NASHVILLE BABYLON: Loud Covenants: Jerry Lee Lewis, God's Garbage Man

[The following is excerpted from the book, COUNTRY: The Biggest Music In America by Nick Tosches, published by Stein & Day Publishers.]

I believe in an ultimate and absolute rhythm.

—Ezra Pound

Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti

He who controls rhythm / controls. —Charles Olson,

“Against Wisdom as Such”

It was three o’clock in the morning, and the master bedroom of Graceland was still. Elvis Presley lay in his orange silk pajamas, dreaming. It was the same old dream. He strode through Tupelo along Highway 78 in the late afternoon, toward the home of Mary. He had not seen her since that sexy, ruinous morning in 1955, and he was happy as he turned the corner onto Fourth; there was the house, where she waited in magic underwear. Suddenly he knew he was walking without shoes and socks. Pleasance became dread, and he flushed with panic. He would go across town, where in this dream his mother lived, and there get shoes and socks. If he hurried, there was time. He took a shortcut through a backyard he recognized, but he was soon lost, running barefoot and scared through strange, derisive streets, until he came to a meadow like none he had ever seen, and afternoon became night and the meadow became endless and he screamed.

The white telephone at Elvis’s bedside was ringing. He reached and

pressed a small silver button on the box of walnut and black glass that sat near the phone. Its dark face lighted, 3:07. Beneath the time, in smaller lines, was the date, November 23, 1976. He lifted the receiver. It was Robert Loyd, a Graceland security guard, calling from the guardpost downstairs. There was trouble.

At the gate Jerry Lee Lewis leaned against his 1976 Lincoln Continental. He held a .38-caliber derringer, and he was drunk. He had come to liberate Elvis, to speak with Elvis, to murder

"I was born feet first; been rockin' ever since.

Elvis, to sing with Elvis. He demanded Elvis come to the gate. Then he demanded he be brought in to Elvis. He waved the gun and yelled curses. His eyes tightened with wrath, and he shouted for Elvis. Loyd was scared, and he asked Elvis’s advice. Ignore him, Elvjs said.

Jerry Lee raved on, and Loyd called the cops. Memphis patrolman B. J. Kirkpatrick arrived to find Lewis sitting in his car, holding the derringer at his knee. The trigger was cocked. He was arrested and charged with public drunkenness and carrying a pistol, then released on a $250 bond pending a hearing the next morning. Neither he nor his lawyer, Bob Wampler, appeared in court for the hearing, and a warrant was issued for Jerry Lee’s arrest. Later in the day the warrant was dismissed by Judge Albert H. Boyd at the request of Lewis’s lawyer. The night after the disturbance Jerry Lee entered Doctors Hospital for treatment of peptic ulcers and influenza.

Less than 24 hours before his arrest at Graceland, Lewis was arrested at a street corner near his home in Collierville, east of Memphis. After driving his 13-year-old daughter, Phoebe, to school, he overturned his $46,000 Rolls-Royce. He was charged with reckless driving, driving while intoxicated, and driving without a license. Collierville police chief, H. A. Goforth, Jr., said Lewis was given a Breathalizer test, but it proved negative. The police were baffled by this thaumaturgy, and could do nothing but free him on $250 bail pending a hearing.

After this arrest Jerry Lee told a reporter he resented that the press treated Elvis as royalty and him, Jerry Lee, as white trash. “You all hate my guts or something,” he said. Tm no angel, but I’m a pretty nice guy.” Hours later he waited, gun cocked, outside the big house on Elvis Presley Boulevard.

On September 30, a few hours before his forty-first birthday, Jerry Lee shot Norman “Butch” Owen's, his bass player, in the upper chest with a .357 magnum. Owens survived, and Jerry Lee told police he thought the. gun was empty. A hearing was set for nine o’clock, October 14, but Jerry did not appear.

The week after he shot his bass player, Jerry Lee was arrested at his home and charged with disorderly conduct. Neighbors had complained that Lewis was shouting obscenities at them.

There had always been legal fires. Until 1975 Jerry Lee kept an office in Memphis: Jerry Lee Lewis Enterprises, Inp., Suite 805, 3003 Airways Boulevard. But one night he blasted 25 holes through his office door with a .45 automatic, and he was asked to leave.

