Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(122)
Even with Jerry Kennedy’s strings sweetening the sound, The Killer Rocks On was his grittiest album since The Return of Rock. He took the occasion to blow through Elvis’s “Don’t Be Cruel,” Charlie Rich’s Sun hit “Lonely Weekends,” and Fats’s “I’m Walkin’” at double time, but also contributed a soulful reading of the old blues song “C. C. Rider,” and takes on two recent Joe South songs, “Games People Play” and “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” that fit his voice—and country radio—perfectly. The old men in overalls called it “that long-haired country,” but he made it rock.
If you could see you through my eyes, instead of your ego
I believe that you’d be surprised to see that you’d been blind
The Killer Rocks On would be more than an album his fans would wear out from start to finish. It would mark an emergence from a country cocoon, his rebirth as a bona fide rocker.
Having made millions singing country, he spent them partying like a rock star. He had languished too long, touring and slaving and waiting for this rebirth, not to enjoy this ride when it came. “There wasn’t no time to lollygag around,” he says. “In one time around Nashville, there was more Jerry Lee Lewis stories than you could count. And, yeah, some of ’em was even true.”
It was a time of epic excess, but even the wildest rock stars of the 1970s learned that when it came to playing good music and then partying like there really was no coming dawn, they were milksop amateurs compared to Jerry Lee. He was even starting to look different: He had always considered long hair effeminate, but he’d enjoyed that beard he grew for Catch My Soul, and now he grew it out again and let his curls grow past his collar. He traded in his sport coats and two-tone shoes for boots and snazzier threads. Heading to England for a historic concert at Wembley Stadium, the first concert ever in that arena, he looked downright casual in his short-sleeved orange shirt and tight matching pants next to Little Richard and Chuck Berry. While he was backstage, he noticed a skinny, big-lipped kid on the stage, jamming like an over-excited teenager, waving a movie camera around. It was Mick Jagger.
“He was rolling on the floor with his camera,” says Jerry Lee. “He had every album I had ever made—with him. I told him, ‘I am not going to sign all them albums.’”
On a spring tour of Europe that year, he was wild onstage, wilder than perhaps he ever had been; the audiences loved him for it, because it was the persona come to life in front of them—not Jerry Lee Lewis, but the Killer. He was climbing the piano again at every show now, growling and threatening and clouding up and raining all over them. In Paris, he punched the air and climbed the piano to bump and grind, and the screams drowned out the music. Backstage, in interviews, he was exhausted, contemplative. He looked like what he was, a man with a troubled soul drifting out of control.
Or maybe, he says now, he just knew he had a role to play.
“I give my audience what it wants,” he said backstage as a French reporter translated. In the black-and-white video, his skin seems pale as bone, though maybe it’s just a trick of the light.
It may have been the role of a lifetime, but it took a toll.
“They want it that way,” he says now. “They want somebody that’s mean. That turns over pianos. That turns Rolls-Royces over. That gets married when he gets ready.
“That’s the Killer, you know? The Killer! Killer! Killer!”
In a blur, Jerry Lee and his entourage returned to London in January 1973 to cut an album with a cadre of gifted British musicians, including guitarists Peter Frampton and Albert Lee. Released as The Session . . . Recorded in London with Great Guest Artists, it was a contentious, hard-driven encounter in which the British would say they were driven like mules and many ass-whippings were threatened by an impatient and well-lubricated Jerry Lee. But the record was another hit, climbing into the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. The single was “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” proving that Jerry Lee could reach as far into his past as he wanted now, with this new momentum, and find a hit. He also cut another record that would be a kind of anthem for him, the Charlie Rich song “No Headstone on My Grave,” about a man defying death but promising to meet his mama in the by-and-by.
Jerry Lee would later say that the long-haired Brits in the funny bell-bottom pants were fine musicians and pretty good boys; they just needed some straightening out, like any band does sometimes. During the session he even tried giving them a little introduction to the long, long, long dead American songwriter and pianist Stephen Foster, leading them through “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Swanee River” in rock-and-roll time. “A lot of folks think he was a kinda . . . settled-type cat, you know,” he told them. “But he was a rockin’ muthahumper, Stephen Foster.”
His price per show, for concert halls, was back to $10,000. Elmo was traveling the world with him, now happy as a toddler with his mouth full of jawbreakers, calling down for room service and giggling at the grown men who brought it up in their silly pillbox hats. Phoebe could go to the finest schools, boarding schools, away from the craziness for a while, then return to the storm to watch her daddy rock and rave. Now, on silver wings, he floated above the mean little beer joints and honky-tonks and jukes where he had been forced to make his living. He had taken the riches from his country stardom and purchased his first airplane, a DC-3, with room for all manner of hangers-on and amiable drunks and pretty women with no particular place to go. He hired his own pilots to fly him in style to the big shows and TV specials, though “I never liked to ride on no airplane,” he says. He had lived his whole life swinging from one near-disaster to another, surviving crisis after crisis, fighting his way out or thinking his way out and sometimes just taking it like a man, but a man in an airplane had no power over anything, unless of course he was flying the thing himself and sometimes not even then. The wind could knock him out of the sky or he could get lost in a cloud or in a sheet of rain and never be seen alive again. “Airplanes don’t leave many cripples,” he says.