He hit the last key and looked up. “And all Daddy said was, ‘Well, we got to go pretty quick.’”
But not before Clement made him a promise: “Well, I’ll see, Jerry Lee, that he hears it.”
Clement played the tape for Sam Phillips when he returned.
“Who is this cat?” Phillips said. “Get him down here.”
“It was about then that J. W. Brown walked up to me down in Ferriday and introduced himself as my cousin,” says Jerry Lee, who did not know the man that well. J. W. was the child of Elmo’s sister, Jane, but had not grown up with Jerry Lee and the Ferriday cousins. He would later say that Jane had been forced to marry an outsider, a man from Franklin Parish named Henry Brown, because the world had temporarily run out of eligible Gilleys and Swaggarts.
J. W. used to work days as a lineman for the electric company, but he’d recently been shocked off a tall pole by a naked wire, and he was in no hurry to handle blue lightning again. Instead he thought he would like to try his hand at being a musician, which is why he came looking for Jerry Lee. He was pushing thirty, with a wife and two children at home in Coro Lake, in northern Mississippi, but he had tried the music business once before and had never gotten that sweet promise out of his mouth. In the early 1950s, he’d spent some time picking guitar with the owner of a bar in Mangham named Big Red. Once, while they were onstage, a boy with no etiquette whatsoever walked up to the jukebox and punched in a song. Red shot his own jukebox with a .45, and the boy went back and quietly finished his beer.
Figuring he needed a better ending for his musical story than that, J. W. ordered a Silvertone guitar from Sears and Roebuck and went looking for the cousin he had heard so much about. His timing was dead-on. Jerry Lee was waiting for Sam Phillips to call him back to Memphis anyway. “J. W. said, ‘You got to come to my house,’” and invited Jerry Lee to stay with him and his family at Coro Lake, where he could be close to 706 Union Avenue and close to his dreams. He had seen the boy play piano like a crazy genius on the stage and in church, and in a world of strummers and pretenders who could sing through their nose and even shake their leg a little bit, Cousin Jerry Lee seemed something else entirely. He took Jerry Lee and introduced him to his wife, Lois, and son, Rusty, who was just a toddler then, and to his lovely twelve-year-old daughter, Myra. It was not, as some have said, love at first sight. “I did notice,” Jerry Lee says now, “that she wadn’t no kid.” Jerry Lee bunked on the couch, and with his pretty twelve-year-old cousin flouncing around, prepared to conquer the world.
His first real recording session—the first one with an eye toward cutting a real record—came on November 14, 1956. He was playing with true recording professionals, with drummer J. M. “Jimmy” Van Eaton and guitarist Roland Janes, two musicians who would be as much a part of Sun in its early days as the ugly green paint and nicotine-stained acoustic tiles and the slapback echo that appeared, almost like a ghost, on the studio’s early records.
Janes and Van Eaton never went on to illustrious careers, at least as far as money and marquees go, but they are synonymous with Sun and with Memphis music and so are at the very nut of rock and roll. They were extraordinary musicians; people who really love the music can pick their styles out of the crowds of lesser ones who played before and after. Not just anyone could keep up with Jerry Lee Lewis; he has kicked musicians off the stage who could not stay with his tempo, could not blend in with his sound. Roland and Jimmy did that and more.
Janes was a marine during the Korean war, the son of a Pentecostal preacher and lumberman from Clay County, Arkansas. He could play mountain mandolin and had grown up with gospel; he had a light, sinuous tone that made itself known around the edges of a song just as much as it did during one of his indelible solos. He would go on to be an engineer and producer and part of the Memphis sound for another fifty years. Sometimes when people realized that the man they were talking to had been the guitarist on those great early hits, they would hand him a guitar and ask to hear him play. He would tell them simply, they done had. Jerry Lee gives him only the highest praise you can give a guitar man: “He could pick.”
Van Eaton was just a kid then, but like Janes he would leave his mark on an entire genre. His beat was subtler that that of most of the early rock-and-roll drummers, influenced by swing, adding crisp punctuation to the swampy Sun sound. He had grown up with Dewey Phillips and Memphis radio, and in the ’50s he became the creative drummer in Memphis, as Jerry Lee would say.
Jerry Lee respected both men, and enjoyed playing with them, but he would not form the bonds with them that he later would with his road bands, who fought drunks with him and chased women with him and survived each trip as though it was some kind of tour of duty. Roland and Jimmy tried that, but not for long. “They played with me just a very little bit. . . . I don’t think they liked being away from their spouses,” he says, and laughs. “We had a little problem with that.” (Van Eaton would say he did not mind jumping off a roof into a swimming pool now and then, but that touring with Jerry Lee was downright life-threatening.)
