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!
This was the song Sun Records picked as the A side of Jerry Lee’s next recording, the song Sam picked to propel him into stardom. Jerry Lee went back into the studio, and gave it all he had.
He knew, heartsick, it would never fly. “I said, ‘Awww, that’ll never be a hit, by itself.’”
Jerry knew he had to take a stand. He made it clear that he intended on recording “Shakin’” somewhere, and Phillips finally agreed to make it the B side of “It’ll Be Me.” Phillips would say later that he did it only to placate Jerry Lee, who knew what he wanted even before he had any real clout. He took a few early stabs at recording “Shakin’” in the studio, but they were dry runs at best, never capturing the spirit of the live shows; it was hard to know whether that was even possible.
It was sometime in February 1957 when Jerry Lee finally went back into the studio with Roland Janes and Jimmy Van Eaton to try it again. They had done five passable takes of “It’ll Be Me” when Clement put on enough tape for just one take of the Shakin’ song. Phillips had told him not to waste a great deal of time on it, and time was money. This time, Jerry Lee pumped the piano the way he remembered it from the Wagon Wheel, and Janes infused the record with his high, keening guitar, unleashing licks and fills that would be copied by other guitarists for decades. That day, in the studio that had given birth to the sound of Elvis, to “Blue Suede Shoes” and “I Walk the Line” and so much more, Jerry Lee ignored the acoustic tiles and the glass window and the machines and sang it like he would have done it for real people, like he sang it in an Arkansas beer joint and a tight little auditorium in Billings, Montana, and he played it wild and rough and perfect enough. And when he was done, exactly two minutes and fifty-two seconds later, the three young men in the studio just sat there, kind of still, because every one of them knew.
“One take . . . and silence,” recalls Jerry Lee. “It never had been silent in there before.”
And that was that. “Well, then we went over to Miss Taylor’s Restaurant—it was right close by—and had some country fried steak and rice and gravy and some turnip greens.” Later, Clement would say that the people who came by the studio almost wore out the tape, listening to it, the only tape of the only take. “Only time I did a song that way,” says Jerry Lee, as if there was some fate in it, or maybe even the hand of God, after all.
Sam Phillips listened to it and liked the song—it was hard not to like the song—but it did not matter that he liked it as a piece of music, any more than a man who bets on horses can make a living off a horse that only runs across a potato field. “The disc jockeys will not play it,” he said, so how would they ever get anyone to hear it? “It’ll bomb. ‘It’ll Be Me’ will be the record.’”
Forget television, he said. With visuals, it was even worse.
“That was the problem, see,” says Jerry Lee, “when I would sing. . .
All you gotta do, honey, is stand that thing in one little ol’ spot
An’ wiggle it around just a little bit.
“. . . I’d take my index finger and point it in the air, and wiggle it.”
To demonstrate, he sticks that finger in the air and rotates it around and around. Without the music, it looks precisely like what it is, what the twenty-one-year-old boy wanted it to look like for all those crazed fans. It did not matter that no one could actually see him do it on the record, if the song made it onto the radio or a jukebox. When he sang it, you could imagine it just fine, and some of the young women, well, could almost feel it.
When Elvis shook his leg, preachers throughout the land may have pretended it was the end of civilization as they knew it, but the sky did not fall, and the Mississippi did not run backward. Jerry Lee intended to follow suit. With his sure-thing hit record on tape but not yet in stores, not on the air, Jerry Lee took to the road again, to play it loud in one auditorium and VFW after another. He did not need to polish the song—that would be like stroking a mean cat—but he needed to get the people talking, get them all whipped up from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Then maybe, even if the police did storm the stage or blockade the convention halls, the disc jockeys would notice, and he would live on the air next to Elvis, or beyond him.
He did not know where he was, precisely, just somewhere in Canada. The caravan thundered down highways that were barely there, the roadbed eaten by permafrost, the gravel flying like buckshot against the bottoms of the big cars. There was a long Lincoln Continental, a Fleetwood Cadillac, a mean-looking Hudson Hornet, and a brand-new Buick Supreme; it was new for only a thousand miles or so, till the potholes got it. The big sedans might have been different colors, once, but now they were all a uniform gray, the color of the blowing dust. Jerry Lee rode in the passenger seat of the Buick, sick of this great distance between crowds and applause, six hundred, seven hundred miles a day. “I didn’t drive. . . . I was paid to play piano and sing. Stars don’t drive.” Instead, he read Superman, or used a cigarette lighter to fire up one cherry bomb after another and flung them out the half window to explode under the trailing cars.
“That first tour was me, Johnny, and Carl, and Sonny James, Marvin Rainwater, Wanda Jackson. We put eighty, ninety thousand miles on that Buick, across Canada, across everywhere . . . throwing cherry bombs the whole way.” Sometimes he missed high and the cherry bombs exploded against windshields or on the hoods, and Johnny and Carl would curse him mightily, curse unheard, but one time he misjudged and the cherry bomb bounced off a window frame and into J. W.’s lap, and J. W.’s screams echoed inside the Buick for a good long while, longer than was seemly for a man. They could have used a chaperone, all of them, or a warden. The lead car was jammed with drum kits, guitar cases, and sharp-cut jackets and two-tone shoes. The only other provisions they packed were whiskey, cherry bombs, and comic books.
He cannot really remember all the little cities and towns they traveled through, not even the names on the road signs, only the vast, empty spaces in between. They would go two hundred miles or more and not see a café or a motel. “We’d stop at a store and get some Vienna sausages and bologna and bread and pickles and mustard, and pull over to the side of the road and have a picnic. . . . Calgary, that was one of the places. Quebec. They went crazy in Quebec. Pulled their dresses up.”
To the owners of the motels and truck stops, it must have seemed like the lunatics had wandered off the path, had stolen some good cars, and were terrorizing the countryside. “Johnny came in my room and saw this little bitty television in there, and he said, ‘You know, my wife’s always wanted one of them.’ And I told him, ‘Fine, go steal one from your own room.’” And it went that way, eight hundred, nine hundred miles a day, half drunk, pill crazy, larcenous, and destructive and beset by loose women and fits of temper, and it was perfect.
“We had some good fights,” says Jerry Lee. “A good fight just cleared the air.”
Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash had begun the tour as headliners. They were still the big names at Sun then and, Sam Phillips believed, his best moneymaking ventures. The problem was this newcomer, this blond-haired kid, who did not know his place and had no governor on his mouth, and in such close proximity, they could not tune him out and could not run away and could not kill him, either, though they considered it. He even had the gall to suggest, as the days wore on, he should close the shows, him with just two records cut and shipped and not even one yet on the charts. Who, they wondered aloud, did that Louisiana pissant think he was?
