Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(94)

It is one of the things Jerry Lee has trouble getting his mind around. He married Myra, lived with her openly, and was crucified. Elvis, with the help of Tom Parker, whom Jerry Lee and many others view as Elvis’s puppeteer, constructed a facade, a blind, and lived in sin inside it.

“He hid her in his house,” said Jerry Lee. “He wasn’t honest at all. He hid that little girl in there, and then he acted like he wasn’t doin’ nothin’. He flat-out lied. I’ve not lied about nothin’. When I got married to my thirteen-year-old cousin, I blew it out. I told the whole world.

“You know that movie,” he says, “that movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—that’s a great movie.” It’s the story of a mild-mannered and well-meaning man who takes credit for a thing he did not do, a thing that makes him seem heroic. The man, played by Jimmy Stewart, hid the truth for a lifetime.

“I . . . ain’t . . . hid . . . nothin’. Elvis, he hid. I didn’t want that, never that. I never had no desire to do the kind of music he did or the kind of movies he did. Me, I wanted to get out there among the people. I just needed to be out there, out there where the people was at. . . .”

Sometimes he would think of the screaming multitudes he had once reached, and a dark sadness would descend on him, but the truth is that that same cloud fell upon him even in the fattest times, a thing not of the outside world but in the blood, passed down. But his mama knew that it would always lift, like black smoke, and swirl away, and that a person had to just go on and live regardless, as he had to live now. She told him that if he wanted to quit, to lie down, she would lie down and die with him, and if he’d had even the slightest intent of giving up, that seared him, boy, the way old men used to light a fire under a half-dead mule that has fallen in a field with the job half done. “It wasn’t how I was raised,” he says again, repeating the only code he ever cared much about. “My people were still behind me, Mama, and Daddy, and them.”

He packed the trunk of his Cadillac and headed out into the great honky-tonk wilderness, filling the gaps between the rare big arenas with $250 shows. He did not want his career to wind up this way—he won’t pretend so even in his most contrary mood—but if what Elvis had was the best of everything, then he could keep it.

“I was goin’ out to play the piano and sing, and make the women holler,” says Jerry Lee. So he drove on, searching for neon, for those roadside signs blinking JERRY LEE LEWIS, ONE NIGHT ONLY. “And I’d hook them old pianos up and kick it off. . . .”





9


“WHO WANTS SOME OF THIS?”




Des Moines

1959

He might have been just a little drunk, might have had some pills to get him up and level him out, but that does not mean it was not pretty, what he was doing. His fingers knew where to go on the ivory and his voice was soaked in sorrow as he sang with the broken heart of an old man stitched up in a young man’s skin, because hadn’t he lived a whole lifetime already, roared and stomped and finally shot to the very highest, with tens of thousands chanting his name and clawing at his legs, before falling smoking into places like this?

His eyes were closed, in great deference to the music he played, but he knew every inch of this beer joint outside Des Moines, knew every breath of Early Times and Evening in Paris, every drunken laugh and curse, and every crash of long-necked bottles on a slick concrete floor, because it was not so long since he’d been here before—here or in a thousand other places like it—on his way up. He had started from nothing, from the colorless mud, and outplayed and outsang them all, till even Elvis, who was weak, came to him and handed him his crown, just handed it to him, as if he wasn’t going to take it anyway by force of will. But now the people who ran the music had turned on him, and even some of the people he played it for had turned on him, and here he was in a honky-tonk in Iowa playing a knee-high stage but by God playing still, fighting back, coming back, playing some big rooms for good money when he could, but if you had glimpsed him here through the dirty window, you would have thought it was a long way from Memphis.

He cannot be certain what he was singing, after so much time, but thinks it was probably Hank Williams.

This heart of mine could never see

What everybody knew but me



He was near the end of the tune, in the last few lovely, hopeless lines, when a drunk defiled the song, and tried to put his dirty and undeserving feet on his stage.

“You son of a bitch!” the drunk roared from the crowd.

It was loud enough to cut through the music and through the din of the beer joint itself, and then the man laughed, deep in his big belly, proud of himself. Jerry Lee stopped playing—he hated to stop playing—and looked out through the blue smoke and tightly packed bodies for the loudmouth who had ruined that lovely song. “I was still packin’ ’em in, still filling up them clubs,” he says, but since London in the spring of ’58, the louts had gotten a little braver, and sometimes the bravest or drunkest of them would shout something from the audience about him or his young wife or something else with bile and ground glass in it, and he would have to find the nitwit right away and call him out for it.

He located the man, a big man, but soft-looking, a big country boy . . . no, a city boy. He had on a T-shirt. Country boys dressed better when they went to town. City boy for sure. This would be easy.