Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(129)
He was relieved to realize they were not actually in someone’s mouth.
“I’ve had these teeth for forty years,” the man said.
There was great shouting and threats, and the police were summoned.
“I just got in my car and left,” Jerry Lee says.
The police needed to arrest someone. They waited for someone, anyone, to approach the door of Jerry Lee Lewis Enterprises. “Elmer Fudpucker drove up,” said Jerry Lee, “so they took him to jail.”
Elvis was also prone to shoot things in his seclusion. He shot at least one television, which went on display at Graceland. He was rumored to have shot more than one, but that would have made him a serial killer, so hard evidence of that, in his more carefully manicured image, is scarce. If Jerry Lee had shot a bunch of televisions, they would have piled them up and hung a sign on them that read THE KILLER WAS HERE!
Jerry Lee says now Elvis was just being a copycat.
“I started shootin’ things, so Elvis got out his gun and started shootin’ things.”
Well I know I’ve earned my reputation
Can’t they see I’ve found my salvation?
I guess they’d rather prove me wrong
My life would make a damn good country song
Again as his life got wilder, his time in the studio went dry. The old honky-tonk formula had worn itself thin, and country radio had gotten sweeter, and even when he found himself a damn good country song, it was only a marginal hit.
“You can only have so many hit records, and record so many, and do ’em different every time, every time, every time, you know?” he says. But he was still Jerry Lee Lewis, and he still did what he wanted. The euphemism muthahumper had begun creeping into the lyrics of his songs—a rare concession for the most dangerous man in rock and roll. His performances and even studio recordings were marked by a rotating repertoire of catchphrases and mannerisms:
Think about it
God almighty knows
I guarantee it
This is J-L-L, and I’m hell when I’m well
And always, always, his name, Jerry Lee, inserted wherever the lyric called for “me,” or even where it didn’t.
He tried what he could to personalize the endless parade of country songs. One day he decided to play the piano from the inside. “One record I had out, I said, ‘I wanna try somethin’ here.’ I reached inside the piano, and kinda moved the quilt back a little bit”—he laughs—“and I took my hand, and I said, ‘Let’s take a take,’ and I said, “‘I wanna hear this. I wanna kick it off with my fingernail right down the strings.’” It did not make music history. Another time, as a lark, he cut a bluesy parody of “Great Balls of Fire,” singing the words slow and low. “I was jus’ cuttin’ up on that. Jerry Kennedy . . . he never said a word. He just cut it. I was havin’ a ball! But even the musicians was lookin’ at me kinda weird.”
The harder he tried to find a hit, it seemed, the more complicated—and less like him—the music became. The new music had a sophisticated, almost Hollywood sound, a style called countrypolitan that had put Charlie Rich back on the charts. Hard country like Jerry Lee’s style was vanishing in a wash of saccharine strings, or so it seemed; the spontaneity of his recordings, the perfect imperfection Sam Phillips had sought, was being polished out by multitrack recording and overdubbing. He hated to sing in a booth over one of his own prerecorded backing tracks, but it was becoming routine.
In February of ’76 he had surgery to correct damage to his sinuses, the result of that broken nose. He believes his voice was never affected by the damage, that his body was fine and his hands were still “perfect.” He was not like other men. By now he had been recording music for almost two decades and was still viable, still spending the money he earned from his dream; few could say that, and even fewer could say they had been there for the very beginning of something and were still recording and playing it two decades later in anything more than nostalgia shows.
He found a kind of second residence at 6907 Lankershim Boulevard, at the Palomino Club in the San Fernando Valley. He had been playing the storied Palomino almost from the nightclub’s first days, watching as the onetime neighborhood bar grew into a hot spot for country, country-rock, and good music in general, on the West Coast and in the nation as a whole. It had been a destination for Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson; Patsy Cline did “Crazy” here, Buck Owens did “Love’s Gonna Live Here,” and Jerry Jeff Walker sang “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris stopped hearts here, and George Harrison jammed with Bob Dylan and Taj Mahal. It was a place where patrons could come in from the harsh California daylight and sip a beer in the cool dark as the musicians—famous and more obscure—played, rehearsed, or just jammed. Patrons wandered backstage for autographs. In its layout in the early 1970s, it could hold more than four hundred people. Jerry Lee packed the place and would play the Palomino at least once a year for three decades. He loved it.
“Come out of there,” he says, “with more money than we could tote. And they got their money’s worth.”
He played what he wanted when he wanted, but in ’76 he played little of it cold sober. His shows achieved a level of wildness perhaps unequaled in his career—so much so that it nearly got in the way of the music.