Back in the early Sixties, before San Francisco first uttered the word psychedelic, Jerry Lee and his band, the Memphis Beats,’ were arrested at a motel in Grand Prairie, Texas, apd charged with possession of 700 amphetamine capsules; 200 were for the band, 500 for Jerry Lee. In March 1975, after San Francisco last uttered the word psychedelic, federal narcotics agents boarded Lewis’s Convair 640 at the Denver airport (Jerry Lee and the boys had just arrived from Canada) and took what a government spokesman called “a substantial amount of drugs.” Lewis claimed it was a set-up. The dope was confiscated, but no arrest was made.

Believe it: Jerry Lee Lewis is a creature of mythic essence, a Set, a Baptist Dionysos. He is the heart of redneck rock:and-roll and, maybe, the greatest country singer alive. Talk about rock-and-roll depravados: Jerry Lee makes them all look like Wayne Newton. Talk about honkytonk heroes: Next to Jerry Lee, they’re a bunch of frat-party pukers. “I was born feet first, been rockin’ ever since,” he’ll tell you if he’s in a good mood. His vassals and kin will tell you more: Jerry Lee can outdrink, out-dope, out fight, out-cuss, out-shoot, and out-fuck any man in the South. He is the last American wild man, homo agrestis americanus ultimus, and his everyday deeds are the stuff of Don Siegel movies. “Just don’t get too close to him and you won’t get hurt,” said Waylon Jennings. In all ways he is a lord of excess.

■ Just don’t get too dose to him and you won’t get hurt. —Waylon Jennings

“I’ve seen him eat four steaks and then eat again in a couple of hours,” said his sister Linda Gail.

He was born on September 29, 1935, in Ferriday, Louisiana, the second son of Elncio and Mary Ethel Lewis. The older son, Elmo Jr., was killed in a car wreck at the age of nine. After Jerry Lee came two daughters, Frankie Jean and Linda Gail. Frankie Jean says her daddy, a carpenter, helped build Angola Prison Farm; she says Jerry Lee started playing piano in 1944, and that “Silent Night” was the first song he could play straight through. In the fall of 1949, Ferriday’s Ford dealer presented a show in his parking lot to hail the new line of cars. Jerry joined the band and sang'and played piano for 20 minutes. He raped the down-home crowd with his version of “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-ODee,” which had been an R&B hit twice that year, first by Stick McGhee and then by Wynonie Harris. The crowd dropped a glorious $13 in Jerry’s kitty, and he decided to go professional.

The next year, Jerry worked at the Blue Cat Night Club in Natchez. On Saturdays he had a 20-minute radio program at WNAT in the same city. His sister Linda Gail recalls that he hitched to New Orleans to make a record, but none was made. He brought home his report card: 29 F’s.

After high school he attended Southwestern Bible Institute, a school of the Assembly of God in Waxahachie, Texas. Jerry Lee was expelled for ravaging “My God Is Real” during a performance in chapel.

Back in Ferriday, he became a doorto-door seller of vacuum cleaners. He quit in 1952 when he got a regular job at the Wagon Wheel in Natchez, drumming in a trio led by Paul Whitehead, a blind pianist. Sometimes Whitehead switched to trumpet or accordion, and Jerry was then allowed to play piano.

Jerry Lee first married when he was 14. The marriage, to Dorothy Barton, lasted little more than a year. In 1954 he married Jane Mitcham of Natchez, qnd on November 2 of that year his first son, J6rry Lee, Jr., was born. (On November 13, 1973, Jerry Lee, Jr., was killed in a car wreck near Cockrum, Mississippi. He had spent part of the year in a nuthouse, which he attributed to the evil effects of marijuana upon his brain. A few weeks before, his death, he was saved at an Assembly of God revival.)

-Jerry Lee came to Sun Records in Memphis early in 1956. Sam Phillips, who owned Sun, had recently sold Elvis to RCA-Victor for $35,000 (which he still truculently denies ever regretting), and he"was in the rqarket for a new punk prodigy.

