Natural Born Killer

It's a December night, and despite the chill, Jerry Lee Lewis wears flip-flops, plaid pajama bottoms and a loose nylon jacket with a casino's logo on the back. Rock and roll's original wild child, now 69, enters the Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis. His band, along with a Los Angeles producer and an engineer, gathers around him.

"You seen your mama lately?" Lewis asks Kenny Lovelace, his guitar player of 37 years.

"Was in Louisiana last week," Lovelace says.

"Tell your mama hello."

Lewis is in a good mood. Every night is different, and his attitude can change from minute to minute, but this night there's a sharpness to it that indicates all is right in his inscrutable world.

Some of the players sip beer, some grape soda. The L.A. producer, Jimmy Rip, tells Lewis that the song they cut at the last session, a rare Lewis original called "Old Glory," now has harmony vocals from Toby Keith. Lewis is in a storytelling mood. "You remember when old Waylon Jennings loaned me his fiddle?" Everyone nods and says, "Yeah, yeah."

"He knew my reputation on the piano, and Waylon said, 'I want it back in the same shape you're getting it.'" Lewis giggles a little, then says he told Jennings, "Or what?" There's a beat, and everyone laughs, picturing these two music outlaws in a standoff.

Nothing gets past Lewis. He sees everything that happens and senses everything that doesn't. It's a good story—told well—but it doesn't get the guffaws he expected, so he rolls on to another, one that conveys both humor and the sense of menacing hostility that always percolates beneath Lewis's skin. "You remember that record we cut in London?" Lewis asks Lovelace, who played on the 1973 London Sessions. "Had all those people there, and that guy showed up—what's his name? The drummer?" The category's too huge, and no one suggests a name. "Played with that English band." It's slimmer now but not by enough. Lewis stammers. How to define him: "Ahh, played with the Beatles."

"Ringo," they all say, turning to one another. Oh, that English band. "Yeah, Ringo. We kept him waiting and waiting—not on purpose, but it just happened—until he couldn't get in the room, and he announced, 'Y'all can shove this record up your butts,' and he walked out of there." Ringo Starr probably didn't say "y'all," but Lewis sure did, cackling.

Half a century since the sun rose on rock and roll, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly are dead. Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash are dead. Little Richard is a caricature when he's not a minister, and Chuck Berry goes through the motions. Only Jerry Lee Lewis is still rocking.

The Killer is the unlikeliest survivor, but dying would have been the easy way out. He created rock's first great scandal—as an incestuous, cradle-robbing bigamist—which set him up for rock's first failed comeback. The public was so disgusted that he had to wait a decade for acceptance and then only as a country singer. It was 1958 when the world learned that the 22-year-old star's third wife, Myra, was also his 13-year-old cousin. Lewis tried to assuage the anger, explaining that the marriage might not be valid as he had never divorced his first wife. When Myra was 17, their three-year-old son drowned in their backyard pool. Jerry Lee Jr., Lewis's firstborn from a previous marriage, was killed in a car crash at the age of 19.

Lewis is in the midst of divorcing his sixth wife. The onetime Kerrie McCarver, however unhappy, must find relief in being the former—and not the late—Mrs. Lewis. After 19 years of marriage, she's alive to tell the tale. Wife number five, 25-year-old Shawn Michelle Stephens, was found dead of an apparent drug overdose in the Nesbit, Mississippi bedroom she'd shared with Lewis for less than four months. Only a year prior, the fourth Mrs. Lewis had also died—in a swimming accident while the couple was awaiting a divorce decree. Lewis had recently recovered from an operation for a ruptured stomach, a situation so dire that journalists were assigned his obituary. There've been fistfights, handguns and shotguns. On a tear in 1976 he accidentally shot his bass player in the chest (not fatally), flipped his car and waved a handgun outside Graceland when Elvis wouldn't come out and say hello; the next day, Elvis went to visit Lewis, who was out, and wound up signing autographs on Lewis's lawn.

Jerry Lee Lewis drank more whiskey, took more pills and had more car wrecks than most rock bands combined. He has broken out of hospitals and fled the Betty Ford Center. Life, it seems, has clung to him, not he to life.

Unlike his peer Elvis Presley. Elvis died like a wimp. Elvis was a girl. Wouldn't fuck his beautiful wife? Got so fat he had to wear jumpsuits? Sang suck-ass songs like "The Impossible Dream"? And that wore him out at 42? "What the shit did Elvis do," Lewis once said, "except take dope I couldn't get ahold of?"

Survivors are the real sufferers.

But here he is in Memphis, still recording and rocking, looking not half bad. Within 30 minutes of walking through the door, Lewis is down to business, running through tonight's song, simultaneously simplifying it and making it more complex—Lewisizing it. It's a song called "Twilight" by Robbie Robertson, a founding member of the Band. Lewis really delivers on the refrain: "Just don't put me in a frame upon the mantel/Where memories turn dusty, old and gray."

