Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(52)

You women have heard of jalopies, heard the noise they make,

But let me introduce my new Rocket 88.



A love song to an Oldsmobile, it was credited to Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats, but such a band did not actually exist; it was just the name Sam put on the label, hoping it would stick. Brenston was a saxophone player in Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm, which had been playing the song at a club in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Turner, Brenston, and the Kings of Rhythm drove up to Sun Records to cut the tune, giving it a rolling rhythm with a steady backbeat and a unique, fuzzed-out guitar riff, one of the first distorted guitar sounds ever laid down on tape. The band’s guitar amplifier was broken—one band member would say it fell from the top of the car and busted on Highway 61 on the way from Clarksdale—so the amp box was stuffed with wadded newspaper to hold the vibrating cone in place, making it sound fuzzy. “Leave it in,” Sam Phillips said, when someone asked if he should try to recut the record. The thing that made music work, he always said, was spontaneity: what happened in that one imperfect moment, that was the perfect thing.

Phillips would record Brenston, Little Milton, Rufus Thomas, Roscoe Gordon, and many others, some famous and some who would never be heard from on this earth again. As Chicago and other northern cities began to siphon the talent and business away from the South, the actual cradle of the blues, Phillips recorded some more hillbilly music, including the beautifully named Ripley Cotton Choppers. But he finally found what he was searching for not in some lonesome backwoods but in a Memphis housing project, in a boy who made a C in music at Humes High, who just walked in the door at Sun Records one day and told his assistant, Marion Keisker, “I don’t sound like nobody.”

Elvis changed the world, but Phillips, living in the real one, sold the last year of his star performer’s contract to RCA Victor for $35,000, money he would use to run his business and promote new talent. And talent was one thing that kept coming, sure as funeral money. He had Carl Perkins, who gave him a monster hit with “Blue Suede Shoes,” and a moody pill popper named Johnny Cash, whose “I Walk the Line” and “Folsom Prison Blues” were pulling hard at country audiences, and Roy Orbison, who wasn’t much to look at but had a voice like sounding bells. They all helped spread this new music around the country, one American Legion, city auditorium, and jukebox at a time. But they were not Elvis, and while they made history of their own on the stage they did not make people lose all reason and want to crawl up on it, thrashing and screaming. Phillips had good music to promote still, but he had sold away the beating heart of rock and roll, its excitement. And he was hoping every day that another miracle would just saunter in his door.


In the motel, Jerry Lee and Elmo took one more splash in the miraculous fountain of indoor plumbing and headed for the Sun studio, only to find that the keeper of dreams was nowhere to be found. Sally Wilbourn, Sun’s secretary, told Jerry Lee and his daddy that Mr. Phillips was out of town, but they were welcome to try back later, just like that, like people could come and go any time they wanted, like people had money for such as that. Jerry Lee told her he was not leaving until someone paid him some attention.

“Somebody,” he says, “was gonna hear me.”

The engineer—what would now be called a producer—was an ex-marine named Jack Clement, who would come to be known as Cowboy Jack and would see his name attached to some of Sun’s most enduring records. He looked up to see Sally Wilbourn lead two men back into the studio, saying that the young one claimed he could play piano as strong as Chet Atkins could pick a guitar, or something like that. Clement said he had to see that for himself.

“You think you’re that good?” he asked the boy.

“I’m better’n that,” said Jerry Lee.

Clement showed him to the piano; this was all he had been asking for, all along. “I knew what I could do, and I knew that if somebody could help me, and put me a record out, I was going to be a big hit. I knew that. But convincing other people about it was like crammin’ a wet noodle up a wildcat’s nose. It just don’t work, you know?”

He sat down to show the man what he could do, sure of himself, but when his daddy leaned against the piano, to show he was with him, tight, he was glad. He played for hours, three at least, played “Seasons of the Heart,” and messed around with other songs, mostly country standards and music from his memories, like “Wildwood Flower.”

“And my daddy was standin’ there. I said, ‘I think I oughta do “Crazy Arms,” put it down on tape so Sam can hear it when he comes back from vacation in Florida.’ I said, ‘Whether he does or not, I’m gon’ be sittin’ down on his doorstep, waitin’ for him.’

“‘Crazy Arms,’” he says now, “is strictly blues.” It had been a big country hit for Ray Price earlier that year, so it wasn’t exactly new—but these were days when plenty of different artists would record versions of a hit song, so that record buyers and disc jockeys might have four or five different versions to choose from. Clement just let the tape run. There was something in the boy he liked. Country music wasn’t moving then, had just gone stale. But he let the tape run, let the boy go and go.

“I played it on that old spinet,” Jerry Lee said, “with Daddy leaning on it, looking right at me.”

Now blue ain’t the word for the way that I feel