THE KILLER RELOADED
January 2007
By Charles M. Young
Photographs by Mary Ellen Mark
There was one occasion when he finished his act by setting the piano
on fire to steal the show from Chuck Berry who was due on stage next
and another time when the Memphis police had to arrest him because he
was on a drunken rampage outside Elvis Presley's Graceland villa,
bawling profanities at "The King".
For Jerry Lee Lewis, Rock 'n Roll
was always more than a mere musical genre: he saw it as a license, a
carte blanche to do whatever he wanted. With this approach, he
certainly livened things becoming known as “Rock'n'Roll's first great
wild man.” For others, he is simply "The Killer' a sobriquet that
remains to this day. Even though in the meantime he no longer insists
on receiving journalists with a cocked revolver in his hand...
Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark
As his five chihuahuas yowl inside the house, Jerry Lee Lewis shuffles
out the kitchen door and rummages around the line of doghouses he
keeps in his carport for the five gentle mutts who lie around outside
in the yard. He is wearing only his underpants ‑ bikini briefs, not
boxers ‑ and it appears that the most rock & roll of all rock &
rollers might be having a senior moment. "Go back in the house,
Daddy!" says Phoebe Lewis, alpha female of his inner circle. Jerry
mumbles something unintelligible. Even in Nesbit, Mississippi ("Home of
Jerry Lee Lewis: The Killer”), nobody talks quite like him. He's the
Mount Vesuvius of vowels, which erupt deep under the surface and spew
pure and unalloyed by consonants into the upper atmosphere. It's like
the guy decided in 1957 to enunciate song lyrics and otherwise use his
tongue exclusively for swallowing food.
"Go back inside," Phoebe says, "and put on your clothes!" "Izza mah
hlay, innih? Ah ih wah rou ih mah orz ih ah wah oo," says Jerry, which
means: "This is my place, isn't it? I can walk around in my shorts if I
want to." "The man here in the driveway is a writer!" says Phoebe. “Ah
o eeha riyer! Ah ellina hroo!" ("I know he’s a writer. I'm telling
the truth.”) "This is the truth? Your underpants are the truth?" Jerry
makes a sound that defies both his daughter and phonetic spelling
"Well, go ahead, then!" says Phoebe. “Make a fool out of yourself! See
if I care! Go ahead and put on a show for all those cars on the
highway, too!"
Jerry glares at his sole living descendant and marches to the
middle of the driveway, which goes up a short rise from Malone Road.
Over the white fence that surrounds his forty acres and pond, the
headlights of the passing cars seem to be gaping at the Killer, who is
illuminated by the garage lights as if onstage. Hunched but unbowed,
after six decades over the piano, he flaps his arms, he jumps up and
down, he screams vowel sounds at the cars, daring them to gaze upon his
nakedness in the humid night air. "Lehm ri ah!" ("Let him write
that”), Jerry snarls, stomping back into the house.
So it isn't a senior moment. It is a Jerry Lee Lewis moment, which
could have happened pretty much any time since he was born on
September 29th, 1935, the same year Elvis Presley arrived in this world
of woe. The last of the original Sun Records pioneers of rock &
roll, and by far the least likely to be walking around in the
twenty‑first century, the only guy in all of music who makes Keith
Richards look about as dangerous as Jessica Simpson, the Killer
continues to rage into the night... well, no. Let's say he’s resumed
raging. The Nineties were a really bad decade for the Killer, and that
would be after the public‑relations nightmare of the Fifties, the
smoking ruin of the Sixties, the unprecedented string of calamities in
the Seventies, and then in 1981 his stomach exploded, and it's been all
downhill from there. Who could blame a guy for taking a little time
off to get depressed?
The Lewis Ranch, as it is called, or Disgraceland, as it is also
called, is a racquetball court, two jet planes and a graveyard short of
Elvis' former mansion, which is about twenty-five miles away, in
Memphis. All the rooms are on one floor, all the rooms are piled high
with swag from fifty years in the music business, and large portions of
it have been painted gold.
