Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(134)

Once upon a time, he knows, “Elvis was a rocker. Oh, yeah.”

A great singer? Of course. And “a great star.”

Jerry Lee? He was a better pure musician than Elvis, truer to the spirit of rock and roll, and both of them knew it.

Where do they rank in the pantheon of the music?

“After me was Elvis,” he says, and that will make some people angry, those who followed this music and those who still wait for Elvis to reappear in line at Walmart or behind a newspaper at Waffle House. But if you know how Jerry Lee Lewis looks at the world and his place in it, then you know he has paid his old friend a great compliment.





14


“BABIES IN THE AIR”




Memphis and Nashville

1979

“A woman looked at my hands once,” he says.

“I’m surprised,” she said to him, “they’re not bigger.”

“No,” he told her, “but they’re perfect.”

People forgave him the braggadocio, the excesses, the indulgences and wickedness, forgave him everything just to hear him use those hands. The oldest and truest fans thought he had earned it; the new ones, seeing him play on television or nostalgia shows or sold-out arenas in far-off lands, some for the first time, were dumbfounded. In an age of machined music, of sound effects, this was what it was supposed to be. Guitar buffs said the same thing when they saw Stevie Ray Vaughan pick his Stratocaster—that it was so much more than music. Jerry Lee’s fans did not have to proclaim him to be anything; if they waited long enough, he would do it for them. They knew that the rest of it was just showing off, the way he played with his feet, his elbows—even his behind. (“You can do it,” Jerry Lee says, “but you have to have a perfect one.”)

But as his hands flew across the keys in ’79, the corrosion was starting to show. The maintenance he had refused to do on his life—the maintenance mortal people did on their bodies and their money and their future—had long been neglected, and now it was beginning to eat through the indestructible exterior, through the very flesh and personality, of the man.

He was not making much new money, and now he found himself in hock to the United States government. He owed the tax man at least a million dollars, the government said. Internal Revenue came for it the first time in January of ’79, raiding the Nesbit ranch as if he was some kind of subversive, then held an auction in Memphis to liquidate his treasure. The United States Treasury had little need for a tractor that once belonged to Jerry Lee Lewis. On the block that day was a 1935 Ford two-door sedan, a ’41 Ford convertible, drop-top Cadillacs, other luxury cars, motorcycles, televisions, gold and diamond rings, gold coins, pianos and other musical instruments, and what federal agents described as an arsenal of modern and antique firearms. Agents also found $31,000 in cash in one bathroom, in a brown paper grocery bag. Jerry Lee did not trust banks much and had rarely had a checking account.

“I think they’re pretty cruel people, to take your cars,” he says.

From the beginning, he said that any allegations of tax fraud were flat untrue. His bookkeeping had been, for decades, less than perfect, “but I paid my taxes,” he says. And if he was short, over the years, he made it right. “They said I owed something, I paid it, and I wiped the slate clean.” But the IRS said he owed more, more than he could pay.

“They was gonna send me up the river.”


He needed a big hit now, a moneymaker, more than ever, at least since his breakthrough record. “And Jerry Lee Lewis don’t know the meaning of the word defeat,” he says now. After his tenure at Mercury was done, he signed with another label, Elektra, and went back, for a while at least, to doing the kind of music he wanted to record, music without a phalanx of violins and a landslide of overproduction. In a few days’ worth of sessions in January 1979, he cut his most recent in a growing list of anthems, a Mack Vickery song called “Rockin’ My Life Away.” While his voice was showing its scars and the words were frequently obscure, Jerry Lee delivered them with commitment, and the beat was pure Louisiana boogie-woogie.

His new producer at Elektra, Bones Howe, had worked on Elvis’s celebrated 1968 comeback special, and he was sympathetic to Jerry Lee’s mind-set. Together they stripped his band down to something closer to what he used on the road, and the little group romped its way through Bob Dylan’s “Rita May” and Sonny Throckmorton’s “I Wish I Was Eighteen Again” and Arthur Alexander’s “Every Day I Have to Cry,” in which he pushed on past the original lyrics and made up some new lyrics of his own about the life he lived and the women he had loved, some longer than others:

Once there was Dorothy, and then came Jane

Look out Myra—you look insane

Come on Jaren, you struttin’ your stuff

I think I’ll take Punkin, ’cause I can’t get enough



(Punkin was a longtime girlfriend)

I wanna thank you very much for lis’nin’ to me

’Cause brother, let me tell you something—I really need it

Come on, girls, I’m a single man again

I’m really waitin’, waitin’, waitin’ just to hang it in




That spring, for the first time since he’d started popping little white pills in the Wagon Wheel a quarter century before, his body rebelled against the chemicals he had fed it. One morning in March, he woke up at home to find he could not catch his breath. The ambulance rushed him to the hospital, in what the doctors would call respiratory distress.