Lewis is one of music's great interpreters, or stylists, to use his term. "There's only ever been four stylists," he has famously stated. "Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Williams, Al Jolson and Jimmie Rodgers." You can count on one hand the songs Lewis has written, but none of the hundreds of songs he's recorded can be imitated. "Twilight" is about to metamorphose wildly.

Seated behind the piano, fooling with the progression of the song, he says to himself more than to anyone in particular, "This song's got a lot of chords in it. We got to play 'em. I don't know 'em."

The bass player pipes up. "I knowe 'em."

"Show 'em to me."

"Would you take offense?"

"C'mon."

B.B. Cunningham strolls over to the piano. Cartoonist R. Crumb couldn't draw Cunningham better. He has a long, narrow face, its verticality emphasized by a ponytail that hangs down his back. His eyebrows can knit like Granny's sewing needles, a worried look that appears when he smiles, which is often. Cunningham's father was a Sun recording artist, and in 1968 Cunningham's band the Hombres had a hit with "Let It All Hang Out." Cunningham first played with Lewis in 1961, has worked with George Clinton and Chuck Berry and rejoined Lewis in 1997.

At the piano Cunningham runs down the chords. Lewis watches, then does it himself. Cunningham makes a correction near the end of the run; Lewis gets it right and then states flatly, "I don't like it."

"Look," says Cunningham, "you can do it like this." He runs through the chords with a variation.

"I don't like that, either." Then Lewis is talking just to Cunningham. He says, his voice low, "When I was 13 my piano teacher showed me a song. He was sitting right next to me like you are. When he got through it, I said, 'Wouldn't it sound better like this?' and reached in front of him and played it my way. The guy slapped me in the face."

"I bet that got your attention," says Cunningham.

"It did more than that," Lewis answers. "Since then I haven't been able to learn anything from anybody. That was my last lesson. Get up and play your bass, B.B." Lewis turns to the studio control room and says, "Maybe you should put one of those little things on there—ahh, ahh, what do you call them?"

"CDs," says J.W. Whitten, Lewis's road manager, right-hand man and mind reader.

"Yeah, play the CD."

As Cunningham returns to his position, he mutters, "I never in my life thought I'd show Jerry Lee something on the piano." Actually, Cunningham did it once before—at Lewis's home in 1962—when Cunningham was a guitarist in the band. He told Lewis that to make a major chord into a minor chord on the piano, he had to change only one finger. Lewis didn't believe him, didn't like the notion at all and chased Cunningham out the front door.

The song's rhythm evolves as Lewis begins playing. Producer Rip, a Texan who evokes a beatnik cowboy, plays guitar. He says to the others, "He's putting a shuffle in it." The band feels its way, and the song begins to sway. Lewis is singing, "Never crossed my mind/To what is right and what is not," and a yip and yodel creep into his voice. Rip and Lovelace glance at each other and laugh. On music stands before them a string of chords is written out, but now they're sailing through the song with simplicity and grace, each slew of chords summarized in the sweep of a single chord—and not just that chord but the space between that one and the ones on either side of it. What isn't played creates not emptiness but feeling, room for feeling, room for Lewis to make "Twilight" his own.

"We have got to come to some sort of collusion here about how we're going to end," says Lewis. "It's hard to end that song. It's so pretty."

Rip answers with understated praise, "I love what you did to it."

"If you hear something wrong," Lewis answers, "don't hesitate to tell me so I can kill you."

To much of the contemporary listening audience, Jerry Lee Lewis is the cartoonish character Dennis Quaid portrays in Great Balls of Fire! Quaid got the simplicity but not the complexity. Cartoon violence doesn't scar the soul, and Lewis's spirit is vulnerable and real. His life has been as much nightmare as dream.

Lewis was born to Elmo and Mary Ethyl Lewis on September 29, 1935 in Ferriday, Louisiana, a town that smelled worse than shit. Ferriday is on the Mississippi River, across from Natchez, Mississippi, where there used to be a paper plant. The waft from a paper plant is all-encompassing. The stench is something you don't just smell—you taste it, wear it, turn your face from it and can't escape it.

When Lewis was three, his older brother, Elmo Jr., already displaying musical talent at the age of nine, was killed by a drunk driver. Around the same time, the Assembly of God Church opened in Ferriday, and Elmo Lewis Sr. was drawn there, not just for consolation but for the raucous music. He liked to play guitar and had collected many Jimmie Rodgers records. The Assembly of God is a fundamentalist church that believes in visible manifestations of the Spirit, such as healing, visions and everyday miracles. Its services capture the spirit of God through rapturous music, often expressed by fits in the aisles, speaking in tongues, shaking your nerves and rattling your brain.

Another early rock-and-roller was raised in a similar church. When Elvis began performing onstage the way he'd seen Christians shaking on the pulpit, people responded with an uproar. But Elvis and Jerry Lee weren't doing anything they didn't often do in front of their mothers.

Like Elvis, Lewis is a surviving son. He was raised for adulation. His parents risked their house to buy Lewis an upright piano when he was 10. His mother, reveling in the sight of him, would run to his side, lift his arm and call everyone close: "Look at the hairs!" she'd say to the assembled. And then to the golden-haired golden boy, "Jerry, every hair on your arm is perfect." To which he would respond, "It certainly is."

