by Rick Bragg
But the movie itself was weak, from its simplistic script to Quaid’s overeager portrait of Jerry Lee. Signed on as an executive producer, Jerry Lee was aghast when he first visited the set. “They wanted me to come up and watch them shoot a scene. I went up and watched them, and I washed my hands of it right there. I said, ‘This isn’t right.’”
Quaid’s comical portrayal made Jerry Lee sound more like Foghorn Leghorn—“a mud-dumb bumpkin,” wrote the Washington Post—and even casual fans realized how badly it missed the mark. Jerry Lee Lewis, the real man, was always deeper and more dangerous than the goofy-eyed hillbilly the film showed. Jerry Lee hadn’t expected to see his story whitewashed, cleansed of its flaws, but he hadn’t expected it to come out looking like that, either.
In public, he gritted his teeth and supported the film. “I was hooked in on the thing. And I’d been paid for it, you know? What can you do?” But he knew it was a shame. “They really fouled it up, the way they did it,” he says.
The film fizzled at the box office, but it would loop endlessly on cable television, introducing newer generations to the music, but also to a portrait of the man that did not fit him. He hates the fact that a generation of younger people first encountered the image of Jerry Lee Lewis as such a cartoonish character, though the Internet has since been flooded with images of the young and dangerous Jerry Lee, the genuine man, playing his music in all his sharp-edged glory.
The movie also made Myra seem like a pure child, stuffing her clothes into that dollhouse as she leaves home, reluctant to marry her cousin, trapped in a situation she couldn’t quite control. Jerry Lee remembers it differently, remembers much more than the film’s few lampoonish details. “If they ever do another movie about me,” he says now, “I want all my wives in it. It would be about piano playin’, and singin’, and women. . . . Women, the one thing I might change.”
He wonders sometimes about his wives, especially after Myra’s movie. “It’s funny. I never talked about any of them the way they talked about me. I could have, but I didn’t,” he says, and grins to let you know that he does not expect the wider world to ever see him as anything more than the Killer, where some things are concerned.
“Being the great humanitarian that I am.”
The film, which premiered in the early summer of 1989, did have one benefit: it brought renewed interest in the real live Jerry Lee. He did a tour of Scandinavia before its release, then Australia in September, then Paris and London. In Melbourne, looking older but sturdy in a light but somber business suit, Jerry Lee rode a revolving stage into a rolling thunder of applause and put on a clinic in rock-and-roll piano. Scowling with concentration as if determined to outstrip even his usual casual perfection, he banished memories of the wired, manic character who had appeared and reappeared throughout the decade. Even his voice seemed stronger, clearer, as he hollered:
Well, give me a fifth of Thunderbird, and write myself a sad song
Tell me, baby, why you been gone so long?
He was going on fifty-four and did not climb the piano to survey his kingdom. But at the end of an extended, freewheeling “Great Balls of Fire,” he picked up the piano bench, flung it across the stage, and smiled. “You give ’em what they want,” he says, and this time he gave them something lasting and fine.
The following year, he returned to 706 Union Avenue to record two versions of a song called “It Was the Whiskey Talkin’ (Not Me),” for the soundtrack of the new Warren Beatty movie Dick Tracy. Many of the film’s original songs were written by Andy Paley, who had written “Whiskey” a decade before with Jerry Lee in mind. The old studio had been resurrected, saved from dereliction and remade as a tourist destination; inside it looked close to how it had in the days when it was the incubator of rock and roll.
The writer Jimmy Guterman would later describe a tiny studio with about a half-dozen people inside, musicians and technicians who were achingly deferential to Jerry Lee. He terrorized one young man, the studio manager, with questions about religion. The young man had the misfortune to be a Baptist, and Jerry Lee told him the only thing wrong with Baptists was they needed to get saved, and that made the young man stammer and claim he was saved, till Jerry Lee told him he was only joking, son. “Baptist folks are good,” Jerry Lee said, “they just don’t preach the full gospel.
