Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(71)
Kevin Horan/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
With Don Everly (center) and Buddy Holly (right), who asked him for marriage advice. Jerry Lee remembers Holly as “a real champion” and “a true gentleman.”
Pictorial Press
With his parents, Mamie and Elmo, 1959.
Bettmann/Corbis
At El Monte Stadium, Los Angeles, with DJ Art Leboe, June 20, 1958.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
REX USA / Devo Hoffmann
The conqueror returns to Europe, early 1960s.
Marion Schweitzer/REX USA
7
TOO HOT TO ROCK
Memphis
1957
He spent money like a Rockefeller, on cars and motorcycles and rock-and-roll clothes, and he had more pretty women chasing him than a Palm Beach Kennedy, but it is a fact of history that poor Southern boys have a problem in success just as an oddly shaped man has trouble finding a suit of clothes that does not cut, bind, and itch, till it is maddening, those clothes, and you want to tear them from you and run for home.
“H. E. L. L.,” Jerry Lee shouted.
“I don’t believe it,” said Sam Phillips.
“Great God a’mighty, great balls of fire,” chimed in one of the impatient session men.
“That’s it! That’s it! That’s it. It says, it says, Make merry! With the joy of God, only,” Jerry Lee shouted.
Sam Phillips looked at him in wonder, and in some fear. He and Jack Clement had tape set up and running in the studio and had hired session men to back Jerry Lee on what seemed a sure thing, a song written especially for him by the man who wrote all those hits for Elvis, the great Otis Blackwell. Everything was in place for another earth-trembling hit, but Jerry Lee had gone home. He was still standing there among them, all right, still inside the soundproofed walls with the drum sets and amplifiers and electric cords, but his heart and soul were someplace else—caught, as they had always been caught, between the smoke and grind of Haney’s Big House and the dire warning of Texas Street, between the might and thunder of faith and the secular sound of lust and greed. Jerry Lee was refusing to cut the record at all, because to do so would be to serve the devil.
“But when it comes to worldly music,” said Jerry Lee, “rock and roll . . .”
“Pluck it out,” said Billy Lee Riley.
“. . . anything like that,” continued Jerry Lee, unfazed, “you have done brought yourself into the world, and you’re in the world, and you hadn’t come from out of the world, and you’re still a sinner. And then you’re a sinner, and unless you be saved and borned again and be made as a little child, and walk before God and be holy . . . And brother, I mean you got to be so pure. No sin shall enter there. No sin. ’Cause it says no sin. It don’t just say just a little bit. It says no sin shall enter there. Brother, not one little bit. You got to walk and talk with God to go to heaven. You got to be so good.”
Riley gave him a hallelujah. As was sometimes the case in the studio, someone had opened a bottle of brown liquor, and it had already made the circuit a time or two among Phillips and the session men, rock and roll being one of those rare professions in which alcohol is as necessary as guitar picks.
Sam tried to argue that Jerry Lee could do good singing his music, lifting spirits.
“All right. Now look, Jerry. Religious conviction doesn’t mean anything resembling extremism. All right. You mean to tell me that you’re going to take the Bible, that you’re going to take God’s word, and that you’re going to revolutionize the whole universe? Now listen. Jesus Christ was sent here by God Almighty.”
“Right,” said Jerry Lee.
“Did He convince, did He save all of the people in the world?”
“Naw, but He tried to.”
“He sure did. Now wait just a minute. Jesus Christ came into this world. He tolerated man. He didn’t preach from one pulpit. He went around and did good.”
“That’s right. He preached everywhere.”
“Everywhere.”
“He preached it on land.”
“Everywhere. That’s right, that’s right.”
“He preached on the water.”
“That’s right, that’s exactly right. Now . . .”
“Man, he done everything. He healed.”
“Now, here, here’s the difference . . .”
“Are you followin’ those that heal? Like Jesus Christ did?”
“What do you mean? You . . . What? . . . I . . .” stammered Sam.
“Well, it’s happenin’ every day.”
“What do you mean?”
“The blinded eyes are opened. The lame are made to walk.”
“Jerry, Jesus Christ . . .”
“The crippled are made to walk.”
“Jesus Christ, in my opinion, is just as real today as He was when He came into this world,” said Sam.
“Right! Right! You’re so right you don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
“Now, I would say, more so . . .”
“Awww,” said Riley, interrupting, “let’s cut it.”
But Sam Phillips, who’d had just enough whiskey to get his back up, was well into his argument and was not quitting now.