by Rick Bragg
I got jaws like a bear trap, teeth like a razor
A Maytag tongue with a sensitive taster
He seemed still unstoppable, making repeat engagements on the now classic late-night TV series The Midnight Special. The show brought him into even greater numbers of living rooms, carrying him even higher into that odd place where legends and stars of the here-and-now breathe the same rare air.
He was in Los Angeles that October playing the Roxy, when a scruffy, nearsighted young man appeared backstage, almost breathless.
His son punched him in the arm, excited, then kept punching him.
“Daddy,” Junior said, “ain’t that John Lennon?”
“Yes, son, that’s John Lennon,” he said.
Lennon rushed up to Jerry Lee and dropped to his knees.
He bowed, and kissed his feet.
“Thank you,” Jerry Lee said, not knowing what else to say.
“I just wanted you to know what you meant to me,” said Lennon. “You made it possible for me to be a rock-and-roll singer.”
“He was very sincere,” Jerry Lee remembers. “He said, ‘I just wanted to show you and tell you how much I appreciate what you done for rock and roll.’”
Jerry Lee had not thought much of the Beatles’ music, but it turned out they were decent boys—at least this four-eyed fellow with the scraggly sideburns and sissy-looking hair.
“He was real nice,” Jerry Lee said. “He was serious. I didn’t know what to think. I guess it is flatterin’, when you have people kissin’ your feet.”
He does not know if any of the other Beatles were there that night in the entourage. “They were in a box of seats, and they were diggin’ the show. I know that. I don’t know what they were smokin’, but there was a lot of smoke comin’ out of that box.”
He purchased that year a big brick house in the country in Hernando County, Mississippi, framed by a beautiful lake, with stables, green pastures, and lush, dark trees. There, about fifteen minutes south of Memphis, inside the pastoral limits of the hamlet of Nesbit, a man could take a swim in his piano-shaped swimming pool or step out his back door and fire his hogleg unmolested at snakes or clouds or the moon and stars, and it was nobody’s business but his. He had envisioned it as a place where he and his daddy and his children, and maybe even boy grandchildren, to carry on his name, would live, perhaps not in serenity, not exactly Walton’s Mountain but still a good place, their place. It was the anchor, a place to come home to.
But he rarely saw it. In 1973 alone, he traveled to eighty cities to play and sing his songs, often doing more than one show in each locale. That fall, he crisscrossed the country west to east and north to south. He started in Syracuse, then Nashville, then off to Europe for a couple of whirlwind dates, then a week in Los Angeles taping an episode of the television drama Police Story, then off to Memphis for Southern Roots, then Oklahoma City and Corpus Christi, then Kentucky, Florida, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, L.A. again, and Indiana. He closed the year in relatively sane fashion, playing five nights apiece at nightclubs in Birmingham, Atlanta, and Fort Lauderdale, wrapping up on Christmas Day.
Sometime that October, between Texas and Kentucky, he put in one more appearance on The Midnight Special, this time electing to give the audience the century-old “Silver Threads Among the Gold,” which he’d just recorded for Southern Roots.
Plant a kiss upon my brow today
Life is fading fast away
In time, Junior had straightened his life out, at least as much as a rock-and-roll drummer was allowed in those wild years, and was growing into a solid man with no true meanness in him; he was like Elmo that way. Jerry Lee saw in his son a good musician but increasingly his own man, not a spoiled kid. He would not be one more person who would just ride in the big man’s wake, a thing Jerry Lee never resented and in fact encouraged of the people he loved. He kept his blood kin close, because blood was everything; anything else was only paper. But it made him proud to see his son take charge of his life, become a capable man. Junior was not afraid to get his hands greasy, knew how to turn a wrench and how to rig a tow bar. He would not be one of those Southern men who stand helpless at the side of the road next to a broke-down car; he would raise the hood and start slinging wrenches.
