Jerry Lee Lewis

by Rick Bragg

  “Yeah,” Elmo said, “that’s good.”

  But it was all he said. Somehow his daddy didn’t seem moved, didn’t seem all that impressed by what his boy had done. It may be that Elmo was a little bit jealous, Jerry thinks now, enough to stifle his enthusiasm for his son. When you dream about something for as long as Elmo had dreamed about playing onstage and making a record, it must have been hard to see that dream draped like a fine suit of clothes on another man, even his own boy.

  Jerry Lee has thought a lot about that day, but he owes his daddy too much to feel any anger; what he feels is disappointment, the lasting kind.

  “He didn’t make much of it. I don’t know why. But he didn’t. It kind of got to me, I guess.

  “But ain’t that the way the real world works?”

  Jerry Lee went back to Memphis to be close to the music. One night he was watching television with J. W., Lois, and the family when the phone rang. J. W. came back in the room and said, “Dewey Phillips is fixin’ to play your record.”

  Jerry Lee told him he was a liar.

  “You listen. Dewey Phillips is about to play it on the radio.”

  “Nawwwww,” Jerry Lee said.

  They turned on the radio, and there he was, talking so fast you could barely make out what he meant: “. . . and this is Daddy-O Dewey Phillips, just fixin’ to bring you the hottest thing in the country, Red, Hot & Blue, comin’ to you from WHBQ in Memphis, Tennessee. . . . Here he is, here’s a new guy that Sam Phillips has got. Jerry Lee Lewis. And here he is, doin’ ‘Crazy Arms.’”

  “And I couldn’t believe it. That’s the first time that I ever heard my record on the radio. An’ I said, ‘Man, listen to that.’”

  The air over Memphis and the dark Delta filled with his voice.

  “I looked over,” Jerry Lee says, “and there was Myra, jumping up and down.”

  At WHBQ, Dewey Phillips and the engineers took call after call from listeners who said they liked that boy from Louisiana, liked him better than Ray Price, liked him the way they liked Elvis. To make sure that Jerry Lee did not wander away from Memphis, Sam Phillips spread the word that there was a hot piano player in town, and Jerry Lee started doing club dates in the Mid-South—nothing too glamorous, some downright dangerous. Roland Janes liked to tell people of a night, not far from Memphis, when a big peckerwood started yelling at Jerry Lee, “Blondie? Heeeeeyyyyy, Blondie?” till Jerry Lee walked over, smiling, and punched the man in the nose, punched him so hard he knocked him across the floor. Then he went back to his piano and played a song. A lot of musicians pretended to be tough, pretended to be about a half bubble off plumb, but Jerry Lee really was, tough and a little bit crazy when it suited him, Janes would say, and he was willing, always willing, to defend the dignity of the stage. On it, he could do anything, perform any antic he wanted, but if you impugned his stage, you insulted him down where it mattered, and he was coming for you every time.

  The specter of Elvis was never very far away, in those days. It was Elvis, speaking to Jerry Lee through the radio, who had convinced him it was all possible, but he still was invisible to this man who had had such an impact on his life. As he went to work in Memphis on his own career, he wondered if he would ever even meet the man. He had already met Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash, and while he knew they were successes and even stars, they did not have the luster of Elvis. Elvis was said to visit Sun Records still, now and then, and Jerry Lee hoped and waited to see him there, not as a googly-eyed fan but as one professional to another.

  Late in 1956, toward Christmastime, Phillips asked him in to help out Carl Perkins, who was coming in to cut the old country blues “Matchbox” and an original tune called “Your True Love.” Jerry Lee was reluctant to play behind Perkins. “Carl was doing a session, and I was just kinda hanging around,” recalls Jerry Lee. Perkins was backed by his band—brothers Jay and Clayton and drummer W. S. “Fluke” Holland—but for this record they wanted piano, and that meant Jerry Lee.