They were starting to call the music “rockabilly” now, but the kid refused to label himself as that, to endorse any kinship with that hillbilly-heavy blues that sold so well in any town with a tractor dealership on its main drag. To Jerry Lee, the word was denigrating, something imposed on these country boys and their music by the outside world. “I wasn’t no rockabilly,” he says, “I was rock and roll.” Carl was pure rockabilly—“Blue Suede Shoes” was the music’s anthem—and Johnny, the storyteller, was more country than most young rock and rollers aspired to be, though his “Get Rhythm” rocked out good and strong, as Jerry Lee recalls. The audience loved all of it, bought tickets by the handful and just moved to it, man, because it made old, traditional country music seem like the record player was too slow, and in town after town they lined up, hungry. But increasingly, as his stage presence swelled and swelled, it was Jerry Lee who created the excitement, who got them dancing, and so he demanded more and more of the spotlight. It was, he believed, only his due.
More than one music fan, more than one historian of rock and roll, have wished for a time machine, just so they could travel back to this one time, this one tour, to wedge into those packed auditoriums on the vast plains and in the Canadian Rockies, to see it all happen the way it did, to see Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins, young and raw and wild, singing into big Art Deco microphones that looked like something that shook loose off the hood of an Oldsmobile, on stages scarred by a million metal folding chairs, in auditoriums where next week the featured attraction would be a high school production of The Merchant of Venice.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, from Maud, Oklahoma, it’s the Queen of Rockabilly, Wanda . . .” And before the announcer could even get it out, the crowd was hollering and hooting—with here and there a wolf whistle or two—as Wanda Jackson came out from the wings in high, high heels, hips swinging free and easy like she walked that way going to the mailbox. She had not a made a sound yet, and already the loggers, drillers, and insurance men were beginning to sweat. This was no cowgirl. Her dresses were fringed, to accentuate her flying hips, and low-cut, to accentuate something else, and her legs were slim and perfect and her waist was so tiny a big man could encircle it with his two big hands. Her big hair was dark brown and flowing, and her big eyes were framed by a starlet’s arched eyebrows; she was a goddess with a voice like a beast, and she growled as she sang that a hardheaded woman is a thorn in the side of a man.
That was hard to follow. But here came Sonny James of Hackleburg, Alabama, striding out in his Western suit, a thin, dark-haired man who had survived the Korean War, singing a love song of the ages. “Young Love” was the song, and it wasn’t the words that made it lovely but how he did it, like smoke on velvet.
Next came that good-looking Marvin Rainwater, who wore a fringed buckskin shirt and a headband onstage, because he was one-quarter Cherokee. He sang in deep baritone about how he was “gonna find him a bluebird, let it sing all night long.” He was a mellow singer, a balladeer, and smoothed out the crowd before the real headliners came on, the boys from the land of the rising Sun.
First came Carl Perkins, in his too-tight pants and pointy sideburns, and he let it rip:
Well, it’s one for the money
Two for the show . . .
Through force of will, Jerry Lee had climbed up the bill and over and straight through Carl, till now there was only Johnny Cash, in his elegant, somber black, hovering just above him on the marquee. That night, there had been the usual argument over who would close the show. Johnny, with the bigger name and a song on the charts, had the promoters on his side: he got top billing, which meant he had to follow Jerry Lee. But first Jerry Lee had to surrender the stage.
The stage had become a kind of laboratory for Jerry Lee, and he was the mad scientist. Onstage he mixed and matched songs and versions of songs, stitched together some parts and discarded others; because he was Jerry Lee, he did what he felt like in the moment, in a set that was supposed to be four or so songs, but he ignored that, too. He gave them “Crazy Arms” one minute and “Big-Legged Woman” the next, and they clapped to one and stomped and howled to the other. His show got wilder and increasingly wicked on that tour, and the audiences bellowed for encores. He had heard that Canadians were earnest, reserved people, but he must have heard wrong. More and more he was beginning to understand that, while the music was at the core, that was just the start of it. Putting on a show was like flipping the switch on Frankenstein’s monster, then watching it show the first twitching signs of life. “You got to dress right, act right, carry yourself right; it all had to come together.”
The good-looking part, well, God had handled that. But you had to use it. His hair, by now, had become almost like another instrument. Under the lights, it really did shine like burnished gold, and at the beginning of a show it was oiled down and slicked back, and he looked respectable, like a tricked-out frat boy or preacher’s kid. But on the rocking songs, he slung his head around like a wild man, and that hair came unbound; it hung down across his face, and that just did something to the women—and their screams did something to the crowd, and things just got kind of squirrely. As it came unbound, the waves turned into tangled curls and ringlets, and it seemed to have a life of its own, a wicked thing, like Medusa herself. Sometimes he would whip out a comb onstage and try to comb it back under control, but it was too wild to tame. “I was the first one in rock and roll to have long hair,” he says, thinking back to that night, “and I did shake it.”
These were the biggest crowds he had seen or heard, and he can see and hear them still.
“More!”
“More!”
“More!”
He did one encore, then two, and at the end he did “Shakin’,” in pandemonium.
“They wouldn’t let me off the stage.”
By the time he finished, the people were out of their seats and the constables were looking antsy. Jerry Lee swaggered off the stage, one arm held stiffly in the air, a salute more than a wave. “And I left ’em wondering who that wild boy was.”
Johnny Cash stood there, sweating and almost white, as the crowd screamed for more. As Jerry Lee remembers it, “he was like a statue. He never said a word.”
In the auditorium, a woman had fainted in the aisle.
Jerry Lee walked right on by Johnny. “Nobody follows the Killer,” he said over his shoulder.
The crowd was still yelling “Jerry Lee! Jerry Lee!” as Johnny came out onstage.
They quieted, respectfully, as he sang “I Walk the Line.”
I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.
I keep my eyes wide open all the time.
They loved Johnny in Canada, but it was like a lull after the storm. “Johnny wouldn’t follow me after that, said he wouldn’t never follow me again,” says Jerry Lee. “He said, ‘When he’s through, it’s done.’ Can’t nobody follow me.” That night, after the show, the girls came by not one or two at a time but in a crowd. “It was unavoidable, too,” says Jerry Lee. “The girls come by in the evening, even before the shows sometimes, when the sun went down. And I just told ’em to go on,” and then he smiles at that, at even the possibility of such a thing happening, of his sending away a beautiful girl.
“My gosh, what a time.”
