Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(109)

But as in most things having to do with love, he has a blind spot for his own infidelity. He does not pretend it did not happen, only that, somehow, it should have been forgiven because it was his. “I never seen a woman wasn’t jealous. I used to be jealous, but I pushed it aside. But that ol’ green-eyed monster can do a lot of damage.”

Myra would threaten to leave him, even see a lawyer, and would allege gross infidelity, physical and psychological cruelty. Worst of all, she felt, Jerry Lee blamed her for the death of their son, had never forgiven her, and never would. There was love there in spite of it all, but there was no hope, not even a chance for it, as he played a show somewhere almost every night of the year.

In the midst of all these bad times, of the awful drought, fate did send him one kindness: a guitar man who would stick with him to hell and gone.


It was 1967, and he had an opening for a picker.

“I met him back in Monroe, Louisiana. My mama and Linda Gail, my sister, wanted to go hear this boy called Kenneth Lovelace,” and told him he should go with them.

“I said, ‘I’ve heard a lot of musicians before, you know?’

“And they said, ‘You ain’t never heard one exactly like this.’

“I said, ‘What does he play?’

“He plays everything,” said Linda Gail. “From a mandolin to a fiddle to a violin, to a piano, to a guitar . . .’

“Yeah,” Jerry said, but “can he really master these instruments?”

She said, “Yeah, he pretty well mastered ’em.”

Jerry Lee saw this boy—tall and rail thin and kind of unassuming, his hair a tight ball of curls. He looked a bit lonesome up there.

Then he started to play.

“I hired him on the spot.”

They went straight to Waco for a show there in some honky-tonk. He was standing behind Jerry Lee, intent on his guitar strings as they blistered through “Whole Lotta Shakin’,” when he got a rude surprise.

“Jerry Lee kicked the stool back and I was right in the way. It caught me right below the knees,” he says. Well, that’s the last time . . . , he told himself.” He would be sure, as he saw Jerry Lee getting revved up, to step back and to the side, out of the line of fire.

Kenny grew up in music in Cloverdale, Alabama, outside Florence, not far from the recording hotbed of Muscle Shoals. He started playing guitar at age seven, moved on to fiddle, then to what his kinfolks called the “tater bug mandolin,” because it looked like a tater bug. He was playing square dances at age eight and competing in fiddlers’ conventions around the South; in time he could play almost anything, any genre, almost any instrument. But more than that, he would become one of the rare people on earth who had the great, deep patience to survive night after endless night with a man like Jerry Lee Lewis, one of the few who could understand, even anticipate—and therefore survive—his moods. The two men would become true friends, bound by mutual respect and by a love of music above all else. He would be one of the people Jerry Lee could not run off, because where would he go to find such an array of music ever again, and get to play it, night after night, and where would Jerry Lee find a man with such splendid musical radar?

It became almost eerie, how good he was at that. He did not join the band so much as become its de facto leader. Jerry Lee was still the genius in charge and always would be, but he was a mad genius. The mild-mannered but precise and efficient Lovelace became the grown-up element in a band and profession lacking in such, who knew that Jerry Lee’s rages were not the end of the world. He backed Jerry Lee on a ’56 Fender Stratocaster that he played like an extension of his own bones, and would mesh, almost in a spooky way, with Jerry Lee’s wild piano, and never seemed to be caught off guard, no small thing for a picker playing behind a man who could change direction like a mechanical bull.

On the last night of a ragged, exhausting tour, Kenny says, “Jerry and I would hop in the backseat, and he’d get the guitar and I’d get the fiddle, and we’d play all the way into Memphis.”

“He’s like a brother to me,” Jerry says. “We’ve shared so many things.” And no matter how ugly things got, “he always bounced back.” He joined the band in bad times; somehow he knew they were temporary. “He’s as good on guitar as I’ve ever heard. He can play the melody of a song on the guitar. I mean, very few people can do that. He gets deep into the music. . . . If he ever missed a lick,” he says, he can’t recall it now.

He had spent years wondering whether he’d have to fire a drummer in the middle of a set or tell a guitar player to pick up the tempo or else. “That’s where the Killer part comes in,” he says, smiling but not really. But with Kenny in place, he says, he put together a road band “that nobody could ever touch.”

During one show, somewhere, he looked up from the keyboard to see a young singer named Janis Joplin sitting next to him on the piano bench. “Might have been Port Arthur,” her hometown, he says. He never really liked visitors onstage unless they were invited. Later, in his dressing room, Janis asked him if he thought her sister was attractive. Jerry Lee responded honestly. “She might be all right if she’d do something with her hair.” She slapped him, hard, and he slapped her back. “And she come across that desk after me and I was fixin’ to knock her brains out.” But that was the way it was. The stage was for the music—there was a purity to it then—and the dressing room was for the foolishness, the fighting, and everything else.