Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(68)

Jerry Lee walked to Memphis on the clouds.

He did not know at the time how far out on the lip of disaster Sam Phillips had come in sending his boy on that trip to New York. He had pressed and shipped hundreds of thousands of records all around the country so they’d be ready in the stores immediately after the Steve Allen appearance. By September, “Shakin’” was the number-one record on the R&B and country charts and was kept off the top of the pop charts only by the megahit “Tammy” by Debbie Reynolds. Sun Records siphoned time, attention, and money away from other projects to focus on its new star, and when reporters asked Sam Phillips if he had any plans to sell his new boy away like he had Elvis, Phillips told them to go to hell. The record that had been chained down by censors still had its detractors, as the movement against rock music ebbed and flowed, tiring in some cities, flaming up in others, “but when one station would ban it, two more would pick it up,” says Jerry Lee.

He truly did not understand what it all meant, any better than Elvis had. He had seen Elvis in stardom from the outside looking in. He had no idea what lurked inside it, good and bad. But there was one difference between them: while Elvis sometimes looked helpless, Jerry Lee helped himself.

“I knew I had been making a hundred dollars a night, and suddenly I was making five thousand, then ten thousand a night,” says Jerry Lee. “Do I know what people were thinkin’? Man, I don’t even think they knew what they were thinkin’. And if you didn’t like it, I just laughed, just gave you the finger and went on.”


There had always been women, pressing up between the footlights, waiting backstage, but now they climbed the stage, rushed it. The first time was in Nashville. “I was on this little bitty stage, but I remember, man, I was just gettin’ with it. We were playin’ the National Guard Armory, and suddenly here comes these girls, a mob of girls. I thought to myself, I don’t like the look in these girls’ eyes, and the cops couldn’t do nothing about it. They was kissing me and pulling at my clothes, and pulling at my hair. . . . Man, I mean they just mobbed me. They tore off clothes, tore ’em off down to my underwear. I had these ol’ stripedy shorts on. . . . After that, I started wearing boxer shorts, in case this happened again. I was hollering, ‘Wait a minute, baby! Hold on!’” The girls ran off with pieces of his clothing like trophies.

“One scrap of it caught on this metal bracelet and it dug into me and like to pulled my arm off. It scared me, a little bit,” he says. “It was a set-up deal. The girls planned it. They got together and planned it all.

“Had a leopard-skin suit on. I liked that suit.”

But later, when someone had given him some pants and he was being escorted to safety by police, a photographer caught him grinning. “You can’t kiss three hundred girls at one time,” he says, so it was just a great waste of exuberance.

But if they had devoured him, he thought, “what a way to go.”


Quickly he supplanted Elvis as public enemy number one in the eyes of the moralists who railed against rock and roll. Elvis was out in Hollywood making Westerns and love stories. Jerry Lee said he knew that Elvis still knew how to rock—“he was a rocker, oh, man”—but he was also the man who did “Love Me Tender,” bought a pink Cadillac, and still seemed even now genuinely surprised at the big, wide world and a little lost in it. Elvis, when he was asked about his music, always said, No, sir, or No, ma’am, he wasn’t going to apologize for his rock and roll, because he did not believe he did a thing wrong by singing it and dancing like he did. Jerry Lee knew that he and Elvis had some of the same fears and doubts, but Elvis pushed his down deep and lived with them, the way a child lives with an invisible friend. He might talk to it sometimes, but not when the grown-ups were around. At least, that was how it seemed to Jerry Lee. “Elvis cared what people thought,” he says, almost puzzled.

For Jerry Lee, fame was a thing that sometimes flogged him and sometimes let him be; he was capable, in the dark times, of losing all sight of the good in his music, of believing it was evil, until suddenly things would just clear and he’d see it all so much better. The thing about rock and roll, he said, was that it made people crazy bad, but more often it made them happy, made them forget life for a while, as another singer would sing it, and if a young woman scaled a stage to fling herself on a good-lookin’ rock-and-roll singer from Louisiana every now and then, squeezing on him like to break his back, what harm did that do?

“I knew Mama was proud, and I knew Daddy was proud,” and armed with that, he did not greatly care whom he offended in the world of strangers. His mama’s pride grew as he got further and further from the bars, from Sodom, and that meant the world to him. “She backed me, one hundred percent. She knew I had to do these things. Then she watched me on the television . . . and she thought it was just the greatest thing she had ever seen.”

And television kept calling—including a call from a young DJ from Philadelphia with a show called Bandstand. “He called me and said, ‘You don’t know me, but my name is Dick Clark,’ and I told him, ‘No, I don’t know you.’ And he said, ‘Well, I have a small TV show . . .’ And I said, ‘Look, you need to talk to Sam and Jud.’” Clark told them that his sponsors said they’d give him a nationwide nighttime show if he could get Jerry Lee Lewis. There was only one catch: the producers wanted Jerry Lee to lip-synch the song, as other guests had done.