Jerry's sixth wife in his seventh marriage,
Kerrie Lynn McCarver Lewis, blew through the place like King Midas.
Painted the walls, painted the floors, painted the grand piano, painted
the cupboards, painted her Cadillac Fleetwood ‑ all of it gold, gold
and more gold. Except the kitchen, which she covered with Coca-Cola
wallpaper.
"She was a horrible bitch who was possessed by the devil and only
shopped at Wal-Mart ‑ we've just now begun stripping the walls,"
says
Phoebe at the kitchen counter in late afternoon. Born to Jerry and his
third wife, Myra, in 1963, she grew up tall and blond and has the Lewis
vibe in all ways. After singing blues and rock around Memphis for a
number of years, she moved back in with her father to help him through
an arduous divorce. “Kerrie told me she was leaving him, but I was
going to run her ass off anyway," she says. "I was born to take care of
my daddy. I never married, don't want to have kids. I'm not going to
steal his money or give him drugs."
Jerry comes out of his bedroom a little before five o'clock,
explaining that he had just awakened and is going to watch Gunsmoke, as
he does every day on cable from five to seven, even though he's
memorized all the episodes and has them on DVD. Phoebe hands him a
plate with a steak on it and a grape soda, his drink of choice since
quitting alcohol in recent years. He also gave his first concert ever
without amphetamines a couple of years ago, so you could say the man's
on a health kick. Breaking with his usual morning routine, Jerry did
not "ride" his motorcycle, which is to say, fire up the Harley-Davidson
in his living room and rev the engine to get a nice lungfish of carbon
monoxide. It was a little too close to the start of Gunsmoke, so he
just returns to the bedroom with his dinner/breakfast.
Wearing boxer shorts and a wife‑beater T‑shirt, and unshaven for
three or four days, he re‑emerges at 7:01. Often described as
sharklike, his steel‑blue eyes retain the testosterone burn that has
illuminated his face since his earliest photographs. The spectacular
wavy blond hair that used to flop over his face like flames dripping
sweat is now wavy and white. He'd been recording his new album, Last
Man Standing,for several years, with various rock stars (everyone from
Little Richard to Kid Rock), country greats (Merle Haggard, Toby Keith)
and blues virtuosos (B.B. King, Buddy Guy). Some of it is fast(“Rock
and Roll," with Jimmy Page), and some of it is slow (“A Couple More
Years," with Willie Nelson), and all of it is utterly charming. One of
the most original pianists and singers ever in American music, the man
can still wrap his vocal cords around a wide range of emotion, which
has been a question since his previous album, Young Blood, in 1995.
His last marriage, rocky from the start and a whole avalanche of
bad by the end, finally sent Jerry to bed, where he watched television
and generally dissipated for several years. Then philanthropist Steve
Bing decided the world needed another Jerry Lee Lewis album, financed
the whole independent production himself, turned loose his creative
partner, Jimmy Rip, to produce and track down a boatload of duet
partners with suitable talent and star magnitude. It took five years,
but as Jerry's creative spirit revived, so did the rest of him. After
sixty years of banging his head on every sharp corner available to a
musician, Jerry Lee Lewis is not only the last man standing, Last Man
Standing is a damn miracle: rock & roll & craziness ... is that
wisdom making those lyrics believable?
"Yeah, we worked hard on this album," says Jerry, settling down in
his den, which would have been a beautiful room if the black walnut
paneling hadn't been painted gold. At this point the five Chihuahuas ‑
Topaz, Topaz Junior, Babette, Prince and Zelda ‑ race into the room,
bark madly, jump on Jerry and are chased off by Phoebe. "I've got my
audience," Jerry says, chuckling "I've gone to the dogs."
It should be stated here that the average Yankee can understand
Jerry's accent with a little practice. His usual interview is about
twelve minutes, so the careful reporter will minimize asking, "What?"
