Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(136)

Just a few more weary days, and then

I hope to God I’ll fly away



“Mickey’s a good person, too. He wanted to be just like Jerry Lee Lewis. He did great, but you can’t get by with just one hit record,” or however many he had. “That boy’s livin’ in a dream world, if he thinks he’s . . .” in the same league as his cousin. But like him, “he knows how to go to church on a song.”

With “Rockin’ My Life Away” and “Over the Rainbow,” it appeared as if there was hope for Jerry Lee and Elektra. Sometime in 1980, he went to the Caribou Ranch recording studio in Colorado to cut a marathon list of songs, more than thirty in all, everything from “Lady of Spain” to “Tennessee Waltz” to “Autumn Leaves” to “Fever.” He did songs he knew from childhood, like “I’m Throwing Rice” and “Easter Parade,” and a whole passel of gospel numbers, including “On the Jericho Road,” “Old-Time Religion,” “Blessed Jesus, Hold My Hand,” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” There were even a few moving new ballads, including a soaring performance on “That Was the Way It Was Then.” And once again he did them all for nothing. Deemed subpar by Elektra executives, the recordings were shelved for decades, available even today only as bootlegs. Many fans would come to consider the Caribou recordings one of the best albums that never was—though actually there was enough material for two or three albums and certainly one of pure gospel. He thought it was good music and one more example of the moneymen messing up an otherwise fine effort.

His relationship with Elektra quickly soured. “I said, ‘It’s not workin’. I don’t feel it workin’, and it’s not happenin’.’ I didn’t want to stay. I wanted away from all of ’em.”

His only solace was on the highway with his road-tested band, including guitarists James Burton and Kenny Lovelace, bassist Bob Moore, and drummer Buddy Harman. “And that’s all we needed,” he says. “You had yourself a band there nobody could ever touch. They followed me. They were such great musicians. It’s a one-time-around deal. You’ll never have it again.”


What happened next has become a legend in the family, though the cousins still disagree on the details. Jerry Lee was doing a show in Dayton, but he was drunk and sick. He had challenged the disgruntled crowd to fight him, and things were going south. Then suddenly Jimmy Swaggart, who was doing a crusade in Ohio at the time, walked onto the stage, told the crowd he was taking his cousin away to take care of him—some cheered at that—and told Jerry Lee he would fight him if he had to, to save his life.

“He didn’t let me know he was gonna be there,” Jerry Lee recalls now. “I don’t recall bein’ in that bad a shape. I kinda just went along with it. I couldn’t just kick him off the stage. I stood up, we shook hands, and we left.”

When they got offstage, there was business to attend to. “You want to take me in your plane, or you want me to have mine come get us?” Jerry asked his cousin.

“Naw, we’ll take mine,” Jimmy Lee answered.

It was a long way from stealing scrap iron in Concordia Parish.

On the way out, Jerry Lee says, his cousin “invaded my dressing room and flushed all my pills down the commode. It made me mad. I said, ‘Jimmy, you didn’t have no right to do that.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I did.’

“I went and stayed at his house for five or six days,” he says, down in Baton Rouge. Swaggart administered a cure that seemed to consist mostly of boiled shrimp. “I must have ate a tub,” he laughs. “They were real nice to me while I was there. There’s no doubt about that.”

After a few days, Swaggart told him, “I can’t see as how there’s really that much wrong with you,” and let him go.

Looking back, Jerry Lee has little inclination to second-guess his cousin. “I think he was . . . he was right. He was right in what he was doing and what he thought and what he thinks.”

But what was wrong with Jerry Lee could not be cured with a few days of clean living.


On the twenty-eighth of June, 1981, after a show in Chattanooga, he complained that his stomach was on fire. But he felt better by morning, and the next day he was back in Nesbit, lounging at his pool, which had been impossible for the IRS to haul away. He was Jerry Lee Lewis, not some puny man, and a stomachache was nothing to fret about.

On the morning of June 30, he awoke with a pain like nothing he had ever felt before and began spitting up blood.

“I was standin’ in front of the mirror in the bathroom. And I had an old gal back there, KK was her name,” he says. “I had a bad case of indigestion. Heartburn. And I said, ‘Man!’ I said, ‘Give me a glass of water with some bakin’ soda in it. That’ll knock this heartburn out. And everything will be all right.’ And I did that, and when I did, immediately, my stomach—I saw it open up! It just . . . hit me. And I fell to the floor.

“And I . . . I know how it is if you’re gonna die. I can feel that, you know?

“And I called KK in there. I couldn’t move a finger. And I told her, ‘KK, if you could get an ambulance here in the next five to ten minutes, I believe I can get to the hospital and I believe I’ll be all right. But if you don’t do that, I’m gon’ be dead here in the next fifteen minutes.’”