“Well, let me get back to where we started,” he went on, “the Book of Acts, second chapter. Read it!” and it is unclear if Jerry Lee is talking about the recording session he is in now or the one he was at some thirty-three years before, when he and Sam Phillips argued faith into the early morning.
“Pentecostal. You are what you are,” Jerry Lee told the room. “You’re realistic and you’re real, or you’re not.”
Then he turned to the people in the booth, behind the glass. “Now I’m watching you people in there,” he said. “I know what you’re thinkin’. I know what you’re lookin’ at. You ain’t foolin’ Jerry Lee Lewis for a minute.”
Elvis stared down from the wall.
Jerry Lee met his gaze.
“Now, if I could just call this dude back here for about fifteen minutes, we could show you a trick. . . . Never be another Elvis Presley. He had that somethin’. Dynamic, you know? Somethin’ that would make you want to drive ten thousand miles to see him if you only had fifteen cents in your pocket. You’d get the money somehow to go.” He told a story of him and Elvis and the army and how Elvis got upset. Then he recalled the day he first saw him, how he pulled up to Sun in that ’56 Lincoln, “I wanted to see what he looked like. He rolled out of that car and he walked in and he looked just exactly like he looked. Dangerous. . . . We had some times. But those days are gone, aren’t they?”
Someone in the room said no, there was still Jerry Lee.
Jerry Lee, seeming oddly isolated even in this cramped little room, almost insecure, apologized for being so slow to get the final take on the record. “Well, ol’ Jerry Lee is really tryin’ to get it together. I know I haven’t quite gotten there yet . . . but I am really workin’ on it with everything I’ve got,” and now it is clear he is talking not about the session but something more. “I’ve had a rough struggle. I got strung out for a couple of years on all kinds of drugs, junk, whiskey, and everything else. And you’ve just got to back off, man, or you’re not gonna make it. Record companies are not gonna buy you, they’re not gonna produce you, they’re not gonna release a record on you, they’re not gonna back you up, if you don’t back yourself up. And they can spot you a mile off, if you’ve got a shot of Demerol or somethin’. . .
“Brother, I don’t mean to be gettin’ into that. It’s just a pleasure talkin’ to somebody.”
He half-talked his way through some lines from “Damn Good Country Song” to applause from people who may or may not have recognized it as one of his records. Then, as Guterman recounts, he went back to the song at hand and cut it till he was mostly happy. “This is a hit,” he said. “I think I can cut a hit with this song.” But he became frustrated with one little piece of it, couldn’t quite get it right.
“Call Sam,” he said, but then immediately, “please don’t.”
In October 1991, a police officer in Indio, California, saw a man driving on the wrong side of the road in a Jaguar. It was Jimmy Swaggart, and he was with a prostitute, reported the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He was in California for a revival.
This time, he was not contrite. He told his congregation that God told him to return to the pulpit. “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.”
“And they lined up,” says Jerry Lee of his cousin’s flock.
It was just a power they both had, for being forgiven.
Jerry Lee needed it more often, in smaller doses.
“But I never pretended nothin’,” he says.
For Jerry Lee, it was the beginning of a period of withdrawal, in which the news he made was mostly in the National Enquirer. He did few shows, fewer recordings. Other, lesser performers wo
uld have called it retirement, but he was aching to get back in front of an audience, to get back in a studio and cut a new record.
“I don’t know where I’d go,” he says now, “if I didn’t have that stage.”
A year passed that way, two, three. In spring of ’93, he loaned his name to a short-lived Memphis nightclub called the Jerry Lee Lewis Spot. Then, with the IRS still dogging him, he fled, to become a tax exile in a country that knew how to treat its artists. He and Kerrie and Lee moved to Dublin, where musicians are exempt from taxes under Irish law.
Kerrie, on an Irish television talk show, said they loved Ireland and planned to make it their home, and that the womanizing, hard-living man now wanted to live quietly. “I caught him at the right time,” she said. She claimed that Jerry Lee was at peace in Dublin. “He loves the rain,” she said. It reminded him of sleeping under a tin roof at home in Black River. “The rain was very soothing . . . the drumming of the rain.”
