Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(130)

One such performance from the Palomino was captured in All You Need Is Love: The Story of Popular Music, a seventeen-part television documentary chronicling performers as diverse as Bing Crosby and Bo Diddley. The filmmakers caught Jerry Lee in a kind of red-faced frenzy, standing on the keyboard in white loafers, keeping time by banging the fall board against the cabinet. It is not exactly anything new, any of it, but it seems uncontrolled and a bit joyless compared to some of his wild shows of the near and distant past. He wanders around the stage, shirt unbuttoned and tied at his waist, crashing through a rendition of “Shakin’” in which it’s hard to make out what he is saying; he stares briefly off into space, then sticks his face close to the camera, nose still swollen, and announces:

You know what I mean. . . .

And I’m lookin’ at every good-lookin’ thang in America right now. . . .

Meat Man! You know what I am. . . .

He doesn’t seem to notice the audience. Some called it one of his wildest performances; to others it seemed bleak, and a foreshadowing of darker things.

Celebrities still came to the Palomino every night then. One night, Phoebe came backstage to see her daddy. “She was pretty young at the time. And she come back cryin’, you know? And I said, ‘What’s wrong with you, girl?’

“Do you know who’s standin’ in line out there to get your autograph?” she asked.

“I have no idea, baby. There’s usually somebody standing in line to get it.”

“She started callin’ off their names. She said, ‘Keith . . . Ronnie . . .’”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “The Rolling Stones. They come around and see me quite often.”

“That,” he says now, “was when they were the hottest thing in the country.”

The Stones saw in Jerry Lee the same trailblazer that John Lennon had. But Jerry Lee connected somehow with the Stones, who lived the rock-and-roll life full tilt—but who always, first and foremost, played the music. They took old blues and introduced it to a whole new generation, as he had done with so many genres.

“We had some great times,” he says. “I used to flip a bottle of Crown Royal, flip it and catch it. Well, Keith then started doin’ it. They must have dropped fifteen bottles of Crown Royal whiskey—the best whiskey—lost it all! Busted all to pieces, you know? And they’d just reach to get another one. It was a trip! I laughed. I said, ‘Don’t do that no more. You’re wastin’ that whiskey.’”

Again he told people to do as he said, not as he’d done.

“I worried about ’em. I warned them. I talked to ’em. Just like I did John Belushi.”

Belushi was another regular, a fan of Jerry Lee and already well on his way to the addictions that would kill him.

“I could see he really wasn’t payin’ that much attention to what I thought was right and wrong. He was just like me; you wasn’t goin’ to tell him what to do. He was dead set in his ways. . . . He liked what he was doin’, and you wasn’t going to stop him from doin’ it.”

In September of ’76, probably not long after that Palomino performance, Jerry Lee was celebrating his forty-first birthday at the house he had purchased for Jaren in Collierville. They were still married, though Jaren had twice filed for separate maintenance so that she could remain married to Jerry Lee without actually living with him.

Butch Owens, his bass player, arrived with a friend, Dagwood Mann.

“Was there drinking going on?” says Jerry Lee. “Unconsolable drinking.”

Dagwood Mann pulled out a big .357 and handed it to Jerry Lee.

“Careful,” he said. “It’s got a hair trigger.”

“Whaddaya mean, a hair trigger?” Jerry Lee said, and laughed, pretending to look for a hair on it.

“It went off,” says Jerry Lee. “It hit a Coke bottle, and that Coke bottle flew into a thousand pieces.”

“I-I-I-I been shot,” screamed Butch Owens.

“It appears to be that way, Butch,” Jerry Lee said, too drunk to be overly concerned.

“Why?” asked Butch.

“ ’Cause you appear to be sittin’ in the wrong spot,” said Jerry Lee.

For reasons that only very drunk men could comprehend, the revolver was cocked when Dagwood Mann handed it to Jerry Lee. Jerry Lee still does not know exactly how it happened.

He will not even admit that he shot the man, not with a bullet, anyway. “I believe it was a piece of the Coke bottle that went into Butch,” says Jerry Lee. “He stuttered a lot when it happened, whatever it was.”

Jerry Lee was charged with discharging a firearm within the city limits, but the shooting was, in criminal terms, judged to be accidental. But Butch Owens sued Jerry Lee for $50,000 and won, claiming that just before he was shot, Jerry Lee told him, “Butch, look down the barrel of this,” and then aimed at the Coke bottle next to him. As he lay there bleeding, Jaren yelled at him for ruining her white shag carpet.

“I just know it took him a couple days to talk right,” says Jerry Lee.


He was being sued by everybody, for broken contracts and such. Jaren had lawyers after him, to pay her for not being his wife and not being divorced from him either, which was a whole new level of marital hell he had not even known existed. In Memphis, people talked bad about him, and talk bad about him today, how he let his wife and daughter live on welfare, how he ignored their needs while he partied the night away at Hernando’s and Bad Bob’s. In the clubs, it seemed like even cocktail waitresses were waiting to pick fights with him, then send in their lawyers to collect. The airports wouldn’t sell him fuel for his plane unless he paid in hundred-dollar bills. Band mates quit him and sued him for back wages. Myra sent lawyers for not meeting the commitments of their divorce. He had to keep a close eye on Elmo, who had somehow gotten himself married during all this. At the Denver airport, drug agents in black Ninja outfits stormed his plane, and their hellhounds sniffed out every pill in the fuselage. He was interrogated about an international drug cartel, which was preposterous, as trying to hide drugs on Jerry Lee’s plane would be like trying to hide a pullet in a chicken house; drugs spilled from the seat cushions.