by Rick Bragg
His ability to bounce back from almost anything was intact. He left in April for another European tour, and in stops in London and Bristol, England, put on shows that seemed to defy or ignore all that had happened to him in the last two traumatic years. Gone, or mostly so, were the runaway ego and erratic behavior. He was gaunt, perhaps more introspective onstage, but he smiled with genuine pleasure at the tightness of the band, of Kenny Lovelace’s guitar licks, as his own piano went ringing through the Hammersmith Odeon in London. He asked for a drink, and they brought him a Coca-Cola; he looked ruefully at the bottle and then played them “Mona Lisa.”
A few days later, in Bristol’s historic Colston Hall, lucky fans witnessed a loose and sustained performance from a pure music man, chatting warmly with the crowd and the band. “I thought it was Wednesday! Thought we were off tonight,” he said when he took the stage, dressed in a simple red turtleneck. He gave them “Chantilly Lace” and “Little Queenie” and “Trouble in Mind,” a roaring “I Don’t Want to Be Lonely Tonight,” even Jimmie Rodgers’s “The One Rose That’s Left in My Heart,” and more, the whole time seriously intent on his piano, on his craft. “Glad to have a sober audience for a change,” he said, sipping from a bottle of Heineken sitting on the piano; later, when he sipped again, it foamed over when he set it back down on the piano lid. He could have nursed one beer all night. He complimented his band again and again. “Them boys are gettin’ pretty good,” he said, a kind of mantra for him in good times. “I can play guitar just like that—well, I wish I could.” But this new, almost modest Jerry Lee still brought them the rock and roll on “Little Queenie,” singing about how “I need a little lovin’—won’t you get your little . . . self . . . back home? . . . Pick it, Kenny!” He was still hurting then, but it was nothing he could not stand; the show he gave them was satisfying, hopeful, and if it was just a window, a glimpse of what things might have been, well, how lucky those people were to get to see it.
The following month, he played the Memphis Cotton Carnival, a kind of Mid-South Mardi Gras for the river city, and it was a different story. He took the stage in dark glasses and a black sleeveless T-shirt, as if he were a punk rocker, and appeared wired, mumbling some of the lyrics, and not just for effect. At the end of the show, barreling without interruption through “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” into “Meat Man” and then into “(Hot Damn!) I’m a One-Woman Man,” he started pushing the band to go faster, faster, till even he could barely keep up, and wouldn’t stop until three girls rushed the stage to distract him with a kiss.
While it’s hard to place an exact moment when it happened, it was about this time that a new downward spiral began, a descent into a whole new hell.
He should have toned down his lifestyle, should have slowed his consumption of the chemicals that put him in such shape. He did not. He was in constant pain, and painkillers replaced amphetamines; eventually it was needles.
“When you get those shots and things, you get addicted to ’em,” he says of the painkillers he took. “I thought it was helpin’ me. I thought I was gettin’ pretty high out of it. And I thought it was helpin’ me onstage.” He laughs, but there is no humor in it. “It wasn’t helpin’ me onstage. It was all in my mind. I got to thinkin’ it was very necessary to have, but I was wrong.”
Instead, he seemed to withdraw inside himself onstage, breaking off a song midstream, often running off to chase a thing inside his head and leaving his band behind—the band he had been so proud of, for the way they meshed, for the good music they had played across thousands of miles. It was that way in the hotel lounges and bigger venues, too.
“I was—kinda got addicted. I liked them shots. But the shots didn’t like me. There’s no way you can make it work. It don’t work. It’ll kill you.”
He was shooting the painkiller directly into his stomach—the only way, some nights, he could climb the steps to the stage.
Now forty-seven, he was starting to miss shows and to be sued by club owners and promoters when he did. The IRS waited at his concerts to take the receipts to pay off his debt. “They were all after me,” says Jerry Lee. “I didn’t pay no attention to ’em. I just kept on rockin’.”
