Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(127)

He hates to concede any weakness when his back is up; it is almost always up. But he says that his son’s death, so close to Mamie’s, “really knocked me off my feet. I didn’t know a thing could hurt that bad. It seemed like it was all I done, was bury my people. It seemed like all I did was stand and watch these people I loved . . .” There was a hopelessness in it, because what was it all for if the people he loved most were gone? His mama’s death was a thing of pure dread, something that wore him down, but his son’s death on the highway hit him with such unexpected force that he still feels it, like a physical thing, in his chest. His friends and bandmates and family wondered if he would recover. He was not a man who cared about a lot of things, and now much of what little he actually cared about was just stripped away.

In the spotlight, he would just stop sometimes in the middle of a song and glare balefully into the darkness at faces he couldn’t even see, as if inviting the audience to rise up against him.

“I walked the aisles back then,” said his daughter, Phoebe, “looking for a gun.”





13


THE YEAR OF THE GUN




Memphis

1974

The car was supposed to be a fine American driving machine, but he never could find a Corvette that would hold the road in those days. “Wrecked a dozen of ’em,” he says. “I was coming home one time—might have been drinking—and I run one up under the front porch of a house. A little girl come out, her eyes real big, and I don’t know why . . . I just said, ‘Top of the mornin’ to you,’ and she run back inside. And this woman stuck her head out the door and said, ‘Oh, Lord, it’s Jerry Lee Lewis.’”


A lot of people had that reaction to him then. He was not yet forty, but already people seemed surprised to see him, or maybe see him alive after all the stories told. At another In Concert taping, the announcer introduced him as “a man who’s so unreal, it’s hard to believe he’s really here.” He took the stage in a black tuxedo, lean and tall and straight, older now, but otherwise not a mark on him. The scruffy beard was gone, his hair long but perfect. “Oh, yeah,” he said into the microphone, over the screams of the audience, then launched into “Haunted House,” the silly but catchy record from one-hit wonder Jumpin’ Gene Simmons, the story of a man who moves into a new house to find it occupied by a green-skinned monster from outer space, who eats a hunk of raw meat “right from my hand . . . and drank hot grease from the frying pan.” It’s a goofy song, no doubt, but also a song about defiance, of refusing to be run off from something that belongs to you, and Jerry Lee turned it into another snatch of autobiography:

Jerry Lee Lewis’ll be here when the morning come

Be right here, ain’t gonna run



Then he tore it up some more.

I bought this house and I am boss



The music dies.

If God’s wi’ me, they ain’t gonna run me off



His hands flew and stabbed, then he stood up and peeled off his coat, flung away his tie, and undid his cuffs so he could slap the piano unimpeded. He stood up to sing, sat down to play, and when he did play, he stuck the microphone into his waistband like a pistol.

He was supposed to be ravaged by grief, eaten away by pills.

“Tortured?” he says now, and smiles. “Me?”

He looked like the Jerry Lee of old, gun-barrel straight and bulletproof on the outside, though inside an awful corrosion was beginning in his stomach, where all the excess of his life had pooled. But as he sang that silly song, it was like he knew the next great comedown, the next big slide, was beginning, and somehow he wanted to tell everybody there on national television that he was not going quietly.

Jaren had filed for divorce by now, but no one seemed in much of a hurry to do anything about that. Jerry Lee saw her occasionally; usually some kind of narcotic or alcohol was involved. He did a few sessions, mostly tepid; nothing much came of them either. He played a stage for money almost every night somewhere, then came home and went to the bars to play some more. He had always taken refuge in his live shows; now he sank into the music deeper and deeper, till it was all that mattered, but even that would be affected. He was still a big star, and acted with impunity in public; the beauty of Jerry Lee was that he would have acted that way anyway. He threatened and howled, and dry-humped the piano on the big stages. At home in Memphis, in the smoke and two-drink minimums, he played still for the joy of it, and punished anyone who interfered.

In March of ’75, a waitress at Bad Bob’s lounge in Memphis said he attacked her with a fiddle bow. He was convicted of assault and battery and fined $25; she was fined $15 for malicious mischief, for breaking the bow after she took it away from him. She sued him for $100,000, saying that he “brutally and savagely attacked her,” but like most lawsuits involving Jerry Lee, he just ignored it till people got tired of bothering him. He does not recall attacking anyone, but if he did whack someone with a fiddle bow, he is sure it was because they were interrupting a song or made him mad or otherwise needed whacking. It was an ignoble event in an awful and ignoble year, and it was just fine with him.

He was hanging out then with his friend Mack Vickery, who, with a comedian named Elmer Fudpucker, had become the opening act for some of Jerry Lee’s live shows. Fudpucker, whose real name was Hollis Champion, would tell a few jokes, much the same rural humor that had become a staple at the Grand Ole Opry with Minnie Pearl, and then Vickery, an accomplished songwriter who could do a dead-on Elvis impersonation, would play some country and some old rock and roll. A native of Town Creek, Alabama, he had come to Memphis in ’57, too, to be a rock-and-roll singer but had discovered that his best chance at fame was in putting the words and rhymes in other people’s mouths. He had written for Faron Young, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Lefty Frizzell, and others. He had Jerry Lee’s irreverence about convention and the straight world—he recorded an album called Live at the Alabama Women’s Prison and sometimes went by the pseudonym Atlanta James. Articulate in both song and life, he would come to be viewed as Jerry’s Lee’s “speechwriter.” Jerry Lee saw in the man not just a drinking buddy but a true blue-collar poet, and many of the things he said onstage were things he first said to Vickery or heard back from him.