Some legends begin like that, in great drama, and others are purely accidental. Somewhere on the road, in another place he cannot really recall, he got sick and tired of playing sitting down while everybody else in the place was on their feet, so he just rose up to play standing. He loved the piano, but it did anchor a man and give him feet of clay. But as he rose, the piano bench was in the way. “So I decided I would just take the heel of my boot and push the piano bench back just a little bit, to make some room, but my boot got caught and I gave the bench a flip across the stage, and man, it tore that audience up. And I said, ‘Well, so this is what they want.’” If they liked it when he just tumped it over, what would they do if he hauled off and kicked it across the stage? So he did, and they howled and hooted and the women screamed, so he had to do it every time now, every blessed time.
“Oh, yeah,” says Jerry Lee, “I was a little bit out of control.”
Performers came and went on the tour, but Jerry Lee spent most of his time with Johnny and Carl despite the tension between him and the other two. It seems almost sweet now, to think of them as a fraternity of young men playing jokes and scuffling in the dirt and acting like spoiled children on the road, as they hammered out their craft. But the road was a good bit darker than that. Everyone was addicted to something. Carl drank hard, most nights and some days, and Johnny was hopelessly hooked on pills, always talking about deep things like man’s inhumanity to man, and prisons, and whether or not pigs could see the wind. And there was Jerry Lee, flying high on all of it and running hot.
“I liked Carl,” says Jerry Lee. “He became my friend. He was a great talent. He could sing, had a real good voice, and he could play that guitar. He could play all over that guitar.” His feelings about Cash are more complicated. “Johnny, well, I just didn’t think he could sing. Wrote some real good songs . . . but let’s just say he wasn’t no troubadour.” He and Cash would be friends off and on and even record together as older men, but in the cold northern spring of ’57, the man in black was one more obstacle in his way.
Oddly enough, when things finally boiled over, it was not Cash he had to fight. One night, in a town he cannot really recall, he and Carl Perkins sat in some lounge chairs outside a small motel, just cooling it in the chill air. Springtime temperatures in the Canadian mountains were about zero some days, but they hated being cooped up in the tiny hotel rooms. At some point in the evening, there had been a quart bottle of brown liquor in their proximity, but no one could remember exactly where it went.
“Carl was pretty well drunk,” recalls Jerry Lee, “and I was just drinking, a little bit.”
That night, Perkins was wearing a fancy shirt from Lansky’s in Memphis, where Elvis got his clothes. “Does this shirt look good?” he asked Jerry Lee.
Jerry Lee did not care if Carl was wearing a burlap sack tied together with fishing line. He only cared what he looked like, and he knew he would be elegant standing in a mudhole.
“Don’t I look good?” Carl asked.
Jerry Lee felt like spitting. He snarled, “You an’ Elvis, always walking around in these fancy clothes, always worried about how you look . . .”
Jerry Lee may have been slightly more drunk than he recalled. “Carl come out of that chair ready to fight, and the next thing I knew we were fighting across the trunk of that Buick.” It was not, he says now, an epic battle. “I wasn’t throwing no good punches, and Carl wasn’t, either.” He does remember getting in one good backhand, and then it was over, and they were friends again, but the jealousy would continue. “It was unavoidable. I would get encores in front of twelve thousand people, two encores, three encores. . . . They knew. They knew, even then, they were seeing the greatest thing.”
He played one stage that was built on a giant turntable that spun slowly around as he played. “I didn’t like that. I liked to stay in one spot, so I could keep my eye on certain people.” He would lose sight of a pretty girl, he said, if he was spinning, spinning. “And then I just had to get my eye on ’em all over again. I could always spot my girl then. Wasn’t no problem, finding a beautiful girl. Look, I’d say to myself, there’s a couple. I’d say, Look, there in the third row.” In Quebec, he almost fell in love. “They pulled them dresses up, and I hollered, ‘Pull it up a little bit higher, baby,’ and they did. Man, they just laid it on you. And they kept on just layin’ it on you, night after night, city after city.”
He was still married, of course, to the volatile Jane, who was still in Ferriday with his son and his parents’ family, but the truth is that he tried not to think about her that much, anymore. It had been a marriage of necessity, and it seemed less necessary two thousand miles away. “I was living the dream,” he said, even if the reality it was based on was, for the time being, more than a little thin.
They drove on for nearly two months, doubling back for even more shows in more remote places, wide-open during the day, wide-open at night, smelling of sweat and whiskey and gunpowder. He was off his leash completely now and, it seemed to some people, almost a little out of his mind. He had taken to playing the piano sometimes with his feet, his size 9½ loafers, and the crowd roared for that, too. “I played it with my feet, in key. It can be done, if you know what you’re doing. It wasn’t just no stunt. I played it.” He was showing off and showing people up, and the crowd was in love with all of it, and by late spring his lightning was bouncing around the airwaves, just weaker and more distant than he would have preferred.
The musicians who played with him remember any encounter with him as a kind of validation, a kind of certificate of authenticity. Guitarist Buzz Cason would later write how he walked out of a theater in Richmond and saw Jerry Lee, the great Roland Janes, and Russ Smith, his pint-size touring drummer, dancing after a show on the roof of a ’58 Buick, just dancing, because the time onstage was never quite long enough. He remembers traveling with Jerry Lee to Buffalo, and that Jerry Lee wanted to make a side trip to Niagara Falls. He stood on a wall overlooking the great cascade, his blond hair whipping in the wind, and stared down into the abyss for maybe thirty seconds, then jumped to the ground. “Jerry Lee Lewis has seen the Niag-uh Falls. Now let’s go home, boys.”
Once on a swing through Texas, he saw two singular-looking individuals sitting at a table in a big nightclub. One was his onetime piano hero, Moon Mullican. The other was the homely but melodic Roy Orbison, another Sun artist. “It was in Odessa, Roy Orbison’s hometown. Roy, his point was, he wanted to borrow fifty dollars from me, so he could get out of that town. . . . He said he knew he could cut a hit record if he could ever get out of that town. And I said, ‘Well, I’ll be glad to loan you fifty dollars.’” Orbison quickly grew jealous of Jerry Lee at Sun, believing that Sam Phillips was devoting too much of the label’s energy to one man. It wouldn’t be the last time that happened. “He got a little upset,” says Jerry Lee, but at least he got out of Odessa.
“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” was finally on the radio, not just in Memphis but nationwide, and according to Billboard, “taking off like wildfire” in country, rhythm and blues, and pop. By the time he got back to the South, it had become a constant on Memphis radio. “They were playin’ it in all the hamburger joints,” he says, and he would ride down the streets of Memphis in his red Cadillac with the top down and hear his own genius wash all around him and into the almost liquid air that is Memphis in summer. Sometimes he’d take his cousin Myra, who made goo-goo eyes at him under her dark-brown bangs.
