Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(126)
“I just wanted you to know what you meant to me,” said Lennon. “You made it possible for me to be a rock-and-roll singer.”
“He was very sincere,” Jerry Lee remembers. “He said, ‘I just wanted to show you and tell you how much I appreciate what you done for rock and roll.’”
Jerry Lee had not thought much of the Beatles’ music, but it turned out they were decent boys—at least this four-eyed fellow with the scraggly sideburns and sissy-looking hair.
“He was real nice,” Jerry Lee said. “He was serious. I didn’t know what to think. I guess it is flatterin’, when you have people kissin’ your feet.”
He does not know if any of the other Beatles were there that night in the entourage. “They were in a box of seats, and they were diggin’ the show. I know that. I don’t know what they were smokin’, but there was a lot of smoke comin’ out of that box.”
He purchased that year a big brick house in the country in Hernando County, Mississippi, framed by a beautiful lake, with stables, green pastures, and lush, dark trees. There, about fifteen minutes south of Memphis, inside the pastoral limits of the hamlet of Nesbit, a man could take a swim in his piano-shaped swimming pool or step out his back door and fire his hogleg unmolested at snakes or clouds or the moon and stars, and it was nobody’s business but his. He had envisioned it as a place where he and his daddy and his children, and maybe even boy grandchildren, to carry on his name, would live, perhaps not in serenity, not exactly Walton’s Mountain but still a good place, their place. It was the anchor, a place to come home to.
But he rarely saw it. In 1973 alone, he traveled to eighty cities to play and sing his songs, often doing more than one show in each locale. That fall, he crisscrossed the country west to east and north to south. He started in Syracuse, then Nashville, then off to Europe for a couple of whirlwind dates, then a week in Los Angeles taping an episode of the television drama Police Story, then off to Memphis for Southern Roots, then Oklahoma City and Corpus Christi, then Kentucky, Florida, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, L.A. again, and Indiana. He closed the year in relatively sane fashion, playing five nights apiece at nightclubs in Birmingham, Atlanta, and Fort Lauderdale, wrapping up on Christmas Day.
Sometime that October, between Texas and Kentucky, he put in one more appearance on The Midnight Special, this time electing to give the audience the century-old “Silver Threads Among the Gold,” which he’d just recorded for Southern Roots.
Plant a kiss upon my brow today
Life is fading fast away
In time, Junior had straightened his life out, at least as much as a rock-and-roll drummer was allowed in those wild years, and was growing into a solid man with no true meanness in him; he was like Elmo that way. Jerry Lee saw in his son a good musician but increasingly his own man, not a spoiled kid. He would not be one more person who would just ride in the big man’s wake, a thing Jerry Lee never resented and in fact encouraged of the people he loved. He kept his blood kin close, because blood was everything; anything else was only paper. But it made him proud to see his son take charge of his life, become a capable man. Junior was not afraid to get his hands greasy, knew how to turn a wrench and how to rig a tow bar. He would not be one of those Southern men who stand helpless at the side of the road next to a broke-down car; he would raise the hood and start slinging wrenches.
On November 13, 1973, on a break from the constant tour, he drove to Cockrum, Mississippi, in his Jeep, a present from his father, to pick up a Ford and tow it back to his father’s house. Police investigators believe he was taking a curve on Holly Springs Highway when the car he was towing struck the abutment of a bridge and caused him to lose control of his Jeep. It flipped, killing him. He had just turned nineteen.
His funeral was on the fifteenth, in the Church of God in Ferriday, another of the churches Lee Calhoun had built. It was an open casket, but the undertaker covered the boy’s face with a cloth of satin. His father stood with the congregation at his back and looked down at his second dead son.
“I did pull that thing back from his face,” his father says, “and I kissed him on the forehead, and I spoke to him.”
They buried the boy in the cemetery at Clayton, which had been so much smaller when he was a boy. He heard the same songs again. He never shed a tear that anyone could see, not ever. But for a long time, when he closed his eyes, all he saw were passing coffins. “Seemed like I was always on my way to the graveyard. At one time, it seemed like I was burying somebody every week. If it wasn’t my mama, it was my boys . . . a steady stream, and it would just keep going, and going, and I would put on my suit and my tie and I would get it done. I buried my people, and I still didn’t break down, I still didn’t cry at the church.
“Because you got to be strong, don’t you? You got to be strong.”
He had the stonecutter fashion a heart-shaped headstone, and later, alone with the dead, he walked through the green of the lovely and peaceful place and read the words.
HIS LIFE WAS GENTLE, AND THE ELEMENTS SO
MIX’D IN HIM, THAT NATURE MIGHT STAND UP
AND SAY TO ALL THE WORLD, THIS IS A MAN!
“I lost my two boys. And I went on. I went on living.” He still toured, but the passing of the caskets had left him with a hole in his middle he could stand only when he was thoroughly numbed. It is the only excuse he has ever offered, and he does not care much if anyone accepts it or not. But whereas in the past it had seemed he didn’t care if he lived or died, now he seemed to taunt death, daring anything and anyone to take him down, even seeming at times to dare the audience to try. A brawl in a Memphis bar in ’73 was just one of several fistfights he welcomed then, though this one left him with a broken nose that never properly healed, one that would even affect his voice in coming years. He does not recall much about it, of course, just that he gave as good as he got. He had always loved his audiences, was always quick to shut up a drunk or call a heckler’s bluff, out of respect for the stage and for the people who came to hear the music, “people who paid their hard-earned dollar.” But now he seemed ready to rise to it, daring anyone to challenge him.