On November 13, 1973, on a break from the constant tour, he drove to Cockrum, Mississippi, in his Jeep, a present from his father, to pick up a Ford and tow it back to his father’s house. Police investigators believe he was taking a curve on Holly Springs Highway when the car he was towing struck the abutment of a bridge and caused him to lose control of his Jeep. It flipped, killing him. He had just turned nineteen.
His funeral was on the fifteenth, in the Church of God in Ferriday, another of the churches Lee Calhoun had built. It was an open casket, but the undertaker covered the boy’s face with a cloth of satin. His father stood with the congregation at his back and looked down at his second dead son.
“I did pull that thing back from his face,” his father says, “and I kissed him on the forehead, and I spoke to him.”
They buried the boy in the cemetery at Clayton, which had been so much smaller when he was a boy. He heard the same songs again. He never shed a tear that anyone could see, not ever. But for a long time, when he closed his eyes, all he saw were passing coffins. “Seemed like I was always on my way to the graveyard. At one time, it seemed like I was burying somebody every week. If it wasn’t my mama, it was my boys . . . a steady stream, and it would just keep going, and going, and I would put on my suit and my tie and I would get it done. I buried my people, and I still didn’t break down, I still didn’t cry at the church.
“Because you got to be strong, don’t you? You got to be strong.”
He had the stonecutter fashion a heart-shaped headstone, and later, alone with the dead, he walked through the green of the lovely and peaceful place and read the words.
HIS LIFE WAS GENTLE, AND THE ELEMENTS SO
MIX’D IN HIM, THAT NATURE MIGHT STAND UP
AND SAY TO ALL THE WORLD, THIS IS A MAN!
“I lost my two boys. And I went on. I went on living.” He still toured, but the passing of the caskets had left him with a hole in his middle he could stand only when he was thoroughly numbed. It is the only excuse he has ever offered, and he does not care much if anyone accepts it or not. But whereas in the past it had seemed he didn’t care if he lived or died, now he seemed to taunt death, daring anything and anyone to take him down, even seeming at times to dare the audience to try. A brawl in a Memphis bar in ’73 was just one of several fistfights he welcomed then, though this one left him with a broken nose that never properly healed, one that would even affect his voice in coming years. He does not recall much about it, of course, just that he gave as good as he got. He had always loved his audiences, was always quick to shut up a drunk or call a heckler’s bluff, out of respect for the stage and for the people who came to hear the music, “people who paid their hard-earned dollar.” But now he seemed ready to rise to it, daring anyone to challenge him.
He hates to concede any weakness when his back is up; it is almost always up. But he says that his son’s death, so close to Mamie’s, “really knocked me off my feet. I didn’t know a thing could hurt that bad. It seemed like it was all I done, was bury my people. It seemed like all I did was stand and watch these people I loved . . .” There was a hopelessness in it, because what was it all for if the people he loved most were gone? His mama’s death was a thing of pure dread, something that wore him down, but his son’s death on the highway hit him with such unexpected force that he still feels it, like a physical thing, in his chest. His friends and bandmates and family wondered if he would recover. He was not a man who cared about a lot of things, and now much of what little he actually cared about was just stripped away.
In the spotlight, he would just stop sometimes in the middle of a song and glare balefully into the darkness at faces he couldn’t even see, as if inviting the audience to rise up against him.
13
THE YEAR OF THE GUN
Memphis
1974
The car was supposed to be a fine American driving machine, but he never could find a Corvette that would hold the road in those days. “Wrecked a dozen of ’em,” he says. “I was coming home one time—might have been drinking—and I run one up under the front porch of a house. A little girl come out, her eyes real big, and I don’t know why . . . I just said, ‘Top of the mornin’ to you,’ and she run back inside. And this woman stuck her head out the door and said, ‘Oh, Lord, it’s Jerry Lee Lewis.’”