Earlier that year, Elvis had reported to Kennedy Veterans Hospital in Memphis for a preinduction physical to see if he was fit to serve his country if he was drafted, though of course there was no war anymore, and surely they wouldn’t take the monarch of rock and roll. He went straight from there to catch a train to New York for his final appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, where the cameramen were directed to show him only from the waist up. Knowing that some Americans still were scandalized by his lewd behavior, Sullivan took Elvis by the arm, looked directly into the eye of the camera and the conscience of the nation, and called Elvis “a real decent, fine boy.” Then Elvis left for home, where Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, presented him with a suit made of gold lamé, but Elvis kept dropping to his knees onstage and wearing off the gold, which was expensive, so Parker told him not to do that no more. Elvis stopped wearing the pants. He went out to Hollywood and made four movies in two years, one called Jailhouse Rock, and recorded more songs in a Hollywood studio than he could even remember. When he came home to Memphis, he moved his mama and daddy into a white mansion called Graceland, which had walls and high gates to keep out the fans who had taken to sleeping on his mama’s lawn back on Audubon Avenue. Chuck Berry, who had been there at the beginning of everything, had written the Bible of rock and roll almost single-handed, but by the spring of ’57, the white boy from a shotgun house in Tupelo had ascended high above everyone else in music, so that when people thought of rock and roll, they thought of him and only him.
Some have suggested that there was malice in Jerry Lee’s heart where Elvis was concerned, but there was none, not then especially. He would say, well into old age, that he worshipped Elvis as a teenager and as a young man had become his friend. But it would be a lie to say he did not want what Elvis had, and there would be nothing sneaky or underhanded about him when he came for it.
Elvis had many friends but few, Jerry Lee says, whom he had not bought and paid for, fewer he could truly identify with. In those early years, they became close friends. He played the piano for hours—Elvis liked to hear the gospel standards, mostly—and it has been rumored that they caroused around Memphis in those days in various stages of craziness. They both owned big Harley motorcycles and tooled around town side by side. The most outrageous story was that he and Elvis once went riding around town buck naked, a story Jerry Lee refuses to confirm—or deny.
“I knew you’s goin’ to say that,” he says now. “I’d just rather not get into that. I don’t think Elvis would appreciate that,” and he laughs. “And he’s not here to defend himself.”
One day, soon after he released a blistering remake of one of Elvis’s movie songs, “Mean Woman Blues,” he ran into Elvis on the streets of Memphis—almost literally.
“He had a black Eldorado, a fifty-six. I had a white Eldorado, fifty-six. I was comin’ up to Sun Records and he was comin’ down the street.” Suddenly Elvis swerved into his lane. “He was goin’ to hit me head-on. And I stopped, and I said, ‘What the hell are you doin’, boy?’”
“I’m gon’ sue you.”
“For what?”
He laughs about it now. “Them were good days. He didn’t have a jealous bone in his body. With me, he didn’t.”
On a trip home to Concordia Parish, the blond-haired boy had received a notice much like the one Elvis had, telling him to report for his medical exam. “It said on it I was to report to my recruiting officer,” said Jerry Lee. “I wadded it up and threw it in the Black River.” Then he got back in his Cadillac and screamed up Highway 61 toward Memphis. There, in his V8 chariot, he circled and circled the throne with his hit song, his lightning, like a javelin in his hand, and waited for the power in it to build and build, to crackle and spit deadly fire, waited till the King turned to face him man to man, because when he took his crown, he wanted him to know who was taking it.
He did not need a song to make him inappropriate. Jerry Lee had always been inappropriate, and being a little bit famous did not change it; you can paint a barn white a thousand times, but that won’t make it a house. It wasn’t just what words he sang; it was how. Anybody can sing about sinning, but when he sang, it sounded like he knew what he was talking about and would show you if he had a minute. Pat Boone did Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and incited not one riot, even among the Presbyterians.
“Them days are gone, have disappeared,” says Jerry Lee, “but I had a real good time.”
For a thin slice of spring and summer, he and his hit song smoked across the airwaves, first in Memphis but spreading fast across the country, and Dewey Phillips even had him on Red, Hot & Blue, talking like the words were burning his mouth. “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” sold more than one hundred thousand records by midsummer, five thousand in a single day.
And teenage kids weren’t the only ones who noticed the new talent. So did songwriters.
“Fella named Otis Blackwell, fella said he wrote songs, said he wanted to write me a song, and he’d write Elvis a song, then write me a song,” said Jerry Lee. Blackwell, a black songwriter from New York, was a hot ticket—the man who wrote “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up” for Elvis.
“‘Surely you ain’t a white boy,’ he said to me, the first time he ever saw me, and I said to him, ‘Why, yes, sir, I am white.’”
That alone worried people a great deal. Elvis had fooled them for a while, had them guessing, and when they found out he was a white man, some of the moral gatekeepers cried blasphemy, and when their daughters wept and screamed and drooled over him, the preachers and politicians railed anew against rock and roll. When Elvis went on The Steve Allen Show, the producers put him in a tuxedo, then had him sing “Hound Dog” to a trembling, unhappy basset hound. But Elvis, being a good boy, petted it and even smooched the dog a time or two, and young Jerry Lee watched it all with that half snarl, thinking to himself, If y’all think that’s dangerous, wait till you get a load o’ me.
He had been dangerous before, but now, with a hit, he was armed. “‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ ’ was on its way to the moon,” says Jerry Lee. “From that first time I heard it, I knew it was more than just a good record. I knew it was unstoppable. I just knew it. Wasn’t nothin’ they could do to stop it.
“And then they banned it.”
Sam Phillips sat behind the cold glass at Sun, morosely correct. It had to happen. Banning rock-and-roll records had become almost a national sport, from Boston to Biloxi, a kind of chicken-and-egg game among pandering politicians, rock-ribbed preachers, advertisers, government regulatory agencies, and radio station owners, and history was not on Jerry Lee’s side. They all fed on each other, growing larger and louder, not just in the so-called backward South but even in the Northeast, as if the whole country had taken on the guise of a crew-cut daddy slipping off his belt as he entered the room of his teenager, saying, “You will not play that nigger music in my house.”
In 1954, a Michigan congresswoman had introduced a House bill to prohibit the mailing of any “pornographic” recording, like rock and roll. In Memphis, police confiscated the Drifters’ “Honey Love” before it could be loaded into jukeboxes. In 1955, in Mobile, WABB received fifteen thousand letters of complaint about dirty records. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, police canceled a performance by Fats Domino at the Ritz Ballroom, afraid that dancing might escalate into a riot. In ’56, ABC radio refused to play a recording of “Love for Sale,” a twenty-five-year-old Cole Porter song about prostitution, by Billie Holiday, a forty-year-old jazz singer. In Ohio, dancing to rock-and-roll records in public was outlawed for anyone under eighteen, while in New York, an executive at Columbia Records hosted a program on CBS to discuss with psychiatrists the negative effects of rock-and-roll music on the teenage mind. In ’57, Cardinal Stritch of the Chicago Archdiocese banned all rock and roll from Catholic schools, fearing the effect of its rhythms on teenagers. Radio stations even banned Elvis’s version of “White Christmas,” based on the Drifters’ recent R&B version.
