Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(96)

“I never shunned a show. If I had to cut my price down to nearly nothin’, I’d take it. To keep workin’. . . . It was brutal strength was what it was, what it took. I played a show every night. Wasn’t no freeways then. We seldom hit a two-lane. Akron . . . Cincinnati . . . Louisville. We’d do little towns and big towns. We’d do one in Ohio, leave for New York, then do one in Ohio, again. . . . Wore out more Cadillacs . . . But wasn’t no choice. We made the dates. Wasn’t no stopping me. We’d pull up just in time, go in and get with it, and then we got back in the car, and we moved on down the road. But we made the dates. Some smart aleck sucker-punched me here in Memphis . . . another in Alabama. He was a big man, too. I musta knocked him fifty feet. Happened again in—where was it? I couldn’t get to him, but Cecil got him. Fight our way in. Fight our way out. I came home once, had the Hong Kong flu. I got up, went to Dallas. Got up, played a show. They said to me, ‘I don’t think you’re gonna make it.’ I made it. . . . Texas. Played all over Texas. Birmingham . . . the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen. The band hung in there with me. I don’t know what I’d done, if they’d given up. . . . Pull up to them ol’ clubs, and rock ’em right on down. Got to where we made them furnish our drum sets. But we never stopped. I never stopped packing the clubs, the auditoriums. . . . Went on for eight or nine years like that, be gone months at a time. Tough on a family, I guess. But I kept going. Back then you could get them real good pills. . . . I’d sleep when I could. We’d see a motel on the side of the road and I’d say, ‘Boys, pull in here, get me a room,’ and I’d get up and barely make the show. Sometimes they’d be five, six of us in a car. . . . I finally got the boys a ’63 Ford to use on the road. They drove it so hard, they melted the head. . . . Played this one club, Mama and Daddy came, out walks this woman without a stitch on, and I just said, ‘She’s just workin’, Mama, same as me.’ But I built my audience back up again, rebuilt my whole foundation. I went in them honky-tonks and them nightclubs, and I went on with it. . . . Had to keep on goin’, ’cause if you quit, you die, and I wasn’t raised to quit.

“It was brutal, I tell you. It was killin’. . . .

“It was beautiful.”

He had played the Paramount on Forty-Third Street in New York City. He had played the storied Apollo, the Boston Arena, and coliseums everywhere. He had played Steve Allen, American Bandstand, and just about every other place a young legend would play, and he never lip-synched a word except in the movies. It was almost like bad luck somehow, doing that. And not long after that came London and the ugliness, then the long road that some people believed to be the only future he had left, the road that he believed—no, he knew—would bring him back to the top, to riches and fame again. It would not break him, this road, but once in a while, it would break his heart. In Newport, Arkansas, he walked into a club and saw that chicken wire stretched across the stage again, strung there to protect the band from a crowd that had so little respect for the music that they felt they could fling their contempt, spray it, at the musicians on the stage. He had seen it before, a screen like this, on the way up, but had it really been only a year or so before?

“Take it down!” Jerry Lee shouted.

The owner told him it was for his own protection. He’d need it if the bottles started flying.

“Take . . . it . . . down,” he hissed, “or I won’t go on.”

They took it down.

“It’s your funeral,” some smart aleck said.

That night he played Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers and some Moon Mullican, even some older music, pretty songs, ancient songs, songs that sounded almost like church, and he dared the people in the audience to do something, anything, to assault his stage or try to lessen his music, lessen him. Then he played some honky-tonk, to make them think about the women and the men who had done them wrong, to make them think about their mamas and cry about their daddies maybe just a little bit, and when they were halfway to redneck heaven, he hit them right between the eyes with some nasty, gutbucket blues, with the mess he’d heard sizzling in Haney’s Big House when he was still just a little boy, and he had them hollering for the blues and they didn’t even halfway know what it was. And finally, when he thought they were ready, when he decided they were deserving of it, he kicked that raggedy piano stool back so hard it slammed into the wall with a glorious snapping sound. He played and played through the evening and into the next day, played until the sweat ran down his face and blinded him, and when he whipped his golden hair back out of his eyes, the girls bit their lips and went against their raisin’. He beat the ivory till his fingers hurt, till he transcended this little honky-tonk in the hip pocket of Arkansas, till this one more bleak stop on a bleak and endless road was transformed into the night of a lifetime, not for him but for these pulpwooders and insurance men and waitresses and notary publics who danced and screamed and begged for more till finally there was no more and the screams filled the room and poured into the dark, till the nighttime fishermen on the White River and cars passing on Highway 67 must have heard it, surely, heard it emanating like the rings of some great explosion, till Jerry Lee dropped wearily into the passenger seat of a dusty Cadillac and rolled on. And as the wind rushed into his face in the small hours of the morning, as the pills and the liquor and passing miles finally rocked him to sleep, he was not sure exactly where he was headed or sometimes even where he had been. He was sure of only one thing.