by Rick Bragg
“Sam seen it in me,” Jerry Lee says, and he does not care that dollar signs were flashing in Phillips’s eyes. He knew Sam was a businessman—all their problems stemmed from that—but also a true believer in the cause, which was why it hurt Jerry Lee when he hesitated over “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” and seemed to turn away from him when the debacle of London knocked them all out of the clouds. People always talked about the almost religious fervor they saw in Sam Phillips when he heard something he loved, something brand-new or sometimes something very old. Jerry Lee saw that fervor, veiled in tears, when Sam Phillips walked from the room after hearing him play Hank’s “You Win Again.”
But the sadness Jerry Lee felt pushing down on him that summer was more than that. The old kings were dying, one by one: Roy Orbison in 1988, Charlie Rich in ’95, Carl Perkins in ’98, Johnny Cash in ’03. And the music itself—as much as people remembered, as much as they loved it—seemed to be more and more a thing of museums, of a bygone day.
“We had such a good time,” he says.
In 2004, Rolling Stone, the magazine that had once all but accused him of murder, placed him on its list of the top one hundred artists of all time. He was about to enter his eighth decade, and he was still looking for a record deal. It was not that he believed he had anything left to prove, he says, or even that he longed for some new validation. It was not even the money, though he knew he had to work, had to earn. It was simpler than any of that: He truly did not know what else to be, other than a rock and roller, a country singer, a piano player, driving his band across the country and around the world, with one eye on the audience the whole time.
“I train my boys to follow me,” he says. “I build up a show. I build it up. And I pick my tempo up at certain times, like I want it. And it brings the crowd up.”
He takes his thumb and jacks it into the air, once, twice, three times.
“When I do that, it means pick up, or else. It means pick it up, or get off the stage.”
He knows he has slipped below that perfection, in the harshest times.
But it can be that way again. He knows it.
“I want that show to be right. And I want that song to be right, when I play it on the piano and sing it. And I want that band to back me up like they’re supposed to.”
He says all this, thinking back to that time, as he recovers from a litany of ailments that prevent him from standing still, or even sitting still, for more than a few minutes at a time.
But there is no other place for him.
“Where would I go?” he says again. “I wouldn’t know where to go.”
16
LAST MAN STANDING
Nesbit
2000S
He had never much cared what other people thought, or at least that was the armor he wore. He probably did care, some, or he would have given up, would have stopped playing his piano and singing songs, but he never did. But you will play hell getting him to concede it. He played from love, the same love “my mama and daddy had. They loved music.” He had risen from professional and personal ruin, from death itself, and public infamy, so many times; could anybody even keep track of how many? He would be lauded onstage, honored with his industry’s highest acclaim, and go home to a house he did not own, which he arranged to be filed under another man’s name, so that the government could never take it away. He was seventy-one years old, in wretched health, his body still polluted by the painkillers he had battled across the second half of his life. And as he sat in the gloom of his big house in Nesbit, there beside the tranquil lake, he was not thinking retirement, or even death, though death had begun, naturally, to creep into his thoughts. He was thinking comeback. He just needed a record, needed a hit. Some things, he says, smiling, “don’t never change.”
He knew it was time to cast off his worldly demon, his addiction, or that comeback was unlikely. He was too far into his life to choke that demon down, and still pour out his songs.
He also knew that if he did not beat it, he would probably die.
He was the last man standing, quite literally, the last of the big Sun boys from the beginning of rock and roll.
Others were still alive, but time had taken either their legs or their will.
Chuck Berry was even older than he, and frail, though still playing.
Little Richard had bad legs, found it hard to walk. He would talk of retirement, but Jerry Lee would dismiss it. “He’ll not retire,” he said. “Not Richard. As long as they make wheelchairs, he’ll be onstage.”
Fats Domino had vanished into his house in Louisiana.
“Fats is, is kind of . . . funny about things. I don’t know. He’s a hard cat to figure out, sometimes. He’d like to do him some more shows, really, but he’s—he’s too nervous about it. He says, ‘I don’t think them people really want to see me.’ I said, ‘I think you’re wrong there, Fats. They want to see you. They love you, man.’”
