Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994

by David Hepworth

  Whereas Little Richard was professionally the show-off and Elvis was professionally modest, the self-belief of Jerry Lee Lewis went beyond the quality it takes to get up on stage and command everybody’s attention with a prolonged ‘weeeeeeellllll’, passed directly through the braggadocio that showbiz traditionally expects of a headliner, and edged perilously close to an acute psychological condition. He was the first rock star to play up to his public image regardless of the cost. He liked to claim that he was ‘born feet first with a hard-on’ and that even at school he’d been known as ‘The Killer’. Either this was not an act or it was such an all-encompassing act he couldn’t afford to let it drop at any point.

  Success certainly didn’t change him. In fact he took it as overdue confirmation of his infallibility. At the end of 1956 he got a royalty cheque for $40,000. That year the average American male made less than $4,000. Jerry Lee was promised the same amount six months later. However, there are few sure things in show business and therefore it was perfectly possible that his might be a one-off windfall. Certainly his manager Sam Phillips urged him to invest at least some of it. Jerry Lee didn’t do that. In fact by March 1957 he’d come back to Sam asking for another $17,000. Why did he want another $17,000? Well, said Jerry Lee, he wanted it to buy some cows.

  Even though he knew it was the wrong thing to do, Sam gave him the money. He never saw it again. He didn’t enquire further about the cows.

  The first rock stars were not natural travellers. This particularly applied to those who came out of the South, who already regarded the rest of the United States as alien territory. Abroad was like the moon. Going abroad involved flying across a body of water, which simply didn’t seem natural. In late 1957 Little Richard had abandoned an Australian tour when he took the launch of the Russian Sputnik satellite as a harbinger of the end of the world and announced that henceforth he would perform only sacred material.

  Jerry Lee Lewis was not the first American rock star to have visited Britain. Bill Haley had toured in 1957. Bill was thirty-one by then and had his head firmly enough screwed on to spot the bear traps laid by British tabloids in search of a story. Jerry Lee was not made of the same timber. Furthermore, Jerry’s domestic arrangements made him more vulnerable.

  In looking at those arrangements from the twenty-first century it’s important to bear in mind that this was the real world for many people in the Southern states of America and not a Coen Brothers fantasy. Jerry Lee had been married for the first time at the age of fifteen. His bride was the seventeen-year-old daughter of a travelling evangelist. Two years later he began running around with another woman, who became pregnant. At the strong urging of her brothers he married her. Unfortunately he did so before the divorce from his first wife had been finalized. This match was further complicated by the arrival of two sons. When Jerry Lee’s music career began to take off he left the second wife and moved in with his bass player Jay Brown, a cousin of his. Jay had a pretty young daughter called Myra. Jerry Lee married her, despite the fact that she was thirteen, despite the fact that she was his cousin, and despite the fact that he was not technically divorced from his previous wife. Or the one before that.

  Now here he was, flying into London airport on an early summer’s day in 1958, anticipating no problems. This was in the days when all visiting entertainers would be expected to give a press conference of some sort as soon as they had gone through baggage claim. There were some friends and family in the touring party, and a hack working for the Daily Mail’s diary page, which went out under the name of the fictitious Paul Tanfield, fastened on the pretty young girl hovering on the edge of the melee and enquired who she might be. ‘I’m Jerry Lee’s wife,’ she chirped, just as you would expect of a proud young bride.

  Myra was to spend most of the rest of her life regretting those words. She could easily have avoided them. After all, she was also the daughter of Jerry Lee’s bass player, and this would have been more than adequate cover. But by then the words were out and the antennae of this representative of Her Majesty’s press had quivered into full alert. He asked for details. ‘How old are you?’ he enquired, pencil poised. Already sensing that she may have done something wrong, Myra attempted to cover her tracks. ‘I’m fifteen,’ she lied, praying this would put an end to it. It didn’t. By the time the party had arrived at the Westbury Hotel in London’s Mayfair the press pack was slavering and Jerry Lee, twenty-two years old and not one of nature’s diplomats, was forced into crisis management mode without the help of a PR.

