Mojo Will Be Ready When Fans Clamor for His Underwear

Maybe it’s a little premature, but somebody ought to start thinking about reserving one of the stars on Hollywood Boulevard for Mojo Nixon.

San Diego’s resident loony tunesmith--who, with his washboard-strummin’ sidekick, Skid Roper, has spent much of the past decade tilting the basic blues structure several degrees toward mayhem--makes his screen debut today when “Great Balls of Fire,” the cinematic biography of rock legend Jerry Lee Lewis, opens throughout San Diego County.

Nixon, cast as the Killer’s drummer, James Van Eaton, is one of three real-life musicians tapped to portray members of Lewis’ fabled Sun Records-era band. The other two are L.A. punk pioneer John Doe as bassist J. W. Brown and Jimmy Vaughan of the Fabulous Thunderbirds as guitarist Roland Janes.

And because most of the movie is set in that Sun era, Nixon and his fellow musicians-cum-actors appear in a fair number of scenes.

“Most of the time, we’re just playing music,” Nixon said. “But here and there I get to say a few things, like ‘That’s right, Killer.’ ”

At first, Nixon appears to take the whole thing in stride.

“I suppose it’s better than being in ‘Police Academy VI,’ ” he said with a shrug. “And I did make a whole heap of money, so I ain’t complaining.”

With a little goading, however, Nixon admits to being plenty excited at the prospect of impending movie stardom.

“I’ve seen how people respond to rock stars from attending hundreds of concerts and from my own experiences,” he said, “but the way people were responding to Dennis Quaid during the filming was unreal.

“You can see rock stars all the time just by going to their concerts, but movie stars are different--you almost never see them in person. I remember one day we were filming a scene on this little street in Memphis, and there must have been 80 women and two guys standing outside Dennis’ trailer.

“They weren’t just standing there waiting, they were standing there staring, staring real hard, as though the harder they stared, the more likely he was to come out.

“A couple of people even asked me if I could get them some of the sheets he slept on, his underwear,” Nixon said. “So later that day, I sold them some of those items--at inflated prices, of course.

“And to think that someday that could be me. It could be my sheets, my underwear they’re after.”

It was through sheer luck that Nixon landed a role in the film. After cutting a series of promotional spots for MTV in the fall of 1987, he said, “I started talking to some people in my agency about getting me a movie part.”

“I had heard about the upcoming Jerry Lee Lewis movie, and I told them that’s the kind of film I’d like to be involved with. So they sent some of those MTV tapes, with me extemporaneously pontificating about all sorts of things, to the movie’s producers, and the next thing I knew I had an audition.”

Early last summer, Nixon flew to Los Angeles and auditioned for the role of Van Eaton, “who way back when looked kind of like me, only he wasn’t nearly as good-looking,” Nixon said.

“I didn’t hear back from them for a long time, but in the middle of September, they called me up and told me I had the part.”

A month later, Nixon arrived in Memphis for two weeks of rehearsals with the other members of Lewis’ “band.”

“We had to learn all of Jerry Lee’s old songs,” he recalled, “to make it look like we were actually playing--when in truth, he had already rerecorded them for the sound track with a studio band.”

Filming began Nov. 1, and his first day on the set, “the wardrobe people dressed me in 1950s-style rockabilly clothes--the kind of clothes my mother would love--and put all this makeup on me.”

Nixon and the other members of the cast remained in Memphis for almost three months, “working for 15 minutes and then waiting around on the movie set for three hours.”

His most memorable experience, Nixon said, came midway through the shoot, when Jerry Lee Lewis paid a surprise visit to the original Sun studios where he had recorded most of his hits--and where Quaid, Nixon, Doe and the rest of the movie’s band were busy re-creating history.

“We were doing something easy, like ‘Great Balls of Fire,’ and the director was trying to get Dennis’ movements all right,” Nixon recalled. “All of a sudden, Jerry Lee walked in, and I was scared to death--I couldn’t find the beat for nothing.

“Then he’s standing maybe 2 feet away from me, keeping his eye on Dennis, and at this point I was pretty much paralyzed. Eventually, somebody introduced us; I shook his hand, and he nodded his head and said, ‘This sounds good.’

“I was so nervous . . . but luckily I calmed down and continued playing. Still, the entire time he was there, you could probably hear my heart beating louder than the music.”

In late January, the entire film crew flew to London for the final two weeks of the shoot.

“Tonight,” Nixon said, “I’ll be standing in line just like everybody else--probably at some drive-in, where I’ll really be gigantic.”