Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(115)
“We were on the road at the time,” says Lovelace. “It was great, man. We was in Columbus, Ohio, and had three or four days off. Elvis found out where we were and called the hotel, but Jerry was asleep. When Jerry woke up, he tried to call Elvis, but he was in the sauna. Elvis called back and said, ‘If you have any time off, I’m gonna be opening at the International Hotel, and starting to tour again. I’d love to have you come out and see what you think of the show.’ He just liked Jerry’s opinion. So me and Jerry Lee and Cecil Harrelson and Dick West flew out there. They had a nice booth reserved. Elvis came out in the middle of the show and said, ‘I’m just so pleased that my good friend came out tonight. And I’d like to introduce you to my buddy, Jerry Lee Lewis.’ Everybody in the room stood up and gave him a standing ovation. After the show, we visited backstage. They had a piano in the dressing room. Elvis said to Jerry Lee, ‘Would you mind just playing a few notes?’ Jerry did some runs; he was just playing around. . . . Elvis leaned against the piano, watching him. ‘What a piano player.’”
That fall, there would be evidence on film to show how much mastery he had achieved. First he did the Toronto Peace Festival, in front of twenty-five thousand people, the same event where Alice Cooper was rumored to have bitten the head off a live chicken. Back on the bill with Chuck, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard, he played it smooth and loose and lovely, like he was in a church basement instead of a big stage in an arena filled with screaming peaceniks. Then just a few days later, he taped a series of short concerts on a small stage at the Memphis Holiday Inn for a television show to be called The Many Sounds of Jerry Lee. In one of his most diverse and impressive performances ever captured on film, he reached back, back into his Sun days for “Ubangi Stomp” and “Lewis Boogie,” did his big rock-and-roll hits and most of his country hits, and surprised the audience with an almost casual show of versatility, playing drums on Bobby Bland’s “Turn on Your Love Light” and strumming guitar on “He’ll Have to Go” and “Green, Green Grass of Home.” He even sang “Danny Boy” with just a microphone, like a genuine pop crooner. But what was most impressive about the Holiday Inn shows was that they were perhaps the first time a camera had truly captured his sheer talent on the keys, his windmilling hands on “What’d I Say,” showing everyone who’d never seen him live exactly what all the fuss was about and reassuring his oldest fans that going country had not turned him weak.
In October, with a pile of smooth country hits in the can, he loosened up in the studio and had some real fun with Merle Haggard’s “Workin’ Man Blues,” the old R&B ballad “Since I Met You, Baby,” and a new A-side, “Once More with Feeling,” all part of a continuing metamorphosis. He insists even today that there was never any real evolution in his art—“I was a master of the piano by age fifteen,” he says, preempting any such talk—but still there was a difference in these Mercury records that had nothing to do with genre. He was more mature—less wired, perhaps, but more assured, proving that he had not done the same thing over and over in those endless road shows but that they had been one long, roving practice session. He was also simply older. His spirit had not mellowed, not a bit, but his voice had, and his subtler delivery did justice to his far more mature material. Where once he had hollered through “Whole Lotta Shakin’”—and still could, of course—now he approached his ballads almost elegantly, though with that constant earthy undertone. He could sing a love song, and you still knew, watching him, that it was not one woman he had wronged or disappointed but one hundred, and you knew that if you messed up his song, he would come off the stage and kick your ass up to your watch pocket. As a pianist he had even more finesse and precision, yet he still loved to beat it to death for the sheer joy of it.
He was not just on top of the world again; in some ways, he was looking down upon it. On November 14, 1969, the astronaut Charles Conrad Jr. carried a collection of Jerry Lee songs with him to the moon on Apollo 12. “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” not only went to the moon, as he always said it would, but it landed on it—the only sound, at times, in that little spacecraft on that cold, distant orb. He would look at the moon sometimes, especially on the nights when it was big and full, and grin about that. Some of the old people at home in Louisiana said we never went to the moon, that they made all that stuff up, but he knows that we did, and that the astronauts heard a little boogie when they got there.
In early ’70, he did The Johnny Cash Show; he was gracious to his host, and Johnny treated him like a long-lost pal. He was acceptable now in the world of country music, and in the wider one. All seemed forgiven. What had once seemed a slow, inglorious burnout was now a genuine comeback: you could tell by the Cadillacs that once again filled his parents’ driveways—though Mamie still stole his when she took a notion.
“I left the keys in it,” he says now, “so she wouldn’t have to ask for them.”
“Mama, you take my new car?” he asked when he saw a bare spot in the driveway about the size of a Fleetwood.
“All the way to Ferriday,” she answered.
“And I would have to buy her one just like it to get it back. I’d call the dealer and he’d say, ‘I happen to have one left.’ A salesman always has one left.”