While they were in Dublin, the IRS hired a locksmith to open the gates on the Nesbit house—he had title to the house only through a lifetime ownership agreement, so the house itself could not be taken—and started to empty the sprawling brick house of everything but children’s toys. Federal agents carried out two grand pianos, a pinball machine, a pool table, a box of Christmas decorations, a riding lawn mower, model cars, including a pink Cadillac, eight swords, a pen-and-ink sketch of Jerry Lee Lewis, a Sun Records clock, a poster signed by Fats Domino, every stick of furniture, two cases of Coke bottles, an empty gun cabinet, eight ceramic cups (one broken), a toothbrush holder, forty-eight records, twenty-five pipes, seventeen jackets (some leather), a candelabra, a Jerry Lee Lewis beer stein, a box of piano-shaped knickknacks, and one warped and buckled Starck upright piano.
Agents would say that the old piano was in “horrible condition” and without value.
The IRS set an auction date, but Kerrie was able to get a restraining order to delay it, and they bought back some of the items that were taken when Jerry Lee declared bankruptcy. The old Starck upright was returned.
After a year in exile, they came home. Jerry Lee missed his people, missed the river, missed it all. After decades of bitter enmity with the IRS, in July 1994 he agreed to pay some $560,000 of a $4.1 million tax bill, fourteen cents on the dollar. To earn the money, he would play music and open the Nesbit ranch to guided tours. “You have to do what you have to do,” said Kerrie, as she opened the house to fans.
He had not recorded in years, and his live shows had dwindled, but someone forgot to tell Jerry Lee that he was finished, if anyone had the nerve. He played another European tour in ’94, including a show in Arnhem, Holland, where he seemed, again, immune to all that life had thrown at him—that he had encouraged it to throw—and gave the fans their due. He was a little stooped now, and there was gray in his hair. Kenny Lovelace, still playing four feet behind him, helped him off with his jacket; Kenny’s ball of curls was graying now, too. But they played “Johnny B. Goode” like it was going out of style; Jerry Lee played all over the piano, and even yodeled a little, as if he was still needling Chuck from an ocean away. He did tell the Arnhem crowd he was glad to be in Amsterdam, but they cheered like crazy anyway.
In Memphis, in December, he was hospitalized after choking on some food.
He was fifty-nine.
“When I can’t play no more,” he says now, of that time, “then it will be over.”
Jerry Lee had only one place to go: back into his own fame. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences awarded Jerry Lee Lewis his second Grammy, this time a Lifetime Achievement Award. He went back on tour, no longer leaping onto the piano but still playing the hell out of it sitting down, as most mortal men have been forced to do it.
In 1995, he released a new album called Young Blood. It would not reach the charts, would not spark a comeback, though besides the soundtrack it was his most sustained work since the Elektra days. It was a mono album recorded with modern-day methods, and it seemed misplaced amid the country music of the time, the way a slightly dusty bottle of Early Times would be out of place in a bar that served fruit-scented vodkas and designer beer. He did Huey Smith’s “High Blood Pressure,” and the old country song “Poison Love,” and classics from Jimmie Rodgers (“Miss the Mississippi and You”) and Mr. Williams (“I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive”), and reviewers said they liked the way his voice had aged, but some of the songs were pieced together mechanically, and the whole seemed to lack his spontaneity, his spirit.
