Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(54)

Also in the studio that day was guitarist Billy Lee Riley, who would go on to have a small hit with “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll” and a bigger one with a cover of Billy “The Kid” Emerson’s Sun hit “Red Hot.” Riley’s records also featured Roland and Jimmy—and Jerry Lee Lewis, making a little side money on piano. Sun called them Billy Lee Riley and the Little Green Men, to capitalize on the flying saucer fad of the time.

They all had more experience in a recording studio than Jerry Lee, but to him it appeared a little slipshod, the way his first real session went down. The studio’s electrical system was less than reliable, circuit breakers always flipping, the place going dark or silent, and people came and went in the studio even during the course of a song. But later, the musicians involved would agree that little mattered that day except the rolling, pumping, boogie-woogie piano and the boy’s strong, plaintive voice, which made all the other sounds in that drab, green little room obsolete. He played his own song, “End of the Road,” and some Gene Autry, “You’re the Only Star in My Blue Heaven.” Finally, he did “Crazy Arms,” just him and the drummer Van Eaton, mostly. Roland Janes left and came back, even picked up a standup bass and strummed it a bit, more or less in time, but he was mostly fooling around and off microphone anyway. At the end of the song, Billy Riley came in from the bathroom and, not knowing there was serious work being done there, hit one big, loud, ugly chord right at the end; it remains on that original recording. “He made ten dollars, for just sittin’,” says Jerry Lee. “It kind of made me mad.”

It was clear from the beginning that Jerry Lee, despite being brand-new at this, could not be led or prodded into playing a song any way other than the way he felt like playing it at the time; it would be like that all his life. Janes and Van Eaton would learn almost to sense the way he was going on a song and follow accordingly. The engineers often just put the tape on and let it run till some kind of imperfect perfection ensued. There was no dubbing, nothing manufactured; there was hardly the technology for that, anyway. “It was art,” Jerry Lee says. “I played it like I felt it, man.”

But he still had not met Sam Phillips.

Later Phillips listened to just a few seconds of “Crazy Arms.”

“I can sell that,” he said.


A few days later, Jack Clement introduced them.

“This is Jerry Lewis,” he told Phillips.

“Jerry Lee Lewis,” said Jerry Lee.

He might have tried to be modest, but he truly did not know how.

“He was kinda stone-faced,” Jerry Lee says of Phillips, “till he got to talkin’ about money. And when he started talkin’ about money, all he would talk about was money,” and then he had the white smile of a shark.

“I just got one question for you, Jerry Lee,” he said. “Tell me what you’re going to do with all this money you’re gonna make.”

Phillips asked the boy what he considered to be a good payday.

“Well,” he said, “one hundred dollars a night would be conquering the world.”

“You’ll do better’n that,” Phillips said. “You won’t be able to fit it in your pockets.”

He might as well have taken a jug of kerosene and upended it on a railroad flare.

Jerry Lee thought for a minute.

“Well?” Phillips said. “What you gonna do with it?”

“I’m gonna spend it,” said Jerry Lee.

“On what?”

“On Cadillacs.”

Before he reached the door, a box of records under his arm, Phillips stopped him. “Son?” he said.

“Yes, sir?”

“I’m gonna make you a star.”

Later, when asked about his first impression of Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Phillips would say, “I knew that if he could do anything at all, even toot a mouth organ, I had me my next new star. He looked like a born performer.” All Jerry Lee knows is that Mr. Phillips backed up his big talk: he took a copy of the raw record to Dewey Phillips, who listened to it, “just like he done with Elvis.” And another piece of his dream clicked into place.

“WHBQ,” recites Jerry Lee. “Everybody listened to Red, Hot & Blue.” He had reason to be hopeful: “I thought a lot of Dewey Phillips. He was one of a kind . . . wild as the West Texas wind.” And one thing was certain: “You were a hit if he played your record.”

But just because a disc jockey agreed to hear a record did not mean he would play it; they were the gatekeepers of early rock and roll. All Jerry Lee could do was wait.


“I went home with that box of records, and I went straight to the back forty where Daddy was working.”

“Daddy, I want to play you this record,” he said.

“Okay, son,” Elmo said. “Let’s go hear it.”

They put the record on and listened standing up as the needle brought that Memphis moment into the little living room in Concordia Parish. Jerry Lee watched his daddy’s face, unreadable, as the circle of music grew smaller and smaller, till his own voice finally vanished into static.

“Yeah,” Elmo said, “that’s good.”

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