If they could ban “White Christmas” just because it was sung to a mild form of rock and roll, how could they fail to ban this new “Shakin’” song by a young white singer who didn’t just hint that the listeners ought to shake something, but told them to—told them to shake “it,” in particular, and while he did not say exactly what “it” was, it would take a very sheltered youth minister not to guess it in three or four tries. The preachers and the politicians heaped all their disgust and disdain and fear of rock and roll on this one song; some even claimed he cussed in the lyric, said the word hell, though that was just the way he sang it. The most hurtful thing was that his record even fell out of favor close to home, as Southern stations pulled it from playlists. Sales went stagnant, and the great arc of his rising star began, for just a moment, to slow.
“I’s just trying to make a record,” says Jerry Lee, innocently, but he was all bound up in the greater story—the just-begun challenge to Jim Crow in the Deep South, which loosed up the fears white folks had over their doomed ideal, and the beginnings of an unbuttoning of sexual mores, and all the rest of it. In Memphis, where the fires of rock and roll had once smoldered underneath Elvis’s twitching leg, the great threat now had a new name and a new snarling face, as politicians and preachers shouted this name and its crimes to the rafters, “and they didn’t know nothin’ about me,” says Jerry Lee. Young people were instructed to smash their Jerry Lee records and then go pray hard. Radio stations that had played the song two or three times an hour, sometimes two or three times back-to-back, pulled it from playlists, and thousands of records stacked up in Sam Phillips’s storeroom, unsold.
Things looked so bleak so quick that Sam reached out to his older brother, Jud, for help. Jud was pushing used cars down in Florence, Alabama, at the moment, but he had worked in the music business before. A born promoter and salesman, he had ties to disc jockeys and television producers around the country, and when he arrived in Memphis that summer, it was to serve as a kind of vaguely defined marketing director with only one real project: Jerry Lee.
Jud Phillips understood human nature and appetite, says Jerry Lee. And it had little to do with taste or even reality. You could tell people anything, and if you yelled it loud enough, they would believe it. As evidence, there was the city’s love affair with wrestling. That year, Farmer Jones, using an Arkansas mule kick and a stump puller, took a two-fall match from Art Nelson in Ellis Auditorium. The people cheered a walking grain silo named Haystacks Calhoun, and booed the bald-headed Lady Angel, who “makes children cry and ladies faint.” It was the year the Zebra Kid defeated Nature Boy Buddy Rogers with a head butt, only to be chased into the street, whereupon a spectator presented a metal chair to the Nature Boy so he could beat the Kid unconscious. And the papers covered it like it was real. But the thing about it was, it was unashamed.
Jud, who always had a newspaper at his elbow, was a student of the mob. Instead of apologizing for Jerry Lee, he decided they would flaunt him. It came to him after seeing Jerry Lee perform on a bill with Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash and Webb Pierce in the Sheffield/Muscle Shoals area, where the boy beat a piano half to death. After the show, Jud introduced himself, walked with him to the dressing room, and told him what he was going to do and how he was going to do it. He had been around music much of his life, like his brother, and was probably the best-connected used-car salesman in the South. He had friends in the networks in New York. He believed, if he just showed up there with this boy, audacious, like they were supposed to be there, maybe he could get Jerry Lee and his song on national television.
Sam Phillips was torn between just shelving the offending song and going all in on one last, big gamble. He was not convinced that an expensive lark to New York City with no guarantees of a second of air time was worth the risk. To Jerry Lee, it was beginning to look like the people who had once promised him the stars no longer believed in him. Jud whispered to Sam that he was risking losing this boy the way he had lost Elvis, over nickels and dimes, but Sam told him to hush, that there was nothing much to lose at this point, except a boy with a record no one would play. “I wasn’t scared,” says Jerry Lee, now, but the battle that went on between those brothers in a locked office would determine his fate.
“He could have been a genius,” says Jerry Lee of Sam Phillips. “Especially on making money. And keeping it.”
But Jud Phillips believed. As with most people loyal to him, Jerry Lee would never forget that. “Jud was a decent man, and he was a good businessman. He was a salesman. And he saw what Sam didn’t.” Even when he was drunk, which was more than seldom, his mind was turning, always turning, says Jerry Lee. “He’d throw parties, slip people a little money, do whatever it took,” to spread the word, to roust a crowd. Finally, he even talked his brother into two train tickets to Grand Central Terminal in New York City. “I’d never been on a train before,” at least not one for which he had purchased a ticket. “I thought it was cool.” As they rolled down the tracks, he took out a folded Superman and decided not to worry about it all, about New York, about the struggle between the brothers. It was not, he knows now, that Sam Phillips had not had faith in him. If it hadn’t been for Sam’s initial faith in him, he doesn’t know for sure what path his music would have taken, and he formed a friendship with the man that he wanted and needed to be genuine, something beyond business and even music; he still needs that today. “He loved me very much,” he says. “Aw, yeah, his respect for me was unlimited.” He was merely being cautious, says Jerry Lee, and perhaps realistic. Such things, such resurrections, rarely happened in the real world, but did, sometimes, in comic books.
He remembers now, mostly, not the towering buildings but the crosstown sidewalks. “Amazing,” he says, “the longest blocks I ever walked. But that’s the city, man, that’s New York. You don’t jump from there, then you don’t go.”
They moved through the throngs of people from one great edifice to another, asking for a chance to show the powerful people, the kingmakers, what he could do. “I wasn’t nervous a bit,” he says now, though he might have been, if he had lived long under the Cyclops of television. But few people back home even had one; his Uncle Lee, of course, had been about the first to get one back in Ferriday, but his mama and daddy had only recently gotten a set, believing, as they had always believed, that one day they would turn the thing on and wiggle the wires and turn the antenna toward some far-off tower, and there would be Jerry Lee, sittin’ at a piano. It seemed like just yesterday he and his mama sat with their heads tilted at that tiny transistor radio to hear the Grand Ole Opry, praying that the battery would hold at least through “Walkin’ the Floor over You.”
Jud’s old contacts and fast talk got them in the door at the networks, but not an audition.
Jerry Lee watched Ed Sullivan throw him out from a distance. “Get out of here,” he said. “I don’t want any more of this Elvis junk.”
It embarrassed Jerry Lee; it was too much like begging. “Come on, Jud, I don’t think he wants us, to even hear us,” he said.
