Jerry Lee Lewis

Rick Bragg

Description

Jerry Lee Lewis has lived an extraordinary life. He gave rock and roll its devil's edge with hit records like 'Great Balls of Fire'. His incendiary shows caused riots and boycotts. He ran a decade-long marathon of drugs, drinking, and women, and married his thirteen-year-old second cousin, the third of seven wives. He also nearly met his maker, at least twice. He survived it all to be hailed as one of the greatest music icons. For the very first time, he reveals the truth behind the Last Man Standing of the rock-and-roll era.

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 28 octobre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780857861603
• Langue: English

Extrait

ALSO BY RICK BRAGG
All Over but the Shoutin’
Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg
Ava’s Man
I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story
The Prince of Frogtown
The Most They Ever Had

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
www.canongate.tv
This digital edition first published in 2014 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 2014 by JLL Ferriday, Inc.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in the United States in 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007
Title page photo: Backstage at the Star-Club, Hamburg, Germany. Redferns/Getty images
For permissions credits please see here
Jerry Lee Lewis Management by: Greg Ericson, Ericson Group www.EricsonGroup.com
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 157 3 Export ISBN 978 0 85786 158 0 eISBN 978 0 85786 160 3
Designed by William Ruoto
To anyone who ever danced in their socks
They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind .
– HOSEA 8:7
If I exorcise my devils , Well, my angels may leave, too .
– TOM WAITS
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations  
Introduction: Jolson in the River
1
The Father of Waters
2
Whiskey in the Ditches Two Feet Deep
3
The Big House
4
Mr. Paul
5
Sun
6
“I Been Wantin’ to Meet That Piano Player”
7
Too Hot to Rock
8
England
9
“Who Wants Some of This?”
10
American Wilderness
11
“He Who Steals My Name”
12
Jet Planes and Hearses
13
The Year of the Gun
14
“Babies in the Air”
15
The Fork in the Road
16
Last Man Standing
17
Stone Garden
Epilogue: Killer  
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
JERRY LEE LEWIS
HIS OWN STORY
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
With his parents, Elmo and Mamie Herron Lewis.
As a boy, at around the time his father took him out to the levee to see the party boats on the Mississippi. “That’ll be you on there someday,” Elmo told him. “That’ll be you.”
The young conqueror loose on the streets.
The bar at Haney’s Big House, with proprietor, Will Haney, second from right. “I just introduced myself to the atmosphere,” says Jerry Lee.
With Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, who tried to convince Jerry Lee that he could save souls as a “rock-and-roll exponent,”.
Sam’s brother Jud, who served, at various times, as manager, drinking partner, and mentor.
Jerry Lee with (left to right) Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and Johnny Cash, around the piano at Sun, December 4, 1956: the afternoon jam session that went down in history as the Million Dollar Quartet. “I knew there was something special going on here,” Jerry Lee says.
Here he is, jumpin’ and joltin’: The Steve Allen Show, July 28, 1957.
Shining down from above: a mysterious Sun promotional photo.
Debuting “Great Balls of Fire” in the jukebox film Jamboree.
Signing autographs for fans at the Bell Auditorium, Augusta, Georgia.
The Great Ball of Fire on Dick Clark’s
“I thought to myself, I don’t like the look in these girls’ eyes , and the cops couldn’t do nothing about it.”
Valdosta, Georgia, probably early 1958.
With fan club president Kay Martin ( upper right ) and a fan backstage at the Loews Paradise Theater in the Bronx, New York, March 31, 1958.
At the Granada Theatre in Tooting, South London: his last concert before leaving England, May 26, 1958.
“Why don’t we leave our personal questions out of this, sir?” Greeting the press with Myra upon his return from England, Idlewild Airport, New York City, 1958.
Steve Allen Lewis, who died before his fourth birthday.
With Don Everly (center) and Buddy Holly (right), who asked him for marriage advice. Jerry Lee remembers Holly as “a real champion” and “a true gentleman.”
With his parents, Mamie and Elmo, 1959.
At El Monte Stadium, Los Angeles, with DJ Art Leboe, June 20, 1958.
REX USA / Devo Hoffmann
The conqueror returns to Europe, early 1960s.
The finale of his triumphant appearance in Granada TV’s Don’t Knock the Rock, March 19, 1964 .
In May 1963, he did a weeklong stint at the Star-Club, a raucous joint on the infamous Reeperbahn where the Beatles had lately cut their teeth.
On April 5 of the following year, he returned to record one of the greatest live albums of all time.
In the studio for Smash, 1965.
A Chicago live date captured for the cover of the Smash album Memphis Beat.
The wild man reborn as a seasoned country star.
“No, never shall my soul be satisfied!” As Iago in Catch My Soul , 1968.
Backstage at the London Palladium, 1972.
At the London Rock and Roll Show, the first concert ever held in Wembley Stadium, 1972.
Bananafish Garden, Brooklyn, New York, 1973.
“Where’s Daddy at? Is he still cussin’?” With Elmo in Texas, 1970s.
After pulling into the gates of Graceland, early morning, November 23, 1976.
In his private plane, 1970s.
Onstage with Linda Gail.
With Mick Fleetwood and Keith Richards for Salute!, a Dick Clark TV special, July 1983.
The boys of Ferriday, Louisiana: with Mickey Gilley (left) and Jimmy Lee Swaggart.
With his fourth wife, Jaren Pate, in 1978.
At his wedding to Shawn Stephens, June 7, 1983.
After Shawn’s death, on April 24, 1984, he married Kerrie McCarver.
Getting his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. With him is Dennis Quaid, who played Jerry Lee in the 1989 motion picture Great Balls of Fire.
At home in Nesbit, Mississippi, with his Sun gold records.
With Chuck Berry and Ray Charles at the first Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, January 23, 1986.
At the Great Balls of Fire premiere party, at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, 1989.
Back at the Hall of Fame, 1995.
Onstage with Levi Kreis at Million Dollar Quartet, 2010.
Frankie Jean.
Linda Gail.
With Judith, 2014.
INTRODUCTION
JOLSON IN THE RIVER

