Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(99)
Into the breach flooded a wide array of music for twelve-year-old girls. It was the time of Ricky Nelson, and Fabian, and Frankie Avalon, the time when Chubby Checker replaced Fats Domino at every hamburger stand in the nation. It was the dawn of surf rock, ushered in by the Ventures’ “Walk—Don’t Run” and culminating in two years with the arrival of the Beach Boys and songs like “Surfin’ Safari.” It was the time when indies like Sun Records were being eclipsed by new labels: Berry Gordy’s Tamla/Motown, with the Marvelettes and the Miracles and the Supremes; Phil Spector’s Philles, with the Crystals and the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers. It was all very catchy and pretty, but it was a long, long way from Haney’s Big House.
As if in disgust, great black musicians with heart and grit went their own way with a music called just “soul,” and Sam Cooke, Solomon Burke, James Brown, and Ben E. King did their thing without great regard to the once grand experiment of rock and roll. It was not that there was no good music on the air—Roy Orbison finally broke through with “Only the Lonely” in 1960 and proved that soft rock could still be rock—but it was clear that great change was upon the industry. By the time Del Shannon’s relatively stripped-down “Runaway” broke in 1961, it was treated as a rare return to rock and roll. Carl Perkins had long since faded away. Johnny Cash had gone all the way over to country. Elvis returned from the army with what critics called “less menace” and “more maturity”; he cut one decent album for RCA, did a TV show with Frank Sinatra, then gave one last live show in ’61 and did not perform again live for eight years. And somewhere out there, somewhere at the end of some gravel driveway in a club with a two-drink minimum, Jerry Lee Lewis gave them the boogie-woogie and the lowdown blues, and when it came time to slow it down and sing them something pretty, he sang them Ray Price or Gene Autry, which was about as sissy as he was willing to get.
“It seems,” he says, “like they let rock and roll wither, a little bit.”
Jerry Lee himself was still calling the tunes, and with the well of new songs drying up, he dug back into the bottomless bag of classic American music. In the fall of ’59, he cut takes on Chuck’s “Little Queenie” and Hank’s “I Could Never Be Ashamed of You,” and released them as a single, to little commercial effect. Six months later, he backed a throwaway new song—“Baby Baby Bye Bye”—with a Stephen Foster song, “Old Black Joe,” which was more than a century old. The stations that no longer boycotted his music outright simply didn’t play the new records much. He was rumored to be starring in a movie in Hollywood, but it was never made. He was rumored to be a sure thing for another film, something called Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys, but that went to some guy named Paul Newman, who couldn’t even sing. At Sun, his star was dying. Sam Phillips was building a new $400,000 studio and pushing records by Charlie Rich and others, but not Jerry Lee. Sam had started to refer to him as a tragic figure, said he wouldn’t throw “good money after bad.” The musicians union was boycotting him for transgressions that had occurred with backup musicians before Oscar Davis went on the lam with the payroll.
It wasn’t that Sun didn’t try to rescue his career; it was just that what they tried had almost nothing to do with Jerry Lee Lewis. His single for the fall of 1960, “When I Get Paid” backed by “Love Made a Fool of Me,” matched a midtempo pop number with a generic ballad and had a piano part that sounded suspiciously like Charlie Rich. In a bid to get around any lingering discomfort over his name, Sun even had Jerry Lee record an instrumental take on the old Glenn Miller hit “In the Mood” under the pseudonym The Hawk, believing that great talent would find an audience even without the name attached, but since no one in the known universe played piano like Jerry Lee Lewis, it was laughably clear who it was, like a football in Christmas wrapping.
One dilemma seemed to intersect with another till it all just wrapped around itself in one suffocating ball. The radio stations wouldn’t play him, so the songwriters wouldn’t bring him good material. Without the songs, his records suffered. He remained the wildest live show around—still explosive, still dynamic, still the fierce, good-lookin’ devil he’d been in ’57, when it seemed like the collective police departments of the Eastern seaboard couldn’t contain the people who wanted to love him to death. People still walked out the doors of the auditoriums or out the gates of the county fairs shaking their heads, stunned, some of them, and amazed, some of them—and almost every one of them mightily entertained. “The day I don’t see that look in their faces, that’s the day I quit. Not before.”
In the midst of this, one of his rocks, his foundation, split in two. His mother and father had always been quietly at war, against each other and both against the world. Mamie and Elmo, leaning on each other, balancing each other, had survived the Depression, the ordeal of prison inside and outside the walls, and the death of a child; one of them was strong as iron inside, the other like steel outside. Mamie’s faith had never weakened, but Elmo’s had never really been strong enough to suit her, and as he drank and caroused into middle age she finally told him to go on about his sorriness without her, though she loved him anyway and always would. They separated in 1961 and later divorced, and the one thing that Jerry Lee depended on more than anything in this world had come apart beneath his feet.