Picture Jerry Lee Lewis as Iago in the rock ‘n’ roll version of “Othello.” You’re just going to have to imagine it. Me, too. Because as far as I know, no visual record exists except for a few scattered publicity photographs.
He played the role in Los Angeles in 1968. The show was scheduled to come to New York next (we had already made plans to attend) – but it never did. According to Jerry Lee, it was because he had grown tired of the actor’s life, six weeks of following the same script night after night was enough, even if, like any Method performer, he never did play it the same way twice. (“I never worked so hard in my life. I mean two hours and forty-five minutes running up and down stairs – it was a mess.”) Very likely the fact that his recording career revived at exactly this time, with three Top 10 country hits in a row, had something to do with it, too.
No matter. As this rehearsal recording clearly proves (there’s another number available called “Let a Soldier Drink” – and I’m not sure that there may not be one more), Jerry Lee inhabited the role, just as he has inhabited virtually every song he has ever sung. Listen to the leer in his voice, listen to the clarity of the message, listen to his delight in the lines. Oh man, I wish I had seen the show.
When I first met him two years later, in the spring of 1970, the role was still clearly in his blood. “You know,” he said to me toward the end of my visit, “a lot of people think if you can make a lot of money, that’s what this life is all about. Well, that can’t be what life is all about, you know? If I can just play my piano and sing – you know, the proudest I ever was in my life was when I got my first record out, hear[ing] it on the radio for the first time.“ He meditated on that for a little while. “Well, life is just a vapor,” he said, winking at me, as if I, too, must surely recognize this Shakespearean allusion. “You breathe it in, and what the heck, it’s gone.“
Remember one thing: if Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan (see the movie, see our earlier Jack Clement blog), then surely he would have to have been at least as much a Jerry Lee Lewis fan. Just ask Jerry Lee, who clearly was impressed with Shakespeare – and the way that the playwright, like every other great artist Jerry Lee has admired, like Jerry Lee himself, really got to the heart of the matter. As for this recording, I think it shows once again why Sam Phillips regarded Jerry Lee Lewis as a genius. Not a natural – a genius. And he was, is, and remains so.
I was hoping you wouldn’t ask. I’m working on getting set up in Nashville, teaching Creative Writing at Vanderbilt in the eighth year of what was supposed to be a one-year appointment.
But in terms of the writing I’m working on, I finished a complete draft (for me, writing on the computer there is no longer any such thing as a first draft, because there’s so much everyday rewriting) of my Sam Phillips biography – which has turned out, against all my disbelieved promises to you, Alexandra, and others, to be about as long as the Sam Cooke biography.
As soon as I get straightened away here, I’m going to start rewriting from the beginning – in which, for surprising reasons, Sam’s mother gives him the middle name of the doctor who was supposed to deliver him (“You take my ass dying when I was born, and you take a drunk doctor showing up – man, he didn’t even make it till I was born – and my mama being so kind she got up out of bed and put him to bed until he sobered up, and then the midwife comes and Mama feels so sorry for Dr. Cornelius she named me after him!”)
And then I guess I’ll just keep on going, with the hope (but not necessarily the promise) of finishing by the end of the year.
PG.com: Why did you decide to write this book?
Sam was as great an inspiration as I’ve ever encountered in my life. My father. My grandfather. Howlin’ Wolf. J.W. Alexander. Solomon Burke. Doc Pomus. A few more. But Sam – the music had always inspired me. But meeting him in 1979 was like having every fantasy I had ever constructed (in terms of philosophy, world view, idealistic purpose, and conscious intent) come true. Here’s a passage from the end of the book that sort of explains it.
Once in a while I dream about Sam, but none of the dreams has left as lasting an impression as the one I had not long after his death. It seemed to center on the first time Elvis was in the studio for his recording “audition” with Scotty and Bill. “I am nothing if not an idealist,” Sam proclaimed, whether to Elvis or me I’m not sure. Then: “I am anything but an idealist,” he declared. “The boy cannot fully understand.”
For all I know, by “the boy,” he could just as easily be referring to me as to Elvis – because I cannot altogether understand. But then I don’t really want to. Like Sam, I, too, am anxious to take leave of my senses. Sam found the vehicle through music. I found the same vehicle in much the same way – but in large part, like so many people, it was through Sam, it was because of Sam.
PG.com: How will it be different than your previous books?
The difference, I guess, is apparent in the passage that I’ve quoted. The book is much more “personal” than any of my other books – I mean all of them are personal. All of them are intensely personal, because they represent what I care about and deeply believe. But here – in the book about Sam – I take on a personal role, because I was there for much of the last 25 years. I was there for many of the events. And I was there not strictly as a reporter (I’m never there strictly as a reporter) but in some other, less definable role. I suppose I would adopt much the same approach if I were to write a biography of Solomon Burke. Which, sadly, I never will. As Solomon said to me the last few times I saw him, “You know, your book about Sam [Cooke] is really great. But when are we going to do The Book?” I tried to get him to start it, I suggested that, just to get us going, he could tell a few of the stories about his grandmother and his days as a Wonder Boy Preacher to his daughter Victoria and send me the tapes - but he never did. And from my point of view (and I think from Solomon’s, too), it had to be a first-person narration. So that book will never be written. But, just as with Sam Phillips, I’ll do my best to continue to sing (as “Pete the Writer,” as Solomon dubbed me early on) Solomon’s song.
