I’m still working on the manuscript, but I just got the proof for the cover for my upcoming book about Southern music, and I’m very pleased with how it turned out.
The book, “LARGE TIME: On the Southern Music Beat, 1976-1986,” includes stories about Elvis, the Allman Brothers, James Brown, R.E.M., Dolly Parton, Isaac Hayes, Atlanta Rhythm Section, the Commodores, Jimmy Buffett, Willie Nelson, Joe South, Roy Orbison, the Brains, Chet Atkins, Charlie Daniels, the B-52’s, Jerry Lee Lewis, Lionel Richie, Chet Atkins, Kenny Rogers, Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, the Dregs, Tanya Tucker, B.B. King, the Oak Ridge Boys, Amy Grant, Barbara Mandrell, Kris Kristofferson and many others!
And, of course, The Beatles make quite a few cameos in the book, with performers ranging from Carl Perkins to the Commodores talking about them.
If you’re interested in receiving word when the book is available for order, just send an email to goodypress@mindspring.com. Put “BOOK” in the subject line.
From Memphis to Macon, Nashville to Athens, Atlanta to Tuskegee
As many of you know, I spent a good portion of my career covering entertainment, and during that time I was fortunate enough to interview many talented performers, including three Beatles (George, Paul and Ringo), a bunch of movie and TV stars and just about a generation’s worth of the top performers in various popular music genres.
I have told many of the Beatles-related stories in Beatlefan magazine through the years.
But I have a lot of other tales from my years on the entertainment beat. Some of the stories about Southern music stars I interviewed (ranging from rock and new wave to r&b, country, gospel, and some who defy categorization) will show up in a book I’m writing that should be out later this year.
The subjects will include such names as Elvis, the Allman Brothers, Charlie Daniels, R.E.M., the B-52’s, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Jimmy Buffett, Kenny Rogers, Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, the Swingin’ Medallions, Joe South, the Tams, the Commodores, James Brown, Isaac Hayes, Lionel Richie, B.B. King, Dolly Parton, Larry Gatlin, Tammy Wynette, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Chet Atkins, Kris Kristofferson, Tanya Tucker, the Oak Ridge Boys, Delbert McClinton, Randall Bramblett, Amy Grant, the Brains and many more.
The Beatles even make a few cameo appearances in it, too!
Anyone interested in receiving word when it’s ready and available for order can email me at goodypress@mindspring.com. Put “BOOK” in the subject line.
Rock ’n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis has died at age 87. I met and interviewed the man known as the Killer back in December 1981, when he came to metro Atlanta for a show at a country music nightclub. Many in the audience believed that it might be their last chance to see Lewis, who had survived a serious health scare earlier that year. In reality, the Killer was around another 41 years. That evening, I got to spend quite a bit of time backstage with Lewis and his teenage daughter Phoebe, who ended up providing a photo to go with my article. Talking with the Killer was rather like being in the middle of an off-the-cuff performance by a legend (a word he used quite a bit, in referring to himself). It was one of my more memorable nights on the music beat. Here’s how it went …
It might be a bone-chilling Thursday night in December, but the house is packed at Country Roads, a smoky country music club just off Interstate 20 in Lithonia. Some of these folks arrived three or four hours ago, just to make sure they got a seat. They don’t want to miss what some of them believe to be their last chance to see a living legend while he’s still living.
The Killer might be back after a brush with death just a few months ago, but a good many in the Country Roads crowd are wondering just how much longer rock ’n’ roll’s original hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-loving wild man will be around. “I didn’t want to miss this,” one young woman says. “This may be the last time. …”
That would make the Killer laugh. Obviously, these people don’t know Jerry Lee Lewis. It takes more than a ruptured stomach, three weeks in intensive care and a two-month hospitalization to stop a Legend. And, as Jerry Lee Lewis still tells you at every opportunity, he is a Legend. No. 1. And, don’t forget that, son.
Showtime is supposed to be 10 p.m., but nobody’s surprised that Lewis is running a little behind. He’s quietly ushered into the dressing room in back of the big room at 10 till 10, and won’t take the stage for almost an hour. After all, you don’t expect a Legend to live by the clock.
His band opens the show with a warm-up number, and then cheers start to swell as the Killer, looking almost frail now, is escorted through the audience and up to the stage, where he takes his customary place in front of the piano, mic stand placed between his legs.
“They tell me he’s straight now,” a local country music DJ says out in the crowd, “but he looks terrible.”
Indeed, the painfully thin man in the spotlight certainly doesn’t look up to a night of rockin’ and rollin’.
