Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(149)

But there is no other place for him.

“Where would I go?” he says again. “I wouldn’t know where to go.”





16


LAST MAN STANDING




Nesbit

2000S

He had never much cared what other people thought, or at least that was the armor he wore. He probably did care, some, or he would have given up, would have stopped playing his piano and singing songs, but he never did. But you will play hell getting him to concede it. He played from love, the same love “my mama and daddy had. They loved music.” He had risen from professional and personal ruin, from death itself, and public infamy, so many times; could anybody even keep track of how many? He would be lauded onstage, honored with his industry’s highest acclaim, and go home to a house he did not own, which he arranged to be filed under another man’s name, so that the government could never take it away. He was seventy-one years old, in wretched health, his body still polluted by the painkillers he had battled across the second half of his life. And as he sat in the gloom of his big house in Nesbit, there beside the tranquil lake, he was not thinking retirement, or even death, though death had begun, naturally, to creep into his thoughts. He was thinking comeback. He just needed a record, needed a hit. Some things, he says, smiling, “don’t never change.”

He knew it was time to cast off his worldly demon, his addiction, or that comeback was unlikely. He was too far into his life to choke that demon down, and still pour out his songs.

He also knew that if he did not beat it, he would probably die.

He was the last man standing, quite literally, the last of the big Sun boys from the beginning of rock and roll.

Others were still alive, but time had taken either their legs or their will.

Chuck Berry was even older than he, and frail, though still playing.

Little Richard had bad legs, found it hard to walk. He would talk of retirement, but Jerry Lee would dismiss it. “He’ll not retire,” he said. “Not Richard. As long as they make wheelchairs, he’ll be onstage.”

Fats Domino had vanished into his house in Louisiana.

“Fats is, is kind of . . . funny about things. I don’t know. He’s a hard cat to figure out, sometimes. He’d like to do him some more shows, really, but he’s—he’s too nervous about it. He says, ‘I don’t think them people really want to see me.’ I said, ‘I think you’re wrong there, Fats. They want to see you. They love you, man.’”

He did not believe in his own passing, his fading, as Fats did.

“I just needed a record,” he says.

His daughter, Phoebe, had come to live with him. She has said many times that she has devoted her life to him, even forfeiting her own personal life, even children, to help care for him. She had seen her daddy rise and fall many times across her life, like some yo-yo, so quick, at times, that it seemed almost impossible in a waking world, more like a dream. Kerrie had redecorated the house—the Coca-Cola wallpaper is still there in the kitchen—but had not, despite her very public accounts of Jerry Lee’s clean living, cured him.

Phoebe took a hand in her daddy’s professional life, searching for a way he could reenter the business beyond the occasional, weary nostalgia show, the tiring European trips, and small events closer to home.

Jerry Lee went searching for a cure of another kind.

He prayed.

He prayed for God to cast off his demon.

“If you’re not in the hands of God, you’re over,” he says, not with the desperation that some men find as old age advances and death stands at the foot of their bed, but with a lifetime of conviction that in the end God would decide his fate in this world and the next. This time, he is certain God gave him another chance to make music, a little more music.

“He calls the shots,” he says. “Broke me from my habit. I’m a very hardheaded person. I had to really be proven to.”

He laughs. “I was proven to.”

Now he calls it one of the hardest things he has ever done. It was not just a rolling addiction, but a lifetime accumulation, sixty years of rattling pills and needles, that he had to relinquish.

“I have myself pretty well straightened out,” he says, looking back on that time. “It’s been a real uphill climb, I tell you. Never be enough money to make me do that again.”

He remembers the usual pain of withdrawal, the shakes and chills that others live through, but he met that with prayer. In the end, he conquered it there in the dark of his bedroom, but not alone.

“God did,” he says.

He was still frailer than he would have liked. But he was ready to take the stage.


His professional deliverance, when it finally came, seemed almost heaven-sent.

Steve Bing, the businessman, film producer, and philanthropist, had inherited some $600 million from his grandparents when he was a teenager, and by 2008 had most of it left. He had written movies like Kangaroo Jack, produced the Stallone remake of Get Carter, and invested in the wildly successful animated film Polar Express. He had a love for rock and roll and produced and financed the Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light, which was directed by Martin Scorsese. He put his money to work for causes he believed in, investing millions in congressional races around the country. And one such cause was the music of Jerry Lee Lewis.

In the early 2000s, Bing decided to finance and coproduce a new record featuring Jerry Lee, in duet with—or backed musically by—some of the most legendary performers in rock and roll and country music, as well as some others who just badly wanted to be part of the project.