He did not believe in his own passing, his fading, as Fats did.
“I just needed a record,” he says.
His daughter, Phoebe, had come to live with him. She has said many times that she has devoted her life to him, even forfeiting her own personal life, even children, to help care for him. She had seen her daddy rise and fall many times across her life, like some yo-yo, so quick, at times, that it seemed almost impossible in a waking world, more like a dream. Kerrie had redecorated the house—the Coca-Cola wallpaper is still there in the kitchen—but had not, despite her very public accounts of Jerry Lee’s clean living, cured him.
Phoebe took a hand in her daddy’s professional life, searching for a way he could reenter the business beyond the occasional, weary nostalgia show, the tiring European trips, and small events closer to home.
Jerry Lee went searching for a cure of another kind.
He prayed.
He prayed for God to cast off his demon.
“If you’re not in the hands of God, you’re over,” he says, not with the desperation that some men find as old age advances and death stands at the foot of their bed, but with a lifetime of conviction that in the end God would decide his fate in this world and the next. This time, he is certain God gave him another chance to make music, a little more music.
“He calls the shots,” he says. “Broke me from my habit. I’m a very hardheaded person. I had to really be proven to.”
He laughs. “I was proven to.”
Now he calls it one of the hardest things he has ever done. It was not just a rolling addiction, but a lifetime accumulation, sixty years of rattling pills and needles, that he had to relinquish.
“I have myself pretty well straightened out,” he says, looking back on that time. “It’s been a real uphill climb, I tell you. Never be enough money to make me do that again.”
He remembers the usual pain of withdrawal, the shakes and chills that others live through, but he met that with prayer. In the end, he conquered it there in the dark of his bedroom, but not alone.
“God did,” he says.
He was still frailer than he would have liked. But he was ready to take the stage.
His professional deliverance, when it finally came, seemed almost heaven-sent.
Steve Bing, the businessman, film producer, and philanthropist, had inherited some $600 million from his grandparents when he was a teenager, and by 2008 had most of it left. He had written movies like Kangaroo Jack, produced the Stallone remake of Get Carter, and invested in the wildly successful animated film Polar Express. He had a love for rock and roll and produced and financed the Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light, which was directed by Martin Scorsese. He put his money to work for causes he believed in, investing millions in congressional races around the country. And one such cause was the music of Jerry Lee Lewis.
In the early 2000s, Bing decided to finance and coproduce a new record featuring Jerry Lee, in duet with—or backed musically by—some of the most legendary performers in rock and roll and country music, as well as some o
thers who just badly wanted to be part of the project.
With Bing’s money as a machine and Jerry Lee’s reputation as an enticement, the project, coproduced by Jimmy Ripp, drew a host of famous fans: B. B. King, Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Jimmy Page, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Eric Clapton, John Fogerty, Buddy Guy, Don Henley, Kris Kristofferson, Neil Young, Robbie Robertson, Little Richard, and Rod Stewart. It also drew country singer Toby Keith, and the modern-day bad boy Kid Rock. Some of the tracks were laid down using the expedient ways of modern music, with voices spliced and married by machines. But some were done the old-fashioned way, with men looking at each other across a microphone.
It brought live performances and even a made-for-video concert show, joining Jerry Lee with great performers in their own right, like Springsteen on “Pink Cadillac.” In one of the most interesting pieces of film from the making of the album, Springsteen sings backup, and seems glad to do it. His line at the beginning of the song, “Go on, Killer!” made people smile with a kind of goofy joy. When he and George Jones sang “Don’t Be Ashamed of Your Age,” he actually yodeled so high that Jones had to warn him not to hurt himself. When he and Willie Nelson sang the sweet “A Couple More Years,” it was with a wink and a grin. When he did “Hadacol Boogie” with Buddy Guy, you knew they spanned a time when that song was more than trivia, when broke-down guitar pickers throughout the South had it in their repertoire. Guitar licks from players like Buddy and Jimmy Page meshed with his piano and voice—which showed its age, surely, but how could it not? It was still Jerry Lee Lewis and all that that implied.