So much for appearances. Lewis may no longer be stomping on the piano keys with his feet, kicking his stool across the stage and standing on top of his instrument as he wiggles his hips — the vintage Jerry Lee Lewis trademarks that always have bordered on self-parody, without ever going over the edge — but the voice is still there, strong and resonant, as he launches into Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.”
An interesting choice for an opener. A walk of any duration in the Killer’s shoes might prove too much for most folks.
***
The difference between today’s Jerry Lee Lewis and the one Atlantans saw this past February isn’t that obvious from the stage. But, in the dressing room before the show, the change is more striking. In place of the cheeky performer with a slight paunch is a man who looks older than his 46 years. The blond curls that hung in his face as a youngster are now clipped short and brown, sweeping back in slight waves from the gaunt face, with its prominent cheekbones. He still hasn’t gained back 20 of the 32 pounds he lost during his recent illness.
Clad in a brown velour pullover, jeans, tan shoes and with a heavy gold medallion around his neck (positively conservative compared with the tux with leopard-skin lapels that he sported back in the ’50s), the Killer is relaxed as he sits on a couch, toying with an unlit pipe and joking with band members and relatives.
Sitting next to him is Stone Mountain resident J.W. Brown, whom Lewis introduces as his former bass player, second cousin and “ex-daddy-in-law.” Road manager J.W. Whitten keeps a watchful eye on his charge from across the room, while Lewis’ 18-year-old daughter, Phoebe, an attractive blonde photography student who lives with her Realtor mother, Myra, in Stone Mountain, moves about the room, taking photos of her father.
The Killer’s daughter, Phoebe, took this shot of her father while I was interviewing him.
I ask Lewis how he’s feeling. “With my fingers! How am I feelin’ now, son? I’ll tell ya.” He pauses thoughtfully, then answers as if reciting a song lyric: “I feel better all over more than anywhere else. That make any sense? Think about it. I feel better all over more than anywhere else. I feel good!”
“I think he looks as good tonight as I’ve seen him,” Brown says.
Lewis cuts him off with mock impatience. “I know I look good,” he says. “I’d look good dead. But, the thing about it: I’m a livin’ … lovin’ … wreck! Legend! Genius! Name the trip, I have done it.”
No false modesty here. The Killer brags incessantly, whether it’s about his Lear jet, his sexual prowess or how many contemporaries he has outlasted. “Why should I be modest?” he says, his voice rising in volume, in the style of the Pentecostal preacher he once considered becoming. “A legend, modest?”
Lewis is in a reflective, nostalgic mood this evening. He and Brown are reminiscing about those early days at Sun Records and their use of one of the first solid-body electric bass guitars.
“We go back to 1956, you know,” the Killer says in a lazy, slurring drawl, barely more than a mumble. “I got him to go up and get the first Fender electric bass in Memphis. I’d noticed this group called the Coasters … not the Coasters, the, uh, I don’t know. They was a colored group, goodies, but, hell, I can’t think of ’em. They were the first group to have a Fender bass. So, Alan Freed had ’em in one of his little movies and I saw it [he imitates the sound of the bass] and I said, Heyah! Man, if a person had that onstage, and the way I hook up a piano [he pronounces it “pee-an-uh”), with a violin pickup, which nobody’d ever seen … a blind man in Natchez, Mississippi, taught me. Paul Whitehead. He’s dead.”
The monologue, punctuated by obscenities and crudities, rises in tempo and volume as Lewis warms up. He spits the words out in a single breath, sometimes running them together in a sort of country jive that’s increasingly harder to decipher as he becomes more excited. At other times, he makes masterful use of the dramatic pause and inflection. He might not be onstage yet, but he is performing. And loving it.
He continues: “An electric bass onstage and a man who’d never played it before, and I showed him how to play it. I said, ‘This is what I want you to do, can you do that?’ And [he looks at Brown now, grinning], he said, ‘Anybody could do that,’ and he was right. Anybody could have done it. The thing about it: Nobody had done it. We did it. But, that electric bass, those licks, that piano and amplifier, and a set of drums — we sounded like Guy Lombardo’s orchestra. We were rockin’ and rollin’.”
The Killer in his heyday.
Did he think of it as rock ’n’ roll when he first started playing? “I thought of it as just pure gospel, man,” he says, tilting his head back and jutting out his chin in a characteristically cocky pose. “I was preachin’ my sermon. And makin’ it stick! Even when it got me denounced out of Bible school.”