Lewis’s first record was a coupling of “Crazy Arms,” the Ray Price hit that was still on the charts when Jerry Lee cut it in the fall of 1956, and “End of the Road,” an original song. He did not pursue writing in subsequent, years (of the several hundred titles he has cut in the past 21 years, only five bear his signature: “End of the Road,”__“High School Confidential,” and “Lewis Boogie” on Sun, and “Lincoln Limousine,” an odd song about John Kennedy’s death, and f‘He Took It Like a Man” on Smash); however,' in “End of the Road” Jerry Lee proved himself a masterful evoker of lurid mood and dark thirst, and it is, precious, and poetically just, to look

the song as a statement of purpose, an existential anthem of the career to follow:

Well, the way is dark,

Night is long,

1 don’t care if I ever get home:

I’m waitin’ at the end of the road! Radio station WHBQ premiered Jerry, Lee’s first record. In July 1954, the station had premiered Elvis’s first record.

Jerry Lee had the two biggest hits of Sun’s history: “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On” and “Great Balls of Fire.” “Whole LqLof Shakin Going On” was cut by Lewis early in 1957 and released on April 15, his second record.

On August 31 it hit the Number One slots in both the country and R&B charts (only one other person in the history of popular music has had Number One hits in both of these markets: Elvis), and in September it hit Number Two in the pop charts. In October the record appeared in the British charts, where it soon reached Number Eight.Mn the end, the record sold six million copies worldwide. Jerry Lee sang it on American Bandstand; Dick Clark recalls that Lewis, was the only guest he encountered who refused to lip-sync. (In many ways, Jerry Lee is a purist, or more precise, a primitivist. “I don’t like no overdubbin’,” he has said. “When you’re makin’ love to a woman, ya can’t go back in and over-, dub.”)

don't like no overdubbin'. When you're makin'love to a woman, ya can't go back and overdub.

Recorded in the fall of 1957 and released on November 3, “Great Balls of Fire” peaked in January 1958, when it was Number One country, Number Two pop, Number Five R&B, and Number One in Britain.

“Great Balls of Fire” was $ fine and sleazy record, the yell of a tribe sloughing its senses, examining its crotch as if for the first tim£. The day the record was released, the Commies fired their second silly Sputnik, a halfton ball circling 900 miles up, a dog panting fearfully within, stranger than any Egyptian glyph. Eisenhower lay numb and still from a stroke; Nixon, large wet cow liver of a human, ruled. Charlie Starkweather, 5-foot-2 .“redheaded peckerwood” (the words of his confession), thrashed and skidded through Nebraska and Wyoming murdering ahd murdering and murdering. How many times did Starkweather gnash and grin with sexy delight as “Great Balls of Fire” crackled from his car radio?

By 1958 Jerry Lee Lewis was on top. Of all the rock-and-roll creatures, he projected the most hellish persona. He was feared more than the rest, and hated more too. Preachers railed against him, mothers smelled his awful presence in the laundry of their daughters, and young hoys coveted his wicked, wicked ways.

My friend Michael Bane grew up in Memphis in the fifties, and he has tenebrious memories of the Killer’s role in local society.

“There was this dive, I mean a real dive, called Hernando’s Hideaway. It was located just south of town, toward the Mississippi line—a great two-story house, all black. When we drove by, my parents would snort and say,'.‘That’s where people like Jerry Lee Lewis play. ’ My mother was real adamant about how, essentially, he was the garbage of the earth. She couldn’t stand him; she couldn’t stand thinking about him.

“He kind of balanced things out in Memphis. He made Elvis acceptable. Elvis tried to be good. Folks could look at him and say, ‘This is a good boy.’But Jerry Lee was always a shitkicker. There were always horror stories. There was always an aura of extreme violence to Jerry Lee.”