He was free to marry now, and he did not worry about propriety. Jaren and he had not lived as husband and wife for years before her death, so to him it didn’t seem too soon to marry again. On June 7, 1983, he put on a white tuxedo with a ruffled red shirt and a big white bow tie and said “I do” for the fifth time, to Shawn Stephens, now twenty-five. The National Enquirer took photographs, covering the event as if it was some kind of royal wedding, as if the editors somehow knew this story would be gold for them, now or at some time in the future.
It was not, of course, a storybook life there in northern Mississippi. It was much less glamorous than it seemed there in the Dearborn Hyatt. The couple argued. Jerry Lee was fully addicted to the painkillers now. His new wife soon began to soften her own reality with her own drugs, barbiturates. “But she done it to herself,” he says now. He never asked her to take anything and never forced her to take anything, he says. “I never hurt her.”
The maid at the Nesbit ranch found Shawn Stephens Lewis dead in a guest bedroom about noon on August 24, 1983, seventy-seven days after she and Jerry Lee were wed. Jerry Lee, who had slept in his own bedroom, had arisen early that morning and had assumed she was sleeping in.
DeSoto County sheriff Denver Sowell said a preliminary autopsy found that the cause of death was pulmonary edema, or fluid buildup in the lungs, a condition that often accompanies pneumonia or a heart condition. The pathologist who conducted the autopsy concluded that Shawn Lewis had not been the victim of a violent death. But later, a full autopsy conducted by Dr. Jerry Francisco—who had also performed the procedure on Elvis Presley, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.—found the painkiller methadone in her system at ten times the normal dose.
“Although you never feel like you know everything everybody did, exactly,” said Bill Ballard, the DeSoto County prosecutor, “I think we made a thorough investigation of this case and nothing has pointed to homicide.”
Francisco told the prosecutor that he found no evidence that the dosage was forced into her mouth or throat. A DeSoto County grand jury reviewed the case and found no grounds for indictment.
But Shawn’s family in Michigan hired a private attorney to investigate her death, unwilling to accept that it was a self-administered overdose. “They feel if Shawn had never met Jerry Lee Lewis, she would probably be alive today,” said Michael Blake, the attorney. Months later, Rolling Stone magazine published a long, dark, ominous article headlined “The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis,” written by Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Richard Ben Cramer. The story raised questions about law enforcement’s handling of the investigation, suggesting that public officials had been covering for Jerry Lee for years. Cramer also suggested that investigators did not pursue some facts in the case, including reports of blood at the scene and questions about the integrity of the evidence.
Both Cramer and ABC News 20/20 reporter Geraldo Rivera cited a violent altercation between the couple the night before her death as evidence suggesting foul play. A bodyguard told 20/20 that he saw Jerry Lee slap her “a time or two.” Rolling Stone reported that an ambulance attendant saw bruises on her arm and scratches on the back of Jerry Lee’s hand. Rolling Stone also wrote that Jerry Lee had struck Shawn’s sister, Shelley, and that he had threatened Shawn. The magazine cited Shelley as the source. They all used his own nickname against him: the Killer.
None of it prompted charges against Jerry Lee or changed the state prosecutor’s conclusions. Police in northern Mississippi and Tennessee had been responding to incidents involving Jerry Lee Lewis for years: fights, cussfights, accidents, gunfire, threats, and untold other infractions. He had been helped into police cars in handcuffs in three counties and judged and fined, usually in absentia, on a regular basis. The notion that they would give him a pass on mur
der did not make sense, officials here would say. It was not a storybook marriage, obviously; divorce records indicated that none of Jerry Lee’s marriages had been harmonious, but investigators would say that the evidence was a long way from proving murder.
Jerry Lee told reporters that he did not believe Shawn meant to kill herself. “We had our usual arguments, but there was no reason for that,” he said.
The Rolling Stone story was devastating to him, he says now.
“They treated me like a dog.”
He has called it ridiculous, a manufactured lie.
“I was innocent, and they never proved nothin’. . . . Never proved I hurt no one. She done it herself. She wasn’t beaten at all. There wasn’t a touch of circumstantial evidence that I done it. It was a mistake,” he says of the overdose. “But I hurt nobody.”
