Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(124)
Don’t go around tonight
Well, it’s bound to take your life
His temper, always infamous, worsened. Graham Knight tells of a concert in England in ’73 when Jerry Lee became furious at a drummer who could not keep up or keep time. “He told the drummer to get off the stage, and if he told the drummer to get, the drummer would go,” he said. “After the drummer left the stage, Jerry continued playing the show, playing the melody on the piano with the right hand, and playing the drum with the left.”
Knight remembers it was the music, still, that sustained the man more than any chemical. Even in England, the end of a show did not mean the music was finished. “I liked the times when he would be in my Mini, sitting in my passenger seat, Kenneth Lovelace in the back. He’d be playing his guitar, and Jerry would sing. And we would drive a couple hundred miles that way, back to London. We’d stop at a truck stop, and Jerry would ask for a cup of beans. Truck drivers would come up to him in the middle of the night. ‘Are you Jerry Lee Lewis?’ they would ask. ‘The one and only,’ he said.”
But the demons even outran the music, and he found he could not run fast enough to beat them and still hold the road. Jerry Lee remembers smoking down the two-lane in his Rolls-Royce somewhere up around Bolivar, Tennessee, blue and red lights in his rearview mirror. “I’s moving on pretty swift,” he said. “Burnt up two more cop cars trying to catch me. I looked up and I saw that the road ahead of me was completely blocked with cop cars. Why, I thought, they must be waitin’ on me.”
Another time, he was blasting down the Tennessee blacktop, his tape deck blaring through custom speakers in a car that cost more than most of the houses he roared by. He tried to take a curve at a speed he can no longer recall, but one beyond the physical mechanics of even his vehicle. “I turned a Rolls-Royce over,” he says, “and it was layin’ up on its side. And this song—it was one of my favorites that was playin’, ‘One Rose,’ Jimmie Rodgers song. And I was listenin’ to that tape, and—boy, I was about half loaded, too, to be honest with you. And I was sittin’ there, and I guess the cops threatenin’ me, and everything, to get out of that car. I said, ‘I’m not gettin’ out of this car until that tape finishes playin’ ‘One Rose That’s Left in My Heart!’ And they just backed off and waited till it finished. It had warped the tape or somethin’ when it turned over. ‘Ooonnne rooossse, that’s left innnn, my heart, deeear . . .’”
At the station, “I was rantin’ and ravin’, and kickin’ and carryin’ on,” he laughs. “They had a time with me. They put me in a cell back there, and he said—the sheriff—‘When you settle down, Jerry Lee, and you quit all this cussin’ and rantin’ and ravin’ and carryin’ on, and threatenin’ us and everything, we’ll let you out and you can go home.’ I said, Maaan, you gon’ let me out, now . . .’ He said, ‘That ain’t gonna get it.’ So I ranted and raved about an hour or so, an’ I finally calmed down, kinda laid down on this bunk and took a little nap, I think.
“He come back by and said, ‘You through with all that rantin’ and everything?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m ready to go home.’”
For some four years now, he had been the most bankable country star in the world. He lived the heartache in his songs every day, but he did not ask for the sympathy of the people who bought his records. How do you ask that of men and women who counted every penny, who prayed to make their payments and pay their power bill? They gave it to him anyway, and the fan mail poured in. People said they prayed for him and thanked him for the happiness he brought them. “I hope it lifted people’s hearts,” he says, and he believes it did. He even still played a city auditorium or high school stage once in a blue moon to stay in touch with those people; three days after the massive concert in Wembley Stadium, he played a school in Indiana. But the love that people gave him, from the factory floor, from the sweatshop sewing plants and typing pools and the double-wides and dirt roads, had not reached as far as the Ryman, the members-only institution that had rejected Hank Williams and been cool, at best, when Elvis took the stage. Once, a long time ago, when his mama was alive, he would have liked to have played there, because it would have meant so much to her. He had seemed such a natural choice back when he did “Crazy Arms” and “You Win Again,” but no one called, and then the Opry banned him outright, because of his rock-and-roll reputation, forbade him to play the show that his mama had hoarded a battery all week to hear on her transistor radio. And now it was too late.
Then, as if to prove how fate messes with a man, in the midst of the heartache and craziness and self-destruction, he was asked to play the Ryman, with all that it implied.
“They asked me to play the Opry,” he says, “and I only did it because this time they begged me to.”
It was January of ’73. It was still the same Opry, with the same austere old men glaring from backstage as if they had been hacked out of hickory and nailed to the Ryman walls. Ernest Tubb and Hank Snow and Roy Acuff, the ageless men who had looked right through him when he was a big-eyed boy standing backstage, stood there in the same suits that hung straight down from their skeletal frames like they were draped on crossed broom handles. Some of the acts had changed, but the act remained: Minnie Pearl, a tag still flying from that same silly hat, still shouted, “Howdeeeeee!” and told stories that depicted country folk as backward but somehow wise at the same time; the Opry regulars did bluegrass and old, old country, and newer, younger guests did some safe music that fit the mold. Little Jimmy Dickens still walked around under that massive white Stetson, like he had a bathtub on his head.