Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(98)
“He left in a big white ambulance,” recalls Jerry Lee.
He forgot to ask the man why he wanted to fight him. In time, it would be clear. Not in every town, but in a lot of them, men lay in wait to take a swing at the Killer, suspecting he might be just mortal enough to fold.
“They just wanted to whip Jerry Lee Lewis. Just wanted to beat on my head, like that feller did.”
The man seemed almost friendly as the paramedics took him off.
“He was a hoss,” Jerry Lee says.
“He was a giant,” says Cecil.
“Haven’t been back to Iowa since,” says Jerry Lee.
It was just a part of livin’ then. He did not enjoy the disruption of his shows, did not enjoy the reputation that preceded him in those days. But as it became inevitable, he embraced it, snarling. It would have been easy if they’d just been a bunch of young rogues making noise, but there was a legend at stake here, and this was real music, good music, “and the music always came first. We gave ’em a good show, and then it was time to move on.” He played Le Coq d’Or in Toronto and the Peppermint Lounge in Pittsburgh. He played Café de Paris in New York, the drive-in in Fayetteville, Georgia, and the Adel, Georgia, elementary school auditorium. He played an Alan Freed show in the Hollywood Bowl, and the Gator Bowl in Florida, and a club at Coney Island. He drove to Los Angeles from Memphis, then drove back to Montgomery, and filled up the space in between with whatever gigs he could find. He played a series of all-black clubs across the northern United States, paired again with the great Jackie Wilson in what promoters had billed as a kind of battle of the races for the soul of rock and roll. He played gymnasiums in Tennessee and Mississippi, and festivals in Arkansas where old men whittled ax handles and sold them for fifty cents apiece.
Bad luck literally flung itself at him. “I was comin’ back from the Wagon Wheel, me and Doc Herron,” he says, of a trip home from the road. “I had this big ol’ Limited Buick. Piece of junk. I was doin’ seventy-five, eighty miles an hour. And I was cruisin’ along. It gets foggy over there, sometimes, in Louisiana—off of Natchez, comes off that hill, that fog does. And Doc says, ‘Watch that horse!’” The horse was launched across the hood of the Buick, through the windshield, and into the front seats. “And I just fell right down, right in [Herron’s] lap. And that’s the onliest thing that saved me. The horse hung on to my car.
“Finally got stopped, and the horse just fell off on the road. Wasn’t supposed to be out. Against the law, horse to be out. What you gonna do, though, you know?” Some people would have sued, to get their car fixed. “I don’t sue nobody,” he says, and he would have felt silly, anyway, making such a big thing about a Buick. Besides, a “poor old colored guy owned it, that horse. Wasn’t nobody gonna speak up for the guy.”
He shakes his head at the memory. “I had a lot of hair—long, blond hair, you know. I got out of the car and I shook my head for . . . must’ve been like three hours, and I just kept gettin’ glass, just kept fallin’ out of my hair. Shattered glass.”
On February 27, 1959, Myra Gayle gave birth to a seven-pound baby boy, Steve Allen Lewis. Little Stevie came into this world with a fine head of hair, like his daddy. Jerry Lee named him for the man who had been kind to him and straight with him and took a chance on him when no one else would, a man he would never say a mean word about, no matter how grim things might get. Photographers pushed their way into Myra’s hospital room to record mother and child. Jerry Lee was no longer collecting $40,000 checks, but he was working almost every night and still drawing a rare fat payday from some big shows, so he bought Myra and Steve Allen a new house in Coro Lake, with white shag carpeting, a small waterfall in the foyer, a white grand piano, and a swimming pool in the back. He rarely saw any of it. He truly believed that if he ever slowed down, he would just vanish, so he fought back one road trip, one little club at a time.
He recorded almost every time he landed back in Memphis, many of them good songs, but it was as if he was singing them into the wind. He had twenty-one recording sessions at Sun between ’59 and ’63, resulting in eighty-five songs, but few of them were potential breakout singles. He cut a hot, “Breathless”-like single called “Lovin’ Up a Storm,” and a novelty song called “Big Blon’ Baby,” and another Otis Blackwell tune, “Let’s Talk About Us.” He even cut his father’s signature song, “Mexicali Rose.”
It was just the beginning of what writer Colin Escott would call “the locust years,” a quagmire that just sucked him down deeper no matter how many miles he drove or how many shows he played. As if in some cruel joke, his music grew in popularity in England and Europe, where young people continued going wild for each new record he released. Yet in the States the taint of scandal was slow to dissipate, and while at one show he might have standing room only, others, unpromoted, left him staring into empty seats. “I played for two old ladies one time in Kansas,” he says. “I told ’em, ‘Y’all don’t owe me nothin’ for this show.’”
But he was also facing a bigger problem: the changing style of rock and roll. The truth is that the American music scene was morphing around him, changing into something he did not recognize and could hardly stand. It was losing its guts, its backbone; the day of the country boogies and the hard rockers was blinking out almost as soon as it arrived. You could listen to the Top 40 all day and not hear a lick of Hank Williams in it, or Junior Parker or Moon Mullican or Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. As the 1950s died, the great roar of rock and roll faded to a kind of simpering sigh. In late 1957, after an airplane engine exploded into a fireball on one of his tours, Little Richard announced that he’d been saved, had joined the clergy, and was preaching of the end of time. Elvis had been overseas since the fall of 1958. In 1959, Richie Valens, J. P. Richardson (known as the Big Bopper), and Jerry Lee’s good friend Buddy Holly died in a plane crash. And in December 1959, the great Chuck Berry was sentenced to three years under the Mann Act for transporting a fourteen-year-old girl across state lines.