The worst of it, he says, was that it made him seem like he had no feelings for the young woman, that people assumed he would not grieve. “That’s the ‘Killer’ part, I guess,” he says now. “You don’t take something you can’t give, when it’s a person’s life. You can never do that.”
But his persona made the tragedy into a story people would hunger for, especially so soon after Jaren’s drowning.
“If I had done everything these people think that I’ve done, I would have been buried in the penitentiary years ago,” he says. “I never killed anything in my life.”
He believes there was another reason that story spread.
“I ain’t never sued nobody,” he says, “and everybody knows it.”
Shawn was buried in Clayton, with his people.
He retreated behind the gates of his ranch and sealed them with a padlock. But it’s hard to be a private man if you are him. In October, two months after Shawn’s death, he taped a concert for Austin City Limits, playing the show behind a set of dark sunglasses that concealed his emotions. Thin and solemn, he played the boogie-woogie in a sweat, but it would be a lie to say he did not still play it like him, did not put on a show, and when he was done, he flew home to wait for the next show and medicate himself in seclusion.
The guilt in it, in the death of his fifth wife, was in the lifestyle he lived, and had lived for so long. He was the unstable rock his blood kin leaned on, and the rock the people who loved him broke themselves against.
Record labels were not courting him. As a last resort, he signed a deal with MCA, but throughout the mid-’80s, the sessions yielded only a few memorable tunes, including yet another signature song, this time by Kenneth Lovelace, called “I Am What I Am”:
I am what I am, not what you want me to be
Meanwhile, the tax man was relentless. Jerry Lee had developed a bad habit of ignoring official documents as if they could all be thrown into the Black River, treating court summonses and marriage licenses like throwaway comic books. It had been his experience that most of them just went away with time, that the courts always got tired of waiting. But on February 14, 1984—Valentine’s Day, wouldn’t you know—he got a piece of paper he could not just discard. He was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of tax evasion.
Prosecutors charged that he had tried to hide assets under the names of other people to avoid having them seized to pay another million dollars in taxes he owed between 1975 and 1980. When he was no longer able to ignore the charges, prosecutors alleged, he went on the lam.
He left his car at a Nashville hotel, hid behind dark glasses and a massive cowboy hat, and sneaked into the studio to record some more songs. Two days later, as if just to show that he would turn himself in on his own schedule, he surrendered to federal authorities in Memphis. He pleaded not guilty and was released on $100,000 bond, after Kenny “Red” Rogers put his club, Hernando’s Hideaway, up for security. The high bond reflected the court’s opinion that Jerry Lee Lewis had shown “a defiant attitude toward the court,” for as long as anyone could remember. “I was just glad to do it,” Rogers told the Associated Press.
When he showed up to be fingerprinted and photographed, he was with a new girlfriend, a twenty-one-year-old singer from Hernando’s Hideaway named Kerrie McCarver. “Honey,” he told her as he was processed, “this is a breeze.”
They were married on April 24, 1984, making her wife number six. They said they were very much in love and wanted children.
Jerry Lee went on trial in October. He was facing a maximum sentence of five years. “Mr. Lewis’s job is to play the piano,” said his attorney, Bill Clifton. “He doesn’t know anything about business.” Jerry Lee thought he was paying his taxes, he said.
When the jury came in with the verdict, Jerry Lee was sitting in the courtroom with his new wife. “I saw that two or three young women on the jury winked at me and gave me the ‘Okay’ sign, so I knew I was in.”
The jury indeed believed him, that he’d meant to do right by the government, but had allowed others, less righteously inclined, to handle his business; they said the government hadn’t proven its case. The courtroom erupted in cheers, and Jerry Lee said he felt the power of God.
Although the charges were dropped, he still owed the government more than $600,000, and federal agents seemed content to follow him to every club date with a briefcase to collect.