  He is slow to talk about doing session work now, as if such a thing was somehow beneath him, but in Carl Perkins he recognized a musician who knew how to get the sound he wanted in a studio. Perkins then was a slim man with dark, oiled-back, curly hair and a big jaw, a snazzy dresser who liked to do a little Chuck Berry duckwalk in his black-and-white two-tone shoes, but in the studio he was all business. “Sam wanted to know if I would play behind the boy, and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ I said, ‘I’ll do the best I can, but Carl does most of the playin’ himself, you know? He says, ‘Yeah, but I want you to take lead on the piano.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think that would really do very good.’ And I don’t remember if he took the lead on it or not. [But] you could hear it. You could tell who was playin’ the piano. And that’s what they wanted.”

  Oh, let me be your little dog

  Till your big dog comes

  After a take or two, Jerry Lee looked up to see Sam Phillips walking toward him.

  “You gonna be around a while?” he asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why?”

  “Elvis called. He said he’d be by in a while and wanted to meet you.”

  Jerry Lee told him he reckoned he could hang around a little bit more.

  6

  “I BEEN WANTIN’ TO MEET THAT PIANO PLAYER”

  Memphis

  1956

  He was the most famous man in the world, at that moment. He pulled up to Sun Records in a white and brown Lincoln Continental convertible, slid out of the new leather, and glided into the lobby with a brunette chorus girl from Las Vegas on one arm of his chocolate-colored sport jacket. Her name was Marilyn Evans, and she was almost as pretty as he was.

  Elvis said his hellos, then came straight over to Jerry Lee and shook his hand.

  “I been wantin’ to meet that piano player,” he said.

  He did not act like the king of rock and roll. He acted like a good boy, with not one speck of ugliness in him. He even hugged Jerry Lee’s neck, as a brother would do.

  “That your car in front?” he asked Jerry Lee. Jerry Lee had taken his first modest check for his recording of “Crazy Arms” and put it down on a red Cadillac convertible with white leather interior.

  “It is,” Jerry Lee said, like he was born in a Cadillac.

  “Man, that’s a beautiful car,” Elvis said.

  “Well,” Jerry Lee said, “I try to keep a good car.”

  It was a Tuesday, December 4, 1956. Much, much later, when the other boy’s body was dead but not his name, never his name, the writer Peter Guralnick would tell of this brief and shining time, and the way it never seemed to fit quite right inside the boy’s head: “It was all like a dream from which he was afraid he might one day awaken. It seemed sometimes like it was happening to someone else, and when he spoke of it, it was often with a quality of wonderment likely to strike doubt not so much in his listener’s mind as in his own.”

  Elvis strolled into the studio itself, to say hey to the others, to old friends, and to talk about old times and new records and this desert oasis called Las Vegas. Elvis listened to the tape of Carl’s new record and told all the boys, “Yeah, I like that.” Later, he wandered to the old studio piano. Just goofing, he sat down and ran his fingers across the keys.

  “Everybody ought to play a piano,” Elvis said.

  “We got to laughing, joking, jamming,” says Jerry Lee. He and Carl joined Elvis at the piano, and with Elvis playing somewhat less than expertly, started singing a hodgepodge of whatever came to mind. Perkins’s band joined in, one by one, and no one noticed, at first, that Phillips was no longer in the room. He had darted into the control room to put on a tape, telling Jack Clement that such a moment might never happen again, then dashed to the office and made two fast phone calls, one to Johnny Cash, asking him if he would mind getting in his car and get down here right now, and one to Bob Johnson, a columnist at the Memphis Press-Scimitar. Johnson arrived in just minutes, with a wire service reporter and a photographe
r, George Pierce. Meanwhile, Elvis was singing a half-joking imitation of Hank Snow. The boys did some Chuck Berry, who they all pretty much thought was a genius, singing “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” or at least as much of it as they could remember among them. It would become one of those rare days in the history of American music, trumpeted by Sam Phillips as a purely accidental, spontaneous gathering of four of the true greats in the early history of rock and roll, even though the truth was that he had ginned it all up himself, sensing its potential, manipulating the proceedings, arranging to have it all covered and photographed and, of course, recorded. But it didn’t matter. It was a good day, just the same.