Jerry Lee Lewis is the greatest song stylist in country music. (He himself will tell you there have been only three real stylists in the whole of music: A1 Jolson, Jimmie Rodgers, and Jerry Lee Lewis.) A recording by Jerry Lee is as unmistakable as a passageby Faulkner. Bursting phrases recur throughout Jerry Lee’s music. “Think about it!” he yells before a strafe-force barrage of ascending triplets. (Scholars,, please note: The first “Think about it!” is found in “Foolish Kind of Man,” in the 1971 album Touching Home.) Pindaf would have loved it: “Think about it!” How similar to Faulkner, who while writing his third novel fell upon the word indomitable and for the rest of his days did not write a book without a handful of grand, truculent indomitables. And Jerry Lee is permitted his vast liberties, as Faulkner was permitted his. Jerry Lee is the only country singer who can get away with yelling at his audience, referring to his musicians as motherfuckers, just as Faulkner got away with statements such as his description of a mule in Flags in the Dust: “Misunderstood even by that creature (the nigger who drives him) whose impulses and mental processes most closely resemble his.”) ^so hold that William Faulkner and Jerry Lee Lewis possess the profoundest and most beautiful masteries of rhythm in this century. And, of course, to both, their whiskey and hawk-eye redneck, ways.

Two country pianists wrought influences on Jerry Lee: Moon Mullican and Del Wood. Mullican (his true first name was Aubrey) was born March 27, 1909, in Corrigan, Texas; he died New Year’s Day, 1967, in Beaumont, Texas. He was the first cbuntry piano-player to record in a boogie-woogie style.

Del Wood (shortened from Adelaide Hazelwood) was born February 22, 1920, in Nashville. She was an oldfashioned piano-player with a hard, clear barrelhouse style. Her first and only hit was “Down Yonder,” a 1951 instrumental on the Tennessee label.

Jerry Lee loved “Down Yonder,” and when he first came to Nashville in the fifties,she was one of the few people who treated him with kindness. When he made his belated Opry debut, on January 20, 1973, he interrupted his performance (the Nashville corpus held its breath in grim anxiety) and invited Del Wood onstage. She sat at the piano with him, and together they partied out “Down Yonder,” then they embraced. In 1969 Bob Dylan had offered a song to Jerry Lee (“To Be Alone with You”), and Charles Conrad had brought a cassette of Jerry Lee’s music to the moon aboard Apollo XII. Quotidian stuff: Jerry Lee. misplaced Dylan’s demo, looked to the full moon for a moment. But a chance to play piano with Del Wood—that was something! (Thenext October, John Lennon came backstagetoJerryLee’sdressing room at»the Roxy in Los Angeles; he knelt gracefully and kissed Jerry Lee’s foot. Jerry Lee looked down to see if his shoe-shine had been smarmed.)

But the most important musical influence on Jerry Lee was Cecil Gant. Not much is known of him. He was a black pianist and singer, who was born in 1915 in Nashville and died in 1951 in New York City, apparently of liquor. He recorded from 1944 to 1951, for Gilt Edge, Bronze, Four Star, Sound, Bullet, Dot, Down Beat, Swing Time, Imperial, Decca, and National.

Much of Cecil Gant’s music was boogie-woogie, but it was wilder, tougher than the classical boogie styles. His “Nashville Jumps,” recorded for Bullet in 1947, is one of the perfect party records.

It is not unlikely that Sam Phillips signed Lewis because he brought to mind black pianist Ike Turner, who had played in the classic Jackie Brenston rock sessions Phillips had produced in 1951. Elvis, the white boy who sang like he had a nigger’s soul, was lost, over the lea, sold to RQ A-Victor for $35,000. Here was a white boy who played piano like a crazy nigger; maybe history would repeat itself. It didn’t.

Jerry Lee fell in the spring of 1958. Arriving for a tour of England in May, he was made victim of a seedy mediagale which tsk-wailed and screamed that his wife (h.e had married a third time), Myra Gail, was also his 13-yearold cousin. With his usual speed, Jerry responded to the British press: “Myra and I are legally married. It was my second marriage that wasn’t legal. I was a bigamist when I was sixteen. I was fourteen when I was first married. That lasted a, year; then I met Jane. One day she said she was goin’ to have my baby. I was real worried. Her father threatened me, and her brothers were hunting with hide whips. So I married her just a week before my divorce from Dorothy. It was a shotgun wedding.” Britain was not pleased. It was announced in the London Times of May 28 that the tour, which was to have lasted until June 29 and included appearances at 27 Rank theatres, had been canceled.

Jerry Lee can out-drink, out-fight, out-cuss, oUt-shoot...any man in the , South.