His style had already been formed. "The first song I learned to play was 'Silent Night,' and I (continued on page 132)Jerry Lee Lewis(continued from page 78) played that rock-and-roll style," he says. His influences at the time included Gene Autry, the singing cowboy he'd listened to in the alley behind the local movie theater—his family couldn't afford the dime needed to enter. His parents played hillbilly records, and his church rocked like a wild party. Since hearing Hank Williams broadcast on The Louisiana Hayride in 1948, he'd been a committed fan. Lewis could recognize the blues in Williams, having experienced the music at Haney's Big House, a Ferriday juke joint for black field hands, which Lewis regularly sneaked into—usually with his cousins Mickey Gilley, later a country music star, and Jimmy Swaggart, later a television preacher and then a notorious whore fucker.

At 14 Lewis made his first public appearance, playing in the parking lot of Ferriday's Ford dealership. "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee" was a hit that year, and the audience responded to it that day. A hat was passed around, and when it returned holding almost $13 Elmo began driving his son around the countryside, the piano in the back of a truck, stopping at crossroads, country stores or anywhere a crowd might gather. Lewis and another pal were already calling each other Killer—still Lewis's greeting of choice—and the name stuck.

Soon Lewis had his own car. "All the kin people would be out in the fields working," says his sister Frankie Gean, younger by nine years. "Mother would be pulling the sack, putting the cotton in it. Daddy would be right behind her. He'd ride up—I have witnesses—he would ride up and down the gravel road along the river, and he would scream, 'Work, you peasants, work! For I don't have to work! For I'm wearing the white shirt! I am the Great I Am!'"

By the time Lewis graduated from high school, he was twice married and a father. He entered his first marriage when he was 15 and his bride was 17. They soon separated, not bothering with the formalities of a divorce—as was common among the poor in rural America. According to a biography by Robert Palmer, Jerry Lee knocked up Jane Mitcham. They got hitched, and Jerry Lee Lewis Jr. was born. With his parents caring for his wife and child, Lewis went to Waxahachie, Texas for Bible college. He would absorb the fear of God by day, then sneak out to Dallas's bright lights to see movies and ride the Tilt-A-Whirl. In assembly one day, his version of "My God Is Real" became a little too real, and though the sound of his church and of his nightclub were often indistinguishable, this version had crossed the line. Lewis was expelled.

He sold vacuum cleaners and sewing machines, he played drums and piano with a local band, he auditioned in Shreveport, Louisiana for a country package tour in 1955. He tried his luck in Nashville, but Nashville was having none of the new sound; Carl Perkins, another white singer who mixed country and blues, had already been told by one corporate label rep there, "I like what you're doing, young man, but I don't know what you're doing."

That unidentifiable mix was much more suited to Memphis than Nashville, which the Lewis family realized when they heard Johnny Cash and Perkins in the summer of 1955, both on Memphis's Sun Records, home also to Elvis Presley. To finance the trip to meet Sam Phillips, Elmo Lewis sold eggs—33 dozen—along the 350 miles north.

Working with Phillips's assistant Jack Clement, Lewis cut "Crazy Arms," his first Sun single. Its sales were a testament to Lewis's style, as the song had already been a country hit for Ray Price and a pop hit for the Andrews Sisters. But Lewis's left hand played funky drums on the piano's low keys while his right ran a lilting, wild melody. He quickly got good bookings, including a tour with Cash and Perkins.

In mid-March 1957 Sun released Lewis's second record. With Clement the band had spent a lot of time working up a rollicking number called "It'll Be Me." It was a Clement original—he'd come up with it while sitting on the studio toilet, pondering reincarnation. The line "If you see a turd in your toilet bowl, baby/It'll be me, and I'll be staring at you" was changed before it was recorded; it became "If you see a lump in your sugar bowl...." The song's feel was well suited to Lewis, but getting the romp just right was proving difficult. "I said, 'Why don't we come back to this later, Jerry? Let's do something else for a while,'" Clement recalls. "And old J.W. Brown spoke up, Jerry Lee's bass player, and said, 'Hey, Jerry, do that song we've been doing on the road that everybody likes so much.' I said, 'Well, let me go in there and turn on the machine.' I hit Play and Record, sat down, and they did 'Whole Lot of Shakin' Going On.' No dry run, no nothin'. One take, there it was! Sprang forth full-blown from its mother's womb. Then we went back to 'It'll Be Me.'"

A summer 1957 appearance on Steve Allen's TV show made Lewis an instant national star. He didn't kowtow to Allen as Elvis had, and Allen loved it. Whipped up by his own frenzy, Lewis hurled his piano bench offscreen. Allen threw it back, and "Whole Lot of Shakin'" went from regional hit to number one on the country charts and number three on the pop charts, unable to shake Debbie Reynolds's "Tammy" from the top spot. Lewis's next child, the one who drowned at the age of three, was named Steve Allen Lewis.