And some of it was music that just stuck in your head. His duet with B. B. King sounded like the two old men were singing on barstools on Beale Street, finally equals, so long after Jerry Lee had to sneak into Haney’s to hear the man play. “‘Before the Night Is Over,’ you gonna be in love,” says Jerry Lee. “That was a song. I liked that.” He did “That Kind of Fool” with Keith Richards, “Traveling Band” with John Fogerty, “Sweet Little Sixteen” with Ringo Starr, and “I Saw Her Standing There” with Little Richard.
Recorded mostly at Sun Studio, it was called, of course, Last Man Standing.
“Who would have believed it?” said Jerry Lee.
He emerged from the gloom of his Nesbit ranch with, if not renewed vigor, at least a new purpose. Jerry Lee Lewis had not just become relevant again, he was back in the charts. Last Man Standing rose to number 26 in Billboard’s Top 200, number 8 in country, number 4 in rock, and number 1 among independently produced albums.
“Was I surprised? Naw, I wasn’t surprised,” he says, slipping back into the confident old Jerry Lee like he was never missing. He is asked if he enjoyed making some of the songs more than others, and he just says “Enjoyed ’em all,” that all of his guest artists, some of them in their sixties, were “pretty good boys.”
Asked later if he could choose to play music with anyone, anyone in the world—the Rolling Stones, B. B. King, Hank Williams—who would it be, he didn’t miss a beat.
“Kenny Lovelace,” he answered immediately.
Last Man Standing would have been a fine album to go out on, if he was planning on going out.
He was not.
“Am I satisfied with how it’s all gone? I don’t think so. I yearn to be satisfied. I do a song and I know I can do it better. And so I seek it.” He thinks only of the music as he ponders that question, not the life that frames it. By the late 2000s, he knew that his voice was changing, ever changing, but it still sounded like him, and his hands were still able to do many of the acrobatic moves of his youth. If it looked a little slower, well, that was his intent. As he had moved closer to the Lord, the old R-rated versions of his shows were fading away. He eased up on the word muthahumper, though it would creep into a recording here and there, out of habit.
In 2007, after being feted by Kris Kristofferson, Wanda Jackson, Shelby Lynne, and others for the American Music Masters series at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, on came a surprise guest: Jimmy Swaggart, who played “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” and told his cousin he loved him. At the end of the program, Jerry Lee took his award and instead of making a speech, walked to the piano, sat down, and played “Over the Rainbow.”
Two years after that, he returned to the Hall of Fame for its twenty-fifth anniversary, this time at Madison Square Garden, as its guest of honor. He opened the two-night celebration alone in the spotlight with a solo rendition of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” The following night he did the same thing with “Great Balls of Fire,” and rose to kick the piano bench away. Then, walking offstage, he picked it up and heaved it farther across the floor. He was seventy-four.
Even well-meaning people believed he was surely done by now; surely he would soon succumb to all that hard living, or at least, growling in disgust, finally retire. Still, when he walked into a hotel room for an interview, reporters seemed surprised somehow that he had actually gotten old. They described his face as wattled, his voice as high and thin; they described a newfound humility when he performed onstage, an increased carefulness with music that now suddenly was not a guarantee. Some reviewers seemed almost let down when he played like a grown-up and relieved when he slipped back into his occasional indulgences.
But he kept showing up, even as the world enlisted yet one more young pretty face to retell his story, now more than half a century old. In early summer of 2010, the musical Million Dollar Quartet opened on Broadway, with the actor and musician Levi Kreis stealing the show in the role of the young upstart piano player.
