Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(116)

The offers for live shows poured in. He even played Vegas, in an extended engagement at the International Hotel. Elvis was playing the main room.

“I was playin’ in the lounge. I mean the lounge was as big . . .” and he laughs. “It was as large as this whole house. Just the lounge. I mean, the main room would seat, like, three thousand people. And the room I was in would seat, like, twenty-five hundred. I was hittin’ [Elvis] tit for tat on that.” With its more casual atmosphere, the lounge was a better match for Jerry Lee. “You can really let your hair down there, you know. I was doin’, like, six shows a night. I didn’t mind. I loved it!”

He had watched Elvis’s show in the big room, but to him it was like he’d lost what made him great—the leanness, not in his body but in his performance. “I didn’t particular care too much for that,” he recalls now. “He had an enlarged band, with horns and violins, stuff like that, and I don’t think it ever come off that good. He was tryin’ to prove somethin’ that really didn’t need provin’. He was takin’ away from his old style.”

For his own shows, all he needed was the raw, stripped-down power of his piano and voice. He wanted as little fanfare as possible. “I never give ’em a chance to introduce me,” often just coming onstage during the warmup and starting to play. One look at the faces there, he says, and he would know what to play and how to play it. Playlists were for timid people. “I can read my audience like that. I can tell what they want and what they don’t want. If it’s there, if they really want it, if they got an addiction for it, so to speak”—he laughs—“I can deliver it to ’em.” He’d play the big hits, of course, but sometimes he’d give them whatever he felt like in the moment—a bit of Bob Wills, or Tom T. Hall, even a sip or two of Jolson. It seemed he could sing anything then, sing the water bill, and they would have given him a standing ovation. The women stood three deep at his dressing-room door, and the husbands left bullets on his piano lid, thinking they were clever, that such a thing had never been done before.


The only thing missing was a musical heir. His boy, Junior, the son he’d had with Jane when he was still playing the Natchez clubs, was now fifteen. He had learned to play the drums—was learning still—and moved out of his mama’s house and joined his daddy on the road and soon onstage. He was handsome even before he was old enough to drive, like his daddy on The Steve Allen Show. He was clean-cut, in the beginning, and wore his hair swooped up high on his head, like his daddy had done. He had a smile full of big, white teeth, and looked like he was getting away with something just sitting there. Born thirteen months after his wedding with Jane, Junior was every inch his boy.

“I loved him. . . . I loved my boy.”

At first he just banged a tambourine, for the fun of it, while he learned the drums. Then Jerry Lee decreed there was no reason why a band could not have two drummers, and Junior took a seat behind his daddy, keeping time. He traveled around the country and around the world, seeing and doing things most teenagers only imagine. He ate with rock stars and listened as his daddy swapped stories of the old days with other legends. He would prove to be a talented drummer, with his family’s ear for music. Jerry Lee knew the rock-and-roll lifestyle was seductive, dangerous, but to deny the boy a chance to experience it, him being a Lewis, would be like telling a Flying Wallenda not to walk a wire. “He done good” on the road and stage, and the excesses of the road, the drinking and drug use, were not preordained, though it would mean the boy would have to rise above not only temptation but the natural bent for addiction and wild behavior that had been in the blood of Lewis men since the Civil War. The Lewises made music, and they raised hell along the way.

But Junior was not his daddy, say the people who played with him. He was not a Killer, but a gentler soul, and he seemed to draw out a tender side in his father. Kenny Lovelace remembers how Jerry Lee would turn from the piano bench, watch the boy play, and when he would hit a particularly hot lick, would grin. “My boy . . .” Jerry Lee says now, and his eyes track away to a dark corner of the room, as if he can almost see him there. His other son, Steve Allen, had left the world so soon, so early, and there was so little to recall. But in this boy, this young man, he could see his own face. “My boy . . . Lord . . .” He will not talk of him for long, and it has been too long already.


His next album, There Must Be More to Love Than This, was full of cheatin’ songs, “Home Away from Home,” and “Woman, Woman (Get Out of Our Way),” and the title song. It was once again prophetic. Myra, left mostly at home as he chased his newfound stardom, had hired detectives to follow her husband on the road and by 1970 had evidence to support her suspicions of gross and prolonged infidelity. She filed for divorce while Jerry Lee was on tour in Australia. Her petition alleged cruelties without end, beatings, and threats on her life. Jerry Lee denied the worst of it—“I never hurt none of ’em”—but the other women were, as he once said himself, “hard to hide,” especially if you are not trying too hard. They had been married thirteen years, and while there had been love in the beginning, it was pretty well stomped flat by then. “Bogged down,” he says. “But she did try to get me back several times. She knew she made a mistake.” (Four months after the divorce was final, Myra married Peter Malito, one of the private detectives she had hired to gather evidence of Jerry Lee’s infidelity.) The new album also featured a song called “Life’s Little Ups and Downs,” Charlie Rich’s paean to marriage and forgiveness. But forgiveness was just one more pleasant fiction, sung in pleasant rhymes.