Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(146)

“Well, let me get back to where we started,” he went on, “the Book of Acts, second chapter. Read it!” and it is unclear if Jerry Lee is talking about the recording session he is in now or the one he was at some thirty-three years before, when he and Sam Phillips argued faith into the early morning.

“Pentecostal. You are what you are,” Jerry Lee told the room. “You’re realistic and you’re real, or you’re not.”

Then he turned to the people in the booth, behind the glass. “Now I’m watching you people in there,” he said. “I know what you’re thinkin’. I know what you’re lookin’ at. You ain’t foolin’ Jerry Lee Lewis for a minute.”

Elvis stared down from the wall.

Jerry Lee met his gaze.

“Now, if I could just call this dude back here for about fifteen minutes, we could show you a trick. . . . Never be another Elvis Presley. He had that somethin’. Dynamic, you know? Somethin’ that would make you want to drive ten thousand miles to see him if you only had fifteen cents in your pocket. You’d get the money somehow to go.” He told a story of him and Elvis and the army and how Elvis got upset. Then he recalled the day he first saw him, how he pulled up to Sun in that ’56 Lincoln, “I wanted to see what he looked like. He rolled out of that car and he walked in and he looked just exactly like he looked. Dangerous. . . . We had some times. But those days are gone, aren’t they?”

Someone in the room said no, there was still Jerry Lee.

Jerry Lee, seeming oddly isolated even in this cramped little room, almost insecure, apologized for being so slow to get the final take on the record. “Well, ol’ Jerry Lee is really tryin’ to get it together. I know I haven’t quite gotten there yet . . . but I am really workin’ on it with everything I’ve got,” and now it is clear he is talking not about the session but something more. “I’ve had a rough struggle. I got strung out for a couple of years on all kinds of drugs, junk, whiskey, and everything else. And you’ve just got to back off, man, or you’re not gonna make it. Record companies are not gonna buy you, they’re not gonna produce you, they’re not gonna release a record on you, they’re not gonna back you up, if you don’t back yourself up. And they can spot you a mile off, if you’ve got a shot of Demerol or somethin’. . .

“Brother, I don’t mean to be gettin’ into that. It’s just a pleasure talkin’ to somebody.”

He half-talked his way through some lines from “Damn Good Country Song” to applause from people who may or may not have recognized it as one of his records. Then, as Guterman recounts, he went back to the song at hand and cut it till he was mostly happy. “This is a hit,” he said. “I think I can cut a hit with this song.” But he became frustrated with one little piece of it, couldn’t quite get it right.

“Call Sam,” he said, but then immediately, “please don’t.”


In October 1991, a police officer in Indio, California, saw a man driving on the wrong side of the road in a Jaguar. It was Jimmy Swaggart, and he was with a prostitute, reported the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He was in California for a revival.

This time, he was not contrite. He told his congregation that God told him to return to the pulpit. “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.”

“And they lined up,” says Jerry Lee of his cousin’s flock.

It was just a power they both had, for being forgiven.

Jerry Lee needed it more often, in smaller doses.

“But I never pretended nothin’,” he says.


For Jerry Lee, it was the beginning of a period of withdrawal, in which the news he made was mostly in the National Enquirer. He did few shows, fewer recordings. Other, lesser performers would have called it retirement, but he was aching to get back in front of an audience, to get back in a studio and cut a new record.

“I don’t know where I’d go,” he says now, “if I didn’t have that stage.”

A year passed that way, two, three. In spring of ’93, he loaned his name to a short-lived Memphis nightclub called the Jerry Lee Lewis Spot. Then, with the IRS still dogging him, he fled, to become a tax exile in a country that knew how to treat its artists. He and Kerrie and Lee moved to Dublin, where musicians are exempt from taxes under Irish law.

Kerrie, on an Irish television talk show, said they loved Ireland and planned to make it their home, and that the womanizing, hard-living man now wanted to live quietly. “I caught him at the right time,” she said. She claimed that Jerry Lee was at peace in Dublin. “He loves the rain,” she said. It reminded him of sleeping under a tin roof at home in Black River. “The rain was very soothing . . . the drumming of the rain.”


While they were in Dublin, the IRS hired a locksmith to open the gates on the Nesbit house—he had title to the house only through a lifetime ownership agreement, so the house itself could not be taken—and started to empty the sprawling brick house of everything but children’s toys. Federal agents carried out two grand pianos, a pinball machine, a pool table, a box of Christmas decorations, a riding lawn mower, model cars, including a pink Cadillac, eight swords, a pen-and-ink sketch of Jerry Lee Lewis, a Sun Records clock, a poster signed by Fats Domino, every stick of furniture, two cases of Coke bottles, an empty gun cabinet, eight ceramic cups (one broken), a toothbrush holder, forty-eight records, twenty-five pipes, seventeen jackets (some leather), a candelabra, a Jerry Lee Lewis beer stein, a box of piano-shaped knickknacks, and one warped and buckled Starck upright piano.