In this case, he talks for an hour. The trick for the careful reporter
is the same trick used by the best of Jerry's producers in the
recording studio: Let the man do what he wants. And with little
prompting (or further attempts at phonetic spelling), what Jerry wants
is to talk about his childhood, starting with his cousin Jimmy
Swaggart. Whatever one's opinion of Swaggart's theology and his
well‑publicized problems with temptation of the flesh in 1987 he is the
best preacher of his generation, every bit the equal of Jerry as a
performer The two were born just six months apart, and their paths are
forever intertwined.
"I started bein' a musician at Jimmy Swaggart’s home," says Jerry. "I
was five or six years old. They had a piano, and we didn't, but l was
interested. I thought, 'That is what I want to do.' My folks got me a
piano when I was eight. By the time I was nine or ten, I was playin'
pretty good, pretty close to how I play now. If that's good. See‑ya!"
Son of sharecropper Elmo Kidd Lewis and his wife, Mary Ethel
Herron Lewis, Jerry was born just after his father came home to
Ferriday, Louisiana, from a prison sentence of several months for
moonshining whiskey. Both parents loved music and were stalwarts of the
First Assembly Full Gospel Church, which was part of the Assembly of
God, a Pentecostal denomination known for its boisterous services,
speaking in tongues and strict adherence to the Bible as the inerrant
word of God.
Soon sentenced to five years for another moonshine bust, Elmo
missed Jerry's early childhood and earned his wife's undying wrath.
Perhaps he got some forgiveness when he mortgaged the family home in
1945 to buy a Starck upright piano, on which Jerry transformed the
tunes he heard on the family Victrola into boogie‑woogie. Perhaps he
lost that forgiveness when he couldn't make the payments and the bank
foreclosed on the house. In any case, it's a safe bet that Jerry had a
deeper bond with his doting mother.
One of the legendary aspects of his childhood was sneaking into
Haney's Big House, a black nightclub in Ferriday that attracted many of
the best blues musicians of the day. "Yeah, I was eight or nine, and
Jimmy would fetch me to go over there, but he chickened out," Jerry
says. "He wouldn't go in. I went in the door so l could really listen
to 'em pick. They was playin' a lowdown blues. I knew l liked that
music. Ha!"
The South was extremely segregated at the time, of course, but
racism was everywhere battered by a creative explosion of music and
technology. Unlike concert venues, the radio dial could not be
segregated and was laying the cultural foundation for rock & roll,
not to mention the civil‑rights movement. When .Elmo wired the house
for electricity shortly after buying the piano and acquired the
family's first radio, Jerry soaked up an undifferentiated gumbo of
country, gospel, jazz, pop and blues.
"I just had the urge to listen to music, go where it was the best,"
he says. “My mother would have had a heart attack f she'd known I was in
that club, and my father would have beat me half to death. I knew the
music was great. I knew it was different. I knew it would capture the
world I knew that, and! wanted it, so I reached in there and grabbed
it. I went home and started playin' me some blues. And l started going
to these roadhouses, puke joints and honky‑tonks where you weren't
supposed to be until you're twenty‑one. I had a job at the Blue Cat
Club in Natchez, and the owner said, 'If the policeman comes by here
and asks how old you are, you tell him you're twenty‑one years old '
said, 'Nooooooo problem.' So the policeman comes by and says, 'How old
are you?' I said, 'I’m twenty‑one,' and my feet weren't even touchin'
the floor of the piano stool. He just cracked up laughin.'
Romantically as well as musically precocious, Jerry got married
for the first time, at age fifteen, to the daughter of a Pentecostal
preacher and enrolled at Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie,
Texas, on the theory that a family man should have a respectable career
in the pulpit. Since his memory could photocopy Bible verse as quickly
as song verse, he wasn't a complete failure as a seminarian, but he
spent most of his time sneaking out to nightclubs in Dallas and was
expelled after three months for playing a boogie‑woogie rendition of
'My God Is Real" in front of the student body.