A curious fact is that not long before Lewis left for England, his cousin-wife had sued him for divorce. From the Associated Press, Memphis, March 11, 1958: “the wife of Jerry Lee Lewis, rock ’n’ roll entertainer, filed for a divorce today.” Through all this, J.W. Brown, Myra’s 31-year-old daddy, played bass in Jerry Lee’s band.

Jerry Lee and Myra Gail were belatedly divorced in the fall of 1^70. (They had two children: Stev^ Allen, named for the man who was responsible for Lewis’s TV debut, was born 1959; Phoebe Allen was bom in 1963. Steve Allen Lewis drowned in the family pool in 1962.) In court Myra testified that their marriage was “a nightmare.” Jerry Lee was placed under court injunction “not to threaten, molest, or intimidate” his 26-year-old cousin. In October 1971, he wed Jaren Pate. They had one child, Lpri Lee, born fn 1972. In 1974 Jaren filed for legal separation.

The New York Times of May 29, 1958, was sinister: “Jerry Lee Lewis Back,” aS one might announce the re: turn of a viral strain. In the same issue of the Times was an advertisement for the film High School Confidential, which opened the next day at the Loew’s State in Times Square: “Exploding Tomorrow with Even More Shock!” Scenes were depicted: wielded switchblade, belly-to-belly kiss, punch-out.

Lewis had cut the title song of High School Confidential on April 21,1958, before his ruined English tour. Released on May 20, the record never broke the pop Top Twenty. The effects of the scandal were severe. In the June 9 issue of Billboard, a full-page advertisement appeared. “An Open Letter to the Industry from Jerry Lee Lewis” began, “Dear Friends: I have in recent weeks been the apparent center of a fantastic amount of publicity and of which none has been good....”

But nothing was healed. “Higlv School Confidential” was Jerry Lee’s last appearance in the Top Ten of the country charts until 1968, and his last appearance, period, in the Top Twenty of both the pop and R&B charts. Six months earlier radio stations had held loud elections: Who’s the King of rock ’n’ roll? Elvis or Jerry Lee? (In many areas, such as that of WHB in Kansas City, Lewis had won two-to-one. Now his price dropped to $500 a night, and disk-jockeys wouldn’t play his records.

Jerry Lee Lewis kept pumping. That word Faulkner loved; indomitable. In 1968 he rose anew with a series of country hits that started with “Another Place, Another Time,” the best honkytonk song of the sixties, for Smash. Of the Sun rockabilly triumvirate—Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee—he is the only one still making 101-proof rockabilly on a grand scafe.

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The mythology of Jerry Lee Lewis has a thousand devoted Hesoids. Since the beginning, Jerry demanded to close every show he appeared in. In 1958 Alan Freed insisted that Lewis precede Chuck Berry in a show. They still talk of that show, how Jerry Lee had the crowd screaming and rushing the stage, how he took a can of Zippo from his jacket pocket and doused his piano with one hand as the other hand banged out “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On,” how he set the piano aflame, his hands still riding the keys like a madman as the kids went finely and wholly berserk with the frenzy of it, and how Jerry Lee stalked backstage stinking of lighter fluid and wrath, turnqd to Chuck Berry, and said, real calm, as the sound of the kids going crazy and stamping and yelling for more shook the walls, “Follow that, nigger.”

A record-company executive recalls another meeting between Jerry Lee and Chuck Berry. The executive was producing a concert in which both singers were to appear. Jerry Lee started a fight with Berry backstage; rftuch drinking and aggravation followed. When the executive called for the curtains to be opened, there at center stage stood Jerry Lee, Chuck Berry, and Elmo Lewis. Chuck Berry was holding a knife to Jerry Lee’s throat, and Pappy Lewis had the open end of a shotgun pressed to the base of Berry’s skull. The audience uttered no sound.

There is said to have been a time when Jerry Lee’s drummer, Morris “Tarp” Tarrant, was eager to have Jerry smoke marijuana, perhaps in the hope that it would soften the lines of his personality. On a night when there was much potent Jamaican dope circulating, Jerry Lee consented to try Jt. Tarp rolled a very fat joint, a thing of true Jerry Lee Lewis proportion, I and Jerry sat with it, consuming its smoke in deep, strong sucks. All awaited the verdict, the birth of Jerry Lee, a flower child, cherub of peace and soft colors. He rose. “Not bad,”, he said, then quickly swallowed five small pills, grabbed a fifth of Old Crow, and departed into the night.

