Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(84)

With his litany of big hits piled up around him, Berry insisted on being given his due, and insisted that no one—no one—follow him onstage. In fact, just like Jerry Lee, he insisted no one could. He made a good case for it, putting on one of the most dynamic and unusual rock-and-roll shows ever done, duckwalking as he played that white guitar, gliding across the stage on one foot, jerking and twisting and moving, spreading his legs out so far he almost did the splits, then hopping along the stage that way, a thing that might have ruined a lesser man or at least ruined the stitching in the straddle of his trousers. In the end, that was what people said about Chuck, as much as anything else: Chuck was a man. He’d had more women than most people had thoughts about them, and he’d done time on top of it all.

Jerry Lee didn’t much care about any of that. He loved the man’s music, and he respected him, but he had pulled himself up from nothing, too. They stood jaw to jaw backstage, one hot word away from fighting right there behind the curtain, with newspaper and magazine reporters everywhere and film and still cameras pointed from every direction. Jerry Lee’s father had made the trip this time, and as he saw the man get right in his son’s face he sidled closer. Elmo was of the school that believed no man should ever threaten another man more than once before knocking him down if not out, and he believed, too, that just because a man was down, you did not put the boot heels to him.

“Daddy didn’t walk around no man . . . and neither did I,” says Jerry Lee.

It was a bad time to inject violence of any kind into rock and roll. Crowds increasingly had been getting out of control, acting out, using the music as an excuse to steal, fight, cut, even riot; every teenager with a leather jacket was suddenly a desperado, a tough guy, or a moll. Freed, sensing potential disaster, took Jerry Lee aside and pleaded with him to let Berry close the show, almost as a humanitarian act. Jerry Lee didn’t much care about Freed’s anxiety, but in a way he knew it might be fun to show Chuck as he had shown Johnny Cash, as he’d shown poor Fats, as he’d shown everybody. Chuck may have thought no one could follow him onstage. Jerry Lee knew that no one on this earth could follow him. No matter where he was in the billing, he planned on being the last thought in the audience’s heads when they left.

After Frankie Lymon, after the Chantels, and after Buddy Holly did his usual rockin’ set, Jerry Lee took the stage of the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn in a jacket trimmed in the fake fur of some jungle cat and plowed into his boogie. He did “Breathless” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’,” and by the time he got to “Great Balls of Fire” the crowd was already out of control and police were moving to cut off the inevitable mass lunge for the stage. He shot that piano stool backward with such force that it went clear off the stage, skittering into the wings and sending people leaping out of the way.

Then he did something that has been written about and argued about and celebrated and denied ever since: he reached inside the piano, took a small Coke bottle of clear liquid, and poured gasoline across the top of the instrument, then struck a match and set it aflame. “I just sprinkled a little bit on it,” he says, but it went up with a whoosh! Instead of walking offstage, he just kept playing and playing as the piano burned, and the crowd screamed. Jerry Lee played, hunched over the flames, the smoke in his face and hair, till the song was done, and then swaggered off stage toward Chuck Berry.

“First time I ever saw a colored guy turn white,” Jerry Lee says. He left the piano burning onstage. “They had to call the fire department and everything.”

“I want to see you follow that, Chuck,” he said, as he walked past Berry.

Some accounts—and there are several—say that he said, “Follow that, nigger,” but he says he did not. There was no room for that mess then, in a music where color and style blended to make the music itself. But it is a fact that he immolated a piano, sent it straight to its ancestors, though even that story has shifted and changed over the years. In many interviews, he has flatly denied it, even gotten belligerent with the interviewer.

He also says he could swear it was outside Cincinnati where it happened. But it hardly matters now. “I do know I like to get in a lot of trouble for that . . . for burning that piano. That story just kept blowing up. They just kept saying it.”

The battle between the two men continued for years. In another show, after closing his regular show with “Great Balls of Fire,” instead of yielding the stage to Chuck, he walked over and picked up a guitar.

He had been playing guitar since he was a little boy, picking out tunes on Elmo’s old acoustic, as well as drums, violin, bass, and just about every string or percussion instrument used on a stage. He slipped the strap over his shoulder, took one long look over at Chuck, and started hollering:

Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans

Way back up in the woods among the evergreens . . .



Chuck stood with murder in his eye.

Jerry Lee kept playing.

“Finally, Chuck walked across the stage and sat down at the piano.”

The crowd roared and roared, enjoying the joke, but Chuck was not smiling.

“He did not play very good piano,” said Jerry Lee.

Later, in a hotel lobby, the two men clashed again.

“Chuck was poppin’ off to me,” says Jerry Lee. “We had been drinkin’.”

“Me and you gonna get this straightened out,” Chuck said, “straightened out right now.”