Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(50)

“They say radio waves bounce,” he says. “Well, I reckon so.”

It pleases him, as an old man, to think of it like that, out there in space, looping through the universe between the stars, never ending.

And it makes him a little sad.

The song is forever.


Mr. Paul played the clubs for years. He lived long enough to see country music become so banal and plastic he could not feel it in his heart. He saw the blues go out of style, saw it replaced on the airwaves by something called disco and then slip deeper, further into a kind of empty posturing known as hip-hop, which did not seem like something, any of it, that a grown man would do. The few old men who remember him recall a genuine music man in a great, glorious time. Sometimes people leave this world just when they should.

Mr. Paul’s sound mostly died with him. The Wagon Wheel closed and returned to the weeds. The blind man never made a commercially viable record of his own, as far as anyone knows. But there is, if you look for it, a ghost of his piano still. After Jerry Lee left for Sun Studio, Mr. Paul’s old bandmate, the guitar picker Gray Montgomery, tried to sell Sam Phillips a song called “Right Now.” It was a swinging little guitar-driven song that was rich with rockabilly and featured a lovely piano solo by Paul Whitehead. Phillips said he liked the song fine, but he wanted to replace the piano with a saxophone. Saxophones were getting to be pretty big in redneck music. Besides, he had already locked up the most sensational, wildly wicked piano man in the whole known universe, maybe the most wild and wicked who had ever been, and he needed another piano record like he needed a cement lawn monkey. Montgomery, unwilling to change it, walked away and took the song to a small label instead. The song got jukebox play in and around Natchez, but it faded and all but vanished, as even some good songs are destined to do. But if you search for it on the new lightning of the Internet, on a little label called Beagle Records, you can find it, still, find Paul Whitehead, his piano solo ringing out so lovely, lovelier than can be described with black ink on white paper. It lasts just a few seconds, but it will be forever, too.





5


SUN




Highway 61

1956

The blacktop runs straight as a hypodermic across the great, flat, brown nothing, stabbing through the heart of the Delta for 323 miles, dreams and failed ambition piled like old bones in the ditches on either side. What waited on the other end of Highway 61, past the crossroad where Robert Johnson cut his deal with the devil and past a huge graveyard of lesser bargains, was the solution Jerry Lee Lewis was looking for. But he knew in his guts that his chances were running out. He stood in the middle of a cornfield near his mama and daddy’s house in Louisiana and watched his daddy work, watched him move like a machine down rows of dead stalks and knew he did not want to travel that haunted road to Memphis alone.

It was one of the few times in his life he felt that way, he concedes now. “I wanted my daddy with me,” he says. “I wasn’t going to Memphis on my own. That road, man, it got a lot of ’em, got a lot of us. . . . It ain’t just I wanted Daddy with me, I insisted.”

But it took some doing. “I was pulling corn with Daddy,” he remembers. “He did four rows to every two I did.” It was shell corn, late in the season, the ears gone hard on the stalk. It would be feed for cattle and hogs or ground up for meal or soaked in lye to slough away the hull for hominy. The husks were paper-dry and rustling and the silk as brittle as a dead man’s beard. The dust off the stalks and husks was stifling, floating in the sunlight, stirred up as the two men crashed through the crop. His heart was not in pulling corn any more than it was in chopping cotton or pushing a wheelbarrow, but he had a favor to ask his daddy and it was hard to catch the old man when he was just sitting in the shade, and it is insulting, in a way that is hard to explain, for one Southern man to watch another one work.

“Daddy,” he said, when he met Elmo coming the other way through the corn, “I been readin’ in this magazine about this man in Memphis named Sam Phillips. This magazine told about how he helped Elvis be a star.”

“Uh-huh,” his daddy said, and kept pulling.

“I want to go to Memphis. I want to show them what I can do.”

His daddy straightened up.

“Well, I don’t blame you son. I would, too.”

But Elmo was between construction jobs and there were debts to pay, and it took a whole tank of gas just to get to Memphis, and they would need hotel money, too. Neither one of them knew how long it would take to get these Memphis moneymen to hear them out, or even if they would let them in the door. But for Elmo, saying no would have been like seeing his own dream go dry on the stalk for a second time.

“I need to see that man,” said Jerry Lee. “I want to see if he can do for me what he done for Elvis. I want to see if he can make me a star.”

He had been shown the door in Shreveport and ignored in Nashville by men who thought music was a product you stamped out on a press, like car parts. He needed a risk taker, a rebel, and he believed—at least he believed it then—that Sam Phillips of Sun Records was that man. He could have gone on his own to audition for Sun, could have lived on saltine crackers and pork and beans and slept in the car, but he knew this was his best and maybe only chance to play and sing for people who knew what chance taking was about, who had already taken one flying leap into the unknown with the boy from Tupelo and found gold.