasn’t no time to lollygag around,” he says. “In one time around Nashville, there was more Jerry Lee Lewis stories than you could count. And, yeah, some of ’em was even true.”
It was a time of epic excess, but even the wildest rock stars of the 1970s learned that when it came to playing good music and then partying like there really was no coming dawn, they were milksop amateurs compared to Jerry Lee. He was even starting to look different: He had always considered long hair effeminate, but he’d enjoyed that beard he grew for Catch My Soul, and now he grew it out again and let his curls grow past his collar. He traded in his sport coats and two-tone shoes for boots and snazzier threads. Heading to England for a historic concert at Wembley Stadium, the first concert ever in that arena, he looked downright casual in his short-sleeved orange shirt and tight matching pants next to Little Richard and Chuck Berry. While he was backstage, he noticed a skinny, big-lipped kid on the stage, jamming like an
over-excited teenager, waving a movie camera around. It was Mick Jagger.
“He was rolling on the floor with his camera,” says Jerry Lee. “He had every album I had ever made—with him. I told him, ‘I am not going to sign all them albums.’”
On a spring tour of Europe that year, he was wild onstage, wilder than perhaps he ever had been; the audiences loved him for it, because it was the persona come to life in front of them—not Jerry Lee Lewis, but the Killer. He was climbing the piano again at every show now, growling and threatening and clouding up and raining all over them. In Paris, he punched the air and climbed the piano to bump and grind, and the screams drowned out the music. Backstage, in interviews, he was exhausted, contemplative. He looked like what he was, a man with a troubled soul drifting out of control.
Or maybe, he says now, he just knew he had a role to play.
“I give my audience what it wants,” he said backstage as a French reporter translated. In the black-and-white video, his skin seems pale as bone, though maybe it’s just a trick of the light.
It may have been the role of a lifetime, but it took a toll.
“They want it that way,” he says now. “They want somebody that’s mean. That turns over pianos. That turns Rolls-Royces over. That gets married when he gets ready.
“That’s the Killer, you know? The Killer! Killer! Killer!”