Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(110)

Lovelace, who would play behind him almost half a century, will always remember the nights in those mean, beginning years, and the tiny dressing rooms before the show. Jerry Lee always hung back until the last minute, till the band members began to wonder if he would show. “The band would go get him. ‘It’s time, Jerry Lee,’ we’d tell him,” said Lovelace. And Jerry Lee would answer:

“Okay, Killers. Y’all hang in there with me.”


Killer: It was the highest compliment he knew how to give, say the people who have known him the longest, but it is complicated. It draws people into his tightest orbit, lets them know that he considers them worthy to be there. It is also genuine fondness, his way of sharing some of whatever it is that sets him apart from other men. But it is also a way of binding people to him, a kind of brand, and he will bestow it on a whole room, if he needs to. And sometimes it is just his way of being friendly, to a young man, or a child, who stumbles up half scared with an old album in his hands. In time the name would almost haunt him, as people started to use it to describe a certain viciousness, a label for a man they suspected might be capable of anything, even killing. But when Jerry Lee looks you in the eye and calls you that, he is cutting off a little piece of himself and giving it away. It makes people grin like they’ve gone goofy and want to thank him, or at least run and tell someone, quick, as if it might fade away.


On the road, he had the band of his dreams. In the studio, he had one of the most talented soundmen in the business and the best session men Nashville had to offer. All he needed was some poetry.

Jerry Lee was done with Mercury, and the executives there were pretty much done with him, quietly waiting for his contract to expire. Between gigs and with no intention of cutting another record for those tin-eared Poindexters as long as he lived, he was back home in Ferriday, to maybe catch a fish with Cecil Harrelson, whom he had made his new manager. When he had rested up a bit and drawn sustenance from the low earth and his mama’s cooking, he would get back on the road and sing those old songs again. It was January 1968, a decade since the fall. “It got better,” he says. “It had to get better.”

What happened next varies greatly from one account to the next, but it went something like this: In Nashville, a sometime rodeo rider named Eddie Kilroy had gone to work for Mercury as a promotions manager. Kilroy, who had played in a country band with Mickey Gilley, had sipped some whiskey with Jerry Lee a few years before and believed he was country at heart, real country, not one of those guys who was all hat and no cow. He called Jerry Lee and asked him if he would consider driving to Nashville’s Columbia Studio to cut an original country song, and Jerry Lee told him he would study on it. He had lost any love he ever had for Nashville but decided it couldn’t hurt to hear a song. He called Kilroy back and said he would give it a try for old times’ sake.

Mercury’s big bosses had little faith it would work, though Jerry Kennedy had been trying to take Jerry Lee country for some time. But when Kilroy started calling writers and asking for material, there were few takers; people in Nashville like to do things according to formula and didn’t think boogie-woogie Jerry Lee was a bankable country artist.

The song Kilroy had in mind had been written by Jerry Chesnut and sung by Del Reeves. Reeves didn’t sing it right, and it hadn’t been released. But it was a good song, with brown liquor and lost love pooling between the lines.

Jerry Lee looked at the words—real words, the kinds of words a man felt when he held a woman he could not truly have, could only even hold for as long as a jukebox played. But could he sing it in a way that would make other people feel it?

He stayed up all night learning it, sipping a little whiskey, and the next morning he sang it, this song every woman and every man already knew. Who knew the sound of a heart breaking could be so pretty?

I just put in my last dime

Heard you whisper we’d meet again

Another place, another time



“I remember we did it in two takes, and I picked the first one. ‘That’s your record,’ I told ’em, ‘right there.’”

At first, he wasn’t sure he thought much of it. Often a song has to grow on him. “This is ridiculous,” he thought. “I know I’ve had better records than this.” But the more he listened to it, the more real, the more human it became. He listened to the words. In a wide world of phony and sissy music, this was something different.

“It was a real song.”

Jerry Lee thought he might have a hit, but there had been so many disappointments. He would have to wait and see, as country disc jockeys around the nation introduced the song to the working people who mostly made up that base. In the meantime, he had to make a living. But with few recording prospects, his contract with Mercury limping to a close, and the businessmen apparently glad to see it happen, he had a choice.

He could return to the road, where bookings were becoming bleaker.

Or he could do something else, something he had never considered before.

That year he also had a different kind of offer to play his music on a stage, but not as Jerry Lee Lewis, not even as the Killer, but as a villain of a different age. Jack Good, the Oxford-educated producer who had welcomed Jerry Lee to Shindig!, had long dreamed of directing a rock opera based on Shakespeare’s dark Othello, and he had decided more than a decade before that his villain had to look and sound and strut and leer just like Jerry Lee Lewis.