Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(78)
Even Liberace, who could play the instrument with great skill beneath all that Old World lace and powder and Vegas glitter, marveled at this untrained boy’s native ability. “He said, ‘Nobody can play a piano, that fast, and hit the right notes . . . and sing at the same time,’” Jerry Lee remembers. “He said there must be another piano somewhere, hid.” Finally, in Hot Springs, he came to see for himself. “He went backstage, where I was playing, and he set back there and watched and listened to me play. He didn’t believe it till he saw it with his own eyes.”
At Sun, the usually tightfisted Sam Phillips packed up thousands of records to give away at disc-jockey conventions, and Jud laid the groundwork for promoting the next record, another Otis Blackwell sure thing called “Breathless,” with a campaign unlike anything the industry had ever seen before. They were men he trusted then, handling parts of the business he could not even pretend to care about. “I was paid to play piano and sing,” he said, repeating another mantra he would hold to all his life, “not any of that other stuff.” The business part of it—the production and bookings and all that junk—took something natural and bled the fun out of it. Playing piano, he would stress, was like making love to a woman, but he seduced everybody.
“Elvis, he charmed the women, and he leaned more toward the women in his music,” he says. “The women was his deal. But I had the women and the men going crazy for me, because my music had guts.”
In Graceland, Elvis watched Jerry Lee’s hits march relentlessly past his on the charts, and when hangers-on talked a little too much about the new boy, because they had all come to think of Jerry Lee as Elvis’s friend, Elvis said to shut up.
The darker side of rock and roll was yet another thing he shared with Elvis. Since the days at the Wagon Wheel and Blue Cat Club in Natchez, he had been taking pills, pills to keep him sharp, keep him awake in the endless nights. He ate them like M&M’s, those amphetamines. “People would just give me a handful—I’d put ’em in my shirt pocket, and reach in and get one.” It became a kind of magic shirt with a bottomless pocket. People, believing they were helping him, would continue to do that for years, till “I had a full pocket of ’em, all the time. I don’t think I ever was a full-fledged addict,” he says, but that reliance on pills to make a show or get through one would deepen, worsen. At the time, in the mid- to late 1950s, he was indestructible, seemingly bulletproof. “But it was easy to get hooked on them pills, especially them pain pills,” and the slow process of destroying his body, night after unrelenting night, had begun.
He was hardly the first. Country music stars had been hooked on amphetamines forever—for Hank Williams, it was morphine—and blues and jazz musicians had made the needle and reefer part of their national persona. But with Jerry Lee that kind of thing was more dangerous. As his daddy had discovered, he had no governor. He was quickly becoming known as not a rock-and-roll singer but a wild man who would outplay, outdrink, outfight and, well, out-everything anybody. He’d steal your girlfriend or your wife, in front of you, dare you to make something of it, and then leave you at the emergency room and her at the motor court.
Most of that is true, he says, but not so much the drinking. “I never drank that much liquor,” he says, knowing that will probably make some people shake their heads and grin at the audacity of it. He did, he says, come to have a taste for Calvert Extra, “and I’d buy a fifth and set it on the piano lid. It kind of cleared my voice, usually.” But it did not take a lot of liquor to coax him into bad behavior. He was a fighter by nature—he liked the thrill of it then, when another man meant to cause him harm—and a lover, he says, by design.
“It’s rough, when they’re beggin’ to get on your bus, or on the plane. It was real life. But it seemed like a dream.”
The women—other men’s wives, often—were another, more immediate threat. “I’d be playin’, and I’d look up and see a bullet sittin’ on top of the piano,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, I wonder who left me this,’ but I had a good idea who left it there. I showed it to the audience,” further cementing his legend. He did not have a lot of respect for husbands who could not keep their women happy. He knew how to do it; if they didn’t, they should try harder.
“I always had this dream, that I had a horse, this special horse, bullets wouldn’t hurt it, and the horse had a speedometer on it, and it’d go sixty, a hundred miles an hour, and I’d set ’er on one hundred and we’d go jumpin’ fences, wide-open across the land, and never got tired,” he says, and smiles. “And I’d have a gun, the fastest gun, and no one could touch me.” He is not certain what that dream means; he is not the kind of man to sit and wonder about dreams. But he has an idea.
Like men do, and have since the beginning of time, he saw no reason why he could not have everything, why he could not have the wild rock-and-roll life and all its excesses, and a family life to root him, to hold him, and there was still the ghost of his raisin’ whispering always in his ear. “I was bad about gettin’ married, though. You’d run into ’em that wouldn’t turn you aloose, so you marry them. I’d just say, ‘Ain’t no use to count you out. The rest of ’em had it.’”
In Coro Lake, the ascending monarch strolled down the street with Myra, his biggest fan. He was still living there with J. W., Lois, the boy Rusty, and Myra. He had enough money to buy a mansion, would have enough soon to buy his own Graceland, if he wanted to, but he didn’t want a mansion, didn’t want to be surrounded by yes men inside the walls and nutcases leaving love letters twisted in the iron of the gate. He liked being the richest perpetual houseguest in the history of Coro Lake, because he liked to be around Myra when he came home. She was slim, with wavy brown hair and a swan’s neck and big, big eyes, and if she was a child, he was a Russian monkey cosmonaut.