  The columnist Johnson would later write that he had never seen the hometown star more relaxed or more likable. Elvis told them all a story about a singer in Vegas who put him to shame: “There was this guy in Las Vegas. Billy Ward and His Dominoes . . . doing this thing on me, ‘Don’t Be Cruel.’ He tried so hard until he got much better, boy, much better than that record of mine.” When voices chimed in to protest, he said, “No, no, wait, wait, wait, now. . . . He was real slender. He was a colored guy.” (It was Jackie Wilson, one of the Dominoes, though that meant nothing to them at the time.) And after getting someone to remind him of the proper key, he gave a demonstration for Sam and Carl and Jerry Lee and everyone else in that little room—sang it not like himself but like that other singer, pretending to be him.

  If you can’t come around

  At least please . . . tel-e-phone!

  “Tel-E-phone,” Elvis said, to laughter. “He was hittin’ it, boy. Grabbed that microphone and on that last note he went all the way down to the floor, man. . . . I went back four nights straight. Man, he sung the hell out of that song. I was under the table. ‘Get him off! Get him off!’”

  Johnny Cash arrived, saying he was just happening by on the way to do some Christmas shopping, and the four of them—or at least three; there is some debate about how long Johnny stayed—harmonized on some songs from home and church. Elvis was playing piano, Jerry Lee standing beside him, aching to play it. “But we blended pretty good,” says Jerry Lee. “I knew there was something special going on here. But me and Elvis just kind of took over. . . . Johnny didn’t know the words, him being a Baptist,” and Carl wasn’t much better. “But they done pretty good, I guess, for Baptists.” As they sang, a photographer snapped one iconic photograph of the four young men. “Elvis’s girl kept trying to get in the picture,” recalls Jerry Lee. “That’s when I noticed that she’s not even looking at Elvis. She’s looking at me.”

  Finally, Jerry Lee sat down at the piano beside Elvis, and started to play.

  Elvis shook his head. “Looks to me like the wrong feller’s been sittin’ at this piano,” he said.

  “Well,” Jerry Lee said, “I been wanting to tell you that. Scoot over!”

  Elvis made a little more room, but did not get up.

  They started to harmonize on old songs, like the song Jerry Lee had loved since childhood, “I Shall Not Be Moved.” Elvis or Carl would sing a line and Jerry Lee would echo it, call-and-response style:

  Well, Lordy, I shall not be

  (I shall not be moved)

  I shall not be

  (Well, I shall not be—mmmm . . .)

  Just like a tree that’s growing in the meadow

  (down by the water!)

  I shall not be moved

  (Yeeeeahhhh . . .)

  Jerry Lee was not bashful or deferential; by the end of the song he had taken the lead, exuberant with the thrill of the moment. They went on to do “Just a Little Talk with Jesus,” and “Walk That Lonesome Valley,” and “Farther Along.” The reporter, Johnson, who had failed to notice Phillips and Clement changing the thirty-minute tape in the control room, expressed the obvious: “If Sam Phillips had been on his toes,” he wrote, “he’d have turned the recorder on when that very unrehearsed but talented bunch got to cutting up. That quartet could sell a million,” and that is how Elvis’s visit came to be known as the Million Dollar Quartet session.

  In one of the breaks between songs, Johnson asked Elvis what he thought of Jerry Lee.

  “That boy can go,” Elvis replied. “I think he has a great future ahead of him. He has a different style, and the way he plays piano just gets inside me.”

  “He was nice to me,” says Jerry Lee now. “I was impressed.”

  Word trickled out onto Union Avenue that something special was going on at Sun, and people came by all afternoon, joining in, fading out. After an hour or so, Johnny Cash left to go shopping with his wife, without ever getting on tape, and Carl drifted away a little later.

  Soon it was just him and Elvis there on the piano bench, “singing all them songs we had sung as little boys,” even the ones they’d learned from the picture show, when Gene Autry was the biggest thing around. Jerry Lee would play a memory, and Elvis would join in or just listen:

  You’re the only star in my blue heaven,

  And you’re shining just for me.

  “That’s why I hate to get started in these jam sessions,” Elvis told Jerry Lee. “I’m always the last to leave.”