  Jerry Lee couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned. Sam Phillips had told him it might not be a good idea to take Myra with him to Britain, where a nymphet would inevitably be catnip to a press pack looking for a story about the decline and fall of morals in the coffee-bar generation. Sam’s brother Jud was even more forthright. His precise words were: ‘If you do this you’re going to flush the greatest talent that this country’s ever seen right down the commode.’ But Jerry was stubborn and Jerry was in love. He said that he wouldn’t go if Myra didn’t. Here, not for the first time, Jerry Lee was a prisoner of his own certainty. Once he’d put his foot down there was no raising it again.

  It was supposed to be a six-week tour, involving thirty-seven dates all over the country. Sam had entrusted the job of running it to Oscar Davis, an old-school country music operative who had once been Hank Williams’s manager and who should have known what might be involved in running a difficult client. What he reckoned without was the fact that he was dealing with a different generation of performer here, one apt to give a candid answer to a probing question, and he was in a country where the press didn’t blench in the face of a sex scandal. In the face of a sex scandal it rubbed its hands together and called for more ink.

  By the time Jerry Lee took to the stage of the Regal in Edmonton in his hot pink suit with sparkly lapels, any music he was playing was overshadowed by this new narrative in which he had been sent to infect the youth of New Elizabethan England with his in-bred hillbilly ways. In the audience was eighteen-year-old Harry Webb from Cheshunt in Hertfordshire. Harry had just been informed by his manager that his name was henceforth to be Cliff (in honour of rock) Richard (in honour of the singer of ‘Tutti Frutti’). ‘People were shouting “cradle-snatcher”,’ Cliff remembered. ‘I didn’t care who he was married to. I just wanted to hear the music.’

  Things got worse during the other London shows. Oscar Davis didn’t have the crisis management skills required and Jerry Lee was temperamentally inclined to quell fires with gasoline, responding to the press question ‘Is she really old enough to marry you?’ with the perfectly incendiary line ‘Just look at her.’ Oscar tried, unsuccessfully, to interest the US Embassy in London in staging a proper wedding between this pair of American citizens on what he argued would be American soil. The columnists had a field day. Questions were even asked in the House. The public space hummed with sanctimony.

  The inevitable occurred. The Rank Organisation, who ran twenty-seven of the venues Jerry Lee was due to play, leaned on the agents, Lew and Leslie Grade, to cancel the tour. Jerry Lee said he wouldn’t be out of pocket anyway and there were lots of places in the States he could play. Oscar Davis stayed behind to try to reach a settlement with the Grades over the $100,000 they had expected to earn from the tour. Jerry Lee put a brave face on it back in New York, giving an interview with his arm around his gum-chewing, visibly adolescent wife, dodging questions about his marriage by drawing her near, looming in the direction of his interlocutor and saying ‘Well, sir, we don’t want any personal questions’ with the smile of The Killer.

  The blow-back was immediate in the United States. Sam Phillips found that distributors were sending back so many copies of his boy’s new single it was in danger of being the first record in the history of the business to have shipped gold and returned platinum. Radio play was non-existent. Given the substance of the scandal it didn’t help that the song Jerry Lee was singing was ‘High School Confidential’.

&nbs
p; Jerry Lee refused to recognize that he had done anything wrong and never once said that he was guilty of any kind of lapse of judgement in taking Myra to Britain. The two remained married for ten years, a union which featured the usual mental and physical abuse but also engendered enough love for them to be still speaking to each other at the end. Says Roland Janes, who played guitar on many of Jerry Lee’s records, in a judgement that could in future be applied to many rock-star marriages, ‘Myra grew up and I don’t think he ever did.’

  Leslie Grade, the old-school agent who had represented Jack Benny, Danny Kaye, Bob Hope and hundreds of other stars – stars who never considered it part of their job description to tell the truth about their personal lives – said afterwards, ‘It seems such a great shame he had to make public his private life.’ The whole point with this new generation of rock performers is there wasn’t really a division between public and private.

