Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(128)

“He was one of my best friends,” says Jerry Lee, who rarely uses such language, even with people he has known all his life. “He was good, kind, gentle . . . he was one person I could depend on. We sat around and laughed and played music. It was like we were brothers.”

The shows they played together were legendary, Jerry Lee says, if for no other reason than their duration. He alone would take encore after encore, and not just in the paid shows but in the impromptu concerts he did for free in the Memphis clubs.

“Sometimes I’d play for four hours,” he says. “People remember things like that.”

He started to frequent a place outside Memphis called Hernando’s Hideaway, which some would come to jokingly call his office.

“It got so ridiculous that Kenny Rogers, the owner—we called him Red—he got to where he was making good money off of me. He said, ‘Stay around, ladies and gentlemen! Jerry Lee landed his Learjet out at the airport and he’ll be here in about thirty minutes.’ And that place was packed out, you know? You couldn’t get a seat. Nowhere! Not even standin’ outside!” No matter how late he was, the crowd never left. “They knew I’d show up sooner or later. And I said, ‘Boy, ol’ Kenny’s moppin’ up.’ I didn’t mind.”

The patrons at Hernando’s Hideaway remember him busting through the door with his entourage, sometimes still in his rock-and-roll clothes from the show. People would rush to bring him something to lubricate his voice; then he would take the piano by divine right and play until dawn.

“Never got tired.”

He fesses up to the pills, but the liquor, he swears, was exaggerated. It always had been.

“People thought I used to drink a fifth of whiskey a night,” he says. “I’d buy a fifth of Calvert Extra whiskey. And I’d keep it to myself—I hid it in my shaving kit, you know? I drank on that fifth of whiskey for about a week, a week and a half. And everybody thought I was drinkin’ a fifth of whiskey a night. That’s something that got started. They still think it.”

There were, of course, many, many exceptions; people just naturally loved buying Jerry Lee Lewis a drink. They would talk about it all their lives, how they bought the Killer a fifth.

In July of ’75, he went back into the Mercury studio to cut a song that was written for and about him. “A Damn Good Country Song” was by Donnie Fritts, a member of Kris Kristofferson’s band:

Well I’ve took enough pills for the whole damn town

Old Jerry Lee’s drank enough whiskey to lift any ship off the ground

I’ll be the first to admit it, sure do wish these people would quit it

’Cause it’s tough enough to straighten up, when they won’t leave you alone

My life would make a damn good country song



Maybe it’s just the nature of country music that a man sings his life out loud. They sing about broken hearts and loving their mamas and beer and babies and trains, of course, and watermelon wine. But sometimes a man sings it down to the bone, as real as a car wreck, or a cave-in.


The year of the gun, for Jerry Lee, was actually a rolling barrage of years and many guns, but since he and almost all the people who should have been keeping watch on him were not clear in the head, exact dates are hard to pin down. Jerry Lee was a Southern man, and therefore had never been far from a gun of some kind, requiring one the same way other men require a pocket watch or suspenders. Like most Southern men, he had been witness from boyhood to the awful mystery of guns, until the day his people placed one in his own hands and lectured him about the power, the responsibility, and he nodded and promised and remembered, for a while—for he had also been raised to know the awful mystery of liquor, and had long ago succumbed to the great temptation to hold the one while his blood swam with the other.

He had never needed an excuse to party, but now there was a wildness and a bald recklessness that set new standards even for him, and mixing with the other barroom smells was an almost regular reek of cordite. Lost pills and empty casings mixed in the shag carpeting. He carried a pocket pistol pretty much all the time now—pearl-handled automatics, dependable snub-nosed .38s and over-and-under .22 derringers. Southern men will tell you that there are really only two things you can do with guns, shoot them and look at them, and Jerry Lee did not like looking at them all that much.

In the drunken excess that was Jerry Lee Lewis Enterprises, Incorporated, on Airport Road, Jerry Lee became bored looking at his .38 one night and fired it into a wall. Then he reloaded and fired it some more.

“I was shootin’ people’s caps off their heads,” he says.

He is asked why.

He just stares blankly.

It was because he wanted to.

“Anyway,” Jerry Lee says, “I didn’t know the bullets was going through the walls. Just went right on through.”

The next day, his neighbor in the adjoining suite, a dental technician who fit and manufactured dentures, came to work to find twenty-five holes in the wall. Worse, a display case of dentures, some of them antiques, had been shot into scattered false teeth and shards of pink porcelain gums.

“He was very upset about that,” says Jerry Lee.

The man stormed over and told Jerry Lee he had shot his teeth off the wall.

It took Jerry Lee, who was hungover, a minute to process.

“What do you mean, I shot your teeth off the wall?”