Also in the studio that day was guitarist Billy Lee Riley, who would go on to have a small hit with “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll” and a bigger one with a cover of Billy “The Kid” Emerson’s Sun hit “Red Hot.” Riley’s records also featured Roland and Jimmy—and Jerry Lee Lewis, making a little side money on piano. Sun called them Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, to capitalize on the flying saucer fad of the time.
They all had more experience in a recording studio than Jerry Lee, but to him it appeared a little slipshod, the way his first real session went down. The studio’s electrical system was less than reliable, circuit breakers always flipping, the place going dark or silent, and people came and went in the studio even during the course of a song. But later, the musicians involved would agree that little mattered that day except the rolling, pumping, boogie-woogie piano and the boy’s strong, plaintive voice, which made all the other sounds in that drab, green little room obsolete. He played his own song, “End of the Road,” and some Gene Autry, “You’re the Only Star in My Blue Heaven.” Finally, he did “Crazy Arms,” just him and the drummer Van Eaton, mostly. Roland Janes left and came back, even picked up a standup bass and strummed it a bit, more or less in time, but he was mostly fooling around and off microphone anyway. At the end of the song, Billy Riley came in from the bathroom and, not knowing there was serious work being done there, hit one big, loud, ugly chord right at the end; it remains on that original recording. “He made ten dollars, for just sittin’,” says Jerry Lee. “It kind of made me mad.”
It was clear from the beginning that Jerry Lee, despite being brand-new at this, could not be led or prodded into playing a song any way other than the way he felt like playing it at the time; it would be like that all his life. Janes and Van Eaton would learn almost to sense the way he was going on a song and follow accordingly. The engineers often just put the tape on and let it run till some kind of imperfect perfection ensued. There was no dubbing, nothing manufactured; there was hardly the technology for that, anyway. “It was art,” Jerry Lee says. “I played it like I felt it, man.”
But he still had not met Sam Phillips.
Later Phillips listened to just a few seconds of “Crazy Arms.”
“I can sell that,” he said.
A few days later, Jack Clement introduced them.
“This is Jerry Lewis,” he told Phillips.
“Jerry Lee Lewis,” said Jerry Lee.
He might have tried to be modest, but he truly did not know how.
“He was kinda stone-faced,” Jerry Lee says of Phillips, “till he got to talkin’ about money. And when he started talkin’ about money, all he would talk about was money,” and then he had the white smile of a shark.
“I just got one question for you, Jerry Lee,” he said. “Tell me what you’re going to do with all this money you’re gonna make.”
Phillips asked the boy what he considered to be a good payday.
“Well,” he said, “one hundred dollars a night would be conquering the world.”
“You’ll do better’n that,” Phillips said. “You won’t be able to fit it in your pockets.”
He might as well have taken a jug of kerosene and upended it on a railroad flare.
Jerry Lee thought for a minute.
“Well?” Phillips said. “What you gonna do with it?”
“I’m gonna spend it,” said Jerry Lee.
“On what?”
“On Cadillacs.”
Before he reached the door, a box of records under his arm, Phillips stopped him. “Son?” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“I’m gonna make you a star.”
Later, when asked about his first impression of Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Phillips would say, “I knew that if he could do anything at all, even toot a mouth organ, I had me my next new star. He looked like a born performer.” All Jerry Lee knows is that Mr. Phillips backed up his big talk: he took a copy of the raw record to Dewey Phillips, who listened to it, “just like he done with Elvis.” And another piece of his dream clicked into place.
“WHBQ,” recites Jerry Lee. “Everybody listened to Red, Hot & Blue.” He had reason to be hopeful: “I thought a lot of Dewey Phillips. He was one of a kind . . . wild as the West Texas wind.” And one thing was certain: “You were a hit if he played your record.”
But just because a disc jockey agreed to hear a record did not mean he would play it; they were the gatekeepers of early rock and roll. All Jerry Lee could do was wait.
“I went home with that box of records, and I went straight to the back forty where Daddy was working.”
“Daddy, I want to play you this record,” he said.
“Okay, son,” Elmo said. “Let’s go hear it.”
They put the record on and listened standing up as the needle brought that Memphis moment into the little living room in Concordia Parish. Jerry Lee watched his daddy’s face, unreadable, as the circle of music grew smaller and smaller, till his own voice finally vanished into static.
“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.