He traveled to Europe for another tour in 1985, but he seemed to be running on fumes. Pale, unsteady, he told an audience in Belfast, “I’m doing the best I can tonight, but . . . I’m just sick. I’m out of breath. I can’t seem to breathe right, but I’m tryin’.” He tried to shrug off what everyone was thinking: “You can call it what you want to. I’m not drinkin’. I’m not takin’ any dope, ’cause I can’t find any.” But the humor was halfhearted, and he left the stage a short time later. The shots he had self-administered for the pain—now he knows he was simply addicted to them—were no longer giving him much relief, so he did more of them. “The dope, it didn’t do nothin’ for me,” he says. “They pushed me into it,” he says of doctors who first prescribed it, but he admits he shared the blame: “It takes two to tango.”
The best balm, he had always found, was to just drift back in time. Back home in Memphis, he reunited with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison to record an album called Class of ’55, a commemoration of their contributions to a whole new kind of American music, and a tribute to the man who could not be there, Elvis. Jerry Lee did the requisite boogie number, “Keep My Motor Runnin’,” and a take on “Sixteen Candles,” and joined with the others for John Fogerty’s “Big Train (from Memphis)” and the Waylon Jennings song “Waymore’s Blues,” but he was in pain throughout, and looked it. In photographs of the recording sessions, the other men stand; he is sitting down. He looks even more troubled in black and white.
He says he enjoyed seeing his old friends/competitors again, but the best part of that reunion may have been not the music, but rather the on-camera sessions in which the aging rock-and-roll pioneers talked about the raw and beautiful beginning of it all.
In November, he was taken by ambulance back to the hospital. His stomach was perforated again. “I had seven bleeding ulcers in my stomach,” he says. “That time, it almost killed me.”
He did not behave. In the middle of the operating room, he stood up on the hospital bed like it was a piano, raving, out of his mind. He does not remember much of it. Much of what happened to him in the coming days happened in sunbursts of pain shrouded in a morphine cloud. The doctors had to cut away a third of his stomach in an attempt to save his life.
But there was more damage, as it turned out.
“I used a syringe that hadn’t been sterilized,” says Jerry Lee, resulting in a massive infection in his thigh that went untreated. “Dr. Fortune . . . he had to cut all that out from my hip, with infection on both sides.” Fortune, who had saved his defiant patient more than once before, was incensed. “And to think I pulled you through all that,” he told Jerry Lee. “I had six doctors flown in here, man!’”
“Boy, he was mad about it,” Jerry Lee remembers.
Agai
n doctors were unsure he would recover.
He looked up through a haze and saw Carl Perkins.
“Hey, Carl,” he said weakly, “what are you doin’ here?”
Two months later, rock-and-roll royalty gathered in an opulent ballroom in New York to honor the survivors and the fallen. The Waldorf-Astoria had seldom beheld so much hair gel, and had never hosted a gathering such as this. Keith Richards, sunken-cheeked and hollow-eyed, lounged at one elegant, candlelit table with tuxedo-bound Ronnie Wood, separated by a centerpiece of pale pink tulips. Quincy Jones, once Big Maybelle’s bandleader, now a legend, dined on smoked Colorado river trout. John Fogerty chatted with Neil Young about a time when their music made politicians sweat and worry, when the radio sang of love and Vietnam.
Pups, all of them. The real legends, the ones who showed the way, were past middle age now, those who had survived at all. They were ushered into this opulence, the living and movies of the dead, to be feted as the first class inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was January 23, 1986, three decades after the great year of Elvis. The inductees included some of the most influential musicians and personalities in music history, and as presenters called their names, they rose and walked to the stage, some more stiffly than others: Fats Domino, who would not follow Jerry Lee Lewis onstage in New York; the Everly Brothers, who would not follow him, either; James Brown, who had walked in from the wings of the Apollo and kissed his cheek. But it was a hard business, this rock and roll, and sometimes when they called the names, there was a second or so of sad silence: For Buddy Holly, who rocked ’em to the floor and became his true friend. For Sam Cooke, who sang prettier, perhaps, than any man he ever heard, who called him “cousin.” And, most of all, for Elvis, who had listened to Jerry Lee play the same song a hundred times, and cried before him and others at Sun.