He began playing “before I was born, I think.” He laughs heartily at his own joke. “I was 8 years old when I got my first piano [a Starck upright that he still has]. Mama and Daddy mortgaged their home and 60 acres [in Ferriday, Louisiana] for that piano. And then lost them.”
He was, he claims, not only a natural musical talent (he taught himself to play piano and drums and learned guitar from his father), but a born rebel. “Very revolutionary, man, yessir. Revolutionary in my walkin’ and talkin’ and my lovin’. Revolutionary. Just can’t help it. Always have been.”
Lewis grew up absorbing musical influences from the “Grand Ole Opry” on the radio, the Assembly of God church his family attended, and Haney’s Big House, a local Black nightclub frequented by Memphis bluesmen.
By the time he was 15, Lewis was playing in a band at a Natchez nightclub, and had begun a brief marriage to Dorothy Barton. A short stint at Southwest Bible School in Waxahachie, Texas, a turn at selling sewing machines and another marriage to Jane Mitcham (this one yielding a son, Jerry Lee Lewis Jr.) preceded his full-time entry into the music business in 1956.
His uninhibited, pumping piano style won over Sam Phillips of Memphis’ Sun Records (Elvis Presley’s first label), who signed him. Lewis’ second record, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” — recorded in one take and released early in 1957 — topped the pop, country and R&B charts, racking up some 6 million sales.
John Lennon once said that nobody in rock ever improved on “Whole Lotta Shakin’,” and Lewis, not unexpectedly, agrees. “It’s the most perfect rock ’n’ roll record that has ever been, or ever will be made. And John Lennon was nobody’s fool. But, he’s dead. And many others. And allllll these damn people that just know it all. I buried ’em.”
He pauses, to let that skin in. “The Killer is still here.”
Jerry Lee Lewis carefully developed an image as a brash wild man.
For a while, the Killer rivaled the King with such international hits as “Great Balls of Fire,” “Breathless” and “High School Confidential.” His appearances on the Steve Allen, Ed Sullivan and Dick Clark TV shows made him a sensation. Whether he was running his comb licentiously through his long hair, flashing that familiar sneer, or just beating his piano into submission (once, he even set fire to it), Jerry Lee Lewis was like nothing the audience ever had seen before.
Then, in the fall of 1958, he arrived in Great Britain to find the newspaper headlines screaming about his recent marriage to 13-year-old Myra Brown, J.W.’s daughter and the Killer’s third-cousin.
His superstardom — some 25 million records sold in 18 months — ended almost overnight. Back in the U.S., radio stations blacklisted his records, and the hits — with the exception of “What’d I Say” in 1961 — stopped coming.
He retreated to the Sun Belt honky-tonk circuit and continued releasing records with a frustrating lack of success. You’d think it would have made him bitter, daughter Phoebe Lewis says, “but he’s not at all. There are times when he gets mad and fed up, and won’t talk to reporters and all, but it surprises me he’s not bitter about the treatment he got.”
Finally, in 1968, Lewis turned completely to recording country music, and soon was hitting the country Top 10 with such songs as “Another Place, Another Time” and “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me).”
His personal life was another story. Myra divorced him in 1970 and he lost his son, Jerry Jr., in a 1973 car accident. (Steve Allen Lewis, his first child by Myra, had drowned at age 3 in 1962.)
A tempestuous marriage to Jaren Pate (they’re now separated), lawsuits stemming from his accidental shooting of a member of his band, tax problems (the IRS auctioned off his cars, motorcycles, guns and diamonds to partially satisfy a lien on $274,000 in back taxes) and arrests resulting from his battles with drink and drugs have kept the Killer in the news during the past few years.
Lurid tales of this period made headlines last fall during the Memphis trial of Dr. George Nichopoulos, who was accused (and acquitted) of providing Lewis and Presley with tremendous amounts of amphetamines and other drugs.
Lewis says none of this publicity about his drug habit bothered him. “I could have cared less about that.” Bad publicity means nothing to a charmer like Lewis. “Any fan of mine, anybody that likes me just a little bit, I will eventually win over completely,” he says.
But, it bothered his daughter Phoebe to have all of this made public.
Jerry Lee Lewis and daughter Phoebe at her high school graduation.
“Unfortunately,” she says, “it was true. So, whether it made me mad or not, there’s not a whole lot I could say about it.”
Then, this past June, came the stomach pains, just before he was supposed to appear at a Fourth of July show at Stone Mountain. Spitting up blood, Lewis was taken from his Nesbit, Mississippi, ranch to a Memphis hospital, where doctors operated twice and gave him a 50-50 chance of pulling through.