So Jud reached out to Henry Frankel, an old acquaintance who was now talent coordinator for NBC, and Frankel reached out to Jules Green, who was Steve Allen’s manager. Steve Allen’s show, which ran opposite Ed Sullivan’s on CBS, was willing to take greater risks to steal a few ratings points from the competition. They featured everything from comedians to ventriloquists to people who spun plates on sticks—and of course, music, as Allen himself was a pianist of the cocktail variety.
Green did not even get up from his desk, just sat there with his wingtips on his desk as Jud walked in. Green was unimpressed by the number of records Jerry Lee had sold and generally unimpressed by the notion of another hillbilly rock and roller. It wasn’t too long since they’d had to camouflage Elvis in order to bring him on the show, to keep the public outcry down to a manageable number of decibels.
“Where’s your tape?” he asked Jud.
“Ain’t got no tape,” Jud said.
“Pictures?”
He told Green he had his product in the lobby, holding up a wall.
Green got up and looked through the window of his office.
“All I see,” he said, “is a guy chewing bubblegum and reading a funny book. You say he can do something. I don’t know.”
The kid, with more blond hair than was appropriate, leaned against a post, engrossed in the adventures of Mickey Mouse. He popped a big bubble and looked bored. He had already been through a Superman.
“If you got a piano,” said Jud, “he can show you what he can do.”
It was one of those rare times when being unknown saved a performer. Green did not know about any ban, about all the stations and sponsors lined up against him, and Jud did not volunteer. Why open the door on a mean dog when it’s only going to bite you?
“Jerry Lee,” Jud said, “come on in here.”
This part, Jerry Lee remembers exquisitely.
“I took my bubblegum out and stuck it on the top of the piano, and I laid my Mickey Mouse funny book down, and I did my thing.”
He played “Shakin’” all the way through, hot and perfect.
By the time he was done, Green was reaching for his wallet. “I’ll give you five hundred dollars right now,” he told Jud, for a promise that he take Jerry Lee back to the hotel, lock the door, talk to no other television producers of any kind, and bring Jerry Lee back to audition for Steve Allen tomorrow at 9:00 a.m.
The next morning, Allen stood right in front of Jerry Lee as he played it again.
“He played drums with his pencil on the piano,” recalled Jerry Lee. “I can still see it. It’s funny, how somethin’ as little as a tapping pencil can change your whole life, change everything.”
Jud told Steve Allen that if he would give Jerry Lee three minutes of air time, there would not be one viewer who would get up to change the channel, or do anything except sit there enthralled. Allen did not see how a man could keep a promise like that, but this was not his first hootenanny, and in a time when people were still feeling their way blind through this new medium, he could see for miles.
“I want you to do that song, Jerry Lee, do it just like that on my show tonight,” Steve Allen told him. Years later, when asked why he gave the boy his chance, Allen would say only that he loved quality and knew it when he saw it.
“He even liked the talking part of the song,” the part that so frightened other people, said Jerry Lee. “He heard that, and he knew we had a serious record. He knew we had something to sell.”
Jerry Lee shook his hand and thanked him for the opportunity. It was July 28, 1957.
“I wasn’t nervous,” Jerry Lee says.
Steve Allen waited onstage for the signal.
Three . . . , two . . . , one . . .
Allen, benign and bespectacled, welcomed America to step out from behind its TV trays and coffee tables and join him for a solid hour—give or take a commercial or two—of variety-show entertainment, with Shelley Winters, Tony Franciosa, the Four Coins, Jodie Sands, singer Jerry Lee Lewis, pantomimist Shal K. Ophir, and “our regular cast of crazies, Tom Poston, Don Knotts, and Louis Nye.”
Jerry Lee waited in the wings. He was twenty-one years old.
“I wasn’t nervous,” he says again.
But he also did not see any real point in standing around doing nothing, watching a panto . . . pantonomer . . . whatever the devil that was. He and the band went across the street and had a drink.
They came back just a minute or two before they were supposed to go on, to some angry glares from the producers and a worried look or two from Steve Allen himself. They didn’t know any better, Jerry Lee says. This TV stuff was like walking on the moon.
“I’ve been waiting on you for an hour, ’cause I didn’t know where you were,” said Allen, on camera, as Jerry Lee, J. W. Brown, and drummer Russ Smith sauntered onto the stage, off camera, to set up. If you listen to the show, to the noise on the set, you can hear them setting up. Allen, the old pro, went on smoothly. “Now, we’re gonna have a word”—crash, thunk, bang—“from our, uh, stagehands, apparently. We want you to stay tuned for rock and roll sensa-”—thunk, bang—“. . . you think this is knocking the joint apart, wait till you hear Jerry Lee Lewis. He destroys the piano and everything.”
Allen cut to a commercial, in which a perplexed but perfectly coiffed housewife watches her son track rainwater in on immaculate floors, but it does not matter, because her floors are waxed with Johnson Stride Wax, “the wax spills can’t spot.” Then with less than five minutes left in the show, the camera reopened on Allen. “There’s been a whole lotta shakin’ going on here all day, as a result of a fella dropping in by the name of Jerry Lee Lewis . . . as you know, you young folks in particular, he has a new record out. . . .” He fumbled around for a while, like he was trying to decide how to warn the people behind their TV trays what he was about to inflict on them. “And now here he is, jumpin’ and joltin’, Jerry Lee Lewis!”
Come on over, baby
Jerry Lee, dressed like he was going to the movies in a striped, short-sleeved shirt, black pants, and white shoes, did what he does. He seemed trapped halfway between wild joy and burning anger, and he glared into the camera like he did it every day, like a little boy on a playground saying, “You wanna make somethin’ of it?” till it just gave in, cried uncle, and took its whuppin’. The only difference he made, the only concession to TV, was slight. When the offending finger rose into the air, when he would have rotated it around salaciously and sung “wiggle it around just a little bit,” he sang instead “jump around just a little bit,” with no discernible rotating or talk of wiggling whatsoever. It would be about the only compromise he would ever really make, for a lifetime, and most people did not even notice it. He banged the keys so hard they seemed to jump back up to meet his fingers, and his hair bounced like some kind of live animal on his head, and at the end, when he kicked that stool back, it went flying all the way across the stage to land near Steve Allen, who picked it up and flung it back across the stage at him. It looked spontaneous and playful and real, but of course it was just good TV. As it happened, Milton Berle was backstage during rehearsals, and he told Allen, “Now, when he kicks that stool back, you pick it up and throw it back so that it goes by in front of the camera.”
When the boy was done, he just stood up and hitched up his pants and looked around as if to say, “Well, there it is,” and the studio audience thundered and thundered inside the small studio. “Not a whole bunch of people, a small stage. They didn’t even know me. . . . But they saw me, and they liked me. That’s what you call opening the door, and I flew.”
