Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(63)

He played one stage that was built on a giant turntable that spun slowly around as he played. “I didn’t like that. I liked to stay in one spot, so I could keep my eye on certain people.” He would lose sight of a pretty girl, he said, if he was spinning, spinning. “And then I just had to get my eye on ’em all over again. I could always spot my girl then. Wasn’t no problem, finding a beautiful girl. Look, I’d say to myself, there’s a couple. I’d say, Look, there in the third row.” In Quebec, he almost fell in love. “They pulled them dresses up, and I hollered, ‘Pull it up a little bit higher, baby,’ and they did. Man, they just laid it on you. And they kept on just layin’ it on you, night after night, city after city.”

He was still married, of course, to the volatile Jane, who was still in Ferriday with his son and his parents’ family, but the truth is that he tried not to think about her that much, anymore. It had been a marriage of necessity, and it seemed less necessary two thousand miles away. “I was living the dream,” he said, even if the reality it was based on was, for the time being, more than a little thin.


They drove on for nearly two months, doubling back for even more shows in more remote places, wide-open during the day, wide-open at night, smelling of sweat and whiskey and gunpowder. He was off his leash completely now and, it seemed to some people, almost a little out of his mind. He had taken to playing the piano sometimes with his feet, his size 9? loafers, and the crowd roared for that, too. “I played it with my feet, in key. It can be done, if you know what you’re doing. It wasn’t just no stunt. I played it.” He was showing off and showing people up, and the crowd was in love with all of it, and by late spring his lightning was bouncing around the airwaves, just weaker and more distant than he would have preferred.

The musicians who played with him remember any encounter with him as a kind of validation, a kind of certificate of authenticity. Guitarist Buzz Cason would later write how he walked out of a theater in Richmond and saw Jerry Lee, the great Roland Janes, and Russ Smith, his pint-size touring drummer, dancing after a show on the roof of a ’58 Buick, just dancing, because the time onstage was never quite long enough. He remembers traveling with Jerry Lee to Buffalo, and that Jerry Lee wanted to make a side trip to Niagara Falls. He stood on a wall overlooking the great cascade, his blond hair whipping in the wind, and stared down into the abyss for maybe thirty seconds, then jumped to the ground. “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niag-uh Falls. Now let’s go home, boys.”

Once on a swing through Texas, he saw two singular-looking individuals sitting at a table in a big nightclub. One was his onetime piano hero, Moon Mullican. The other was the homely but melodic Roy Orbison, another Sun artist. “It was in Odessa, Roy Orbison’s hometown. Roy, his point was, he wanted to borrow fifty dollars from me, so he could get out of that town. . . . He said he knew he could cut a hit record if he could ever get out of that town. And I said, ‘Well, I’ll be glad to loan you fifty dollars.’” Orbison quickly grew jealous of Jerry Lee at Sun, believing that Sam Phillips was devoting too much of the label’s energy to one man. It wouldn’t be the last time that happened. “He got a little upset,” says Jerry Lee, but at least he got out of Odessa.

“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” was finally on the radio, not just in Memphis but nationwide, and according to Billboard, “taking off like wildfire” in country, rhythm and blues, and pop. By the time he got back to the South, it had become a constant on Memphis radio. “They were playin’ it in all the hamburger joints,” he says, and he would ride down the streets of Memphis in his red Cadillac with the top down and hear his own genius wash all around him and into the almost liquid air that is Memphis in summer. Sometimes he’d take his cousin Myra, who made goo-goo eyes at him under her dark-brown bangs.


Earlier that year, Elvis had reported to Kennedy Veterans Hospital in Memphis for a preinduction physical to see if he was fit to serve his country if he was drafted, though of course there was no war anymore, and surely they wouldn’t take the monarch of rock and roll. He went straight from there to catch a train to New York for his final appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, where the cameramen were directed to show him only from the waist up. Knowing that some Americans still were scandalized by his lewd behavior, Sullivan took Elvis by the arm, looked directly into the eye of the camera and the conscience of the nation, and called Elvis “a real decent, fine boy.” Then Elvis left for home, where Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, presented him with a suit made of gold lamé, but Elvis kept dropping to his knees onstage and wearing off the gold, which was expensive, so Parker told him not to do that no more. Elvis stopped wearing the pants. He went out to Hollywood and made four movies in two years, one called Jailhouse Rock, and recorded more songs in a Hollywood studio than he could even remember. When he came home to Memphis, he moved his mama and daddy into a white mansion called Graceland, which had walls and high gates to keep out the fans who had taken to sleeping on his mama’s lawn back on Audubon Avenue. Chuck Berry, who had been there at the beginning of everything, had written the Bible of rock and roll almost single-handed, but by the spring of ’57, the white boy from a shotgun house in Tupelo had ascended high above everyone else in music, so that when people thought of rock and roll, they thought of him and only him.

Some have suggested that there was malice in Jerry Lee’s heart where Elvis was concerned, but there was none, not then especially. He would say, well into old age, that he worshipped Elvis as a teenager and as a young man had become his friend. But it would be a lie to say he did not want what Elvis had, and there would be nothing sneaky or underhanded about him when he came for it.