Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(102)

“I love Jerry. Jerry loves me. That’s the real story of my life.”

There was still snobbery, still outrage that the man had been permitted to bring his smut back into their grand old England, and there was criticism of his decision to come and play music like his just a week or so after his son was buried. But mostly, he was spared. The reporters had already gone at him once, and gleefully, and nothing bores a newspaperman more than old news. A cat will stalk a live mouse for a very long time, but will play with a dead one for only a little while before losing interest. The only real news in Jerry Lee’s life was the tragedy of his son, which was the opposite of scandal; the press couldn’t worry it for long without appearing tacky and callous itself. And this time Jud Phillips, who was nobody’s idiot, made the trip as publicist, plying the press with good whiskey, with such copious amounts of free liquor that some of the reporters assigned to the Jerry Lee Lewis story didn’t write anything at all.

That left Jerry Lee free to sing and play, and he did it with that still-young man’s fury and vengeance and with an older man’s broken heart, and they were still screaming as he left; he could hear it even through the walls of his dressing room, and he felt young again, and thought of the first time, the first time he ever approached a man about singing a song for folding money in a club, and how simple it had all been. “Julio May, owned the Hilltop in Natchez,” he recalls. “‘What you doin’ in here, boy?’ he asked me, and I told him, ‘Sir, I play the piano and I sing,’ and he looked at me for a minute, and then he said, ‘Well, get up there and do it, then.’” The drumming on his door—the fans had fought past the security and found him—brought him back. The security guards said they couldn’t guarantee his safety if he lingered, and again he was forced to flee a crowd that climbed all over his car and pressed their faces and lips to the window, only this time there was no doubt: “They loved me in England.”

The tour continued to go well. Some writers would say that not every theater was full, but Jerry Lee remembers it as a triumph, night after night, an unending standing ovation. In Glasgow, the crowd rushed the stage, Jerry Lee climbed atop the piano, and a few fans followed him there, too, breaking the lid. The instrument was left in such a pitiful condition that promoters were forced to cancel an upcoming classical concert.

He was invited back for another tour the following year, and the one after that.

On the opening night of his May 1963 tour, he walked onto the stage in Birmingham to a standing ovation and left it running, chased by fans who had ripped away his jacket, tie, and half his shirt. “No matter what you have read, no matter what you have heard, watching Jerry Lee Lewis on stage always produces a profound shock for the ears, the eyes, and for the very soul,” wrote Alan Stinton in the Record Mirror. “What Jerry does on stage is so beyond the realms of human imagination that no one can fully anticipate the aura of sheer magical excitement which he creates.” And the crowd chanted:

We want Jerry!

We want Jerry!

We want Jerry!


At home in Ferriday, planting season had come and gone for the spring crops, the bounty of the Southern table. Old men walked through fields of tomatoes and okra and squash, searching for blight, hoping for rain but not too much, thumping off the stinging, leaf-eating caterpillars and stomping them underfoot. In the rows of yellow squash, the old men took the first blooms and pinched them off the way their fathers had taught them to do. They were wise old men and knew that sometimes a bloom is not a bloom at all, just a flower, just something pretty to look at, and nothing would grow from it. They call them false blooms.





10


AMERICAN WILDERNESS




The Road

1963

He was supposed to be done again, finished again, but he was too hard-headed to lie flat. He had merely risen again, this time in neon almost two stories tall, glowing over the Memphis streets. He had a regular gig playing the Oriental, a nightclub owned by his latest manager, Vegas-hard-and-slick Frank Casone, who hung the giant electric Jerry Lee over the club to usher in the tourists. It had blazing yellow hair and blinking neon fingers and looked just like him, people said, a Jerry Lee you could see from space. He swaggered out onstage as if against a crosswind, listing a little, and as he approached the piano, he located a petite blonde beauty standing with her girlfriends near the stage.

“He just picked me up—I didn’t weigh but ninety-eight pounds, soaking wet—and sat me down on the piano,” said Gail Francis, who had ventured bravely into downtown Memphis after dark to see the infamous Jerry Lee Lewis play real rock and roll. Her girlfriends were jealous.

“I was a looker then,” she said.

She remembers that he seemed very drunk or a little bit high or maybe both, but the moment he reached the piano stool and stretched his fingers out to rest them on the keys, well, there was just something about it, something hard to explain after all this time, something sweet and sad but magic just the same.

“He was mostly there in spirit,” she said.

The place was jammed, she remembers, “mostly girls, and he sure had some admirers there,” she said. She cannot remember everything he played and sang, but remembers singing along to “Great Balls of Fire.”

“It was exciting. It was fun, sitting on that piano. I know I’ll never forget that.”