The Killer Reloaded

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 lungful 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. "We traveled all over the country working with different people. I helped pick the songs, but the other people all had a say, too. Nobody hogged anything. They all just done a little bit on them. I've never worked with so many brilliant musicians. I don't know how we got through that thing with George Jones. We was crackin' jokes the whole time. Ha, ha, eeee-yah! The song we done, 'Don't Be Ashamed of Your Age,' goes back a long time. I was researchin' music right, even when I was a boy."

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 I 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. Hee-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.

"Nah, I didn't take no lessons. I took one lesson. The guy got a little disturbed with me, Mr. Griffin did, kinda popped my jaw a little bit. He would play a song by reading the notes, and I would say, 'That's pretty good, but wouldn't it sound better this way?' And I changed it to my style. Boy, he got mad. Great guy, though."