Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(5)
His friends and closest kin, most of them, are protective of him now, always polishing his legend. They will fight you if you question his generosity, or the goodness that, they assert, shines just beneath his more public persona. He has played benefit after benefit for charity, even when he himself was busted, or nearly so. That does not mean he does not expect to get his way, almost all the time. “He don’t jump on top of the piano anymore,” said guitar picker Kenny Lovelace, who played three feet away from him for forty-five years. “But still, he walks out there and sits down, and you know the Killer is here.”
“I was born to be on a stage,” says the man himself. “I couldn’t wait to be on it. I dreamed about it. And I’ve been on one all my life. That’s where I’m the happiest. That’s where I’m almost satisfied.” He knows that is what musicians say, what a musician, in his twilight, is supposed to say. “I do really love it,” he says, in a way that warns you not to doubt him. “You have to give up a lot. It’s hard on a family, on your women, on the people that loves you.
“I picked the dream.”
Even if it was worn and scarred, or hidden in some raggedy place at the end of a gravel road, or protected by chicken wire, he would drive six hundred miles, even club a man with a microphone, to possess it. And for much of his life he gave his fans more than they paid for, gave it to them slow and soulful and fast and hard, till the police came clawing through the auditorium doors, refusing to relinquish the stage even as other rock-and-roll idols, including the great Chuck Berry, waited helpless and seething in the wings. In Nashville, three hundred frenzied girls in the National Guard Armory tore his clothes off his body, “down to my drawers,” and he grumbles about it to this day, about all those crazed, adoring women, because they cut short a song, dragged him off the stage, and cut short the show.
The dream is why, when news of his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin, Myra, caused promoters and some fans to turn away and his rocket ship to sputter, when scandal and changing times caused record sales to sag, he filled two Cadillacs with musicians and equipment and went on the road. He played big rooms at first, then dives or beer joints where he had to fight for his money or fight his way out the door. But he played, fueled by Vienna sausages, whiskey, and uppers, and the next day he rolled out of some little motel, said good-bye to women without names, and drove all day and into the night to play again. Others became footnotes, vanished. He fought, tore at it, one motel room, one bottle, one pill, one song at a time. And it is why, in the early days of his stardom, he would come back onstage when the house was dark and the door chained shut, to play some more. Other musicians on the bill, ones who would be legends, too, trickled back to the stage to sing with him, for that one last encore to the empty seats.
“I want to be remembered as a rock-and-roll idol, in a suit and tie or blue jeans and a ragged shirt, it don’t matter, as long as the people get that show. The show, that’s what counts,” he says. “It covers up everything. Any bad thought anyone ever had about you goes away. ‘Is that the one that married that girl? Well, forget about it, let me hear that song.’”
Hank Williams taught him this, and he never even met the man.
“It takes their sorrow, and it takes mine.”
He looks across the arc of bad-boy rockers who have come after him and laughs out loud; amateurs, pretenders, and whistle-britches, held together with hair spray. But worse, they were not true musicians, not troubadours, who lived on the road and met the people where they lived. He crashed a dozen Cadillacs in one year and played the Apollo. With racial hatred burning in the headlines, the audience danced in the seats to a white boy from the bottomland, backed by pickers who talked like Ernest Tubb. “James Brown kissed me on my cheek,” he says. “Top that.”
In recent years he has recorded two new albums, both critically acclaimed, and both made the Top 100. He did them between hospital visits: viral pneumonia, a stabbing recurrence of his arthritis (in his back, neck, and shoulders, never in his hands), and broken bones in his leg and hip have left him in pain and unable to travel or even sit for more than a few minutes for much of the past few years. But even at his lowest, of course, Jerry Lee was merely between resurrections. In March 2012 he married for the seventh time, to sixty-two-year-old Judith Brown, a former basketball star who had been married to his former wife’s little brother. She had come to help care for him when he was sick. To make the proverbial long story short, he got better. “I didn’t mean to fall in love with him,” she says, “but . . .” They married and honeymooned in Natchez, near the bridge he walked as a boy. By late summer 2013, he was back playing gigs in Europe, booking studio time in Los Angeles, buying a new Rolls-Royce and stopping for Sonic cheeseburgers before driving Judith’s Buick one hundred miles an hour down Interstate 55. The laws of Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the United States of America have never much applied.
Once, while mulling over a difficult question, he muttered, “This feller’s about to get shot.” And I thought, Well, I’m dead. It was only Gunsmoke he was watching over my shoulder. He’d seen it all before, and he knew what happened next.
“You know, you can load that .357 with .38 shells,” I told him, “and you won’t blow such deep holes in . . . things.” I waited a few flat, silent seconds, knowing I had wasted my breath.