After a stint selling vacuum cleaners and almost going to jail for
neglecting to pay the company its share of the proceeds, Jerry noticed
some interesting new sounds on the radio. They all seemed to be
emanating from what is now viewed as the birthplace of rock & roll
Sun Records in Memphis. When Jerry knocked on Sun's door in September
1955, he was well placed to be 'the next Elvis" when owner Sam Phillips
made the worst deal in music history that November: selling the
recording contract of the old Elvis to RCA for $35,000. Even then, Sun
had an incredible roster of talent that included Johnny Cash, Carl
Perkins and Roy Orbison. Phillips heard Jerry’s audition tape, offered a
contract and had the intuition to turn on the tape deck and let his
next Elvis go where his emotions took him.
The destination turned out to be a sensational hit single, "Whole
Lotta Shakin' Goin' On." Recorded with one microphone at Sun Studio, it
captured just enough of his highly
percussive‑yet‑more-melodic‑than‑Little Richard piano while Jerry
expounded a joyous sexual invitation that had never been heard or even
suspected by most middle‑class Americans. Right there in the midst of
the Cold War and all its dismal propaganda, Jerry Lee Lewis had somehow
entered a rarefied realm of orgiastic enthusiasm heretofore inhabited
only by Howlin' Wolf and maybe a few guys at Haney’s Big House. When he
performed the song on The Steve Allen Show on July 28th, 1957 he took
it even further; preaching a salacious sermon of seduction that still
looks daring fifty years later, his hair exploding as he shifted from
pumping eighth notes to pounding sixteenth notes, two millennia of
Christian sublimation reversed in two minutes. Not Elvis, not the
Beatles, not anybody had a more exciting debut on television.
Overnight, he became a star
"I never really thought in that direction, that the records were
vulgar;" says Jerry. “I didn't think about it until years later. I got
to listening to them, and thinking about them, and! thought, ‘Now that
is a risque record, isn’t it?’ Now I’m not a dumbbell. But I only
thought about music. I knew the music was good, I knew people liked it,
and that was the direction I went in. I wasn't going to get in a
girl’s pants or anything even though eventually I did. Nature will take
its course."
This statement isn't precisely true. Jerry was actually tormented
by the content of his second huge hit in 1957 "Great Balls of Fire,”
which he at first refused to record on the grounds that it was the work
of the devil. And maybe it was. Whatever forbidden desires "Whole
Lotta Shakin'" explored, its successor was an even hotter song
impossibly raising the energy and hormone levels even further. He and
Sam Phillips had a vehement argument, which was taped and has been
included in a number of Sun collections.
"I wasn't used to the girls coming on so strong," Jerry continues.
“I'll never forget, I walked offstage one time, and my dad was with me.
I had to leave before I did half the songs, they were screaming so
loud. My daddy said, ‘Now how in the world do you keep turning that
down?' I said, 'Turning what down, Daddy?' He said, 'Those real pretty
girls.' I said, ‘I never thought about that.' Ha! You could see where
he was comin’ from."
Jerry wasn't exactly virginal in his naiveté. He was in love with
his thirteen‑year‑old second cousin Myra Gale Brown, who was the
daughter of his cousin and bass player, J.W. Brown. Incapable of doing
anything except what his emotions told him to do, Jerry had already
been married twice, fathered one child and hadn't paid a lot of
attention to legal formalities like divorce. Marrying for the third
time, to Myra, didn’t seem like such a big deal. To Jerry it appeared
that love should conquer all including horrified parents and outraged
public opinion. He'd been through it before. This time he at least had
the money to take care of a wife. He had huge hit records. He was
headlining shows with Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. He didn't think he'd
done anything wrong, so why worry? Then the newspapers found out about
Myra on a tour of England in May of 1958 and hounded him out of the
country. Back in the United States, prominent supporters like Dick Clark
abandoned him and DJs began boycotting his records. Overnight, he went
from $10,000 per concert to $200.
"I coulda cared less," says Lewis. “I never hid nothin' from the
world. Sam Phillips warned me to hide it. That was a buncha baloney.
I'd be a hypocrite if did that."
Unable to sell records after his fall from grace, Jerry continued
to make a living playing clubs, where he refined his delivery and
unerring crowd radar, even as the British Invasion seemed to cast him
further into the dustbin of pop history. He was too old at twenty‑nine.