Somewhere in the direst and scariest gut of Alabama, Jerry Lee was playing a honky-tonk. It was a gasmoney date. Pick up some cash and split. Toward the beginning of the second set, a drunken, thick, red man encroached Jerry Lee. He was angry. “My wife’s crazy about you,” he said, motioning to a female dissolved nTdarkness and smoke and the blurred vision both men shared. “She bought every record you ever made. But I think you’re a piece of shit, and you know what I just did? I went home and busted ever one of them records. Whatchoo think about that, boy?” Jerry Lee moved his face close to the drunk’s, captured his pupils with his own, and in a voice neither loud nor soft, said, “Good, now she’s gotta go out and buy ’em all over again.”

There was a wife, one of them, whom Jerry Lee left sleeping in a Nashville motel room. He returned to the room moments before dawn. He carried a lighted cigar and a submachine gun. The wife was awakened in a novel way, as the wall above her head was shattered with metal.

Merle Haggard tells of his night with Jerry Lee in 1974. “We were in that little room at the bottom of the King of the Road in Nashville, and he had ah ready busted some guy in the mouth that night, a guy who was a life-long fan of his. The guy was just in awe of Jerry Lee. I knew the guy, and he was a piano-player. This guy was sitting there watching Jerry Lee play and all of a sudden—BAK!—Jerry took his whiskey bottle and busted it in his face, cut the guy’s face all up to pieces.

I found Jerry Lee that next morning, about six o’clock. I had just heard about what he’d done and, well, I figured he was in one of those rare moods. HesSaid, ‘Well, let’s go out and pick.’ So we did.”

Writers have not had much success interviewing Jerry Lee. One night in Brooklyn in 1973, an editor of Country Music asked Jerry Lee a question. The interviewee responded by leaping across the table, breaking off the butt of his pint-bottle of Heaven Hill, and sticking the interviewer in the neck with it.

Armed, I attended a Jerry Lee Lewis recording session in Memphis. Pappy Lewi4 was there. On[his way to the studio, Pappy had been chased down the highway by the Memphis police as he rushed along in Jerry Lee’s white, custom-built Lincoln (1-FZ541) at a speed of 110 miles per hour. Pappy’s reaction to his situation was ingenious. He increased his speed until he put enough distance between himself and the police so that he was invisible to them. Then he skidded the car to the side of the road, jumped in the back seat, and waited. The police arrived at a moment. “Glad you showed up,\ boys,” Pappy said. “That crazy man drivin’ this car was like to get us killed. When he saw your light flashin’, he stopped the car and ran off into them trees there.” The cops stared dully at the vacant driver’s seat. “My son’s Jerry Lee Lewis. He’s makin’ a record on Poplar Avenue, and I gotta be there. This is his car. I’m in no condition to drive myself. How’s about one you boys takin’ me? Jerry be purty mad I don’t get his car back to him.” He was driven to the studio. >

Earlier in the day, at Jerry Lee’s office, the scene was something like this: Jerry was on the telephone, shouting. “He’s gonna sue me? You tell that sonofabitch husband of yours that if he tries to sue fne I’m gonna come over there and give him the biggest ass-whuppin’ he ever got in his life.” There were perhaps 12 other people in. the room. Everyone was drunk, and a few were falling asleep as Jerry shouted into the phone. It was ten o’clock in the morning. For some reason, Jerry Lee was drinking bourbon and orange juice, a combination the color of wan excrement. “He’s on a health kick,” somebody suggested., Pappy Lewis decided to try some orange juice in his bourbon, so he asked someone to give him the Tropicana container from Jerry’s desk. Jerry Lee banged the hand with the receiver as it was about to touch the orange juice. From the wielded receiver, a woman’s voice was faint and shrill: “What the fuck was that?” Jerry was indignant. “What the hell you doin’ my orange juice?” A voice attached to the hand, a drunken voice, answered, “It’s for your father.” Jerry Lee returned the receiver to his ear. “Shoot. Tell him to go buy his own fuckin’ orange juice. Yotf still there, darlin’?”