A lot of people had that reaction to him then. He was not yet forty, but already people seemed surprised to see him, or maybe see him alive after all the stories told. At another In Concert taping, the announcer introduced him as “a man who’s so unreal, it’s hard to believe he’s really here.” He took the stage in a black tuxedo, lean and tall and straight, older now, but otherwise not a mark on him. The scruffy beard was gone, his hair long but perfect. “Oh, yeah,” he said into the microphone, over the screams of the audience, then launched into “Haunted House,” the silly but catchy record from one-hit wonder Jumpin’ Gene Simmons, the story of a man who moves into a new house to find it occupied by a green-skinned monster from outer space, who eats a hunk of raw meat “right from my hand . . . and drank hot grease from the frying pan.” It’s a goofy song, no doubt, but also a song about defiance, of refusing to be run off from something that belongs to you, and Jerry Lee turned it into another snatch of autobiography:
Jerry Lee Lewis’ll be here when the morning come
Be right here, ain’t gonna run
Then he tore it up some more.
I bought this house and I am boss
The music dies.
If God’s wi’ me, they ain’t gonna run me off
His hands flew and stabbed, then he stood up and peeled off his coat, flung away his tie, and undid his cuffs so he could slap the piano unimpeded. He stood up to sing, sat down to play, and when he did play, he stuck the microphone into his waistband like a pistol.
He was supposed to be ravaged by grief, eaten away by pills.
“Tortured?” he says now, and smiles. “Me?”
He looked like the Jerry Lee of old, gun-barrel straight and bulletproof on the outside, though inside an awful corrosion was beginning in his stomach, where all the excess of his life had pooled. But as he sang that silly song, it was like he knew the next great comedown, the next big slide, was beginning, and somehow he wanted to tell everybody there on national television that he was not going quietly.
Jaren had filed for divorce by now, but no one seemed in much of a hurry to do anything about that. Jerry Lee saw her occasionally; usually some kind of narcotic or alcohol was involved. He did a few sessions, mostly tepid; nothing much came of them either. He played a stage for money almost every night somewhere, then came home and went to the bars to play some more. He had always taken refuge in his live shows; now he sank into the music deeper and deeper, till it was all that mattered, but even that would be affected. He was still a big star, and acted with impunity in public; the beauty of Jerry Lee was that he would have acted that way anyway. He threatened and howled, and dry-humped the piano on the big stages. At home in Memphis, in the smoke and two-drink minimums, he played still for the joy of it, and punished anyone who interfered.
In March of ’75, a waitress at Bad Bob’s lounge in Memphis said he attacked her with a fiddle bow. He was convicted of assault and battery and fined $25; she was fined $15 for malicious mischief, for breaking the bow after she took it away from him. She sued him for $100,000, saying that he “brutally and savagely attacked her,” but like most lawsuits involving Jerry Lee, he just ignored it till people got tired of bothering him. He does not recall attacking anyone, but if he did whack someone with a fiddle bow, he is sure it was because they were interrupting a song or made him mad or otherwise needed whacking. It was an ignoble event in an awful and ignoble year, and it was just fine with him.
He was hanging out then with his friend Mack Vickery, who, with a comedian named Elmer Fudpucker, had become the opening act for some of Jerry Lee’s live shows. Fudpucker, whose real name was Hollis Champion, would tell a few jokes, much the same rural humor that had become a staple at the Grand Ole Opry with Minnie Pearl, and then Vickery, an accomplished songwriter who could do a dead-on Elvis impersonation, would play some country and some old rock and roll. A native of Town Creek, Alabama, he had come to Memphis in ’57, too, to be a rock-and-roll singer but had discovered that his best chance at fame was in putting the words and rhymes in other people’s mouths. He had written for Faron Young, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Lefty Frizzell, and others. He had Jerry Lee’s irreverence about convention and the straight world—he recorded an album called Live at the Alabama Women’s Prison and sometimes went by the pseudonym Atlanta James. Articulate in both song and life, he would come to be viewed as Jerry’s Lee’s “speechwriter.” Jerry Lee saw in the man not just a drinking buddy but a true blue-collar poet, and many of the things he said onstage were things he first said to Vickery or heard back from him.
