Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(65)

If they could ban “White Christmas” just because it was sung to a mild form of rock and roll, how could they fail to ban this new “Shakin’” song by a young white singer who didn’t just hint that the listeners ought to shake something, but told them to—told them to shake “it,” in particular, and while he did not say exactly what “it” was, it would take a very sheltered youth minister not to guess it in three or four tries. The preachers and the politicians heaped all their disgust and disdain and fear of rock and roll on this one song; some even claimed he cussed in the lyric, said the word hell, though that was just the way he sang it. The most hurtful thing was that his record even fell out of favor close to home, as Southern stations pulled it from playlists. Sales went stagnant, and the great arc of his rising star began, for just a moment, to slow.

“I’s just trying to make a record,” says Jerry Lee, innocently, but he was all bound up in the greater story—the just-begun challenge to Jim Crow in the Deep South, which loosed up the fears white folks had over their doomed ideal, and the beginnings of an unbuttoning of sexual mores, and all the rest of it. In Memphis, where the fires of rock and roll had once smoldered underneath Elvis’s twitching leg, the great threat now had a new name and a new snarling face, as politicians and preachers shouted this name and its crimes to the rafters, “and they didn’t know nothin’ about me,” says Jerry Lee. Young people were instructed to smash their Jerry Lee records and then go pray hard. Radio stations that had played the song two or three times an hour, sometimes two or three times back-to-back, pulled it from playlists, and thousands of records stacked up in Sam Phillips’s storeroom, unsold.

Things looked so bleak so quick that Sam reached out to his older brother, Jud, for help. Jud was pushing used cars down in Florence, Alabama, at the moment, but he had worked in the music business before. A born promoter and salesman, he had ties to disc jockeys and television producers around the country, and when he arrived in Memphis that summer, it was to serve as a kind of vaguely defined marketing director with only one real project: Jerry Lee.

Jud Phillips understood human nature and appetite, says Jerry Lee. And it had little to do with taste or even reality. You could tell people anything, and if you yelled it loud enough, they would believe it. As evidence, there was the city’s love affair with wrestling. That year, Farmer Jones, using an Arkansas mule kick and a stump puller, took a two-fall match from Art Nelson in Ellis Auditorium. The people cheered a walking grain silo named Haystacks Calhoun, and booed the bald-headed Lady Angel, who “makes children cry and ladies faint.” It was the year the Zebra Kid defeated Nature Boy Buddy Rogers with a head butt, only to be chased into the street, whereupon a spectator presented a metal chair to the Nature Boy so he could beat the Kid unconscious. And the papers covered it like it was real. But the thing about it was, it was unashamed.

Jud, who always had a newspaper at his elbow, was a student of the mob. Instead of apologizing for Jerry Lee, he decided they would flaunt him. It came to him after seeing Jerry Lee perform on a bill with Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash and Webb Pierce in the Sheffield/Muscle Shoals area, where the boy beat a piano half to death. After the show, Jud introduced himself, walked with him to the dressing room, and told him what he was going to do and how he was going to do it. He had been around music much of his life, like his brother, and was probably the best-connected used-car salesman in the South. He had friends in the networks in New York. He believed, if he just showed up there with this boy, audacious, like they were supposed to be there, maybe he could get Jerry Lee and his song on national television.

Sam Phillips was torn between just shelving the offending song and going all in on one last, big gamble. He was not convinced that an expensive lark to New York City with no guarantees of a second of air time was worth the risk. To Jerry Lee, it was beginning to look like the people who had once promised him the stars no longer believed in him. Jud whispered to Sam that he was risking losing this boy the way he had lost Elvis, over nickels and dimes, but Sam told him to hush, that there was nothing much to lose at this point, except a boy with a record no one would play. “I wasn’t scared,” says Jerry Lee, now, but the battle that went on between those brothers in a locked office would determine his fate.

“He could have been a genius,” says Jerry Lee of Sam Phillips. “Especially on making money. And keeping it.”

But Jud Phillips believed. As with most people loyal to him, Jerry Lee would never forget that. “Jud was a decent man, and he was a good businessman. He was a salesman. And he saw what Sam didn’t.” Even when he was drunk, which was more than seldom, his mind was turning, always turning, says Jerry Lee. “He’d throw parties, slip people a little money, do whatever it took,” to spread the word, to roust a crowd. Finally, he even talked his brother into two train tickets to Grand Central Terminal in New York City. “I’d never been on a train before,” at least not one for which he had purchased a ticket. “I thought it was cool.” As they rolled down the tracks, he took out a folded Superman and decided not to worry about it all, about New York, about the struggle between the brothers. It was not, he knows now, that Sam Phillips had not had faith in him. If it hadn’t been for Sam’s initial faith in him, he doesn’t know for sure what path his music would have taken, and he formed a friendship with the man that he wanted and needed to be genuine, something beyond business and even music; he still needs that today. “He loved me very much,” he says. “Aw, yeah, his respect for me was unlimited.” He was merely being cautious, says Jerry Lee, and perhaps realistic. Such things, such resurrections, rarely happened in the real world, but did, sometimes, in comic books.