•

A month after the "Twilight" session, Lewis performs at a Christmastime benefit in Memphis. Hometown gigs are rare, especially in smaller venues like this club. His touring has picked up since his divorce proceedings began a couple of years back. He can command sizable fees for an appearance; he and the band recently flew to Switzerland for a single performance. In a Biloxi, Mississippi casino, his was the first act in a year to pay for itself. Tonight he's closing the show, and the audience stays late to see him.

When he is announced, he receives a standing ovation. Entering from the side, he does a fanny-shaking shimmy to great applause. He's wearing a leather waistcoat that he doesn't remove before sitting at the piano. But he has nothing to hide—he's slender and fit. The tempo changes—the feel, the emphasis—but it's still distinctly Jerry Lee Lewis. His voice is full of power this night, assuming confidence before an audience whose ages span six or seven decades. This is about conjuring the spirit from within, from the place where good meets bad and right meets wrong and the forces push and they pull, and the tension is exhilarating so that you find yourself unable to stand still and unable to move—shake, baby, shake—and part of you feels as if it might explode—easy, now—until there's a moment of liberation and what's happening onstage is happening in the audience, and no one can say who's leading because everyone together is joining in some new kind of freedom.

Lewis's set swings from his own classics, including both "Great Balls of Fire" and "Whole Lot of Shakin'," to his take on other standards—"Lucille" and "What'd I Say" among them. It's thrills and chills to follow these nonstop twists from the audience but something more of a workout onstage. "I always keep my eyes right on his hands," says Robert Hall, his drummer since 1996. "There's 20 regular songs he draws on, 60 or 80 backups that could come in at any time and a solid 40 I've never even heard. We still get a new one every now and then."

"Jerry can hear grass growing in the music," says bassist Cunningham. "He pushes you further than you think you're willing to go. We try to recognize what key he's in, then pick up what he's doing. One night in Vegas he started playing something even Kenny couldn't follow, and he's been with him for 37 years. Nobody played anything; we just let him play. All of a sudden he stopped, leaned into the microphone and said, 'Are you boys going to jump in with me or just take my money?"

"He has no set list, which gives him the freedom to do what he feels like doing," Cunningham says. "It's part of the mystique you go through with him as a fan and a player: What will happen tonight?"

•

It was a hot August day in 1957, before air-conditioning was common, when Sam Phillips gathered Lewis and his band in the breezeless Sun studio to record a follow-up to "Whole Lot of Shakin'." "Great Balls of Fire" was perfect for Lewis, built around the tension between sexual release and religious exaltation—two of his favorite pursuits (others include cars, motorcycles, tobacco pipes and boots).

As a warm-up for the song, Phillips and Lewis discussed theology. Clement hit the Record button. "H-E-L-L!" the Killer exclaimed and clapped his hand on the piano. "It says, 'Make merry with the joy of God only.' But when it comes to worldly music, rock and roll, anything like that, you have done brought yourself into the world, and you're in the world, and you're still a sinner."

"All right," responded Phillips, maintaining his cool in the heat of Lewis's passion. "Now look, Jerry. Religious conviction does not mean anything resembling extremism. Jesus Christ came into this world, and he tolerated man. He didn't preach from one pulpit; he went around and did good. If you think you can't do good if you're a rock-and-roll exponent——"

"You can do good, Mr. Phillips. Don't get me wrong——"

"When I say 'do good'——"

"You can have a kind heart! You can help people——"

As Lewis thought his hellfire and Phillips's humanism were merging, Phillips stunned him: "You can save souls!"

"No! No! No! No!" Lewis made the crowning distinction: "How can the devil save souls? What are you talkin' about? Man, I got the devil in me. If I didn't, I'd be a Christian!"

A few moments later, riled and primed by his record producer, this musician achieved one of the artistic high points of his life. With apocalyptic imagery, lascivious delivery and unbridled energy, Jerry Lee Lewis cut "Great Balls of Fire" as if announcing the End of Days.

The song was featured in a Hollywood teen exploitation film called Jamboree; it was the only song with an electric bass—played by Lewis's first cousin J.W. Brown. Brown—whose mom and Lewis's dad were siblings—was an electrician who opened his Memphis home to Lewis, as well as to his second wife and his namesake. According to Robert Palmer, when the dads were on the road, Brown's preteen daughter Myra saw that Jerry Lee Jr.'s mama was cavorting with other men. This fueled her adolescent crush on her cousin, a flame Lewis fanned. The cousins eloped in December 1957. Myra had turned 13. Singing perhaps to her, his next hits were "Breathless" and the forward-looking "High School Confidential."

While love was blooming, the relationship between the entertainer and the press was about to wither. No matter how much Lewis appreciated the way reviewers, critics and writers had helped launch his career, the character assaults that followed the revelation of his wife's age, their blood relationship and his past marriages revealed the journalists' true murderous natures. He squared off with them in a stance he maintains to this day: He has no interest in mixing with the press, no trust that it will do anything but create bloodthirsty headlines.