Such shenanigans did not happen every week on national television, where producers were still scouring the country for jugglers and comedians; this looked like a party, and because of television everyone was invited. Steve Allen came out onstage dancing, though in a kind of goofy, very white man’s way, slapping his hands together and motioning for all the other guests—there was a passel—to come out and join them onstage. Jerry Lee was grinning like he stole something and got clean away, and he would have plopped back down on the bench and played all night, played all the way through the commercials, if they had let him.
“Mama and Daddy even saw it, saw me on the TV. They flipped out.”
Allen would later say the boy was pure gold under a camera; the show brought great numbers, better even than Ed Sullivan’s, and in television nothing much really mattered except the arithmetic. “He was quality,” Allen later said. And after that night, “he was a star.”
“That broke it all loose, that night,” said Jerry Lee. “Steve Allen asked me back for the next week, and then asked me back for a third time, and it just busted wide-open. The records started selling forty, fifty thousand copies in a single day. We were a smash. Steve Allen put us back on top, and I never forgot that.
“The second one I did, Jane Russell came back to the dressing room. She asked me, ‘What’s it like, to go out in front of a live audience and a live microphone?’ I said, ‘Honey, you got no problem. Just do it.’ And she kissed me on the cheek.”
Apparently the gatekeepers of American morality were willing to crack the gate a little if the money was right. “Everybody lifted the ban on it,” he remembers. “We was on top of the world, man.” Back at Sun Records, Cash and Orbison and Perkins sulked. Billy Lee Riley got drunk and, in a jealous rage, tried to tear up the studio until he was restrained.
Jerry Lee walked to Memphis on the clouds.
He did not know at the time how far out on the lip of disaster Sam Phillips had come in sending his boy on that trip to New York. He had pressed and shipped hundreds of thousands of records all around the country so they’d be ready in the stores immediately after the Steve Allen appearance. By September, “Shakin’” was the number-one record on the R&B and country charts and was kept off the top of the pop charts only by the megahit “Tammy” by Debbie Reynolds. Sun Records siphoned time, attention, and money away from other projects to focus on its new star, and when reporters asked Sam Phillips if he had any plans to sell his new boy away like he had Elvis, Phillips told them to go to hell. The record that had been chained down by censors still had its detractors, as the movement against rock music ebbed and flowed, tiring in some cities, flaming up in others, “but when one station would ban it, two more would pick it up,” says Jerry Lee.
He truly did not understand what it all meant, any better than Elvis had. He had seen Elvis in stardom from the outside looking in. He had no idea what lurked inside it, good and bad. But there was one difference between them: while Elvis sometimes looked helpless, Jerry Lee helped himself.
“I knew I had been making a hundred dollars a night, and suddenly I was making five thousand, then ten thousand a night,” says Jerry Lee. “Do I know what people were thinkin’? Man, I don’t even think they knew what they were thinkin’. And if you didn’t like it, I just laughed, just gave you the finger and went on.”
There had always been women, pressing up between the footlights, waiting backstage, but now they climbed the stage, rushed it. The first time was in Nashville. “I was on this little bitty stage, but I remember, man, I was just gettin’ with it. We were playin’ the National Guard Armory, and suddenly here comes these girls, a mob of girls. I thought to myself, I don’t like the look in these girls’ eyes, and the cops couldn’t do nothing about it. They was kissing me and pulling at my clothes, and pulling at my hair. . . . Man, I mean they just mobbed me. They tore off clothes, tore ’em off down to my underwear. I had these ol’ stripedy shorts on. . . . After that, I started wearing boxer shorts, in case this happened again. I was hollering, ‘Wait a minute, baby! Hold on!’” The girls ran off with pieces of his clothing like trophies.
“One scrap of it caught on this metal bracelet and it dug into me and like to pulled my arm off. It scared me, a little bit,” he says. “It was a set-up deal. The girls planned it. They got together and planned it all.
“Had a leopard-skin suit on. I liked that suit.”
But later, when someone had given him some pants and he was being escorted to safety by police, a photographer caught him grinning. “You can’t kiss three hundred girls at one time,” he says, so it was just a great waste of exuberance.
But if they had devoured him, he thought, “what a way to go.”
Quickly he supplanted Elvis as public enemy number one in the eyes of the moralists who railed against rock and roll. Elvis was out in Hollywood making Westerns and love stories. Jerry Lee said he knew that Elvis still knew how to rock—“he was a rocker, oh, man”—but he was also the man who did “Love Me Tender,” bought a pink Cadillac, and still seemed even now genuinely surprised at the big, wide world and a little lost in it. Elvis, when he was asked about his music, always said, No, sir, or No, ma’am, he wasn’t going to apologize for his rock and roll, because he did not believe he did a thing wrong by singing it and dancing like he did. Jerry Lee knew that he and Elvis had some of the same fears and doubts, but Elvis pushed his down deep and lived with them, the way a child lives with an invisible friend. He might talk to it sometimes, but not when the grown-ups were around. At least, that was how it seemed to Jerry Lee. “Elvis cared what people thought,” he says, almost puzzled.
For Jerry Lee, fame was a thing that sometimes flogged him and sometimes let him be; he was capable, in the dark times, of losing all sight of the good in his music, of believing it was evil, until suddenly things would just clear and he’d see it all so much better. The thing about rock and roll, he said, was that it made people crazy bad, but more often it made them happy, made them forget life for a while, as another singer would sing it, and if a young woman scaled a stage to fling herself on a good-lookin’ rock-and-roll singer from Louisiana every now and then, squeezing on him like to break his back, what harm did that do?
“I knew Mama was proud, and I knew Daddy was proud,” and armed with that, he did not greatly care whom he offended in the world of strangers. His mama’s pride grew as he got further and further from the bars, from Sodom, and that meant the world to him. “She backed me, one hundred percent. She knew I had to do these things. Then she watched me on the television . . . and she thought it was just the greatest thing she had ever seen.”
And television kept calling—including a call from a young DJ from Philadelphia with a show called Bandstand. “He called me and said, ‘You don’t know me, but my name is Dick Clark,’ and I told him, ‘No, I don’t know you.’ And he said, ‘Well, I have a small TV show . . .’ And I said, ‘Look, you need to talk to Sam and Jud.’” Clark told them that his sponsors said they’d give him a nationwide nighttime show if he could get Jerry Lee Lewis. There was only one catch: the producers wanted Jerry Lee to lip-synch the song, as other guests had done.
Jerry Lee played the show, but he didn’t play by the rules. “They didn’t want me to do it like I do it, but I did it out loud, and I didn’t skim over nothin’,” he says. “I did it all.”
It was about then that Sam Phillips gave him his first big royalty check for “Shakin’.”
It read: $40,000.
