Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(133)

On a new Porsche car



“That was our last big hit,” Jerry Lee says. “No piano at all on that,” or not his piano, anyway. “That’s something Jerry Kennedy wanted to prove he could do.” Kennedy gave Jerry Lee an acetate with the complete backing track—strings, rhythm, and a host of guitars he’d overdubbed himself. “The voices and everything, except mine. And I brought it home and played it, and I played it, and I learned it. . . . And I went up there into Nashville, and he set up everything, and I walked up to the microphone, took one take on it, and that was it.”

It was not what he remembered recording a song to be.

The relationship with Mercury had grown thankless, each side wary of the other. “Seemed like I was doin’ the same thing over and over and over. . . . They tried to get me to quit working the road. They said, ‘Stay home, and you’ll be making all the money you can make. Take care of your body.’ But I said, ‘I can’t. I just can’t.’ I couldn’t take it, not bein’ on the road. I had to be in front of my audience. Besides, no one told me what to do. Bull, trying to tell me what to do.”

Still, today he has second thoughts about the whole thing.

“I just got so tired of it, I left Mercury. I just bidded them good-bye. Tired, y’know?” But that was a “bad mistake,” he says now, with a laugh. “I should have never left Jerry Kennedy. I should have never left Mercury Records. ’Cause they were too good to me.” It is another rare expression of regret, but he concedes that he would probably make the same choice if he had it to do over, because he’s still Jerry Lee Lewis.

He still had the urge to cut quality music. At some point he and Mack Vickery went back to Memphis to collaborate on a kind of tribute to Stephen Foster, whose music he had learned on his old piano at Black River. Foster, who died in 1864, is known as the father of American music, with songs like “Camptown Races,” “Oh, Susanna,” and “Beautiful Dreamer.” His songs were played as the citizens of New York rioted in the streets over conscription for the Civil War, were sung in barrooms in the Old West, and are sung today in grammar schools. Jerry Lee felt a kinship with the man: like him, Foster had forged white and black American music into a new kind of sound, almost a hundred years before rock and roll. Jerry Lee and Mack met Sam Phillips’s son, Knox, at the Madison Avenue studio and recorded hours of material, including a version of “Beautiful Dreamer” that opened with a long monologue about the importance of Foster’s music.

And no one heard any of it, or at least only a handful of people did.

His cousins, meanwhile, were conquering the charts. Jimmy Swaggart was selling millions of gospel albums while asking people to kneel in their living rooms and pray before the TV, and little cousin Mickey Gilley had used the same rolling, thumping country boogie to blow away the competition on the country charts. In the year 1974 alone, he had three number one country hits, including “Room Full of Roses,” “City Lights,” and “I Overlooked an Orchid.” People said he sounded a lot like Jerry Lee, but then, who else would he sound like? The music was in the dirt they had all walked on. He says now that he was happy for them. “They were family,” he says. But at the time, it seemed like they were stealing his act. He would hit a piano lick and shout out, “Think about it, Jimmy!” or “Think about it, Mickey!”

“Neither one of them could touch me,” he says.


On August 16, 1977, nine months after he charged the gates of Graceland, three weeks after he cut “Middle Age Crazy,” Jerry Lee woke up to find that Elvis Presley had died. The death, by what the coroner called cardiac arrhythmia, had left Elvis on his bathroom floor, his bloodstream polluted by prescription pills and his heart stressed by his weight. He was so beloved that many people would simply refuse to believe he was dead, and the public would invent sightings, till even the dead Elvis took on a celebrity of its own.

The next day, a reporter asked Jerry Lee what he thought when he heard the news.

“I was glad,” he reportedly said. “Just another one out of the way. I mean, Elvis this, Elvis that. All we hear is Elvis. What the shit did Elvis do except take dope I couldn’t get ahold of?”

He was drunk at the time, and sick, and hurting, and angry.

He did not mean those words.

“I loved Elvis,” he says now.

Everybody loved him, didn’t they?

He does not believe Elvis is alive; that stuff is for tourists. But he is haunted, a little bit.

“I don’t know what was on his mind,” he said of that night Elvis called and asked him to come see him, “but he had something on his mind. But I hit that gate, boy . . . ,” and the police came, and so he will never know. Some would say Jerry Lee wanted to be him, to crash the gates and seize the castle, but that was wrong. They were too different, he says, and wanted different things from their lives. . . . Sometimes it seems like all there ever was, between him and Elvis, is unanswered questions.

“I think of him,” he says now, “quite a bit.”

But he does not like to think of that night.


In late ’77, he made a solemn and sober-seeming appearance on Nashville Remembers Elvis, a television special, singing “Me and Bobby McGee” and “You Win Again,” which seemed a mournful, rueful tribute to Elvis from his most persistent rival. The year before, he had told a camera crew that Elvis had failed rock and roll, that “he let the Bobbys take it, Bobby Vinton, Bobby Darin, all the Bobbys,” and they turned it into treacle. “I think he let us down,” he still says now, though with less scorn than sorrow.