"He's a man of a great, contrite heart who's just maybe messed himself up from time to time," Phillips said 25 years ago. "It's a shame he doesn't have anyone to direct his talent—he is one of this century's great, great talents. But he feels a lonesomeness in his talent, extreme lonesomeness, for somebody to be strong around him."

The lonesomeness created a protective layer of arrogant skin. Even at his lowest point he still had the demeanor of an angry god. When touring in the 1960s, playing state fairs and dive bars before his Nashville comeback, he got an engagement in a Miami nightclub following a two-week stint by Conway Twitty, who'd known Lewis since they were both at Sun. Twitty had warned the club owner about Lewis's pounding piano style, so the owner bought an old upright for the gig. "Jerry showed up the afternoon he was supposed to open," Twitty once recalled, "took one look at the piano and kicked it off the stage onto the floor. He kicked it all the way out of the building, across the parking lot and into this lake. Then he came back in, blew cigar smoke in this mobster's face and said, 'Now get me a goddamn piano.'" He got his piano.

•

Another recording session in Memphis. Jimmy Rip has flown in from Los Angeles, but no band has been called. Piano and vocals only, three songs, though guest vocals and backing tracks will be dropped in later: "What Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)" will get a visit from Rod Stewart; Lewis's first-ever recording of Hank Williams's "Lost Highway" will be bolstered by Delaney Bramlett's raspy vocal; and "Miss the Mississippi and You," a yodeling classic by Jimmie Rodgers, will remain a solo presentation.

Lewis is brought to the studio this time by his daughter Phoebe. She is in her early 40s and, since his divorce proceedings, has stepped up to help manage Lewis's affairs.

Phoebe has long blonde hair and her father's spirit. She speaks with a Mississippi twang, smokes a corncob pipe and is excited about this new album. "I couldn't believe I was hearing Led Zeppelin's 'Rock and Roll' blaring out of my dad's bedroom. He was learning the song. And of course he cut it totally different."

Rip is pleased to have Phoebe at the session. Lewis doesn't go anywhere alone. He drinks hardly any alcohol these days, and pills, reefer and all drugs except those prescribed by his physician are out of his life. (At a recent doctor's visit following teeth transplants, Lewis was pronounced to be in perfect health. The new teeth have not affected the peculiar wet slur that has always made his speech an effort to understand.) It may be whatever he's taking to keep him from taking anything else, it may be a life of being doted on, or it's possible he feels as though he owns every damn place he finds himself in—but Lewis needs looking after. In a hotel not long ago he wound up alone in his room. "Hey!" he shouted, because he needed something. There was no answer, so he shouted "Hey!" louder and then again louder, until he left his room in his socks and underwear and stood in the hallway, shouting "Hey!"

Lewis is out at the piano noodling around, and without pause or introduction he breaks into "What Made Milwaukee Famous." The engineer is Roland Janes, who besides being the house engineer at the Sam Phillips Recording Service was Lewis's guitar player in the glory days. Janes can read Lewis, and he has missed nothing—he has the tape rolling in plenty of time.

Lewis moves on to the Williams song. He's reading the lyrics off the music stand, but he's singing with fervor. (He was reading the lyrics when he recorded "Great Balls of Fire" at Sun.) "I'm a rolling stone, all alone and lost/For a life of sin, I have paid the cost...."

Lewis has switched from rehearsing to recording without telling anyone, and even Janes misses the turn this time. "Hold it," his old friend says into the talk-back, "wasn't rolling."

"Aww, now," says Lewis, "you ruffled my feathers. Let me go get my pistol."

A visitor in the control booth gasps and says, "Oh no, not the pistol." After waiting a couple of beats, as if he could hear the fear, Lewis adds, "Only a joke. I ain't got a pistol."

"Boys, don't start that stupid rambling round," he sings, his back straight, his face stern beneath eyeglasses, his beady eyes focused on the page. His profile is sharp, like a hawk's. The piano hides his flip-flops and pajamas. Lewis could be a preacher alongside his cousin Swaggart.

Rip steps out to the studio between takes and says, "One more "

"One? At least 10 more."

"I think one more will be enough."

"Too bad you don't know me as well as you think you know me," Lewis says. The revelation of such a truth is always startling, though it's natural that the Great I Am would open up in a recording studio, where he has always pored over and poured out his soul. With each take, he's only begun to peel away the song, to simplify and complicate, to reveal more of his terrifying, terrified soul.

He says, "If you let me get this down right, you'll have a million-seller on your hands—20 or 30 more takes." Rip explains that from the three keeper takes he can build a solid one on the computer. "Play it back, then," Lewis snaps. He's willing to listen to what they've got, but he really doesn't feel he's hit his lick yet. "Don't cover up my mistakes with the band," he protests. "Let me get it right. He writes everything you do in the Book of Life, and he'll hear it. Dim the lights."

Rip says, "Lighting is everything."

