Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(106)
People took to asking him, with irritating regularity, if the old Sun magic was gone. In 1965, he answered with what has been described as his first great album, The Return of Rock—a record that recalled the bravado and precision, the sharpness, of the Star-Club performance, and added a fleet-fingered swing. He did Joe Turner’s “Flip, Flop and Fly,” and the old, old blues “Corrine, Corrina,” and “Don’t Let Go,” the song Roy Hamilton had blown him away with onstage. He did three Chuck Berry songs, “Maybellene,” and “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Johnny B. Goode,” and proved he could still make people sweat and blush with his take on Hank Ballard’s “Sexy Ways,” which delivered what “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” only winked about:
Come on darlin’, now, I want you to get down on your knees one time
And shake for Jerry Lee Lewis, honey—yeah!
The album cracked the Top 200, but it peaked at 121, and it lacked the breakout song he needed to bring him back.
The problem, as always, was material, not technique. In a way, he believes now, his sound was better than it ever had been. The producer who cut The Return of Rock and most of Jerry Lee’s music at Smash was Jerry Kennedy, who understood the science of music and mechanics of sound, how it bounced and flew and settled into the ear and even into a person’s mind. Kennedy had been in love with music since he could walk, and as a child he’d been in the front row at Shreveport Municipal Auditorium to hear Hank Williams play one of his last shows. He had been a backup vocalist as a child, could play the guitar and dobro, had worked with Elvis at RCA and Jerry Lee at Sun, and as a producer at Smash was determined to get the best sound he could out of Jerry Lee’s piano. At Sun, the piano had sometimes been lost in the mix—even when Jerry Lee was beating it to death—but Kennedy knew how to bring it right up front. “Jerry Kennedy, he was gettin’ the piano sound he wanted,” says Jerry Lee. “It was a knockout. He’d take a quilt, a big, thick quilt he had, and cover the whole piano up—big grand piano—cover it up where nothin’ could get through it,” trapping the sound so that the engineers could highlight it in the mix. Jerry Lee believes now that the Mercury team were perhaps the smartest pure engineers he ever knew; the title “producer” might sound important, but to him Kennedy was like a great mechanic who made the car run sweeter, smoother. His critics would say he did not always make it run stronger, that once he hit on a formula, he stuck to it, and that sometimes he bled the spirit out of a record with too many strings and sappy backup vocals. Either way, for a decade or more, his handprint on Jerry Lee’s music and career would be plain to see.
Among other things, Kennedy recognized that his artist was at his best in front of an audience. One time, Jerry Lee recalls, they were recording at Monument Studios, on the “main strip” in Nashville. “Jerry said, ‘Do you mind if I just stop some people out here on the street and invite ’em in to hear you cut this song?’ I said, ‘Naw, that’d be great!’ And they set up about twelve chairs. And they come in, and they set down, and they were real nice, they never uttered a word. They just set there and they’s just . . . astonished.”
But he was still trying to make tarnished gold shine again, still caught in a rut of recycled music. Remaking old songs was everyday business for him, but hits like “Great Balls of Fire” and “Breathless” had come from established songwriters who knew how to join a fresh catchphrase to a catchy riff and come out with a hit. Throughout the mid-1960s he cut one album after another full of other people’s music: Country Songs for City Folks in ’65, Memphis Beat in ’66, Soul My Way in ’67. He cut tough country songs like “Skid Row” and tough blues like “Big Boss Man”; he read the lyric of Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” like he was thinking out loud. But none of it was new, not really.
“That was a hangup for me,” he says, “tryin’ to do a song that’s already been a multimillion seller. You don’t tackle somethin’ like that. That wasn’t Jerry Kennedy’s fault. That was my fault. I said, “I wanna do ‘Detroit City.’ ’Cause I can beat the original on it.’” But later, he admitted, “Boy, I sure am wrong on this one!”
One of them almost was a hit: Porter Wagoner’s agonizing prison ballad “Green, Green Grass of Home,” which he cut for Country Songs for City Folks. “That should have sold fifty million records,” he says, but Smash dropped the single without any support. “They didn’t do nothin’ for it. It was number one in every station in Alabama. And nothin’ in Memphis. And nothin’ anywhere else. Nothin’. And that don’t make sense. . . . You got a record number one and sellin’ like crazy in Alabama,” he laughs, “but you leave Alabama and you ain’t never even heard of the song.” His hunch was justified when the Welsh heartthrob Tom Jones, who had worshipped Jerry Lee since boyhood, heard the album and recut the song, making it an international number one hit the following year. To Jerry Lee, it seemed like Smash was waiting on a sure thing to get behind, and he lost faith in the label—the business side, not the studio team—early in his time there.
His reliance on pills and whiskey again ratcheted up. Once he could eat them by the handful and they didn’t faze him, maybe gave him a little nudge in the late nights or a soothing pat on his fevered head when he needed to go to bed. He could still drink his three fingers and six fingers and drink until he couldn’t measure them even if he had to take off his socks and shoes, and though he maintains now that he never drank that much, the stories of his tolerance are legendary.