Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(67)

Jerry Lee waited in the wings. He was twenty-one years old.

“I wasn’t nervous,” he says again.

But he also did not see any real point in standing around doing nothing, watching a panto . . . pantonomer . . . whatever the devil that was. He and the band went across the street and had a drink.

They came back just a minute or two before they were supposed to go on, to some angry glares from the producers and a worried look or two from Steve Allen himself. They didn’t know any better, Jerry Lee says. This TV stuff was like walking on the moon.

“I’ve been waiting on you for an hour, ’cause I didn’t know where you were,” said Allen, on camera, as Jerry Lee, J. W. Brown, and drummer Russ Smith sauntered onto the stage, off camera, to set up. If you listen to the show, to the noise on the set, you can hear them setting up. Allen, the old pro, went on smoothly. “Now, we’re gonna have a word”—crash, thunk, bang—“from our, uh, stagehands, apparently. We want you to stay tuned for rock and roll sensa-”—thunk, bang—“. . . you think this is knocking the joint apart, wait till you hear Jerry Lee Lewis. He destroys the piano and everything.”

Allen cut to a commercial, in which a perplexed but perfectly coiffed housewife watches her son track rainwater in on immaculate floors, but it does not matter, because her floors are waxed with Johnson Stride Wax, “the wax spills can’t spot.” Then with less than five minutes left in the show, the camera reopened on Allen. “There’s been a whole lotta shakin’ going on here all day, as a result of a fella dropping in by the name of Jerry Lee Lewis . . . as you know, you young folks in particular, he has a new record out. . . .” He fumbled around for a while, like he was trying to decide how to warn the people behind their TV trays what he was about to inflict on them. “And now here he is, jumpin’ and joltin’, Jerry Lee Lewis!”

Come on over, baby



Jerry Lee, dressed like he was going to the movies in a striped, short-sleeved shirt, black pants, and white shoes, did what he does. He seemed trapped halfway between wild joy and burning anger, and he glared into the camera like he did it every day, like a little boy on a playground saying, “You wanna make somethin’ of it?” till it just gave in, cried uncle, and took its whuppin’. The only difference he made, the only concession to TV, was slight. When the offending finger rose into the air, when he would have rotated it around salaciously and sung “wiggle it around just a little bit,” he sang instead “jump around just a little bit,” with no discernible rotating or talk of wiggling whatsoever. It would be about the only compromise he would ever really make, for a lifetime, and most people did not even notice it. He banged the keys so hard they seemed to jump back up to meet his fingers, and his hair bounced like some kind of live animal on his head, and at the end, when he kicked that stool back, it went flying all the way across the stage to land near Steve Allen, who picked it up and flung it back across the stage at him. It looked spontaneous and playful and real, but of course it was just good TV. As it happened, Milton Berle was backstage during rehearsals, and he told Allen, “Now, when he kicks that stool back, you pick it up and throw it back so that it goes by in front of the camera.”

When the boy was done, he just stood up and hitched up his pants and looked around as if to say, “Well, there it is,” and the studio audience thundered and thundered inside the small studio. “Not a whole bunch of people, a small stage. They didn’t even know me. . . . But they saw me, and they liked me. That’s what you call opening the door, and I flew.”

Such shenanigans did not happen every week on national television, where producers were still scouring the country for jugglers and comedians; this looked like a party, and because of television everyone was invited. Steve Allen came out onstage dancing, though in a kind of goofy, very white man’s way, slapping his hands together and motioning for all the other guests—there was a passel—to come out and join them onstage. Jerry Lee was grinning like he stole something and got clean away, and he would have plopped back down on the bench and played all night, played all the way through the commercials, if they had let him.

“Mama and Daddy even saw it, saw me on the TV. They flipped out.”

Allen would later say the boy was pure gold under a camera; the show brought great numbers, better even than Ed Sullivan’s, and in television nothing much really mattered except the arithmetic. “He was quality,” Allen later said. And after that night, “he was a star.”

“That broke it all loose, that night,” said Jerry Lee. “Steve Allen asked me back for the next week, and then asked me back for a third time, and it just busted wide-open. The records started selling forty, fifty thousand copies in a single day. We were a smash. Steve Allen put us back on top, and I never forgot that.

“The second one I did, Jane Russell came back to the dressing room. She asked me, ‘What’s it like, to go out in front of a live audience and a live microphone?’ I said, ‘Honey, you got no problem. Just do it.’ And she kissed me on the cheek.”

Apparently the gatekeepers of American morality were willing to crack the gate a little if the money was right. “Everybody lifted the ban on it,” he remembers. “We was on top of the world, man.” Back at Sun Records, Cash and Orbison and Perkins sulked. Billy Lee Riley got drunk and, in a jealous rage, tried to tear up the studio until he was restrained.