Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(141)
Although the charges were dropped, he still owed the government more than $600,000, and federal agents seemed content to follow him to every club date with a briefcase to collect.
He traveled to Europe for another tour in 1985, but he seemed to be running on fumes. Pale, unsteady, he told an audience in Belfast, “I’m doing the best I can tonight, but . . . I’m just sick. I’m out of breath. I can’t seem to breathe right, but I’m tryin’.” He tried to shrug off what everyone was thinking: “You can call it what you want to. I’m not drinkin’. I’m not takin’ any dope, ’cause I can’t find any.” But the humor was halfhearted, and he left the stage a short time later. The shots he had self-administered for the pain—now he knows he was simply addicted to them—were no longer giving him much relief, so he did more of them. “The dope, it didn’t do nothin’ for me,” he says. “They pushed me into it,” he says of doctors who first prescribed it, but he admits he shared the blame: “It takes two to tango.”
The best balm, he had always found, was to just drift back in time. Back home in Memphis, he reunited with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison to record an album called Class of ’55, a commemoration of their contributions to a whole new kind of American music, and a tribute to the man who could not be there, Elvis. Jerry Lee did the requisite boogie number, “Keep My Motor Runnin’,” and a take on “Sixteen Candles,” and joined with the others for John Fogerty’s “Big Train (from Memphis)” and the Waylon Jennings song “Waymore’s Blues,” but he was in pain throughout, and looked it. In photographs of the recording sessions, the other men stand; he is sitting down. He looks even more troubled in black and white.
He says he enjoyed seeing his old friends/competitors again, but the best part of that reunion may have been not the music, but rather the on-camera sessions in which the aging rock-and-roll pioneers talked about the raw and beautiful beginning of it all.
In November, he was taken by ambulance back to the hospital. His stomach was perforated again. “I had seven bleeding ulcers in my stomach,” he says. “That time, it almost killed me.”
He did not behave. In the middle of the operating room, he stood up on the hospital bed like it was a piano, raving, out of his mind. He does not remember much of it. Much of what happened to him in the coming days happened in sunbursts of pain shrouded in a morphine cloud. The doctors had to cut away a third of his stomach in an attempt to save his life.
But there was more damage, as it turned out.
“I used a syringe that hadn’t been sterilized,” says Jerry Lee, resulting in a massive infection in his thigh that went untreated. “Dr. Fortune . . . he had to cut all that out from my hip, with infection on both sides.” Fortune, who had saved his defiant patient more than once before, was incensed. “And to think I pulled you through all that,” he told Jerry Lee. “I had six doctors flown in here, man!’”
“Boy, he was mad about it,” Jerry Lee remembers.
Again doctors were unsure he would recover.
He looked up through a haze and saw Carl Perkins.
“Hey, Carl,” he said weakly, “what are you doin’ here?”
Two months later, rock-and-roll royalty gathered in an opulent ballroom in New York to honor the survivors and the fallen. The Waldorf-Astoria had seldom beheld so much hair gel, and had never hosted a gathering such as this. Keith Richards, sunken-cheeked and hollow-eyed, lounged at one elegant, candlelit table with tuxedo-bound Ronnie Wood, separated by a centerpiece of pale pink tulips. Quincy Jones, once Big Maybelle’s bandleader, now a legend, dined on smoked Colorado river trout. John Fogerty chatted with Neil Young about a time when their music made politicians sweat and worry, when the radio sang of love and Vietnam.
Pups, all of them. The real legends, the ones who showed the way, were past middle age now, those who had survived at all. They were ushered into this opulence, the living and movies of the dead, to be feted as the first class inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was January 23, 1986, three decades after the great year of Elvis. The inductees included some of the most influential musicians and personalities in music history, and as presenters called their names, they rose and walked to the stage, some more stiffly than others: Fats Domino, who would not follow Jerry Lee Lewis onstage in New York; the Everly Brothers, who would not follow him, either; James Brown, who had walked in from the wings of the Apollo and kissed his cheek. But it was a hard business, this rock and roll, and sometimes when they called the names, there was a second or so of sad silence: For Buddy Holly, who rocked ’em to the floor and became his true friend. For Sam Cooke, who sang prettier, perhaps, than any man he ever heard, who called him “cousin.” And, most of all, for Elvis, who had listened to Jerry Lee play the same song a hundred times, and cried before him and others at Sun.
When the organizers started planning the gala, a year before the event, they had wondered who would accept the award for Jerry Lee Lewis, certain that there was no way he could rise one more time. The musicians in the room had last seen him in hospital beds or too sick to stand; others had seen the headlines, the death watches. It had seemed only a matter of time until he joined the ones who fell from the sky or swallowed down their own destruction.
Keith Richards swayed to the stage and stripped off his black tuxedo coat to reveal a yellow faux-leopard-skin jacket, to wild applause, looking a little surprised, as if he had just been roused from a good nap. “It’s very difficult for me to talk about Chuck Berry because I lifted every lick he ever played. . . . This is the gentleman that started it all, as far as I’m concerned.” The house band—Paul Shaffer and his band from Late Night with David Letterman—ripped into “Johnny B. Goode,” and Berry, still spry, duckwalked onto the stage. Richards, once punched in the eye by Berry at a rehearsal, hugged him and handed him his statue.