Jerry Swift passed on from this life about a year ago. His wife, Leasa, wanted to keep the news low-key at the time and so I didn’t write about it, but I think now a remembrance is in order. He was a hell of a guy and he deserves his flowers.
The first thing I’ll say about Jerry is that if he hadn’t taken a job selling ads for the Memphis Flyer in its early days you wouldn’t be reading this. This was some 35 years ago, four years before my own stint at the Flyer began, but I heard lots of Jerry tales — some from those who were working at the paper when publisher Ken Neill founded it, and many more from Jerry himself. He had a million stories and loved to tell them.
Jerry was a singer in a band in his teens and early 20s, but he made his bones in Memphis in the music-club business, most notably by opening the Ritz Theatre on Madison Avenue in 1976. Billy Joel was the club-opening act and there were lines around the block. Jerry managed to bring performers such as Meat Loaf, Joan Armatrading, Al Jarreau, Tom Waits, Roy Buchanan, and others to Memphis to play a 350-seat venue. He had a good eye (and ear) for up-and-coming talent and had a knack for striking a deal.
Jerry knew everybody in the local music business and brought those connections with him to the Flyer. Soon most of the city’s venues were advertising in the upstart little weekly. He even got the no-nonsense Beale Street club owners to start buying ads, a major coup. Jerry also talked the local topless joints into the paper, and they mostly ran full-page ads. Cash only. The bills smelled of sweat and perfume.
It was a wild and woolly time, and without the advertising dollars that Jerry brought in, it’s unlikely the Flyer would have survived. He gave the paper street cred. And, as he told it, he never sold an ad. “I just tell them what we offer and how much it costs,” he’d say. “If they want to buy an ad, they’ll let me know.” Cool. Whatever his approach was, it worked. Jerry could talk to anyone, and did. And nobody intimidated him, not even his boss.
He loved to tell the story about how an angry Ken Neill was pounding his fist on the table in an ad sales meeting when his metal watchband exploded and flew off in several pieces around the room. There was an awkward silence before Jerry started laughing so hard that the whole room soon joined in. “That was the last time Ken pounded on the table,” Jerry recalled.
He was a big man, full of gusto and full of ideas. One of those ideas, which he latched onto with a vengeance in the mid-1990s, was that we should start playing golf — “we” being Recording Academy director Jon Hornyak, Flyer photographer Larry Kuzniewski, and me. Jerry was a hard man to resist, so we bought clubs at local thrift stores and met one Sunday morning at Overton Park to embark on a new adventure.
It wasn’t pretty at first, but we got better after a few Sundays. I remember well the first time we all four hit our drives over the dreaded “ditch” on number 7. Usually, at least one of us bounced a pellet into the lovely concrete confines of Lick Creek. It was a funny, joyful, high-fiving moment that has stayed with me through the years.
That same foursome stayed together for the next 25 years, playing what Jerry dubbed the “Grudge Match,” which pitted Larry and me against Jerry and Jon. We played courses all over the area before finally settling on a weekly game at Galloway after the course was renovated. Jerry and Leasa bought a house nearby, and when Jerry retired, he played there several days a week, until he injured his back in a fall that put him in the hospital and ended his golf career.
As they will with all of us, the years finally caught up with Jerry last May at the age of 76, a number he would have been proud to have on his scorecard. He is sorely missed. And you wouldn’t be reading these words without him.