“He was one of my best friends,” says Jerry Lee, who rarely uses such language, even with people he has known all his life. “He was good, kind, gentle . . . he was one person I could depend on. We sat around and laughed and played music. It was like we were brothers.”
The shows they played together were legendary, Jerry Lee says, if for no other reason than their duration. He alone would take encore after encore, and not just in the paid shows but in the impromptu concerts he did for free in the Memphis clubs.
“Sometimes I’d play for four hours,” he says. “People remember things like that.”
He started to frequent a place outside Memphis called Hernando’s Hideaway, which some would come to jokingly call his office.
“It got so ridiculous that Kenny Rogers, the owner—we called him Red—he got to where he was making good money off of me. He said, ‘Stay around, ladies and gentlemen! Jerry Lee landed his Learjet out at the airport and he’ll be here in about thirty minutes.’ And that place was packed out, you know? You couldn’t get a seat. Nowhere! Not even standin’ outside!” No matter how late he was, the crowd never left. “They knew I’d show up sooner or later. And I said, ‘Boy, ol’ Kenny’s moppin’ up.’ I didn’t mind.”
The patrons at Hernando’s Hideaway remember him busting through the door with his entourage, sometimes still in his rock-and-roll clothes from the show. People would rush to bring him something to lubricate his voice; then he would take the piano by divine right and play until dawn.
“Never got tired.”
He fesses up to the pills, but the liquor, he swears, was exaggerated. It always had been.
“People thought I used to drink a fifth of whiskey a night,” he says. “I’d buy a fifth of Calvert Extra whiskey. And I’d keep it to myself—I hid it in my shaving kit, you know? I drank on that fifth of whiskey for about a week, a week and a half. And everybody thought I was drinkin’ a fifth of whiskey a night. That’s something that got started. They still think it.”
There were, of course, many, many exceptions; people just naturally loved buying Jerry Lee Lewis a drink. They would talk about it all their lives, how they bought the Killer a fifth.
In July of ’75, he went back into the Mercury studio to cut a song that was written for and about him. “A Damn Good Country Song” was by Donnie Fritts, a member of Kris Kristofferson’s band:
Well I’ve took enough pills for the whole damn town
Old Jerry Lee’s drank enough whiskey to lift any ship off the ground
I’ll be the first to admit it, sure do wish these people would quit it
’Cause it’s tough enough to straighten up, when they won’t leave you alone
My life would make a damn good country song
>
Maybe it’s just the nature of country music that a man sings his life out loud. They sing about broken hearts and loving their mamas and beer and babies and trains, of course, and watermelon wine. But sometimes a man sings it down to the bone, as real as a car wreck, or a cave-in.
The year of the gun, for Jerry Lee, was actually a rolling barrage of years and many guns, but since he and almost all the people who should have been keeping watch on him were not clear in the head, exact dates are hard to pin down. Jerry Lee was a Southern man, and therefore had never been far from a gun of some kind, requiring one the same way other men require a pocket watch or suspenders. Like most Southern men, he had been witness from boyhood to the awful mystery of guns, until the day his people placed one in his own hands and lectured him about the power, the responsibility, and he nodded and promised and remembered, for a while—for he had also been raised to know the awful mystery of liquor, and had long ago succumbed to the great temptation to hold the one while his blood swam with the other.
He had never needed an excuse to party, but now there was a wildness and a bald recklessness that set new standards even for him, and mixing with the other barroom smells was an almost regular reek of cordite. Lost pills and empty casings mixed in the shag carpeting. He carried a pocket pistol pretty much all the time now—pearl-handled automatics, dependable snub-nosed .38s and over-and-under .22 derringers. Southern men will tell you that there are really only two things you can do with guns, shoot them and look at them, and Jerry Lee did not like looking at them all that much.
In the drunken excess that was Jerry Lee Lewis Enterprises, Incorporated, on Airport Road, Jerry Lee became bored looking at his .38 one night and fired it into a wall. Then he reloaded and fired it some more.