Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(82)

Otis Blackwell’s next great creation—he was as bankable as Coca-Cola—was something different, something without so much rough edge as his first contribution, “Great Balls of Fire,” and certainly without the grit of Jerry Lee’s first great hit, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” But it was a singular song that moved fast and had nuances in almost every breath, spiced as always with Jerry Lee’s signature rolling, thumping piano sound. It was not a one-take recording this time—it was a complicated song in some ways—but something Jerry Lee and the session men worked over and over till they came up with a song on which he almost wailed on one line and whispered on the next, a song that even now people have trouble trying to categorize or even explain. But if “Shakin’” and “Great Balls of Fire” were about sex, theorized music historians, then “Breathless” was about the feeling that came after.

My heart goes ’round and ’round

My love comes tumblin’ down

You . . . leave me . . . breathless



It was a slicker song, but Jerry Lee’s piano gave it that locomotive quality, and his accent mussed its hair a little bit, and at the end of the day it was unmistakably him, but with a little wink to it. “I think it was a great song,” he says. It was like Otis Blackwell was writing blank checks for the great singers to fill in.

With what he felt was another sure hit in the bank, Jerry Lee took Myra home to see his people and found no criticism of his marriage among the kin in Concordia Parish, and those were about the only people—outside of Sam and Jud Phillips, perhaps—whose opinions mattered to him all that much anyway. His cousin Jimmy, who had condemned pretty much everything about his life over the past few years, lambasting him to the point that his sins had become a kind of cottage industry on the Louisiana and Mississippi revival circuit, said not a word about his marriage to the girl. “Jimmy was human, too,” Jerry Lee says, a mantra he would repeat over and over again where his cousin was concerned.


In January of ’58, he left for his first real international tour that did not involve a Buick or a can of Vienna sausages. Though he was a little reluctant to fly that far over water, he boarded a plane for a whirlwind tour of Australia, with stops to perform shows coming and going in Hawaii. He would be playing, again, with his friend Buddy Holly, and with Paul Anka, the boy crooner whose “Diana” was one of the top hits in the country that year. He was glad to see Buddy, but not so much Paul Anka, whom he saw as an example of the slow softening and weakening of rock and roll, a purveyor of music that had no honky-tonk, juke joint, or even church in its makeup. Jerry Lee even now lacks the capacity to pretend to like someone, and he was not fond of the fifteen-year-old Anka, disliking him only slightly less than Pat Boone.

It was not a happy tour, clunked up as it was with child singers and big orchestras. It left him wishing he and Buddy Holly could just bust out on their own and go do some good, simple, driving rock and roll and leave this mess behind. He found some peace in Hawaii. “We spent the night at the Hilton, went swimming in that beautiful water, wasn’t even scared of sharks.” But the next night, in Sydney or some such place, he found himself in a backstage area crowded with unnecessary musicians and difficult access to a bathroom, badly needing to pee. Desperate, he found an unguarded bottle of beer. He poured the beer in the trash, found a single, semisecluded corner of the staging area, and turning his back, let it go. He filled it up and set the bottle back where he found it. “I had to pee somewhere,” he says, shrugging.

A large man, one of the musicians in the orchestra, walked up, took the bottle, and took a swig.

“Yeeeeaaaaggggghhhhh!”

He flung it down, cursing and spitting.

“Just name the man,” he screamed to everyone there. “Just show me the man . . .”

His bandmates gathered ’round, ready to attack.

“I want to kill somebody!” the offended musician shouted.

“I don’t blame you,” Jerry Lee shouted back. “I would too.”

He promised to help, because musicians had to stick together.

“I’ll get him,” Jerry Lee said. “I’ll find him.”

He walked away, as if hot in pursuit.

“He was a horn player. I think, the saxophone.”


Anka, meanwhile, was getting on his nerves. He cannot recall exactly what it was about the boy; maybe just the fact he was so dad-gum nice, so good.

“He was a drip,” Jerry Lee says.

Anka was a milk drinker. Jerry Lee told him it came from kangaroo, down here, or some other marsupial, and told him to have some beer.

“The guy who was watching after him was trying to get it on with this little ol’ gal. . . . I got him a beer.”

Anka, he says, liked the beer. “He drank all that beer and got knee-walkin’ drunk, and we all walked up to the roof of the hotel. . . . Tallest building in Sydney, Australia, and it was only twelve stories high. But if you jumped off of it, it’d make a pretty good splash, I imagine.”

Anka, he remembers, walked to the edge. “I don’t like the way things are going,” he said. “I think I’m just gonna jump. I’m gonna jump off this thing.”

“That’s a good idea, Paul,” Jerry said, disgusted. “That’s the very thing you ought to do.” He sauntered over to the edge and looked down. “It’s clear.”