  And Jerry Lee paid the price. He said later that his earnings went down from $10,000 a night to $250, which may have been an exaggeration of the actual figures but was a reasonable representation of the trajectory. He didn’t return to Europe until the next decade and never recovered his momentum as a rock and roll star in the USA. He didn’t get another proper shot until he relaunched himself as a country singer, his speciality being honky tonk laments that made the most of the one quality he had taken away from his week in 1958, ruefulness.

  Jerry Lee Lewis’s disorderly retreat from London played into the narrative favoured by the popular press, in which rock stars were essentially characters belonging in a farce, people who couldn’t find their own fundaments with a flashlight and owed their brief period in the spotlight solely to the machinations of their minders. The music was now clearly past the point of being a fad but the press certainly weren’t going to take it seriously. It seemed that grown-up media had identified what The Times called ‘the mood of self-pity and resentment which is bedevilling modern youth’ and had got the number of the quacks who claimed to be able to minister to this condition. The Phil Silvers Show had an episode called ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Rookie’ in which their unit was joined by a suddenly rich rock and roll star, an amiable rube called Elvin Pelvin who was of course no match for Bilko’s swindles. At the same time British humorists Frank Muir and Denis Norden were writing a sketch for Peter Sellers which was a thinly veiled satire on Britain’s rock svengali Larry Parnes and the stable of gormless young men who just happened to share his Mayfair apartment. This last featured the immortal reprimand from the manager to one of his intellectually challenged charges, ‘How many times have I told you? The hole on the guitar points away from you!’

  1958 PLAYLIST

  Jerry Lee Lewis, ‘Breathless’

  Peggy Lee, ‘Fever’

  Chuck Berry, ‘Johnny B. Goode’

  Buddy Holly, ‘Rave On’

  Royal Teens, ‘Short Shorts’

  Cliff Richard, ‘Move It’

  Eddie Cochran, ‘Summertime Blues’

  The Kingston Trio, ‘Tom Dooley’

  South Pacific soundtrack

  Duane Eddy, ‘Ramrod’

  3 FEBRUARY 1959

  CLEAR LAKE, IOWA

  A good boy flies out

  EVERYBODY LIKED BUDDY Holly. His records, ‘That’ll Be The Day’, ‘Oh Boy’, ‘Peggy Sue’ and ‘Rave On’, had been hits in the United States and all over the world. His particular strain of ‘western bop’ had enjoyed surprisingly wide acceptance. He had even topped the rhythm and blues charts. He had appeared on all the big TV shows: Ed Sullivan in the United States and Sunday Night at the London Palladium in the UK. He had headlined tours. He was famous. Even his glasses were famous. Nevertheless in the winter of 1958, barely a year since he had been at number one in the US Hot 100, twenty-two-year-old Buddy Holly found himself without funds.

  Born in 1936, the youngest of a poor but musical family, Charles Holley had little reason to think he would ever amount to anything. In a school essay in 1953 he listed all his many shortcomings and then said, ‘I have thought about making a living out of Western music if I am good enough, but I will have to wait to see how that turns out.’ Gary Tollett, who sang on some of Holly’s records and came from the kind of west Texas town outside Lubbock that Larry McMurtry depicted in The Last Picture Show, said of their entire generation, ‘We thought more about work than we did about playing.’ Holly was the first member of his family to graduate from high school. He thought if he was very lucky he might get work as a draughtsman.

  The unhappy position he found himself in at Christmas 1958 owed something to the deals he had done in the course of his swift rise to fame. He and his group the Crickets made their hits in a studio in Clovis, New Mexico which was owned by an older musician and producer called Norman Petty. Petty had no great sympathy for rock and roll but it was he who got them a deal on two separate labels of Decca, one for the Crickets as a group and one for Buddy as a solo. Petty, a father figure without whom they may well have remained unknown in Lubbock, intervened in the creative process, sometimes to add words in the songwriting, at other times to decree the addition of radio-friendly backing vocals, and his name often ended up among the writing credits. Of course nobody argued about who had the credit and how the split worked in 1957 when they were riding high on a sequence of hits. They were too busy tearing about all over the world, making the most of the fact that everybody suddenly wanted them. They assumed that once things settled down everything would be straightened out. However, by the following year, when Buddy had done a lifetime’s growing in twelve short months, got married, moved to Greenwich Village, was suddenly visiting jazz clubs, taking acting lessons and talking about recording in a different style, things, as they have a habit of doing, turned ugly.

