Biography: Jerry Lee Lewis by Rick Bragg

Author:Rick Bragg [Bragg, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Way back up in the woods among the evergreens . . .

Chuck stood with murder in his eye.

Jerry Lee kept playing.

“Finally, Chuck walked across the stage and sat down at the piano.”

The crowd roared and roared, enjoying the joke, but Chuck was not smiling.

“He did not play very good piano,” said Jerry Lee.

Later, in a hotel lobby, the two men clashed again.

“Chuck was poppin’ off to me,” says Jerry Lee. “We had been drinkin’.”

“Me and you gonna get this straightened out,” Chuck said, “straightened out right now.”

Elmo, who had been drinking seriously, who drank like he drove nails and pulled corn, without resting, reached into his pocket, pulled out his Barlow knife, and slipped it under Chuck’s chin.

“You know what we do to men like you back home?” he asked, keeping the tip of the blade pressed into the soft flesh of Chuck’s jugular. “We cut their heads off and throw ’em in the Blue Hole.”

Jerry Lee can still see his daddy standing there, can remember thinking that it would be a sight if his daddy murdered Chuck Berry. He did not quite know how he would explain it to his mama, who loved Chuck’s music—maybe just by saying that Chuck was being mean to him. Then she would not only understand but be in agreement.

Chuck was a fearsome man, but Elmo, even deep into middle age, had not declined much; he still looked like he could do what he said, and might enjoy it. “Well, Chuck took off running, and Daddy took off running after him.”

Alan Freed, who was standing steps away, asked Jerry Lee, “You think he’ll catch him?”

“I don’t know,” said Jerry Lee.

They took off running after them.

“But we gave out,” remembered Jerry Lee, “and set down on the curb.”

He did not see his father that night—“like I said, we was drinkin’”—and after a while the prospect of Elmo’s taking Chuck Berry’s life became less compelling, and he went to bed.

“The next morning, Chuck and Daddy was sitting together in the hotel café, eatin’ breakfast.”

The show moved around the Northeast and finally to Boston in May.

“Boston had banned rock and roll,” says Jerry Lee.

It was as though the crowd came into the Boston Arena intending to give the city fathers exactly the ugliness and violence they had warned would occur if the paganism of rock and roll was allowed to flourish. Jerry Lee could feel it, an ugliness beyond the usual good-natured hysteria that followed a great show. But they had paid their money and come expecting to hear his music. “You give ’em what they deserve,” he said, “always.” But he had barely started playing when the crowd rushed forward and began to push and swell against the police cordon, bulging out toward the stage like some kind of blob from a science-fiction movie. “The cops were holding ’em back, tryin’ to hold ’em back, and I was thinkin’, Please don’t turn them people loose on me. But they mobbed the stage and got to fightin’ and carryin’ on.

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