Jerry Lee wasn’t sure for a while if that meant four thousand or forty thousand, and he was just about as happy either way. He put it in his pocket and just carried it around with him, for weeks, months, till the ink faded and it was so creased, it was almost cut in two. He went to Taylor’s Restaurant and had some steak and gravy and black-eyed peas and turnip greens, and he might have even had some beets, though he didn’t even really like beets, and, man, it was good, and as a goof he tried to pay with his forty-thousand-dollar check.
“Uh, I don’t think we can cash this,” the waitress told him.
He went home and went about the business of keeping his promises. He bought his mama a nice new house in Ferriday, not a mansion on a hill but a good, clean house with hot and cold running water and wiring that didn’t glow red in the walls and burn the place down, with lights that didn’t flicker when the refrigerator clicked on. He bought his daddy some land, a farm, because a man was nothing without land, just a borrower.
“I bought Mama a new Fleetwood Cadillac,” he said. “And I bought her a new one every year, and she got to expecting it. If I didn’t, she’d just take one of mine. She drove off one time in a white one with red leather interior. I had to call her and say, ‘Mama, you got my car?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I got it.’ She got to where, if I saw her walking around one in the yard, I knew she was gonna take it.”
He bought his daddy a big Lincoln. He gave his sisters a thousand dollars at a time, for shopping sprees. If other kin had a crisis and needed help, they came to him, and he dug in his pocket and gave them cash.
“They accepted it, and they wanted it,” says Jerry Lee, and they deserved it, for the faith they had in him, so early and for so long. If he ever had any doubts about that, all he had to do was shut his eyes and imagine that piano on back of his daddy’s old truck as it got bigger and bigger coming down that dirt road, till it was so big in his mind and his eyes that it was all he could really see, for years and years.
Elmo grabbed hold of the rock-and-roll dream with both big hands, and Jerry Lee loved every minute of it, seeing his daddy’s dreams come true through him. A more traditional family, one from a Norman Rockwell painting, might have dreamed it differently, might have hoped to see their child go off to college and come home a doctor or a lawyer or a captain of industry, but what Jerry Lee’s people had stirring in their blood was music, and when you make it in music, their kind of music, no one hands you a sheepskin and one of those funny flat hats. So Jerry Lee handed his daddy the keys to a new Lincoln, and Elmo got drunk not long after that and drove it into something that did not move, and so Jerry Lee bought him another one, because he loved him, and because that piano tilted the world.
He tells how he bought Elmo a brand-new Cadillac, and how his daddy, flying drunk through Mississippi, “just didn’t make a curve, and turned it over about three times, and he just got out and took off walking. ‘Where’s your car, Daddy?’ I asked him, and he looked at me and said, ‘Son, I have no idea.’ Well, that day I bought him one just like it, red with white leather—I mean, a sharp car—and parked it in his driveway. And he just come out the door and got in it and drove off, like he never had a wreck. I don’t think he even knew the difference. I don’t think he ever did. I said to him, ‘Looks like your car’s goin’ good, Daddy,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, son, it’s going all right.’
“In California, I bought him a new Harley. He drove it all the way back, and he was going a hundred and ten in Greenville, Mississippi, when they finally run him down. The phone rang, and it was the police chief, and he said, ‘Is this Mr. Jerry Lee Lewis?’ and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, it depends.’ And he said, ‘I’ve got a fellow here who says he’s your daddy, and he’s coming through here doing a hunnert-ten, and said he’s had just one beer.’ And I heard Daddy in the background, saying, ‘Honest to God, son, just one beer.’ And I said to the police chief, ‘Yeah, that’s him.’ I asked if he could let him go, and he said to me, ‘Tell him to slow down.’
“Them was good days, too,” says Jerry Lee.
In the studio, as he searched for another hit, there was time to record some more fine old music, the kind he’d heard as a boy. One day, he says, “Jack Clement caught me at the right time, in the right mood,” and he sat down at the piano alone and cut a version of “That Lucky Old Sun,” a number one hit by Frankie Laine in 1949. The song was one of those pieces of music that just ride easy in your head, and Jerry Lee’s piano gave it a barroom, blue-collar undertone. In a voice that was smooth and easy—in great contrast to the shakin’ and shoutin’ music he became famous for—he sang about a workingman, burned and wrinkled by the sun, sweating for his wife and children.
While that lucky ol’ sun ain’t got nothin’ to do
But roll around heaven all day.
“That’d make the hair stand up on the back of your neck,” says Jerry Lee.
The one bleak spot was his marriage to Jane. She was still living back in Ferriday while he bunked with the Browns in Coro Lake, and sometimes he could forget he was married at all. He knew his boy was being cared for, there so close to his people, but Jane was sick of the distance between them and was insisting that she bring Jerry Lee Jr. to stay with him in Memphis. But Jerry Lee was still living with his cousin J. W. and his family and was in no hurry to live anywhere else. More and more, he was spending time with his cousin Myra, who didn’t look thirteen a bit, not to him. He believed she was of age, by all the customs and standards of his history, his experience, and, after a failed reunion with Jane in Memphis, he felt even less married than he ever had, and was becoming suspicious that she didn’t feel married, either. But she was no longer fighting, no longer hurling the whole world at him, and it all just died, what love there might have been, in a kind of indifference, and he knew that ducking was all there had ever been. But as always, he hated to drag the laws of man into his life, so he just let it be, as he disappeared into the studio for the crucial follow-up record to “Shakin’.”
The sky over Memphis was full of falling stars. He had seen Carl Perkins stall after one big hit, watched Roy Orbison and Billy Riley and the others grasp at straws, and he was determined to do better, recording and discarding song after song, never finding just the right thing. But “Shakin’” was far from done, and he had time, still, to relish it. People were already daring to say what he had known all along. In August, a story clattered across the United Press wire claiming that Jerry Lee Lewis was on his way to usurping Elvis Presley as the king of rock and roll.
He remembers, as “Shakin’” held strong on the charts, sitting with Johnny Cash in the studio at Sun. Cash and Perkins and Billy Lee Riley and the other Sun artists were still rankled over Jerry Lee’s New York trip, and Sam’s ongoing sponsorship of Jerry Lee to the exclusion of all else, so they just sat, sharing the silence. Jerry Lee was reading Superman.
“How many records have you sold?” Cash suddenly asked Jerry Lee.
Jerry Lee looked at the secretary, Regina.
“It’s sold about seven hundred thousand,” she said.
“How many has mine sold?” Johnny asked.
“About two hundred thousand,” she said.
Johnny, in that taciturn way he had, thought on that for a minute.
“Gee, whiz,” he said, in that baritone voice. “I wish I was a teen idol. It must be nice.”
Jerry Lee told him, yes, it was, and went back to his funny book.