  Jerry Lee was in no hurry either. He ran through both sides of his first record, “Crazy Arms” and “End of the Road,” and improvised a little boogie that someone would later label “Black Bottom Stomp,” though they could have called it anything and been right.

  “Jerry Lee, it was good to have met you,” Elvis finally told him. “You got to come out to the house.”

  Jerry said he would do that, and for just a second the two young men just looked at each other. Maybe it was nothing, but Jerry Lee saw the future in it, or at least what might come to be. “Sometimes I think he was a little afraid of me,” says Jerry Lee. “I mean, he was number one. He was sitting right in the throne I was headed for. And I thought, I might have to go through him. I think he knew that, somehow. And I did a pretty good job going through him.”

  It would have been against his nature to walk away from that day feeling any other way.

  “I’m a Lewis,” he said, repeating a mantra he returns to often, “and if you want something, you take it. You can ask for it first, but you take it.”

  “It was comin’ together,” says Jerry Lee. “I sang in the clubs and cut my records. I cut ’em like I felt ’em. And it was all comin’ together the way it was supposed to. There was some hard work still I had to do. Sure I did. But I think all of ’em—Beethoven, and Brahms, and all of ’em—felt it when it was comin’ together.”

  Billboard, in its reviews of new country music, seemed to agree, calling his new “Crazy Arms” single “exceptionally strong” and “flavor-packed,” with “a powerful feeling for country blues.” The song he wrote himself, “End of the Road,” was “another honey, right in the rhythm groove and abetted by the same piano beat. Distinctly smart wax.” It is a senseless thing to ask him if he is ever surprised by any of it. He finds such a thing to be a questioning of his abilities, and mildly insulting. “Yeah, I thought it would happen. I think I always knew it would happen. That was my goal, to be on top of the world.”

  The day the Billboard review came out, just before Christmas, Jerry Lee sauntered over to Sun to see Sam Phillips. He had a good car, and some good rock-and-roll clothes to play in, but no big money yet. He had no intention of letting another Christmas pass him by as a poor man. “I just wanted to show my family a nice Christmas,” he says.

  “Sally,” he told the secretary, “I need to talk to Sam.”

  “What about?” she asked.

  “I need to borrow three hundred dollars,” he said.

  “No, no,” she said. “Don’t do that. He’ll have a heart attack.”

  “Sam was tight as bark on a tree,” recalls Jerry Lee.

  He finally cornered the man in his office. “I think you can afford to loan me three hundred dollars,” he told him, “so I can go home for Christmas.”

  Phillips looked at him a moment and nodded his head. He would lat
er say he understood Jerry Lee better than most people. But he certainly knew, if you promise a boy like Jerry Lee you are going to make him a star, you had better do it quickly or at least be willing to advance him $300 on the future you predicted. “Sam knew,” says Jerry Lee. “He knew I was a money-making venture.”

  With that piddling amount of money, Sam Phillips bought a little patience from a consummately impatient man, not just then but for years and years to come. In that moment, $300 meant the world to Jerry Lee. He could take it and show his mama and daddy and his people that he had hit the big time at last. The money to come, checks with so many zeroes he could barely comprehend, would, in an odd sort of way, mean less.

  He drove home the hero, with Dewey Phillips shouting in his ear and spinning his record.

  “Did I turn it up?” he says. “Of course I did.”

  The car rode low on its springs down 61, from all that Christmas shopping. “I spent one hundred and fifty dollars just on groceries, on turkeys, on all kinds of stuff. I bought presents. I bought the girls something pretty. I bought Daddy something, and Mama. Mama was glad to see me.” The family drew names to buy each other presents, but it was rock-and-roll money that bought them. His mama took a breath, for the first time in a long time where her boy was concerned. He was somebody, and he had proved it. He was earning a living—not in a tabernacle, but not in Sodom, either—and so she took a breath. She could live with auditoriums, with VFWs, and American Legions, much easier than she could live with beer joints and honky-tonks. Her boy had sung with Elvis, and showed him how to play a piano, properly.

  His daddy shook his hand and held it.

  “I never was the man you are. I only wanted to be,” he told his son.

  Jerry Lee just looked away. “No, Daddy, I never will be the man you are.”