Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(105)

But as proud as he was of the music—he was backed by a British group, the Nashville Teens, who were neither from Nashville nor teens—he says it was not greatly different from what he did on the road night after night in the United States, not greatly different from what he would do every night of his life till the last night, the last note. He treated it like the live show it was, giving the engineers or even his backup band barely a clue ahead of time, but playing what he felt like, rolling into a riff and a song and expecting the rest of the world to fall in behind.

Asked about it now, he recognizes its impact on others but doesn’t dwell on it for long—because, like other great performances, it is tainted for him by the business dealings that surround it. At first, and for decades, the album was available only in Europe, held up by legal constraints; back on this side of the Atlantic where he really needed a power album, it was rarely heard.

But perhaps worse than that, he believes he was never properly reimbursed for the record. “They never paid me a penny,” he says, certain that he should have received the money directly. The record company that released it did tell him they wanted to once, but he believes they tried to short him. “Come up to my room one time,” he recalls. “I was doin’ a tour, and they had a check for, I don’t know, thirty-three or thirty-four thousand dollars, which was a pretty good little chunk of money back then.” But it wasn’t what he was owed, just a token sum. “I wouldn’t even let ’em in the room. They wasn’t livin’ up to the bargain. And they still owe me the money, and Mercury sold out to Universal, and Universal now owes me the money. I want them people to jar loose some of that money and give it to me.” The black and white of it, in the ledger, may never be known. But he feels it, he believes it, and it is a belief that most of the rock and rollers of this generation share about their own finances, and it colors their worldview to this day.

He does not worship money, he says again, but he also despises being cheated.

“I got it comin’ to me. It’s mine.”

In summer of ’64, he followed the Star-Club phenomenon with a live show in Birmingham, Alabama, that resulted in an album titled The Greatest Live Show on Earth. The show proved to an American audience in a large venue that, even in the midst of a recording downturn, Jerry Lee Lewis was still a hurricane force onstage. He played big Boutwell Auditorium, where the Memphis wrestlers went when they told their fans they were going on “world tour.” Every seat in the room was filled; people even stood along the walls to hear him rip through staples like “Mean Woman Blues” and “Hound Dog” and a few fresh tunes like Chuck Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go” and Charlie Rich’s “Who Will the Next Fool Be.” “A good show,” he says, though some fans would find it almost tame compared to Hamburg. But the big live shows—and the hundreds of smaller ones he continued to do to make a living—could not return him in any significant way to the stardom he had enjoyed before without new songs and the radio play he needed. Instead he slipped in and out of the public eye like a ghost, one who shook the house and wailed through the night but, in the morning, was gone.

In England, he was being slowly edged out by the act who preceded him at the Star-Club, the Beatles. “Boy, when they broke, they broke, didn’t they?” At home, where they had hit with great force in February of ’64, he couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing them:

She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah



“I never did care for the Beatles all that much, to tell the truth.”

Sometimes it seemed to him that the real troubadours were dropping away—even Patsy Cline was dead, killed in a plane crash in Tennessee—and he was forced to sit in purgatory while old Johnny Cash kept churning out number one country hits, as though Johnny was singing right at him:

I fell into a burning ring of fire

I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher



As the arms of obscurity snatched at him, he kept recording, looking for a hit, and kept touring, taking gigs that would have killed his pride if he hadn’t so loved the simple act of playing. “Wasn’t no place too far for me to go to sing my songs,” he says. “Wasn’t no place too rough.” And when he didn’t have a gig, he played anyway, showing up at clubs around Memphis to commandeer a piano. No one was going to say no to the Killer. “I played Bad Bob’s, played Hernando’s Hideaway, played for the love of it, for the joy of playing.”

In December of ’64 he finally returned to American television, in what would become a series of appearances on the new ABC music show Shindig! But again it was too little, the return of a ghost playing the rock and roll that started it all. The nation’s popular music itself continued to weaken and simper into a cloying mess. Some days, spinning the dial on his radio on his way to another show in God knows where, it seemed like he was trapped in a perpetual never-ending loop of Herman’s Hermits and “Puff the Magic Dragon.”


At first the boys at Smash had little more luck with his records than Sam Phillips had. They released a retread album of his Sun hits, The Golden Hits of Jerry Lee Lewis, which made the charts briefly before vanishing. When “I’m on Fire” failed to catch, he tried the Ray Charles hit “Hit the Road, Jack,” an Eddie Kilroy country ballad called “Pen and Paper,” and a song called “She Was My Baby (He Was My Friend).” He rocked out on “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” a single lifted from the Birmingham album, but it barely made the charts.