Sam Phillips’ wife, Becky, died a few months ago, on September 13, 2012. She was eighty-seven, a wonderful woman, and a wonderful friend – and no one who knew her could fail to be inspired by her quiet dignity and dedication.
Although best-known, certainly, for her behind-the-scenes role as wife and mother to America’s first rock ‘n’ roll family (her husband was the visionary prophet of Sun Records, and her sons Knox and Jerry continued the tradition), she possessed a creativity of her own that found expression not only in her pioneering radio work but in the unfailingly nurturing and sustaining role she adopted for her family.
She was a woman of deep-seated religious faith, but it was her sweetness of spirit that communicated itself most of all to everyone she met, whether family, friends, or fellow workers in radio over the years.
She was a seventeen-year-old high school student, already doing a radio show with her sister, when she met her nineteen-year-old husband-to-be at station WLAY in her native Sheffield, Alabama. Sam had only recently gone to work there as an announcer in 1942, and the way she described it, “He had just come in out of the rain. His hair was windblown and full of raindrops. He wore sandals and a smile unlike any I had ever seen. He sat down on the piano bench and began to talk to me. I told my family that night I had met the man I wanted to marry.”
Becky, Sam said, was the inspiration behind WHER, his first radio station, the first All-Girl Station in the Nation, which went on the air on October 29, 1955, just as he was finalizing the deal to sell Elvis Presley’s contract. The idea of giving women a chance they had never had was “based on what I knew Becky could do. Becky was the best I ever heard,” he declared in a 1998 interview for the Peabody Award-winning Kitchen Sisters’ documentary on PBS, WHER: 1000 Beautiful Watts. And what he meant by that had less to do with her exceptional gift for writing, for speaking, for presenting and organizing her thoughts in a cogent and compelling fashion, than what lay behind those thoughts, what Sam would call the innate spirituality of the presentation.
But you didn’t have to hear her on radio (where she continued to broadcast till the mid-1980s) to get the benefit of Becky Phillips’ unmistakable capacity for kindness and connection. Her on-air slogan, “A smile on your face puts a smile in your voice,” could just as easily stand for her chosen path in life. There was no better friend, there was no better partner, there was no better confidence-builder than Becky Phillips – though she would be the last to admit it.
One of my fondest memories of Becky is of holding hands with her. This was when we were making the A&E documentary about Sam in 1999, and Becky was, of course, an integral part of the story. She helped in every way possible, providing pictures, memories, stories, and personal memorabilia. She did everything in fact except cook us breakfast at five o’clock in the morning the way she always did for Elvis when he would come to visit Sam and her and the boys in the middle of the night. The only thing she wasn’t certain about was the idea of doing an on-camera interview herself.
Well, she was certain.
She just didn’t think it was necessary. She said she would be too nervous. She said she wouldn’t be comfortable without a script (she wrote wonderful scripts for all of her radio specials). What it came down to in the end was that, yes, she would be too nervous to do it – but she didn’t want to let us down. Most of all, she didn’t want to let Sam down, because although they had been separated for many years, she never considered herself in any way separate from him.
Knox got her to the interview. He got a really cool suite at the Ridgeway Hotel out east in Memphis, and he had it filled with flowers – and Becky got her hair done and looked really beautiful. But as we sat there, it became more and more clear how nervous she really was. And she grew even more nervous as the crew hurried to set up. She said, “I just don’t think I can do it.” I told her I knew she could, she’d be great. She said, “Maybe if I could just read something I’ve written?” But she knew that just wouldn’t be right. Finally she said, “Maybe if you could just hold my hand.” So we sat there holding hands for ten or fifteen minutes while they finished setting up – and then she did the most beautiful, eloquent, composed interview one could ever imagine, with all the warmth and assurance that informed every other aspect of her life.
We held hands one or two more times in similar situations over the years. And she always liked to act like I was the one giving her support. But the truth is, that was only part of it. Honestly, I don’t know anyone I’d rather be holding hands with than Becky Phillips. Because whatever you may have been doing for her, she could always do so much more for you. She could just do so much for your confidence in yourself, as any member of her family would readily attest – because she always made you feel like you really were something. Because she showed such an immeasurable and unreserved belief in you. The very qualities that Sam Phillips cited as her special gifts for radio could just as well be cited by friends and family, by everyone in fact who were the beneficiaries of that indomitable loyalty, that remarkable sense of order and communication not just of words but of deep-rooted emotion that this quietly remarkable and self-effacing woman sent forth into the world.
Sam, Knox & Becky circa 1957
The Kitchen Sisters excellent piece on WHER aired on NPR. Here’s a link to the archive of the audio story: http://tinyurl.com/cw8xeq7