He had the wrong haircut, accent and instrument.
“My fans never stopped lovin' me," he says. "They always came to my
shows. They didn't always get my records, 'cause Sam dropped all his
distributors and wouldn't release anything. When I moved on to Mercury
Records [in 1963] and started recording some country, my style of
country, and some rock & roll too, one of them songs [‘Another
Place Another Time,' in 1968] sold a million copies right of the press.
That tells you something is wrong, that Sam didn't do me right "
The entire roster of Sun stars had moved on to other, bigger
companies in hopes of getting artist support equal to their talent.
Despite selling several million records, Jerry never collected a
royalty from Sun and never sued Phillips.
"Nope. Never sued nobody," he says. "Sam owed me millions. He told me
he did. In font of several witnesses, yeah. I said, ‘About how much
do you owe me now?' This must have been twenty‑five years ago. He said,
'Well, a little over 8 million dollars.' I said, 'Why don't you pay
me, Sam? It's my money, isn't it?' He said, 'I can't see it goin for a
bunch of houses and women and cars. I just can't let it go like that.
'I said, 'In other words, you're not going to give me my money, are
you?' He said, 'Nope. Not gonna do it. I know you shoulda gone after
it. If you wanna do that, go ahead and sue me. But I'm not gonna pay
you.’" Jerry laughs hard, the hardest he has all day, as the
Chihuahuas come yapping into the den again. "I knew the ballgame was
over with that," he says. "Gettin' money out of Sam Phillips was like
cramming a wet noodle up a wildcat's nose. He was tight as bark on a
oak tree. Twenty‑five cents meant as much to him as 25 million
dollars."
Most people would consider suing under those circumstances. “Just
think what he'd owe me now," he says. "But l never had a feeling about
it. Money's not the greatest thing in the world. It pays the bills,
helps you take care of your family. Buys cars. Cigars. Things. That's
about it. I've made enough money on the road I always had ways to make
money. And I always spent it. Yeeeeeha‑ha‑ha‑ha! Oh, Lord!"
Well, music is not ultimately about money. "Music is something
you're giving people They're paying to hear it, but you're not supposed
to rob them. I was never much for saving money or carrying on with it.
I just enjoyed taking care of my mother and father until they passed
away, and the rest of my family. And I love entertaining my audience.
If I was doing it for the money, I'd be the wealthiest man in the
world. Well, me and the IRS, Yeee‑ha! They come after me three times.
Took everything I had I don' know. I probably did owe them the money.
They check on you. They know. I just added some extra dates and paid
them off in a month and a half. And then did it again with them!
Yeee‑ha! I ain't no tax person. I leave that up to somebody else. And
that's the worst thing you can do!"
It's hard to imagine Jerry Lee Lewis as an accountant. "Not my
style. A person's gotta do what he's gotta do, I guess. Are we through
now? I don't know anything else I could tell you. They'll put me in
jail." That was it for the interview. Jerry perhaps intuited that
there was not much easy stuff left to talk about and it was time to
move on to the difficult stuff, some of which being:
When Jerry was
three, his brother Elmo Jr., also a great musical talent, was killed at
the age of eight by a drunken driver. On Easter Sunday in 1962, his
two‑year‑old son Steve Allen Lewis drowned in Jerry 's backyard
swimming pool. In 1971, his fourteen‑year marriage to Myra, the love of
his life, ended in divorce, and his mother, his only true anchor, died
of natural causes at fifty‑nine. In 1973, his nineteen‑year‑old son
Jerry Lee Jr. (by his second wife) died in a car wreck, he divorced his
fourth wife, and he got arrested for drunk driving. In 1976, he
accidentally shot his bassist Butch Owens in the chest with a .357
Magnum (Jerry was aiming at a Coke bottle in his bedroom and the bullet
ricocheted; Owens survived). He spent several months in 1981 near
death himself after tearing a two‑inch hole in his stomach, the
result of ulcers from alcohol, amphetamine and barbiturate consumption.