  Holly’s new wife María Elena was a New Yorker. He had proposed on their first date and she had accepted. Holly’s Baptist mother didn’t like the idea of him being married to a Hispanic Catholic. María Elena, who worked for his publishing company, knew her way around New York. Holly, on the other hand, had grown up in a wind-blown town in Texas, a town that styled itself ‘the buckle of the Bible belt’. María Elena pointed out that all the money he earned was going through Petty’s bank account before being disbursed to Holly and the Crickets. This was news he didn’t wish to hear. This was a classic case of a young star’s new associates in the big city facing off against the allies who had helped him out of the small town, with the new star in the middle feeling it ought to be possible to please everyone.

  Petty had always worried his charges would have their heads turned by success. He had seen the signs early on when they all went out and splashed money on matching brand-new motorbikes on their way home from some out-of-town dates. Now it seemed to be happening. Nevertheless Petty sat tight, thinking this all might pass.

  Holly moved to sever his links with his manager, figuring in his naivety that there would be a simple accounting of the monies from which everybody would be able to walk away satisfied. This proved not to be the case and hence, until the lawyers had finished their inevitably cash-draining work, as 1958 drew to a close Holly found himself in the unenviable position of being massively famous, widely celebrated and functionally penniless.

  At this point enter Irvin Feld, who had promoted ‘The Biggest Show of Stars’ on which Holly had appeared in 1957. Holly wanted Feld to be his agent and find him some work which could cover his expenses and pay for some studio time. Feld had been busy cooking up a tour of unpromising secondary venues in the frozen north of the country in the depths of winter. With the jaunty optimism of a promoter who doesn’t actually plan to come along for the ride himself, Feld billed this as the ‘Winter Dance Party’. It featured the young Latino Ritchie Valens of recent ‘La Bamba’ fame, the radio personality cum pop singer J. P. Richardson, otherwise known as ‘the Big Bopper’, and up-and-coming New York greasers Dion and the Belmonts. Advance sales had been sluggish so Feld invited Buddy to join the bill as headliner for a fee of around $3,000 a
week. Holly didn’t have a lot of choice. Musicians, even famous ones, had to play or starve.

  The itinerary of the Winter Dance Party didn’t make it sound like a cakewalk. It seemed more like an attempt to map the middle of nowhere. It began at the Million Dollar Ballroom, Milwaukee and ended at the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay, Wisconsin. These were far from front-rank venues. These were the kind of places show-business people were traditionally sent as punishment.

  The musicians travelled in two old school buses. These might have been equal to the job of taking kids on a short hop to school in the summer months but over long distances in the middle of winter they were found wanting. Most of the people on board had been born in the middle of the Great Depression so as a rule they did not tend to complain. But this was different. There were men on that bus who had served in Korea who had never expected to be that cold again. They kept warm by taking slugs of whisky which they mixed with mouthwash. What heaters the buses were fitted with had recently frozen up and now they were heading into the northernmost part of the itinerary where the mercury didn’t often get above zero. When the buses broke down, which they frequently did, the huddled occupants burned newspapers in the aisles to keep warm.

  Some people were going down with flu. One unfortunate member of the tour party was even hospitalized with frostbite. By the midway stage of the tour the traditional fatigue and homesickness had been made worse by an all-pervading lack of hygiene. Following each evening’s second show all the musicians would take off their sweaty stage clothes and toss them in the back of the bus, where they would ripen. This meant the bus smelled. It smelled so bad that even small boys remarked on it.