Lewis misses not a beat. "Nah, it's a little part of it, but it means a lot." He begins one more take—it opens completely differently from the others. "One more," he says again but no longer means it, having heard what's there and realized he's done a good job. "I stayed here three days and nights once," Lewis says. "Laid my pistol on the piano, dared anyone to leave. We was cutting a religious song, and I felt myself rising up off the piano bench."

The talk of the old days primes him to cut "Miss the Mississippi and You," a Jimmie Rodgers song his parents would play on a 78 before Lewis could even find middle C. The song washes out of him like silt onto a delta. "That would bring a tear to a steel ball," he says, and gets up from the piano.

After the session there's small talk in the control room. Lewis has bought a Hummer for his 17-year-old son, Lee, and he laughs as he complains about the cost of the insurance. Phoebe laughs, then says her dad recently set his Harley-Davidson inside the living room of his ranch, where he can admire it. After several days of looking he could resist no longer. He opened the sliding glass door so the exhaust wouldn't kill him, mounted the beast, kicked—and unleashed mayhem. The machine roared throughout the house, the dog went crazy barking, and the fumes set off the smoke alarm.

Lewis's Nesbit home is a sprawling ranch built on 30 acres with its own lake. It has six bedrooms, six bathrooms and plenty of living space. He's lived there since 1973, and it suits him just fine. Phoebe occupies one of the suites, and their longtime helper Carolyn is often around. She cooks like Lewis's mama—Phoebe has given her the family recipes. He eats only one real meal a day, dinner around eight, but he'll snack. A night owl, he has a suite in the back, where he sleeps, bathes and watches a big-screen TV. His collections are on display there—model cars, tobacco pipes (he keeps his many boots in a closet)—and so are his prizes and awards, including his Grammy (bestowed for an album titled Interviews From the Class of '55, best spoken word in 1986), as well as some gifts he's been given. "Little bitty things mean the most to him," says Whitten, his road manager. "A friend will get him something, and he'll cherish it."

Studio talk turns to Gunsmoke, an indication that the evening is going great. Gunsmoke is Lewis's favorite subject in the world. He loves television, Westerns in particular. Of all the Westerns, he likes Gunsmoke best. Of the two kinds of Gunsmoke, he prefers Chester, the Dennis Weaver character, over Festus, his replacement. When asked why he likes Gunsmoke so much, he answers, "Because it's unique, perfect and great. I got tapes going back to 1954—Kitty was beautiful." He states, "Matt Dillon is my hero," and he admits he cried when Harry Dean Stanton's character on the show died.

•

Lewis is legendary as a rock-and-roller, so it's often forgotten that when he came to Sun he was playing George Jones and Ray Price songs, a Carter Family number and Jimmie Rodgers. And it was to country he turned in 1967, a decade after his meteor burned up. He made classic honky-tonk comfortable in the modern era with "Another Place, Another Time" and began a string of country hits—many in the top three and more than several that crossed over into pop—that ran all the way through the 1970s and included "She Still Comes Around (To Love What's Left of Me)," "She Even Woke Me Up to Say Good-Bye," "Would You Take Another Chance on Me" and "Thirty-Nine and Holding." The run ended in the late 1970s, when the individualism Lewis brought was no longer appreciated.

Lewis married Kerrie McCarver in the mid-1980s, and initially they ran a nice little cottage industry. His fan club was thriving, she opened his home to tours, and she took over the management of his career. But storm clouds appeared. According to a member of Lewis's band, Little Richard, with whom Lewis has always gotten along famously, said, "That fat white girl called me a nigger to my face." And after her first European tour, contracts reportedly began to include "no Kerrie" clauses; she was not welcomed back. "It was a relief for us," says one entourage member.

In 1985 Lewis was 51 and soon to be a father again. "I want my unborn son to have a drug-free daddy," he said at the Betty Ford Clinic, but he checked out two days after checking in. "Patients are supposed to clean bathrooms, take out garbage, sweep floors and pick up after people," he said. "That may be fine for Suzie Homemaker, but it ain't my style."

The new family moved to Ireland during a protracted battle with the IRS. But over time the partnerships—marriage and business—soured, until Lewis basically quit performing. Kerrie moved out of the house, but the divorce, with all its attendant court appearances, lawyers and gag orders, has been ongoing since spring 2003.

•

It's evident that the final Phillips studio session for the new album, titled The Pilgrim, will be different. A tour bus is parked out front, and movie lights are glowing. The lobby, usually so quiet that the echo of the 1950s can be heard, is a video crew's staging area. "When I started doing this record, it was so low-key," says Rip. "For this to be the end, it's wild."

A couple of weeks earlier Lewis was in Los Angeles to tape a Willie Nelson Memorial Day weekend TV special with Merle Haggard, Keith Richards and Toby Keith—all guests (along with Nelson) on Lewis's new album. (Other guests include Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Buddy Guy and Bruce Springsteen.) Lewis was slated to close the show in a duet with Kid Rock.

Two days before the May taping, Lewis had never heard of Kid Rock. Phoebe looked him up on the Internet, and in the first picture they saw, the Kid was standing atop a grand piano. "I like him already," Lewis said.

