Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(30)
“Then Mr. Bateman, the principal, come in, and asked me what had happened, and I told him,” and he even managed to make himself seem almost noble. “I said, ‘Mr. Bateman, they tried to make me go back to the sixth grade but I didn’t want to go back to the sixth grade and I wanted to stay in the seventh grade,’ and he said, ‘Son, I don’t blame you a bit, but I got to suspend you for two weeks, because we can’t have you killing teachers.’” Jerry told him, “Well, okay,” but what he was thinking was more like, Please, Mr. Fox, don’t throw me in that briar patch.
“I think he give Cecil two weeks, too.”
The two boys walked together through the gate.
“Well,” said Cecil, as they turned to go their separate ways, “see ya later, Killer.”
“And I been the Killer ever since,” says Jerry Lee. Most people think he got the nickname because of his wild stage show or his reputation offstage or worse, but it had nothing to do with any of that.
“I named him. I did,” recalled Cecil Harrelson, who would go on to be Jerry Lee’s road manager and his friend through good and awful times, who would hold men while Jerry Lee hit them, as they played and fought their way across the country and back again. “It’s funny. You pass through this life and you wake up one morning, and it’s about all behind you,” Cecil said shortly before his death, “but you never forget that about being boys. It’s the first thing you think of.”
Jerry Lee continued to educate himself, one genre and influence at a time. Sometimes a hit song came over him like a fever, and he quit whatever he was doing, left people standing slack-jawed, to go and play it himself and adapt it, in a matter of minutes, to his style. One day, it happened to him while he was on a date at the Arcade Theater. “I’d go see Gene Autry,” he recalls, “and just before the movie come on they’d take fifteen minutes and play Al Jolson songs on those 78 records. I was sittin’ there and I was listenin’. I had a girlfriend with me.”
Then something happened that got his attention. “Al Jolson come on, and he’s singin’ this song—I think it was ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye.’ And back then I could listen to a song an’, if I liked it, automatically I adapted that song into my mind. . . . I knew it word for word, melody for melody. I knew it. And I told my girlfriend, I says, ‘I gotta go use the restroom. I’ll be right back.’ And I left. I got on my bicycle and went home.
“I sat down at the piano and played that song—played it for two, three times, got it just like I wanted. I got back on my bicycle, went back to the theater, parked my bike, went inside, set down by Faye—her name was Faye, Faye Bryant. And she said, ‘You . . . you was gone quite a while, wasn’t you?’ I said, ‘Naw, I just went to use the restroom. Picked up some popcorn.’
“It’s unbelievable. But it happened.”
Other musical lessons took longer to sink in. It was about this time that Jerry Lee Lewis first heard the words and music of a painfully thin, sallow, brilliant man from the great state of Alabama. His mama loved Hank Williams, this man they called the Hillbilly Shakespeare, because he sang straight at her, the way he did every man and woman who had ever gone to bed unsure of what the new morning would bring.
Jerry Lee did not actually know it was genius, not quite yet. “I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t particularly care for him myself,” he says. “I didn’t think he could sing that good.” But in time, he began to listen closer, “and I was really wrong about that. It flowed out, that real stylist talent,” and suddenly it was like the man was singing right at him, too, even when the radio was off or when he was out of nickels at the jukebox and only static hissed from the spinning record.
He had practically been weaned on Jimmie Rodgers, but when he heard Hank Williams wail for his attention—really heard him—it was like he was hearing his own future sung to him. Williams had started singing on WSFA in Montgomery, with a voice that was so forlorn, it seemed trapped halfway between this and the other side. He had written songs on café napkins and scrap paper about the things that mattered—about women who did not love you back, and sons who called another man Daddy, and being so lonesome in the night that you wished you would die—and it wasn’t so awful somehow, to those cotton mill workers, pulpwooders, coal miners, sharecroppers, sweatshop workers, and the women who wiped the tables in the truck stops, when he sang their pain on the air. Then he made them laugh out loud, singing about wooden Indians that never got a kiss, and a beer bucket with a hole in it, and how that little dog better scoot on over because the big dog’s movin’ in. He could not read music or think of a song in notes but never had to, being a genius. He drank and took morphine and gobbled painkillers to smother the agony in a twisted back and a pressing darkness; he sang drunk onstage and sometimes did not show up at all, and people loved him anyway, because he belonged to them, broken whiskey bottles and littered pill bottles and needles and all, because when he sang, you could forget for a while the stabbing, slashing machines that took their fingers, and the rich man’s courts that sent them to rot in Atmore, Parchman, and Brushy Mountain.
Like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank was not afraid to yodel, even though the moneymen had told him that a yodel record would not sell in the modern age of American music, and certainly not sell outside the peckerwoods. He told them to go to hell. After a few smaller records he wrote himself, he finally found the song that would carry him to glory. “I can throw my hat onto the stage after I sing ‘Lovesick Blues,’” he said, “and my hat will get three encores.” And he was right.