Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(113)

Divinity of hell!

When devils will the blackest sins put on,

They do suggest at first with heavenly shows,

As I do now.



The crowd, at first flabbergasted, started to cheer as he continued, verse after verse.

From the wings, another voice calls the part of Rodrigo to him:

Thou didst hold him in thy hate.



Iago:

Despise me

If I do not! I have told you often

And I will tell you again and again,

I hate the Moor! Three great ones of the city,

In personal suit to make me his lieutenant,

Off-capped to him, and by the faith of man,

I know my price, I am worth no worse a place:

But he . . . :

“I have already chosen my officer.”

And what was he?

One Michael Cassio, . . .

That never set a squadron in the field

Nor the division of a battle knows

More than a spinster, . . .

But he, sir, he must be lieutenant—he!



Then he took his seat at the piano, the crowd still going crippled-bat crazy, and went back to singing about whose barn, what barn, my barn.

He has always wondered why the entire play was not recorded, perhaps for television—it was not—because he would like to see it all again. And he has often wondered about Shakespeare himself, what kind of man he was, what a conversation between them would be like. Were they not, in a way, both stylists? Shakespeare just took history, took Rome and Venice, and remade them to suit his own mind and to entertain the people.

“I wonder what Shakespeare would have thought of my music?” he wondered then and wonders still today.

His time with Shakespeare at a close, he returned to the South, a place where history truly does, now and then, repeat itself. He returned to find that the inertia that had held him prisoner for years had been shattered, been obliterated again, by the force of a single song.

Chairs are stacked all over tables

And it’s closing time, they say



He had to go back into his past to find his future.

I could wait here forever

If they’d only let me stay



“It was the kind of thing Hank Williams would have wrote,” he says, and so naturally the people felt it in their hearts. “Another Place, Another Time” was as strong as he hoped. The record had climbed into the country charts even as he spouted Iago’s treachery in the shadows of the Hollywood Hills. Soon “Another Place” was battling for the number one country slot, and his entry into mainstream country music was already in place before he even crossed the Tennessee state line. It was undeniably a tearjerking country song, but it had grit in it, and it had his piano, thumping the slow, steady heartbeat of the song. There were no pyrotechnics in the music here, nothing that would make a piano virtuoso even blink—and no sweeteners, for that matter, just the counterpoint of Kenny’s lonesome fiddle. It was the kind of song you would expect to hear on the very jukebox he was singing so mournfully about, the kind of song that was born in a honky-tonk where the air smelled like Winstons and Juicy Fruit. “It sounded real,” says Jerry Lee.

Producers at Mercury were anxious to get him back in the studio to record more of the same. He had barely landed in Tennessee when he was hustled back into the studio with sheets of lyrics for three new songs written by Glenn Sutton. These songs were of the kind they were starting to call “hard country,” not because it had a rock beat or crossed over into rock in any real way, but because it was more substantial than the cloying, overproduced mess out there on country radio.

For the follow-up single, he cut Sutton’s “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser out of Me),” another heartbreaking barroom anthem. His voice is so mournful, you believe him, and even after a thousand songs about a man trapped in a neon prison as a woman waits at home, it sounded somehow new.

Well it’s late, and she’s waiting, and I know I should go home

But every time I start to leave, they play another song



His voice cries out, not so much for sympathy as for some kind of company, maybe even some kind of second chance. These were not whining songs; it is hard to feel sorry for Jerry Lee Lewis in any context, in any era, and he doesn’t want you to feel sorry for him. They were, this new generation of Jerry Lee songs, simple ballads about losing, wanting, and walking on. Jerry Lee sang of shared misery, of a familiar pain, and knowing they were not alone made it easier, somehow, for his audience to get up the next morning, go back out in the world and do it all over again. As Hank Williams had sung it to them more than two decades before, Jerry Lee reminded them that a broken heart was common as dirt, and the could even be kind of pretty, neighbors, if the melody was sweet and the words all rhymed.

It was music for people who worked in the pipe shops and steel plants and cotton mills, who sold insurance and slung wrenches and drove taxis and trucks and wiped the tables at the Waffle House. Many of them were the same rock and rollers who had shook it till it hurt when the music was still new and dangerous, in the time of the two-tone shoe, but they had gotten a little older, saner. They had to get up early now; they had mortgages on two-bedroom brick ranches with chert-rock driveways, and payments on new Buick Rivieras every five years. Rock and roll had deserted them, with Top Forty playlists and all that magic-dragon crap. So they had simply gone home to the country, to country music and the country radio stations they had been weaned on; Jerry Lee merely joined them there, thanks to his own ear and the work of a few good songwriters.