They were slated to play "Whole Lot of Shakin'" and possibly work up a take on the Stones' "Honky Tonk Woman." Lewis had practiced the song, but under the eyes of five cameras, 70 crew members and the song's co-author—Keith Richards—Lewis couldn't get it. The idea was scrapped. But Kid Rock and the Ferriday Kid behaved like reunited father and son. Rock never left the Killer's side, and Lewis was digging him right back.

At 2:30 A.M., after the gig, Rip's hotel phone rang—a summons. Lewis played "Honky Tonk Woman" with vehemence. And thus this last Memphis session: That's Kid Rock's bus out front, itineraries having been aligned for the pair to record "Honky Tonk Woman." The film crew is from Dream Works Nashville, the label that will release the new record under its Lost Highway imprint. James Stroud, head of Dream Works Nashville, drummed in Lewis's band in the early 1970s; he's playing on tonight's session. Before the evening is out he will have had so much fun that he'll declare he's making this record the company's number one priority.

The engineer is playing the Stones' version of the song. Kid Rock is wearing black: jeans, T-shirt, hat. His cigar is brown, which matches his snakeskin boots. His gold cross is bigger than his large plastic cup of whiskey and cola. Waiting for Lewis, he invites people onto his bus, where a Detroit Pistons game plays on a TV the size of the side of a bus.

As his car approaches, Lewis's jaw drops. He steps out and says, "I got to go comb my hair. Looks like we got an audience already." Road manager Whitten, who has driven him, suggests Lewis use the bathroom on the bus. Kid Rock bows to show his hospitality. "They got one inside," Lewis says. "I been paying for it for 29 years." He's not wearing pajamas tonight—crisp black jeans and a black shirt with gold trim that will flash in the video—but he's still got on the flip-flops. His skin looks pastier than usual, and he's sucking on a tobacco pipe. "I like that crease in your pants," Kid Rock says with genuine admiration. "That's old-school. I ain't coming near you—you'll cut me."

As Lewis glides through the track, his "Honky Tonk Woman" sounds appropriate for a honky-tonk. Kid Rock suggests starting it as a slow gospel thing. He's full of ideas—he inserts a break for the drummer, then for the whole band. He modifies Lewis's verse again, telling the multiracial background trio to "hit on the upbeat," slapping time on his knee. They run the song down. Lewis says, "Well, you might have an idea there." The producer agrees—these pros are ready to recognize positive input. "It's good," Rip says. Kid Rock adds, "It's rock and roll." And Lewis, out of the side of his mouth and a bit under his breath, says into his mike, his voice rising like a question, "That's rock and roll?" It's wry and contentious, just this side of snide, and there's a weighty pause after he says it as everyone in the room reflects on what has just happened. It's not a put-down; it's just something the granddaddy of rock and roll is allowed to say, and it's laden with meaning and humor.

After the recording the Killer tells the Kid, "Don't let nobody change your style," and the Kid replies, "I won't."

There's lots of jubilant photo taking, and the Kid stands next to Lewis and says, "Show me something on the piano." The two share the bench, and Lewis pulls out Fats Domino's "Walking to New Orleans." But the Kid's really too excited to pay attention, and they wind up doing a duet of Hank Williams's "Lovesick Blues." The talk leads to Williams, then to Louisiana. "Did you ever live near a paper plant?" the Killer asks. "Auto plants. Detroit," says the Kid. "Man, you should live near a paper plant," says Lewis. "It stinks." It's been nearly half a century since Lewis lived downwind of Natchez, but there's a lot he ain't forgot.

•

At eight P.M. on a summer night, the band congregates in a Memphis hotel parking lot. A luxury bus will cart us to Nashville, where Lewis is closing a star-studded night hosted by Marty Stuart at the historic Ryman Auditorium—the mother church of country music. Lewis is due to play at one in the morning. The last one to arrive, he boards and heads directly to his suite in the back, son Lee in tow. He turns on the big-screen TV, settles onto the comfortable sofa and sits slack jawed, rapt with a three-quarter smile for the next three or so hours. It doesn't matter that Ronald Reagan's funeral is the only show on; television—sitcoms, a hemor-rhoid-treatment commercial, Moses coming down from the mountain—makes him oblivious of the world, and happy.

This performance is part of country music's Fan Fair. Lewis has never been totally comfortable with fans. At a show not long ago, someone passed a request to him on a cocktail napkin; without a glance he blew his nose on it. When his bus pulls into the alley behind the Ryman—the alley Hank Williams used to cross from the Grand Ole Opry to get a drink at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge—fans swarm the vehicle. No one disembarks, but one elderly gentleman is let on. He's Lewis's barber, and they talk about old times while Lewis gets a trim.

Outside, fans wait patiently and expectantly. A ponytailed man in his 60s holds a stack of albums, not CDs, that he dreams of getting autographed. Many people have markers and pens at the ready, pick guards pulled off their guitars, autograph books open to a blank page. "Should we just get a picture of the bus?" asks one woman, tired of waiting. "Whose bus is that?" asks another. When she's told, she repeats the name and stares, sounding surprised that Lewis is still alive.

