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 photographer, 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 later 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.”
Decades later, as he talks of dirty dealings and unreleased records and unpaid royalties, he is disarmed a bit by the memory of that measly wad of twenty-dollar bills pressed into his palm by a man he needed to trust.
He could spend money, but he had no interest in counting it. “It’s expected,” Jerry Lee says of the record business, “to be cheated a little bit.”
Phillips failed him later, he believes, but he did not fail him then.
“December twenty-second, nineteen fifty-six,” he says now, “the best investment in the history of rock and roll,” with the possible exception of his daddy’s purchase of a secondhand upright piano.
“I loved ol’ Sam. He was my friend.”
Years later, Sam Phillips would say that he and only he ever really understood Jerry Lee.
“I could look in that boy’s eyes,” he said, “and see his soul.”
Jerry Lee discovered that much had happened while he was gone. Frankie Jean, who had turned twelve, was getting married. A few relatives said it was a bit early for the child to be wed, but others said it was nothing new, nothing even out of the ordinary in the family history or in the traditions and practices of the community, so the wedding was eventually blessed all around, and everyone went and had some turkey and cornbread dressing, and hot biscuits, and mashed potatoes running with butter, and when they prayed, they thanked God for the good fortune that had found their boy, who had sense enough to know that if you’re going to be hit by a train, you have to go stand on the tracks in Memphis, Tennessee. Amen.
In 1957, Elvis, with a two-year head start, was playing the last of three shows on his fifty-thousand-dollar Ed Sullivan contract. Jerry Lee went on the road, chasing, always chasing. Sometimes he played package tours in front of a few thousand paid customers; sometimes he played gigs not much bigger than the clubs he had played at home. He played auditoriums, true, but also played an electronics store, and a tomato festival, and in bars where the take-home was less than a hundred a night for the whole band. Success was coming, but it was taking its time. He played Little Rock, Monroe, Jackson, Odessa, Texas, and Sheffield, Alabama. In late spring he played the venerated Big D Jamboree in front of six thousand people in the Sportatorium in Dallas, playing with Sid King and the Five Strings. It was his biggest show so far, to a crowd mostly accustomed to Hank Snow, Webb Pierce, Janis Martin and the Marteens, and Leon Payne and His Lone Star Buddies. Billy Walker played there, wore a mask like the Lone Ranger and called himself the Traveling Texan. But radio station KRLD, with fifty thousand watts, carried the show live, and the CBS radio network broadcast it nationwide. Elvis had played here, as did Johnny and Carl and other, less traditional artists. He would be called back for another Saturday night, and then a third, and people reached out to grab his hand as he tried to leave the stage to tell him how ol’ Ray Price didn’t do that “Crazy Arms” nothin’ like he did, how even Hank would have been proud to hear his music sung so well.
Between gigs, he returned again and again to the studio to find a follow-up record that could be his breakthrough hit. He tried old, old American standards, songs he had played as a child like “Silver Threads Among the Gold” and country ballads like “I’m Throwing Rice,” “I Love You So Much It Hurts,” and “I Love You Because.” He ran through a few country blues tunes, like “The Crawdad Song,” “Deep Elem Blues,” and Joe Turner’s Kansas City rhythm-and-blues hit “Honey, Hush.” He did the dark folk ballad “Goodnight, Irene,” Western swing tunes like “Shame on You,” and the R&B ballad “Tomorrow Night.” He did “Dixie.” He did the “Marines’ Hymn.” He went back to Gene Autry for “My Old Pal of Yesterday” and to Hank Williams for “I Can’t Help It” and “Cold, Cold Heart.” He even cut a couple of attempts at a theme song—a misfire called “Pumpin’ Piano Rock,” and a simpler, more powerful song he called the “Lewis Boogie”:
It’s called the Lewis Boogie—Lewis way.
I do my little boogie-woogie every day.
These were the first—or at least among the first—recordings in which he refers to himself in the lyrics, something he would do onstage and in the studio for half a century.
He would burn a few days in Memphis, and then head back out on the road. “I missed it,” he says. That year, he played the Rebel Room in Osceola, Arkansas, a place with chicken wire across the stage to protect the band from flying beer bottles. The wire always offended him—“I didn’t want nothin’ between me and the audience”—but it was a place where bottles were prone to come winging at the singers’ heads. The police came in twice that night, to quell riots and thwart attempted murder, and it was past midnight before the crowd, some too drunk to move, settled down even the slightest bit and actually listened.
Some say it was there in Osceola that it happened for the first time. Some say it was at another raggedy little bar over in Blytheville. Jerry Lee knows only what happened inside. He was getting a little sick of trying to sing to drunks who thought music was just a soundtrack for fighting or falling down or throwing up; sometimes he was not really, truly heard. That was when Jerry Lee uncorked his lightning and hit those bleary-eyed drunks and big-haired women right between the eyes with a hot poker of rock and roll. He started rolling out that two-handed boogie intro he had heard in the Wagon Wheel years before, and snatched them up on their unsteady feet. He brought the women right up to the edge of the stage, breathing so hard their blouse buttons were hanging on for dear life. But it was different now. He was not some kid feeling his way through a song, like he’d been in the Wagon Wheel. He was a real live man.
Whose barn? What barn? My barn!
And when the song was over, the crowd screamed and screamed and demanded that they play it again. So they did, and then played it again. Jerry Lee looked back at J. W. Brown, who was playing bass for him on the road, and at his drummer, Russ Smith.
“Well, there it goes, J. W.,” Jerry Lee said. “Think we got a hit?”
“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” remained his pocket ace, a live music phenomenon, a song people talked about from town to town and came to ask for, but it had no radio play to keep it alive. Jerry Lee, as proud as he was of “Crazy Arms,” knew that his first record hadn’t been the push he needed and would not carry him where he hungered to go, not onto national television and nationwide play on radio, not to Hollywood, not across the seas. “I just couldn’t throw that knockout punch,” he says.
So he went to Sam Phillips and pulled out his hole card, only to find that the poker players at Sun Records were suddenly playing checkers like tired old men. Suddenly, the label that had taken that flying leap into the unknown with Elvis Presley was too squeamish for real rock and roll. Jack Clement believed that Elvis had left no room for another Southern white boy singing and playing rebel rock and roll.
“He told me, ‘Elvis done drove that into the ground and broke it off,’” recalls Jerry Lee.
Not only did Sam Phillips not much want to record it, he seemed downright afraid of it. “Awwww, no, that’s too vulgar, much too risqué. It’ll never go. No way,” Sam told Jerry Lee.
“It’s a hit record,” Jerry Lee argued.
Others say Sam must have had more enthusiasm for the song than that, though probably not as much as Jerry Lee. For Sam, good music was both passion and business—and, even if he loved it, this song was a business risk.
To hedge his bets, Phillips told Clement to write a new song for him, and the result was a song with perhaps the most ignoble beginnings any song could have. The story goes that Clement was in the bathroom, thinking about a breakup with his girlfriend and, for some reason, reincarnation, and how funny it would be if he came back as something floating in the bowl and if, when his girlfriend looked down, there he’d be, winking at her. He could not write that, of course, but it was inspiration:
If you see a head a-peepin’ from a crawdad hole,
If you see somebody climbin’ up a telephone pole—it’ll be me!