Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(85)

Elmo, who had been drinking seriously, who drank like he drove nails and pulled corn, without resting, reached into his pocket, pulled out his Barlow knife, and slipped it under Chuck’s chin.

“You know what we do to men like you back home?” he asked, keeping the tip of the blade pressed into the soft flesh of Chuck’s jugular. “We cut their heads off and throw ’em in the Blue Hole.”

Jerry Lee can still see his daddy standing there, can remember thinking that it would be a sight if his daddy murdered Chuck Berry. He did not quite know how he would explain it to his mama, who loved Chuck’s music—maybe just by saying that Chuck was being mean to him. Then she would not only understand but be in agreement.

Chuck was a fearsome man, but Elmo, even deep into middle age, had not declined much; he still looked like he could do what he said, and might enjoy it. “Well, Chuck took off running, and Daddy took off running after him.”

Alan Freed, who was standing steps away, asked Jerry Lee, “You think he’ll catch him?”

“I don’t know,” said Jerry Lee.

They took off running after them.

“But we gave out,” remembered Jerry Lee, “and set down on the curb.”

He did not see his father that night—“like I said, we was drinkin’”—and after a while the prospect of Elmo’s taking Chuck Berry’s life became less compelling, and he went to bed.

“The next morning, Chuck and Daddy was sitting together in the hotel café, eatin’ breakfast.”


The show moved around the Northeast and finally to Boston in May.

“Boston had banned rock and roll,” says Jerry Lee.

It was as though the crowd came into the Boston Arena intending to give the city fathers exactly the ugliness and violence they had warned would occur if the paganism of rock and roll was allowed to flourish. Jerry Lee could feel it, an ugliness beyond the usual good-natured hysteria that followed a great show. But they had paid their money and come expecting to hear his music. “You give ’em what they deserve,” he said, “always.” But he had barely started playing when the crowd rushed forward and began to push and swell against the police cordon, bulging out toward the stage like some kind of blob from a science-fiction movie. “The cops were holding ’em back, tryin’ to hold ’em back, and I was thinkin’, Please don’t turn them people loose on me. But they mobbed the stage and got to fightin’ and carryin’ on.” Riots broke out around the city; the teenagers put on their leather jackets, to be dangerous, and looted stores, and stabbed at old people and other helpless people with their knives, and the enemies of rock and roll said, “See? See what happens?”

“I just kind of snuck out,” said Jerry Lee. The prosecutors in Boston tried to charge Alan Freed with anarchy, with trying to overthrow the actual government, but it was hard to make those charges stick, since a bunch of dumbasses throwing bricks and waving switchblades could not be proven to be an actual armed revolt. Jerry Lee was not trying to overthrow the government; he was singing rock and roll and truly did not understand how that would make you want to do anything bad, beyond some spur-of-the-moment fornication.

In Haney’s, when people took to fighting, the floorwalkers came up and cracked some heads and dragged the offenders out into the weeds, and the music never stopped. But what do you do when the stage you are playing on really is the world itself, and there ain’t a bouncer big enough to straighten out all the fools who use the music as an excuse to debase themselves and attack their fellow man? Jerry Lee did not believe he was making good people into bad people or making bad people worse. He believed that any such urge must have been in a person or not before they ever bought a ticket. So he just kept pounding, and his stage shows got wilder, but it was always just a show. “People come to expect things a certain way, and they’re disappointed if you do it different,” he says. So he kicked the stool, and beat the keys with his whole body, and went wild—every time.

He says adamantly that he rarely abused a good piano, but promoters had seen him go wild so often on the keyboards, seen him pound the keys with his feet and other body parts, that some gave him inferior pianos to play. He could get more out of a mediocre piano than most, but could not get great sound out of a hulk, out of a wreck, and one night in Florida he lost his temper and pushed the piano offstage, down a ramp, and out a stage door. “It was harder to do than you would think,” rolling it down a sidewalk with half the audience running along beside him.

“What you doin’, Jerry Lee?” they cried.

“I’m takin’ it swimmin’,” he shouted back.

He wasn’t sure if he could actually make it to the water, but the topography was in his favor, and he pushed and pushed till all at once there was a great splash and the people cheered and cheered. “It’s insulting,” he says, “to give a bad piano to a piano player like me.”


That spring, even as Jimmy Lee drove around condemning evil and immorality like he’d just discovered them, his cousin’s music became the soundtrack for a movie about smoking dope and blond hussies in tight pedal-pushers doing God knows what on a drive-in screen the size of the First State Bank of Louisiana.

High School Confidential, directed by Jack Arnold, the same man who gave America the horror classic Creature from the Black Lagoon, was the story of an undercover agent, played by Russ Tamblyn, who wades into the dark jungle of a public high school to confront a plague of demon marijuana. Designed to capitalize on the cravings of American teenagers of that time to rebel against something, for God’s sake, anything, High School Confidential was about drag racing and delinquents but mostly dwelled on the dimensions of Mamie Van Doren, the villain’s squeeze. And while that was a hard show to steal, Jerry Lee did steal it, shouting the title song from the bed of an old 1940s-era pickup truck, banging that dead piano the same way Gene Autry sang to his horse Champion, till no one could tell, not in a million years, that the real version of the song was recorded back at Sun, and all this stuff was just pretend.