In 1982, his fourth wife, Jaren Elizabeth Gunn Pate Lewis, drowned
in a friend’s swimming pool. In 1984, fifth wife, Shawn Michelle
Stephens Lewis, died of an accidental drug overdose, and was the
subject of some investigative reporting by Richard Ben Cramer that implied Jerry was some kind of rock & roll
Bluebeard, more perpetrator than grieving widower. The dark rumors and
cruel jokes about Jerry have never stopped.
Anyway, interspersed in all the above tragedy: a lot of reckless
driving including a totaled Rolls‑Royce and a totaled Corvette;
lawsuits from a wide array of wronged parties, only a fraction of whom
got to see Jerry show up in court; and the aforementioned problems with
the Internal Revenue Service, who took his furniture, pianos, cars,
motorcycles, jet skis and mechanical bull twice and then put him on
trial for tax evasion, which he somehow beat but still owed the money.
Only Jerry was in the house when his fifth wife died. After an
argument, she apparently mistook Jerry's methadone (which he was taking
for an addiction to painkillers) for sleeping pills and died of fluid
in the lungs while she slept. If there's anything more to her death
than this, which is what the coroner found, only Jerry would know. It
can be said that Jerry was a difficult husband, and he has a
fascination with guns and knives. But he's no sociopath. Once an avid
hunter, Jerry had a conversion experience sometime in the Seventies
after shooting a squirrel. He has forbidden hunting on his property
since then and posts a big sign near his front gate: God made the
animals, love them, don't kill them. When he finds bugs inside his
house, he doesn't squash them, he picks them up and carefully places
them outside. Whatever his childhood nickname, and however much he has
tried to intimidate people to protect himself over the years, the
Killer is an unlikely killer.
Jerry's recording career has been another story. Whatever
failings Sam Phillips had as a paymaster; he understood the importance
of "feel" for his musicians and had the sense to put Jerry in the
studio with one or two legless backup musicians (mostly Janes and
drummer J.M. Van Eaton) and then let Jerry do what he pleased. The
sheer scope of Jerry's initial was not really understood until the
Seventies and Eighties when the original Sun tapes were rediscovered,
and even then it was overshadowed by the mess of Jerry's life outside
of music. Like an actor who makes the gossip columns too often, Jerry
forced his audience to carry a lot of his personal baggage when it
considered his art.
In the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, Waylon Payne may
have come closer to the real Jerry Lee Lewis in his supporting role to
Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash. Payne caught Jerry's bizarre caroms
between Pentecostal Puritanism and rock & roll hedonism, banging
off the wall of arrogance that Jerry erected to protect himself from a
world that had inflicted so many wounds. Taking advice from Johnny Cash
and Carl Perkins on his first tour that he had to get crazy or die (in
front of the audience), Jerry was a fast learner who quickly
out‑crazed his teachers, learning that a well‑kicked piano bench could
send any crowd into a frenzy. On his next tour, he and Gene Vincent
competed to see who could sing the filthiest lyrics, while at the same
time he tried to keep faith with God by singing the gospel. The daring
juxtaposition of stage moves previously confined to the pulpit and a
leering open sexuality ‑ it was more contradiction than anyone could
handle without chemicals.
"In those days, everyone took a couple of diet pills and five double
cognacs before they went on," says Ronnie Hawkins, a first-generation
rockabilly from Arkansas. "You had to take the edge off and get the
energy up, and that was the comfortablest way of doing it. All of us
who wanted to be a frontiersman, we were all acting crazy. It was part of
the show. But Jerry had the most nerve. Jerry was just one of them
cats who might be rural, but he could be quick-witted and mouth off to
people. He set a blistering pace, and he did shit that ain't nobody else
gonna do."
