Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(148)

Jerry Lee spent more and more time at the ranch, but it was quieter now; music no longer poured from the place when he came home from a show. “She took my records,” he said, in the divorce. The tours of the house ceased, at least. He could roam the dark halls in peace, still in lingering addiction, still hoping for another comeback, and why not? The last time he looked in the mirror, it was still Jerry Lee Lewis he saw looking back.

The pills were no longer as easy to obtain. Dr. Nick had finally been censured and lost his license after a review by the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners. In the late 1990s he tried for a third time to regain his license, but officials of the Board of Health evoked the ghost of Elvis and the ruin of Jerry Lee as evidence against him, and he was denied.

Jerry Lee had somehow passed into the realm of the old master, and more than ever the younger stars—some of them legends themselves—wanted to be close to him, to reach out and touch history. Some of that attention he welcomed; some, he resented. It depended on the musician. He had seen his life mirrored—though that mirror was sometimes cracked—in every corner of pop culture. He had misbehaved badly, and if he had any regret, it was that some of those who followed him believed that was all there was to it. “I’ve seen ’em, these new so-called bad boys. They try. They really try. I see it, and it’s as phony as can be.” He has seen them trash their hotel rooms in celebration, because they can afford to smash as many hotel rooms as they want, at least until the money runs low. “Well, it just don’t work that way. You got to feel it, boy. Be what you are. If you feel it, you can jump up on that piano, kick the stool back, beat it with a shoe. But you got to feel it. The music has to be there. It has to be there, first.”


Sam Phillips died in the dog days of summer, July 30, 2003, of respiratory failure, two days before the little studio at 706 Union was declared a national historic landmark. He had been a smoker much of his life. Jerry Lee was sad when he heard the news, of course, despite their stormy time together. But it was not only that institutional, historical sadness people feel when someone of importance has passed. Jerry Lee also understood what Sam had done for American music, and so for the music of the world. By taking white music and black music by the hands and joining them together, Sam Phillips not only helped make way for rock and roll but broke down some barriers between those two peoples, made the world a little better to live in, and certainly more joyful. He would record anything, if he felt it, if it moved his soul even a little and made him tap his toes, and he did not give a damn what color the man’s skin had; whether it was a towering black man from the Delta, like Howlin’ Wolf, or a brooding Arkansas cotton picker, like Johnny Cash. He stamped it all in hot wax and sent it to a pasty-white teenager in Middle America, so he could feel everything they felt—and more, for the distance it traveled. And if that was the so-called danger in rock and roll, then he was a thoroughly dangerous man.

“Sam seen it in me,” Jerry Lee says, and he does not care that dollar signs were flashing in Phillips’s eyes. He knew Sam was a businessman—all their problems stemmed from that—but also a true believer in the cause, which was why it hurt Jerry Lee when he hesitated over “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” and seemed to turn away from him when the debacle of London knocked them all out of the clouds. People always talked about the almost religious fervor they saw in Sam Phillips when he heard something he loved, something brand-new or sometimes something very old. Jerry Lee saw that fervor, veiled in tears, when Sam Phillips walked from the room after hearing him play Hank’s “You Win Again.”

But the sadness Jerry Lee felt pushing down on him that summer was more than that. The old kings were dying, one by one: Roy Orbison in 1988, Charlie Rich in ’95, Carl Perkins in ’98, Johnny Cash in ’03. And the music itself—as much as people remembered, as much as they loved it—seemed to be more and more a thing of museums, of a bygone day.

“We had such a good time,” he says.


In 2004, Rolling Stone, the magazine that had once all but accused him of murder, placed him on its list of the top one hundred artists of all time. He was about to enter his eighth decade, and he was still looking for a record deal. It was not that he believed he had anything left to prove, he says, or even that he longed for some new validation. It was not even the money, though he knew he had to work, had to earn. It was simpler than any of that: He truly did not know what else to be, other than a rock and roller, a country singer, a piano player, driving his band across the country and around the world, with one eye on the audience the whole time.

“I train my boys to follow me,” he says. “I build up a show. I build it up. And I pick my tempo up at certain times, like I want it. And it brings the crowd up.”

He takes his thumb and jacks it into the air, once, twice, three times.

“When I do that, it means pick up, or else. It means pick it up, or get off the stage.”

He knows he has slipped below that perfection, in the harshest times.

But it can be that way again. He knows it.

“I want that show to be right. And I want that song to be right, when I play it on the piano and sing it. And I want that band to back me up like they’re supposed to.”

He says all this, thinking back to that time, as he recovers from a litany of ailments that prevent him from standing still, or even sitting still, for more than a few minutes at a time.