In 1996, on February 24, at the Sports Arena in Goldston, North Carolina, he took the stage, ready to raise hell, and didn’t leave it until he had barreled through “Meat Man,” “Over the Rainbow,” “Memphis, Tennessee,” “When I Take My Vacation in Heaven,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Lucille,” “Mean Woman Blues,” “Mr. Sandman,” “What’d I Say,” “To Make Love Sweeter for You,” Hank Williams’s “You Win Again,” “Room Full of Roses,” a medley of “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “You Belong to Me,” “White Christmas,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” a snatch of “Peter Cottontail,” “Mexicali Rose,” “Seasons of My Heart,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Thirty-Nine and Holding,” a few bars of the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream” and the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” Al Jolson’s “My Mammy” and “April Showers,” “Boogie Woogie Country Man,” one verse of Johnny Horton’s “Honky Tonk Man,” “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye,” a medley of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “I’ll Meet You in the Morning,” and “On the Jericho Road,” “Great Balls of Fire,” “The Last Letter,” “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” “Money,” “Lady of Spain,” “Who’s Gonna Play This Old Piano,” “Lewis Boogie,” “Crazy Arms,” “Goodnight Irene,” Jimmie Rodgers’s “In the Jailhouse Now,” Harry Belafonte’s “Jamaica Farewell,” “Chantilly Lace,” a few improvised lyrics (“You’re from the center of Alabama/I’m the center of attention”), “In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town,” “Bye Bye Love,” a medley of “Trouble in Mind” and “Georgia on My Mind,” “Me and Bobby McGee,” two lines of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “I Wish I Was Eighteen Again,” and an encore of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Folsom Prison Blues,” 160 minutes later.
In 1998, after a long but fractious marriage, Kerrie filed her initial complaint for a divorce, citing irreconcilable differences, alleging that he had been unfaithful—he suspected the same of her—and that he had hidden financial assets from her. It was the most benign complaint he had ever encountered, but the divorce would take years to finalize. Court records were sealed, but the Commercial Appeal reported that Kerrie received a $250,000 lump sum, $30,000 a year for five years, and $20,000 for child support for Lee, by then a teenager.
Jerry Lee spent more and more time at the ranch, but it was quieter now; music no longer poured from the place when he came home from a show. “She took my records,” he said, in the divorce. The tours of the house ceased, at least. He could roam the dark halls in peace, still in lingering addiction, still hoping for another comeback, and why not? The last time he looked in the mirror, it was still Jerry Lee Lewis he saw looking back.
The pills were no longer as easy to obtain. Dr. Nick had finally been censured and lost his license after a review by the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners. In the late 1990s he tried for a third time to regain his license, but officials of the Board of Health evoked the ghost of Elvis and the ruin of Jerry Lee as evidence against him, and he was denied.
Jerry Lee had somehow passed into the realm of the old master, and more than ever the younger stars—some of them legends themselves—wanted to be close to him, to reach out and touch history. Some of that attention he welcomed; some, he resented. It depended on the musician. He had seen his life mirrored—though that mirror was sometimes cracked—in every corner of pop culture. He had misbehaved badly, and if he had any regret, it was that some of
those who followed him believed that was all there was to it. “I’ve seen ’em, these new so-called bad boys. They try. They really try. I see it, and it’s as phony as can be.” He has seen them trash their hotel rooms in celebration, because they can afford to smash as many hotel rooms as they want, at least until the money runs low. “Well, it just don’t work that way. You got to feel it, boy. Be what you are. If you feel it, you can jump up on that piano, kick the stool back, beat it with a shoe. But you got to feel it. The music has to be there. It has to be there, first.”
Sam Phillips died in the dog days of summer, July 30, 2003, of respiratory failure, two days before the little studio at 706 Union was declared a national historic landmark. He had been a smoker much of his life. Jerry Lee was sad when he heard the news, of course, despite their stormy time together. But it was not only that institutional, historical sadness people feel when someone of importance has passed. Jerry Lee also understood what Sam had done for American music, and so for the music of the world. By taking white music and black music by the hands and joining them together, Sam Phillips not only helped make way for rock and roll but broke down some barriers between those two peoples, made the world a little better to live in, and certainly more joyful. He would record anything, if he felt it, if it moved his soul even a little and made him tap his toes, and he did not give a damn what color the man’s skin had; whether it was a towering black man from the Delta, like Howlin’ Wolf, or a brooding Arkansas cotton picker, like Johnny Cash. He stamped it all in hot wax and sent it to a pasty-white teenager in Middle America, so he could feel everything they felt—and more, for the distance it traveled. And if that was the so-called danger in rock and roll, then he was a thoroughly dangerous man.