Pappy Lewis seemed to be speaking in Hittite. Only Jerry could comprehend him, or perhaps he was merely faking. “You know you ain’t supposed to drink.” Pappy responded in Hittite and spilled an eight-ounce Dixie cup of whiskey into his lap, a deed he loudly regretted, in Hittite. With Pappy was the son of his girlfriend. The future son-in-law was about 30, drunk but not in the Hittite fashion. It surfaced that Pappy could not remember his fiancee’s name, but he was sure the fiancee was mad with him. “Get a dime; call your mama,” he said, in English, or something like it.

A woman with bleached hair was referred to by all as “the curse of the family,” a distinction of awesome implication.

A man dressed in black and carrying a bottle of Peter Pan Port introduced † himself to the curse of the family. “Don’t get fresh,” she said, frequently. He was the drummer with Bobby and the Spotlites, the house band at Hernando’s Hideaway. There was a pack of cigarettes sticking frorh each of his pockets. Every pack was open, and he smoked from them variously. Memphis session organist James Brown was in the studio. The drummer from Hernando’s Hideaway saw him and screamed, “Oh, my God, don’t tell me Jerry Lee’s got spooks in his band!” The curse of the family applied lipstick.

, Judd fell asleep on the floor. Jerry Lee gently .kicked him awake and said, “Take out your teeth and I’ll marry ya.” Judd returned to sleep.

Through all this, Huey Meaux was trying to produce a record. Carl Perkins was in the studio, playing guitar in several cuts. Every few minutes a large, barefoot, suet-thighed lady turned to Huey Meaux and yelled, “Make Carl Perkins play the ‘Blue Suede Shoes’! Please!” Carl, a reformed alky, seemed ill at ease.

Billy Lee Riley, the man who cut “Flying Saucers Rock ’n’ Roll” for Sun in 1957, materialized, looking like 5,000 concentrated volts. He spread his hands before him as if holding a birthday cake. “Man, I got me a pill this big, and when I take a bite the damn thing grows right back.” The he smiled, baring a large space between his teeth, and departed quickly.

It was the only recording session I ever saw that was fun.

Patsy Lynn Kochin, esteemed deposed president of the Jerry Lee Lewis Fan Club, told in her Newsletter of a night she spent with Jerry Lee in a Boston Rama^a Inn. It is one of my favorite passages.

“Jerry would play the piano with one hand and sing while he found what he was looking for in the Bible using the other hand, He then read Acts Ch. 2...Jerry also spoke on the last days which he says we are living in—the end almost here...Then he told us why the South lost the war... Jerry then, explained the difference in a 99 year sentence and a 10Q year sentence.

The truth is that Jerry Lee has always known the end is almost here, must be almost here, and that the almost-here end is the heart of it all; without it, there is no rock-and-roll, no jukebox epiphany, just pale, soft people looking from the window. Without the obsession or the fever or the fear of the almost-here end, all is reasonable and mere.

Somehow that is why Jerry Lee Lewis leaned with a loaded gun beneath the window of Elvis Presley in the hour of the wolf. Elvis had turned his back on the Church of the Almost-Here End, sold his soul to MOR, but Jerry Lee kept pumping —Holiness! Tongues!—and with each new clawsome, wild wife, with every new midnight violence, every extravagance of face, he slid further from grace. The King and the Killer: this was their desert. To Elvis it was a droll annoyance, but to Jerry Lee 'the midnight deed was glory, no more D&D scene, but 1 Sam. 17:49, -38style. In the cold, brilliant handcuffs the creature known in certain parts of Mississippi as Colonel Hermes Trismegistus, in parts of Tennessee as God’s Garbage Man, squinted into the dark and though a thought: Did they have Breathalizers in the Old Testament days?

In May 3,1977, Memphis City Court Judge Albert Boyd declared Jerry Lee Lewis not guilty of the charges for which he wa$ arrested at 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard the previous November. Rock on, Judge.

May the voice never end that for so long has said these words of virtue: “Just gimme my money and show me where the piano is.” If it does, so does the Church.