The show, a fanciful re-creation of that long-ago December day in 1956, was the brainchild of Sun historian Colin Escott, who had written with authority about Jerry Lee for decades, and director and writer Floyd Mutrux. In giving the role to Kreis, the show’s creative team selected a Southerner from Oliver Springs, Tennessee, and a piano pounder who had grown up on Jerry Lee’s music after his mother handed him a stack of Jerry Lee Lewis 45s when he was still in elementary school. “I cut my teeth . . . on Jerry Lee Lewis music,” he told one interviewer. He also played the hymns of Jimmy Swaggart, and was at the time enrolled in ministerial school, as Jerry Lee had been. It was almost like fiction, how his story dovetailed with Jerry Lee’s own.
The story of Million Dollar Quartet revolved around a few slender subplots—Johnny Cash’s departure from Sun, Sam’s dream of luring Elvis back from RCA—but all the energy came from the blond-haired figure behind the piano. He had never been an appropriate man, but in old age much had been forgiven, it seemed, and the very idea of Jerry Lee Lewis was enough to carry a show in what they used to call the legitimate theater. And besides, everyone said the music was the true star, just as it had been in 1956.
On a visit with his younger self in New York, Jerry Lee showed none of his characteristic gruffness or ego at the idea that someone else could play him. Wearing slippers on his feet, he merely told the young man he did a splendid job.
Then, in an almost surreal time-machine moment, the real Jerry Lee later joined the actors playing his now-departed friends onstage for an encore after the final curtain. He played “Shakin’,” rewriting the lyrics there, too, as he liked, without telling anyone beforehand. Kreis just sat close by and watched.
“There’s no stopping him,” he told the interviewer. “I want to be kickin’ ass and takin’ names at his age, like he is.”
In covering the meeting between Lewis and Kreis, the New York Times noted that it was made poignant by the older man’s “unmistakable frailty.” It was true: he was weaker that year, even as a man playing his younger self took home the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical.
Last Man Standing had been such a success that there seemed little reason not to do it again, and while the album that followed had fewer blockbuster guests, it was crammed with fine music.
It was his fortieth album, called Mean Old Man.
This time the music was mellower but perhaps m
ore meaningful, the artists more soulful.
He sang “Life’s Railroad to Heaven” with Solomon Burke, “Release Me” and “I Really Don’t Want to Know” with Gillian Welch, and “You Are My Sunshine” with Sheryl Crow and Jon Brion. He did a pair of well-chosen songs from the best corners of the Rolling Stones’ catalog: the heartbreaking “Dead Flowers” with Mick Jagger and the spiky, mournful “Sweet Virginia” with Keith Richards.
One of the jewels of the album was its title song, by his old friend Kris Kristofferson:
If I look like a voodoo doll, that’s what I am
If I look like a voodoo doll
Who takes his licking standing tall
Who’d rather bite you back than crawl
That’s what I am
The album would enter the Top 100 too, peaking at number 72—and putting Jerry Lee Lewis back in the charts for his seventy-fifth birthday.
He seemed to be having a good time on the album, with its easy tempos and warm ambience, but perhaps what he enjoyed most was shooting the cover photo. Dressed in a dark suit, his blond hair completely silver now, he steps out of a limousine into a waiting bevy of beautiful young women.
“They changed clothes right in there,” he says, motioning to a small room off his bedroom, “and they didn’t shut the door.”
A man is not meant to be alone.
He would fix that, in time.
He was in demand again, but even as he celebrated this latest triumph, he knew something was different this time. His phone rang with offers that year, but he could not take them, or at least not most of them. In the middle of this latest comeback, his body failed him again, this time not violently, as it had before, but in a creeping betrayal. Arthritis in his back all but crippled him, making it nearly impossible to sit on the piano bench for more than a few songs, a few minutes. Pneumonia hit him again and again, leaving him weak. Shingles left him in agony. Still he wasn’t convinced that he would not rise one day from his sickbed in the big house in Nesbit and walk into a studio or climb a stage. “I would like to record some new songs,” he said that summer, “but I guess that’s in God’s hands.” He had beaten his addictions and walked cold turkey away from his old friend Calvert Extra just in time to be beset by the ravages of age, as if he were any other man. The phone rang, and he promised, weakly, to do it if he could, when he could.