Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(59)
It’s called the Lewis Boogie—Lewis way.
I do my little boogie-woogie every day.
These were the first—or at least among the first—recordings in which he refers to himself in the lyrics, something he would do onstage and in the studio for half a century.
He would burn a few days in Memphis, and then head back out on the road. “I missed it,” he says. That year, he played the Rebel Room in Osceola, Arkansas, a place with chicken wire across the stage to protect the band from flying beer bottles. The wire always offended him—“I didn’t want nothin’ between me and the audience”—but it was a place where bottles were prone to come winging at the singers’ heads. The police came in twice that night, to quell riots and thwart attempted murder, and it was past midnight before the crowd, some too drunk to move, settled down even the slightest bit and actually listened.
Some say it was there in Osceola that it happened for the first time. Some say it was at another raggedy little bar over in Blytheville. Jerry Lee knows only what happened inside. He was getting a little sick of trying to sing to drunks who thought music was just a soundtrack for fighting or falling down or throwing up; sometimes he was not really, truly heard. That was when Jerry Lee uncorked his lightning and hit those bleary-eyed drunks and big-haired women right between the eyes with a hot poker of rock and roll. He started rolling out that two-handed boogie intro he had heard in the Wagon Wheel years before, and snatched them up on their unsteady feet. He brought the women right up to the edge of the stage, breathing so hard their blouse buttons were hanging on for dear life. But it was different now. He was not some kid feeling his way through a song, like he’d been in the Wagon Wheel. He was a real live man.
Whose barn? What barn? My barn!
And when the song was over, the crowd screamed and screamed and demanded that they play it again. So they did, and then played it again. Jerry Lee looked back at J. W. Brown, who was playing bass for him on the road, and at his drummer, Russ Smith.
“Well, there it goes, J. W.,” Jerry Lee said. “Think we got a hit?”
“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” remained his pocket ace, a live music phenomenon, a song people talked about from town to town and came to ask for, but it had no radio play to keep it alive. Jerry Lee, as proud as he was of “Crazy Arms,” knew that his first record hadn’t been the push he needed and would not carry him where he hungered to go, not onto national television and nationwide play on radio, not to Hollywood, not across the seas. “I just couldn’t throw that knockout punch,” he says.
So he went to Sam Phillips and pulled out his hole card, only to find that the poker players at Sun Records were suddenly playing checkers like tired old men. Suddenly, the label that had taken that flying leap into the unknown with Elvis Presley was too squeamish for real rock and roll. Jack Clement believed that Elvis had left no room for another Southern white boy singing and playing rebel rock and roll.
“He told me, ‘Elvis done drove that into the ground and broke it off,’” recalls Jerry Lee.
Not only did Sam Phillips not much want to record it, he seemed downright afraid of it. “Awwww, no, that’s too vulgar, much too risqué. It’ll never go. No way,” Sam told Jerry Lee.
“It’s a hit record,” Jerry Lee argued.
Others say Sam must have had more enthusiasm for the song than that, though probably not as much as Jerry Lee. For Sam, good music was both passion and business—and, even if he loved it, this song was a business risk.
To hedge his bets, Phillips told Clement to write a new song for him, and the result was a song with perhaps the most ignoble beginnings any song could have. The story goes that Clement was in the bathroom, thinking about a breakup with his girlfriend and, for some reason, reincarnation, and how funny it would be if he came back as something floating in the bowl and if, when his girlfriend looked down, there he’d be, winking at her. He could not write that, of course, but it was inspiration:
If you see a head a-peepin’ from a crawdad hole,
If you see somebody climbin’ up a telephone pole—it’ll be me!
This was the song Sun Records picked as the A side of Jerry Lee’s next recording, the song Sam picked to propel him into stardom. Jerry Lee went back into the studio, and gave it all he had.
He knew, heartsick, it would never fly. “I said, ‘Awww, that’ll never be a hit, by itself.’”
Jerry knew he had to take a stand. He made it clear that he intended on recording “Shakin’” somewhere, and Phillips finally agreed to make it the B side of “It’ll Be Me.” Phillips would say later that he did it only to placate Jerry Lee, who knew what he wanted even before he had any real clout. He took a few early stabs at recording “Shakin’” in the studio, but they were dry runs at best, never capturing the spirit of the live shows; it was hard to know whether that was even possible.
It was sometime in February 1957 when Jerry Lee finally went back into the studio with Roland Janes and Jimmy Van Eaton to try it again. They had done five passable takes of “It’ll Be Me” when Clement put on enough tape for just one take of the Shakin’ song. Phillips had told him not to waste a great deal of time on it, and time was money. This time, Jerry Lee pumped the piano the way he remembered it from the Wagon Wheel, and Janes infused the record with his high, keening guitar, unleashing licks and fills that would be copied by other guitarists for decades. That day, in the studio that had given birth to the sound of Elvis, to “Blue Suede Shoes” and “I Walk the Line” and so much more, Jerry Lee ignored the acoustic tiles and the glass window and the machines and sang it like he would have done it for real people, like he sang it in an Arkansas beer joint and a tight little auditorium in Billings, Montana, and he played it wild and rough and perfect enough. And when he was done, exactly two minutes and fifty-two seconds later, the three young men in the studio just sat there, kind of still, because every one of them knew.