So Jerry drank and did pills to tweak his brain, like every other
musician in the world. A true Christian and a true artist, he refused
to compound his sins with lies and hypocrisy, but that still left a
lot of guilt to dissolve. Jesus counseled that you should not hide your
light under a basket, and Jerry was not going to hide, even if his
light illuminated America's pagan lower chakras. Fans are full of
stories about Jerry coming into a bar; throwing down more shots than
they had ever seen and talking all night about how much he wanted to
fuck Chuck Berry's daughter. Journalists, even when they could
understand his accent, have never been quite sure if they were
interviewing a man or a reptile. Jerry would feed the uncertainty by pulling a gun, placing it on the table next to a
whiskey bottle and saying, “Now what did you want to ask?"
"Sure, it was an act. They all had an act," says Robbie Robertson,
who was playing guitar for Ronnie Hawkins at the age of sixteen and
contributed his song "Twilight" to Jerry's latest album. "But with
Jerry, there was a genuine feeling of danger about him, and that was
part of the excitement. I'm not saying he was on all the time, just
that he carried some shit around with him that you went, ‘Wooooooo.'
You never knew if something was going to make him laugh or cry or get
angry. But the important thing was the music. I used to watch him in
those little honky‑tonks, and there was music coming out of his every
pore. Everything he did was musical. Everything he did was in time."
In 2002, Steve Bing, the movie producer and one of the largest
donors to the Democratic party, wanted Jerry to record a couple of
songs for a soundtrack. The movie never got made, but Bing's
collaborator Jimmy Rip dropped his normal role as
guitarist‑bandleader-producer and did some detective work to track down
the Killer, who had no Web page, no manager, no nothing. After a
couple of months of searching and a few weeks of phone negotiations,
Rip and Bing went to Mississippi. Jerry was barely functioning
physically after many years on methadone, which he took to get off
Talwin, a painkiller he got addicted to after tearing his stomach in
1981.
"The meeting went well, but he's been burned so many times that he's a little suspicious of people," says Rip. “Plus, his last marriage had fallen apart, and it just wasn't nice at all.
He had pretty much gone to bed, and we had to pry him out. Finally, we
came to an agreement about money, cash up front. He’s an incredibly
smart man and totally aware. If there are ten conversations going on in
a room, he can keep up on all of them. He was just very sad at the
time, which happens a lot to older musicians. Just a reaction to
getting treated like shit. Either you're not getting your due, or
you're getting ripped off. It’s just frustrating when you're talented
and you know it. But as soon as we started recording, we started
laughing. And we've been laughing for five years now."
So Jerry, Jimmy, and Steve hit it off and the soundtrack quickly
morphed into an album. It was all financed by Bing and released
independently, so they could do whatever they wanted for however long
they wanted.
“People were very suspicious of it being just another celebrity
rat‑fuck record, where it's just a basic track with a glopped‑on big
name," says Rip. "That’s what they thought until they heard it, and
everyone loved it and wanted to be a part of it. Bruce Springsteen sent
me such a sweet letter after we recorded ‘Pink Cadillac.’ It said,
'Thank you for fulfilling a rock & rollers dream: Jerry Lee Lewis
recording one of my songs. This is my favorite version of one of my
songs that anyone has ever done."
"The greatest joy was seeing what happens to a song once it gets in
Jerry's head and comes back out again his way," says Rip. "He’s always
humble about it, says, ‘If a man writes a song, he should hear it the
way he wrote it. I don't want to mess it up too much.' And then he
turns around and just destroys the thing and reconstructs it eight
times better."
Sometimes talent seemed to be the only thing holding him up. "I've
watched him from the wings of the stage when he's been sick, just out
of his hospital bed, and you think, 'This guy isn't going to live to
reach the piano bench,' but the second he drops his hands on the keys,
something metaphysical happens," Rip says. "Everyone jumps. It's like
electricity.”
“He took all my song suggestions except one," adds Rip. "The only
song l brought to him that he didn't want to do was ‘Angel of Death,'
by Hank Williams. He loves Hank Williams, always says that there were
only four true American originals: Al Jolson, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank
Williams and Jerry Lee Lewis. He's recorded ten of Hank’s songs. But
not that one. He's had so many bad things happen. Everything else, from
the Beatles to the Stooges he ate them up. But that he would not sing.
The one topic he won't touch is death."
END