The Killer Reloaded

Jerry wasn't exactly virginal in his naivete. He was in love with his thirteen-year-old second cousin Myra Gale Brown, who was the daughter of his cousin and bass player, J.W. Brown. Incapable of doing anything except what his emotions told him to do, Jerry had already been married twice, fathered one child and hadn't paid a lot of attention to legal formalities like divorce. Marrying for the third time, to Myra, didn't seem like such a big deal. To Jerry it appeared that love should conquer all, including horrified parents and outraged public opinion. He'd been through it before. This time he at least had the money to take care of a wife. He had huge hit records. He was headlining shows with Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. He didn't think he'd done anything wrong, so why worry? Then the newspapers found out about Myra on a tour of England in May of 1958 and hounded him out of the country. Back in the United States, prominent supporters like Dick Clark abandoned him and DJs began boycotting his records. Overnight, he went from $10,000 per concert to $200.

"I coulda cared less," says Lewis. "I never hid nothin' from the world. Sam Phillips warned me to hide it. That was a buncha baloney. I'd be a hypocrite if I did that."

Unable to sell records after his fall from grace, Jerry continued to make a living playing clubs, where he refined his delivery and unerring crowd radar, even as the British Invasion seemed to cast him further into the dustbin of pop history. He was too old at twenty-nine. He had the wrong haircut, accent and instrument.

"My fans never stopped lovin' me," he says. "They always came to my shows. They didn't always get my records, 'cause Sam dropped all his distributors and wouldn't release anything. When I moved on to Mercury Records [in 1963] and started recording some country, my style of country, and some rock & roll too, one of them songs ['Another Place Another Time,' in 1968] sold a million copies right off the press. That tells you something is wrong, that Sam didn't do me right."

The entire roster of Sun stars had moved on to other, bigger companies in hopes of getting artist support equal to their talent. Despite selling several million records, Jerry never collected a royalty from Sun and never sued Phillips.

"Nope. Never sued nobody," he says. "Sam owed me millions. He told me he did. In front of several witnesses, yeah. I said, 'About how much do you owe me now?' This must have been twenty-five years ago. He said, 'Well, a little over 8 million dollars.' I said, 'Why don't you pay me, Sam? It's my money, isn't it?' He said, 'I can't see it goin' for a bunch of houses and women and cars. I just can't let it go like that.' I said, 'In other words, you're not going to give me my money, are you?' He said, 'Nope. Not gonna do it. I know you shoulda gone after it. If you wanna do that, go ahead and sue me. But I'm not gonna pay you.'"

Jerry laughs hard, the hardest he has all day, as the Chihuahuas come yapping into the den again. "I knew the ballgame was over with that," he says. "Gettin' money out of Sam Phillips was like cramming a wet noodle up a wildcat's nose. He was tight as bark on a oak tree. Twenty-five cents meant as much to him as 25 million dollars."

Most people would consider suing under those circumstances.

"Just think what he'd owe me now," he says. "But I never had a feeling about it. Money's not the greatest thing in the world. It pays the bills, helps you take care of your family. Buys cars. Cigars. Things. That's about it. I've made enough money on the road. I always had ways to make money. And I always spent it. Yeeeeeha-ha-ha-ha! Oh, Lord!"

Well, music is not ultimately about money.

"Music is something you're giving people. They're paying to hear it, but you're not supposed to rob them. I was never much for saving money or carrying on with it. I just enjoyed taking care of my mother and father until they passed away, and the rest of my family. And I love entertaining my audience. If I was doing it for the money, I'd be the wealthiest man in the world. Well, me and the IRS. Yeee-ha! They come after me three times. Took everything I had. I don't know. I probably did owe them the money. They check on you. They know. I just added some extra dates and paid them off in a month and a half. And then did it again with them! Yeee-ha! I ain't no tax person. I leave that up to somebody else. And that's the worst thing you can do!"

It's hard to imagine Jerry Lee Lewis as an accountant.

"Not my style. A person's gotta do what he's gotta do, I guess. Are we through now? I don't know anything else I could tell you. They'll put me in jail."

That was it for the interview. Jerry perhaps intuited that there was not much easy stuff left to talk about and it was time to move on to the difficult stuff, some of which being:

When Jerry was three, his brother Elmo Jr., also a great musical talent, was killed at the age of eight by a drunken driver. On Easter Sunday in 1962, his two-year-old son Steve Allen Lewis drowned in Jerry's backyard swimming pool. In 1971, his fourteen-year marriage to Myra, the love of his life, ended in divorce, and his mother, his only true anchor, died of natural causes at fifty-nine. In 1973, his nineteen-year-old son Jerry Lee Jr. (by his second wife) died in a car wreck, he divorced his fourth wife, and he got arrested for drunken driving. In 1976, he accidentally shot his bassist Butch Owens in the chest with a .357 Magnum (Jerry was aiming at a Coke bottle in his bedroom and the bullet ricocheted; Owens survived). He spent several months in 1981 near death himself after tearing a two-inch hole in his stomach, the result of ulcers from alcohol, amphetamine and barbiturate consumption. In 1982, his fourth wife, Jaren Elizabeth Gunn Pate Lewis, drowned in a friend's swimming pool. In 1984, his fifth wife, Shawn Michelle Stephens Lewis, died of an accidental drug overdose, and was the subject of some investigative reporting by Richard Ben Cramer in these pages (RS 416) that implied Jerry was some kind of rock & roll Bluebeard, more perpetrator than grieving widower. The dark rumors and cruel jokes about Jerry have never stopped.

Only Jerry was in the house when his fifth wife died. After an argument, she apparently mistook Jerry's methadone (which he was taking for an addiction to painkillers) for sleeping pills and died of fluid in the lungs while she slept. If there's anything more to her death than this, which is what the coroner found, only Jerry would know. It can be said that Jerry was a difficult husband, and he has a fascination with guns and knives. But he's no sociopath. Once an avid hunter, Jerry had a conversion experience sometime in the Seventies after shooting a squirrel. He has forbidden hunting on his property since then and posts a big sign near his front gate: GOD MADE THE ANIMALS. LOVE THEM, DON'T KILL THEM. When he finds bugs inside his house, he doesn't squash them; he picks them up and carefully places them outside. Whatever his childhood nickname, and however much he has tried to intimidate people to protect himself over the years, the Killer is an unlikely killer.