The Killer Reloaded

The Chihuahuas raced back into the room and jumped on Jerry. "Whewwwww!" he exhaled. "Those are stinky little dogs!"

Jerry still has his original Starck piano, dilapidated and unplayable, the ivory pounded right off the keys, sitting in the parlor next to his gold grand piano.

"The reason I don't fix it up is, when I look at that piano, the shape it's in, I know that's the shape I'm in. Heeee-ya!"

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 I could really listen to 'em pick. They was playin' a lowdown blues. I knew I 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 if 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 I wanted it, so I reached in there and grabbed it. I went home and started playin' me some blues. And I started going to these roadhouses, juke 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. I 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 off 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 I 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."