Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(74)
Jerry Lee took his seat at the grand piano, a piano played by some of the greatest musical talents the world had ever known. When he said hello, his voice with its Louisiana accent filled the place. Confronted with the anomaly, he made a snap decision: rather than try to hide it, he decided to exaggerate it. He felt threatened, and a strutting rooster does not run out of the barnyard; he crows louder and scratches the ground. He says he meant no disrespect, but did not see how being apologetic of his Southernness would in any way help the tension. He decided to make himself and his band even more Southern, more unlikable. Most people would not have done such a thing, but they do not think with his head.
“I’m happy to be here at the Apollo Theater with my boys,” he drawled, marbles in his mouth and sorghum on his tongue. “This here on drums is Russ Smith, from Newport, Arkansas,” he lied. Russ, taken aback, began to slightly shake his head; he wasn’t from dad-gum Arkansas but Biloxi, Mississippi. “And this here, on bass, is J. W. Brown. He’s from Little Rock, Arkansas, where’s it’s too hot to rock,” and J. W. did a double-take of his own, because he knew he was from Louisiana even if no one else did.
“Figured I’d just take the bull by the horns,” Jerry Lee says now. If they were going to be run off the stage and out of Harlem and out of New York, better get it over with. There was, for a moment, a deathly quiet. “But there was this big, fat feller sitting right down in the front row,” who got the joke, even if it was not a very good one, “and he just laughed out loud,” says Jerry Lee. He laughed at the guts it took, at these boys coming to play here straight out of the heart of darkness of the segregated and violent South. And that made people in the crowd smile, some even to laugh out loud themselves, and the tension just deflated, recalls Jerry Lee. Then he launched into his set, not into a blues song, which would have been expected, maybe, but into his boogied-up “Crazy Arms,” a country song this white boy had remade as a blues. The crowd clapped, politely, and then he hit the first few keys of “Mean Woman Blues,” and they started to move. “I knew what they were waitin’ on. I knew what they wanted,” and he gave them the new song, stabbing, beating.
I laughed at love ’cause I thought it was funny
But you came along and mooooved me, honey
I’ve changed my mind
This love is fine
Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire!
“And real quick, they got with it, and they started dancing.”
They came up out of their seats and out into the aisles.
He combed his blond hair at the piano stool and finished with the “Shakin’” song as hard as he had ever played it, and when he kicked back the stool, he tried to knock it halfway down to Amsterdam Avenue. Critics would say, of that show, he was an uncouth hillbilly with a certain animal vigor, but as he walked offstage, the crowd was clapping and screaming and stomping the floor, and the pretty girls were looking at him with that look, and he left the historic Apollo in a great storm of noise.
“Bet they didn’t see that comin’,” he said to himself as he left the stage.
It seemed like, in those days, he always walked downhill.
“‘Great Balls of Fire’ accomplished the mission and did a whole lot toward gettin’ me right to where I needed to be,” says Jerry Lee. “We knew early on it was a classic, that it would be the kind of song people wait on, and it would come down to a choice between that one and ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ as to which one I closed the shows on, and it didn’t matter, ’cause the people just went crazy either way.” He did it on The Steve Allen Show, slender and slick this time in a dark jacket and white slacks.
“I never looked at the song like it was risqué or anything. WHBQ, they had ‘Great Balls of Fire’ at number one. And it was number one on their station for six weeks straight . . . they couldn’t get it off number one. And they banned it! To get it off.”
By the holidays, “Great Balls of Fire” was the best-selling record Sun had ever had. It was not a deep record, no more or less than “Whole Lotta Shakin’” had been, but it was what rock and roll was then, before the crooners stole the music for a little while, when it lost its bottom. In a way, “Great Balls of Fire” was a love song, but a twenty-one-year-old Jerry Lee Lewis love song, a love song going a hundred miles an hour, not a moonlit drive by the beach but a man and woman fleeing the police and the entire disapproving world. Other people might have missed the meaning in it, lost in the rhythm and the beat, but not him. “It says a lot,” he said. “It says the truth.” Not everybody considers things from all sides or to any depth. Some people make lifetime decisions in the white heat of one moment, at least people like Jerry Lee do. The people who never have, he feels sorry for.
Rock-and-roll music, already, showed the first signs of what it would soon morph into, a kind of musical treacle, but he had no interest in that awful mess, and when he did try to do it, in the studio, he usually just goofed around, to show that such music was beneath him. Producers often wanted a contrasting song for a B-side to a record, but for Jerry Lee that had always meant going back to his roots. For the B-side of “Great Balls of Fire,” he had chosen exactly what he wanted, and he didn’t think the man who wrote it, forever rumbling in that ghost Cadillac down some Lost Highway, would mind.