Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(125)

As Jerry Lee stood there in the wings, waiting, he shook hands and nodded and was polite, but he had not forgotten. He remembered the last time he had stood here, invisible unless he was in someone’s way. And then a sweet voice had asked him, “Son, are you lost . . . ?” And then he heard his name announced, and he strolled to his piano, across those scarred but historic boards, to great applause.

The old, thin men in the fine, glittery suits and Stetsons stared from around the curtain, uncertain. What heresy would he unleash?

Instead he did “Another Place, Another Time,” a song written to be played here, expected to be played here, and when he was through, the people began to applaud, warmly, loudly. But almost before they could bring their hands together, he blistered into Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say” and a medley of “Break My Mind” and “Mean Woman Blues,” followed by “I Can’t Seem to Say Goodbye” and “Once More with Feeling,” and the Singing Brakeman’s “Waiting for a Train,” and the people in the polite crowd whistled and roared.

“Played right through the commercials,” he says, ignoring the broadcast schedule, any schedule. They could work around him. Then he looked into the wings and motioned for Del Wood, the one member of the Opry who had been kind to him when he was here as a teenager wandering Music Row.

“Ladies and gentlemen, many years ago, I had the privilege of meeting a fine lady. Her name is Del Wood. . . . I was just a kid at the time, about nineteen years old. I came backstage—I don’t know how I got in, I just slipped in—and she treated me with the most . . . I don’t know, she was so courteous. I’ll never forget for as long as . . . I live. This meant so much to me. And I’m gonna ask Miz Wood if she would come out. . . . No one has asked me to do this in any way, shape, form, nor fashion. . . . I just talked with her backstage, and I said, ‘Honey, I want you to come out, and let’s me and you just sit down to the piano and play “Down Yonder.”’”

The crowd whistled and cheered as she walked out.

“This is a privilege to Jerry Lee Lewis,” he said.

“Took the words right out of my mouth,” she said. “It’s a privilege to me.”

And the piano started to ring. She could play anything, that woman, ragtime or gospel or honky-tonk. They’d called her the Queen of the Ragtime Pianists when she toured with the Opry for the soldiers in Vietnam, but she was a star only in memory now. Now she sat with the still-young Jerry Lee, and they played together, sometimes laughing out loud.

“I’m gonna tell you one thing about that lady,” Jerry Lee said, as she walked off to thunderous applause. “If she can’t get it, you can forget it, because it couldn’t be got.”

Then someone in the crowd screamed out “Johnny B. Goode,” and he got back down to it. “Yes, yes,” he said, and played it for them, then went into another medley of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Workin’ Man Blues” and “Rock Around the Clock,” and then finished with a red-hot second round of “Shakin’.” He slowed down to do “Me and Bobby McGee,” played “Chantilly Lace,” then another medley of “Good Golly Miss Molly” and “Tutti Frutti.” The crowd screamed and whistled and shook the ancient floorboards. They behaved in a way that this old place had not seen since the last inappropriate boy had climbed the stage, the one who said he could throw his hat onto the stage after singing “Lovesick Blues” and his hat would get three encores. They hollered and stomped like they’d hollered for no one but him, not even that boy Elvis.

“Elvis,” he says now, “was not ready.”

He looked around at the old, worn building, so ragged to hold such gilded history.

“It was a barn,” he says now.

Then Jerry Lee looked out across the seats and played. . .

Hear that lonesome whip-poor-will

He sounds too blue to fly



Two months after the Opry show, he gave a thunderous performance in Brooklyn, backed by a full set of horns, that was broadcast nationally on the ABC series In Concert. Then, in September, he returned to Memphis to cut a new album, Southern Roots. During these sessions, he insulted the producer, threatened to kill a photographer, and drank and medicated his way into but not out of a fog. In that haze, he did the raunchy classic “Meat Man,” written by his friend Mack Vickery, a song that needs little explanation:

I got jaws like a bear trap, teeth like a razor

A Maytag tongue with a sensitive taster



He seemed still unstoppable, making repeat engagements on the now classic late-night TV series The Midnight Special. The show brought him into even greater numbers of living rooms, carrying him even higher into that odd place where legends and stars of the here-and-now breathe the same rare air.


He was in Los Angeles that October playing the Roxy, when a scruffy, nearsighted young man appeared backstage, almost breathless.

His son punched him in the arm, excited, then kept punching him.

“Daddy,” Junior said, “ain’t that John Lennon?”

“Yes, son, that’s John Lennon,” he said.

Lennon rushed up to Jerry Lee and dropped to his knees.

He bowed, and kissed his feet.

“Thank you,” Jerry Lee said, not knowing what else to say.