Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(77)

He heard “Wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom” through a dressing room wall, screamed out by a man known as Little Richard, who wore more mascara than Cleopatra, who sang every breath like it was going down in history, like he would never have that chance again. “He was a trip,” Jerry Lee says. “He was somethin’ else.” He was a great singer and wailer, but mostly a showman to his bones. “His voice was rock and roll.”

He heard Ray Charles. “An utmost, really, genius. His personal knowledge was—it was incredible. He was just so great . . . such a good man. I’d go see him, he’d say, ‘Hey, Jerry Lee, you’re looking good!’” He still takes offense at the indignity Charles suffered when he was arrested for carrying heroin, “which he had been doin’ for years. And they come down pretty hard on him for that. They didn’t understand, you know?”

He met the greats, and some even cooked him supper. He chatted with Fats Domino, and wondered, “Why do they call him Fats? He ain’t fat. He just kinda looked fat. But he was a great piano player . . . humble as he could be. Cooked me beans and rice.”

He marveled at the smooth vocals of the man they called Gentleman Jim Reeves, and sat with a despondent young man named Michael Landon after the moneymen tried to twist him into a teen idol. “I give up, Jerry Lee, ’cause I just ain’t a singer,” and the next time Jerry Lee saw him, he was riding across the Ponderosa in the same gray pants and green jacket every week, shooting the bad men with Hoss and Adam and Pa, and trying not to tick off Hop Sing.

He finally met one of the music’s true beacons, the man who called on Beethoven to roll over and Johnny to be good—watched him take the stage, long and whipcord lean, moving with that easy grace, long arms and big hands dangling at his side, his anger at the white man still smoking because of the way they tried to box him out. That man took one look at Jerry Lee and his spine went stiff as a ladder-back chair, and promoters whispered, yes, there would be trouble here. “Chuck . . . Chuck Berry,” says Jerry Lee, and shakes his head, smiling. And the promoters were right.

He stood in the wings as Buddy Holly, “who was a rocker, too, oh, yeah,” screamed “all my life, I been a-waitin’” with as much raw passion as he had ever seen. Holly finally yielded the stage to him only after four encores but stayed backstage to watch and dance and whoop like a fan, yelling out, “Man, this is almost as good as Texas!” He was especially fond of Buddy. “A real champion,” he says. “He was hotter’n a pistol, yeah. He done a great show. And he could play the guitar . . . as good as Chet Atkins. He was a gentleman, and he never lied, he never cheated or anything like that on his girlfriend.”

He saw everyone, played with everyone, and it seemed that no matter where he played, he outdrew the big names who had played before him—even Sinatra, even Elvis—till he was at the top of every billing every day, which is where he should have been all along.

He is asked, after all this time, if there was ever anyone he was afraid to follow onstage—though afraid is probably too strong a word. He says there was one man.

“The only person I ever had a problem with, was Roy Hamilton.”

Hamilton was a good-looking, lantern-jawed rhythm-and-blues singer from Leesburg, Georgia, who could croon and deliver some rockin’ soul. He’d had operatic and classical voice training, had been a Golden Gloves boxer, and, like Jerry Lee, had started off singing in church. He influenced everyone from Elvis to the Righteous Brothers and sang his heart out onstage, from lungs already infected and weakened by the tuberculosis that would help kill him by age forty.

“He had some great songs—I mean, ‘Ebb Tide,’ ‘Unchained Melody.’ He had that record ‘Don’t Let Go.’ He was just beginning to hit. We both were, really. I was doin’ a show somewhere, and I was the star of the show. I was closing the show. And I heard him do his show. He closed his part of the show with that ‘Hear that whistle? It’s ten o’clock! Go, man, go! Go, man, go!’ And he had these boys backing him up, singers—Get-a-Job Boys, they called themselves.” (This was the Silhouettes, whose record “Get a Job” was their only hit.) “And they backed him on that, and it was tremendous.

“And I said, ‘Man, I got to follow that cat on the stage? I didn’t like that at all. I said, ‘That’s an impossibility, to follow him onstage.’ And his manager said, ‘You’re right, Jerry. You got your work cut out for you tonight.’ I went out there and I opened up with ‘Great Balls of Fire” and immediately went into ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.’” He usually closed the shows with those records.

“I finally got their attention pretty good. But he . . . really done it. He should have closed that show.”

But there was no time to be humble in ’57. A great and fearful void had suddenly opened in rock and roll as Elvis prepared for his induction. And swaggering into that frightening place came that boy from Black River, playing his piano on a flatbed truck, but this time on a Hollywood set, and it all made the fans fall out on the floor and the promoters smile that crocodile smile, till it was clear that the only person who could stop Jerry Lee from ascending the throne was Jerry Lee himself. The acclaim was not universal, but detractors were hooted down or their criticism dismissed as snobbery. Some critics sneered at him outright—not his music, but him, chided him for combing his hair onstage and other loutish behavior, while admitting, even though he beat the piano to death, he beat it in perfect key. “I didn’t care one way or another, ’cause I wasn’t doin’ the show for them, anyway,” he says.