“He had indigestion,” Phoebe recalls, “and took an Alka-Seltzer or something, and his stomach just exploded. That 50-50 business they released was bullshit. The doctors told me after he’d recovered that they thought he had only a 5 percent chance of living. He’s an amazing man.”
Lewis was so weak when visited in the hospital by old friend Johnny Cash that he could communicate only with hand signals. But, he says quietly, “I didn’t even think about dyin’, whatsoever. If I had, I probably would have died. Defeat is one word I’ve never really used.”
Did such a close call change his life? “It changed my life completely,” he says. “It’s educated me enough to know that I … It’s made me think a lot, yes. Slowed me down from drinkin’ a lot. Slowed me down from fuckin’ too much. Slowed me down from takin’ too many chances. I mean, in other words, it made me realize that I was 46 years old, and not 21 or 31 or 41. I was 46.”
A wicked grin breaks the sober mood. “So, yeah, I took another look at my life, and I went out and I fucked more women. I wrecked more cars. I flew more planes. I drank more whiskey. But, I don’t take any more dope.”
He turns to Brown. “A hell of a speech, wasn’t it?”
So, the Killer hasn’t really changed, has he? Lewis furrows his brow and gives a reproachful look. “How could I ever change what I am? How could anyone change what they are? I can remember when I was a kid, every time they had altar call at church, I was right down there. But, I’ve never been a hypocrite. I haven’t lived it, and I know it. I am what I am! Not what you want me to be, uh-uh.”
“He was always just like he is now,” Brown says. “Doesn’t give a damn and tells it like it is. I ain’t never seen anything like him.”
Lewis says he views his life with no regrets. “I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain. I’ve seen it all. I’ve had happy times beyond the realm of imagination that I can never go back and capture again. But, I have happy times now.”
Those include seeing more of Phoebe, who hasn’t lived with him now for 11 years (although she did spend two summers touring with him as a backup singer, before deciding she wasn’t cut out to be a performer). Lewis spent the Christmas holidays here with her and his ex-wife.
“Amazingly,” she says, “I have a close relationship with my father. It’s not really a father-daughter relationship, though Jerry would like it to be. But, he wasn’t there to discipline me when I was little, and it’s too late for him to start now.”
The man she knows, she says, is warm, compassionate and giving. Not a legend.
Hearing that pleases Lewis inordinately, but he still doesn’t want to let go of a reputation he says he “developed” and “earned.” Road manager Whitten says there’s no way the Killer could have done all he’s reputed to have done. To that, Lewis adds: “But I done most of it. I think I deserve everything I got.”
Lewis was back on the road a month after getting out of the hospital and says he’s happy to be performing. “This is my life.”
He says he’s finally gotten that “heavy eagle off my back,” a reference to the IRS, and is negotiating a new record deal (he has no label now). He might cut a gospel album. He’d like to make one good movie. But, as for actual plans, he says he doesn’t know what he’ll be doing.
“Yes, you do,” Phoebe interjects. “He’s gonna be doin’ the same thing he’s doin’ now, forever. That’s all he knows how to do.”
“All I know how to do,” the Killer repeats. “That’s very true, baby.”
***
Onstage, those staccato piano licks ring out, and the Killer runs his elbow up and down the keys. “Middle Age Crazy,” “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” “Chantilly Lace,” “Great Balls of Fire” — the mixture of country ballads and rockers brings the audience to its feet.
A last look at a living legend? Not likely. The Killer says it all in the song “Rockin’ My Life Away.” His voice blares from the speakers with conviction as he cries: “My name is Jerry Lee Lewis, and I’m damn sure here to stay.”
Bill King
UPDATE: Besides the Killer, there’s a wide range of Southern acts in my upcoming book “LARGE TIME: On the Southern Music Beat, 1976-1986,” ranging from Southern rock to R&B to new wave to country music to gospel. The subjects will include such names as Elvis, the Allman Brothers, Charlie Daniels, R.E.M., the B-52’s, Roy Orbison, Jimmy Buffett, Piano Red, Kenny Rogers, Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, the Commodores, James Brown, Isaac Hayes, Lionel Richie, Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, Willie Nelson, Tanya Tucker, the Oak Ridge Boys, Amy Grant and many more. Anyone interested in receiving word when it’s ready and available for order can email me at goodypress@mindspring.com. Put “BOOK” in the subject line.
Quick Cuts With Bill King 