Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(60)
“One take . . . and silence,” recalls Jerry Lee. “It never had been silent in there before.”
And that was that. “Well, then we went over to Miss Taylor’s Restaurant—it was right close by—and had some country fried steak and rice and gravy and some turnip greens.” Later, Clement would say that the people who came by the studio almost wore out the tape, listening to it, the only tape of the only take. “Only time I did a song that way,” says Jerry Lee, as if there was some fate in it, or maybe even the hand of God, after all.
Sam Phillips listened to it and liked the song—it was hard not to like the song—but it did not matter that he liked it as a piece of music, any more than a man who bets on horses can make a living off a horse that only runs across a potato field. “The disc jockeys will not play it,” he said, so how would they ever get anyone to hear it? “It’ll bomb. ‘It’ll Be Me’ will be the record.’”
Forget television, he said. With visuals, it was even worse.
“That was the problem, see,” says Jerry Lee, “when I would sing. . .
All you gotta do, honey, is stand that thing in one little ol’ spot
An’ wiggle it around just a little bit.
“. . . I’d take my index finger and point it in the air, and wiggle it.”
To demonstrate, he sticks that finger in the air and rotates it around and around. Without the music, it looks precisely like what it is, what the twenty-one-year-old boy wanted it to look like for all those crazed fans. It did not matter that no one could actually see him do it on the record, if the song made it onto the radio or a jukebox. When he sang it, you could imagine it just fine, and some of the young women, well, could almost feel it.
When Elvis shook his leg, preachers throughout the land may have pretended it was the end of civilization as they knew it, but the sky did not fall, and the Mississippi did not run backward. Jerry Lee intended to follow suit. With his sure-thing hit record on tape but not yet in stores, not on the air, Jerry Lee took to the road again, to play it loud in one auditorium and VFW after another. He did not need to polish the song—that would be like stroking a mean cat—but he needed to get the people talking, get them all whipped up from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Then maybe, even if the police did storm the stage or blockade the convention halls, the disc jockeys would notice, and he would live on the air next to Elvis, or beyond him.
He did not know where he was, precisely, just somewhere in Canada. The caravan thundered down highways that were barely there, the roadbed eaten by permafrost, the gravel flying like buckshot against the bottoms of the big cars. There was a long Lincoln Continental, a Fleetwood Cadillac, a mean-looking Hudson Hornet, and a brand-new Buick Supreme; it was new for only a thousand miles or so, till the potholes got it. The big sedans might have been different colors, once, but now they were all a uniform gray, the color of the blowing dust. Jerry Lee rode in the passenger seat of the Buick, sick of this great distance between crowds and applause, six hundred, seven hundred miles a day. “I didn’t drive. . . . I was paid to play piano and sing. Stars don’t drive.” Instead, he read Superman, or used a cigarette lighter to fire up one cherry bomb after another and flung them out the half window to explode under the trailing cars.
“That first tour was me, Johnny, and Carl, and Sonny James, Marvin Rainwater, Wanda Jackson. We put eighty, ninety thousand miles on that Buick, across Canada, across everywhere . . . throwing cherry bombs the whole way.” Sometimes he missed high and the cherry bombs exploded against windshields or on the hoods, and Johnny and Carl would curse him mightily, curse unheard, but one time he misjudged and the cherry bomb bounced off a window frame and into J. W.’s lap, and J. W.’s screams echoed inside the Buick for a good long while, longer than was seemly for a man. They could have used a chaperone, all of them, or a warden. The lead car was jammed with drum kits, guitar cases, and sharp-cut jackets and two-tone shoes. The only other provisions they packed were whiskey, cherry bombs, and comic books.
He cannot really remember all the little cities and towns they traveled through, not even the names on the road signs, only the vast, empty spaces in between. They would go two hundred miles or more and not see a café or a motel. “We’d stop at a store and get some Vienna sausages and bologna and bread and pickles and mustard, and pull over to the side of the road and have a picnic. . . . Calgary, that was one of the places. Quebec. They went crazy in Quebec. Pulled their dresses up.”
To the owners of the motels and truck stops, it must have seemed like the lunatics had wandered off the path, had stolen some good cars, and were terrorizing the countryside. “Johnny came in my room and saw this little bitty television in there, and he said, ‘You know, my wife’s always wanted one of them.’ And I told him, ‘Fine, go steal one from your own room.’” And it went that way, eight hundred, nine hundred miles a day, half drunk, pill crazy, larcenous, and destructive and beset by loose women and fits of temper, and it was perfect.
“We had some good fights,” says Jerry Lee. “A good fight just cleared the air.”
Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash had begun the tour as headliners. They were still the big names at Sun then and, Sam Phillips believed, his best moneymaking ventures. The problem was this newcomer, this blond-haired kid, who did not know his place and had no governor on his mouth, and in such close proximity, they could not tune him out and could not run away and could not kill him, either, though they considered it. He even had the gall to suggest, as the days wore on, he should close the shows, him with just two records cut and shipped and not even one yet on the charts. Who, they wondered aloud, did that Louisiana pissant think he was?