At 1:45 A.M. he disembarks and heads to the stage. Passing through the fans, he's anything but fair, greeting the peasants cursorily, making no real contact. He seems repulsed by the idea of touching something of theirs. Strolling directly to the piano—there is great applause—he begins to play "Roll Over Beethoven." He sits three-quarters cocked to the audience—but he's more than half-cocked, fully loaded, bangin' 'em out.

Lewis's hands pound out a fury. Sometimes they seem barely to rise off the piano, and at other times he's all ass and elbows, his arms flailing like a roller coaster. The piano is an extension of his own being, and he commands it. He's been known to stomp on the keys with the heel of his boot, to pound it with his fists, to place his butt squarely on the ivories—and always the piano sounds perfect. He's declared that he can stare at the piano and make it play.

Within seconds of the 30-minute set's last notes, Lewis is back on the bus, settled on the rear suite's sofa, mouth agape, eyes looking at the TV. A couple of hours later, at five in the morning, rolling down the highway, I walk back to the bathroom on the bus. It's the last door on the left, just before his suite. He's reclining on the sofa, framed by the doorway, his hair newly trimmed, the TV uncomfortably loud. He's slouched, his feet planted firmly on the floor, ready to kick anyone who dares to cross the threshold, anyone who mistakes his door for the bathroom door and tries to piss on him. He looks up as I near and glares—his eyes burning through an un—healthful pallor, but burning. His skin shines like wax, but the meaning in his look is real. He glares like the devil.

Lewis's glare is as intimate and arbitrary as Elvis's gifts of Cadillacs. It's a way to retain control of the moment. When Elvis slurred that he was buying you—a stranger, a friend—a Cadillac, he was purchasing not just the moment but his control of you. You said no, you pissed him off, and the relationship was over; you said yes, you lost your power of independence. So it is with Lewis's glare. Respond to the glower with a challenge—"Yeah, what do you want to do about it?"—and get thrown off the bus; tuck tail and meekly go about your business, you prove yourself a candyass. In a business of manipulation, these are masterful moves.

The TV in the back is so loud—even over the noise of a tour bus barreling 70 miles an hour on the expressway—and the day has stretched so long that someone finally slides the suite door shut. Lewis—rapt at the altar of TV—doesn't notice. Band members climb into bunks for an hour of shut-eye before they can go home and sleep.

The sky is pale purple becoming the white of day, and the bus is on city streets when there's an angry banging and someone shouts, "Open this door." For a minute, I am seeing the Twilight Zone image of the gremlin who has hung on through the whole flight outside the airplane window. The banging continues. It's from the back of the bus—someone's locked in the bathroom?—and as we get oriented from half sleep, we realize it's Lewis. "I want this door open right now!" He says it with such force, the door itself must cower before him. B.B. Cunningham hustles down the aisle, sees it's a sliding door, feels everywhere for a handle and takes a hit as the assault continues right by his head. "Somebody open this door!" There's panic in Lewis's voice, as if he's drowning near shore, each pounding blow as strong as a victim's flailing. Cunningham is bent at the waist, trying to get his fingernails wedged between the metal frame and the door to rip it open.

Blam! Blam! "Somebody open this door right now." There's a syncopation to the banging and shouting—it's not something you'd dance to, but it gets your attention. The bus driver hears the commotion and yells to the back, "It's pneumatic." Bang! Bang! "It runs on air," he yells. "Push the button." There's a crowd at the door when the message reaches the back: "Push the big black button to the right of the door." As in Batman, Austin Powers, Indiana Jones—the door disappears inside the wall and reveals Jerry Lee Lewis, an everyday miracle, stunned but with an aura of fire burning like a voodoo candle, a voodoo campfire. He is silent, he speaks, he steps out of the room and back in. What he does and says is nothing compared with how he appears: a ball of fire, of pent-up rage. He's a warm front of vulnerability, a cold front of anger and mistrust, the thundering fury that is the Killer. Life is hell, and Lewis is still paying.

Photography Ethan Russell 1978

2004 Jim Marshall

Cousins

It's All Relative

Jerry Lee Lewis's cousin Myra Gale Brown got a great deal of attention in 1958 when her marriage to Lewis became public. But two other cousins—along with Lewis, all from Ferriday, Louisiana (population 3,632) and born within a year of one another—gained fame the same way the Killer did: by playing the piano. Lewis made a mark as a country singer, but the country charts were even kinder to his cousin Mickey Gilley, who left Ferriday at the age of 17. Settling in Houston, Gilley established his namesake nightclub—the setting for the movie Urban Cowboy—and scored 17 number one country hits, beginning with 1974's "Room Full of Roses." These days he has his own theater in Branson, Missouri, and he has a Ferriday street named after him. Still, many claim fallen televangelist Jimmy Swaggart is the greatest musical talent in the family As noys he and Lewis played holy-ghost boogie togther; later, from his 270-acre ministry in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Swaggart sold more than 15 million copies of his gospel albums.