The Black River, and the Mississippi
1945
The party boats churned up the big river from New Orleans and down from Memphis and Vicksburg, awash in good liquor and listing with revelers who dined and drank and danced to tied-down pianos and whole brass bands, as their captains skirted Concordia Parish on the way to someplace brighter. The passengers were well-off people, mostly, the officer class home from Europe and the Pacific and tourists from the Peabody, Roosevelt, and Monteleone, clinking glasses with planters and oil men who had always found riches in the dirt the poorer men could not see. Weary of the austerity of war, of rationing and victory gardens, of coastal blackouts and U-boats that hung like sharks at the river mouth, they wanted to raise a racket, spend some money, and light up the river and the entire dull, sleeping land. They floated drunk and singing past sandbars where gentlemen of Natchez once settled affairs of honor with smoothbore pistols and good claret, and around snags and whirlpools where river pirates had lured travelers to their doom.
The country people, in worn-through overalls and faded flour-sack dresses, watched from the banks of the Mississippi and Black rivers the same way they looked through the windows of a store. In the war years, they had traded the lives of their young men for better times, but they had seen too much bad luck and broke-down history to overcome with just one big war. Reconstruction, the Great Depression, and named storms and unnamed floods had left generations hunched over another man’s cotton, and in their faces you could read the one true thing: that sometimes all you could get of a good life was what you could see floating just out of reach, till it disappeared around a bend in the river or vanished behind a veil of flood-ravaged trees. And sometimes, hauntingly, even when a boat had passed them by, they could still hear the music drifting down-river as if there was a song in the water itself, Dixieland or ragtime or, before they turned away to their lives in the colorless mud, a faint, thin scrap of Jolson.

Down among the sheltering palms
Oh, honey, wait for me .

He was still a boy then. One day, when he was nine or ten, he stood on the levee beside his mother and father as one more party boat pushed against the current, well-dressed people laughing on deck. Safe in the middle of the Black River, they raised their glasses in a mocking toast to the family ashore. “They tipped their mint juleps at us, tipped ’em up,” he says, and smiles the faintest bit to prove how little it matters to him after so much time. But it mattered to the man and woman beside him. His daddy was indestructible then, gaunt, six foot four, with big, powerful hands that could squeeze weaker men to their knees, and a face that seemed drawn only in straight lines, like Dick Tracy in the funny papers. As the drunken revelers lifted their glasses of bourbon high in the air, Elmo Kidd Lewis pulled the boy to his hip. “‘Don’t worry, son,’ Daddy told me. ‘That’ll be you on there someday. That’ll be you.’” He does not know if his daddy meant it would be him up there with the rich folks, the high and mighty, or if it would be his songs they played as the boat passed by. “I think maybe,” he says, “it was both.”
Elmo knew it the way he knew wading in the river would get him wet. He had seen it, he and his wife, Mamie, when his son was barely five years old, seen a power take over the boy’s hands and guide them across a piano he had never studied or played before. For the boy, it was . . . well, he did not truly know. His fingers touched the keys and it was like he had grabbed a naked wire, but as it burned through him, it left him not scorched and scarred but cool, calm, certain. Only God did such as that, his mama said, and his daddy bought a piano for the boy, so the miracle could proceed.
Finally, something worth remembering.
He rests now in the cool dark of his bedroom and lets it draw at the old poisons in him like a poultice. He is a swaggering man by nature