Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(55)

Jerry Lee has thought a lot about that day, but he owes his daddy too much to feel any anger; what he feels is disappointment, the lasting kind.

“He didn’t make much of it. I don’t know why. But he didn’t. It kind of got to me, I guess.

“But ain’t that the way the real world works?”


Jerry Lee went back to Memphis to be close to the music. One night he was watching television with J. W., Lois, and the family when the phone rang. J. W. came back in the room and said, “Dewey Phillips is fixin’ to play your record.”

Jerry Lee told him he was a liar.

“You listen. Dewey Phillips is about to play it on the radio.”

“Nawwwww,” Jerry Lee said.

They turned on the radio, and there he was, talking so fast you could barely make out what he meant: “. . . and this is Daddy-O Dewey Phillips, just fixin’ to bring you the hottest thing in the country, Red, Hot & Blue, comin’ to you from WHBQ in Memphis, Tennessee. . . . Here he is, here’s a new guy that Sam Phillips has got. Jerry Lee Lewis. And here he is, doin’ ‘Crazy Arms.’”

“And I couldn’t believe it. That’s the first time that I ever heard my record on the radio. An’ I said, ‘Man, listen to that.’”

The air over Memphis and the dark Delta filled with his voice.

“I looked over,” Jerry Lee says, “and there was Myra, jumping up and down.”


At WHBQ, Dewey Phillips and the engineers took call after call from listeners who said they liked that boy from Louisiana, liked him better than Ray Price, liked him the way they liked Elvis. To make sure that Jerry Lee did not wander away from Memphis, Sam Phillips spread the word that there was a hot piano player in town, and Jerry Lee started doing club dates in the Mid-South—nothing too glamorous, some downright dangerous. Roland Janes liked to tell people of a night, not far from Memphis, when a big peckerwood started yelling at Jerry Lee, “Blondie? Heeeeeyyyyy, Blondie?” till Jerry Lee walked over, smiling, and punched the man in the nose, punched him so hard he knocked him across the floor. Then he went back to his piano and played a song. A lot of musicians pretended to be tough, pretended to be about a half bubble off plumb, but Jerry Lee really was, tough and a little bit crazy when it suited him, Janes would say, and he was willing, always willing, to defend the dignity of the stage. On it, he could do anything, perform any antic he wanted, but if you impugned his stage, you insulted him down where it mattered, and he was coming for you every time.

The specter of Elvis was never very far away, in those days. It was Elvis, speaking to Jerry Lee through the radio, who had convinced him it was all possible, but he still was invisible to this man who had had such an impact on his life. As he went to work in Memphis on his own career, he wondered if he would ever even meet the man. He had already met Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash, and while he knew they were successes and even stars, they did not have the luster of Elvis. Elvis was said to visit Sun Records still, now and then, and Jerry Lee hoped and waited to see him there, not as a googly-eyed fan but as one professional to another.

Late in 1956, toward Christmastime, Phillips asked him in to help out Carl Perkins, who was coming in to cut the old country blues “Matchbox” and an original tune called “Your True Love.” Jerry Lee was reluctant to play behind Perkins. “Carl was doing a session, and I was just kinda hanging around,” recalls Jerry Lee. Perkins was backed by his band—brothers Jay and Clayton and drummer W. S. “Fluke” Holland—but for this record they wanted piano, and that meant Jerry Lee.

He is slow to talk about doing session work now, as if such a thing was somehow beneath him, but in Carl Perkins he recognized a musician who knew how to get the sound he wanted in a studio. Perkins then was a slim man with dark, oiled-back, curly hair and a big jaw, a snazzy dresser who liked to do a little Chuck Berry duckwalk in his black-and-white two-tone shoes, but in the studio he was all business. “Sam wanted to know if I would play behind the boy, and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ I said, ‘I’ll do the best I can, but Carl does most of the playin’ himself, you know? He says, ‘Yeah, but I want you to take lead on the piano.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think that would really do very good.’ And I don’t remember if he took the lead on it or not. [But] you could hear it. You could tell who was playin’ the piano. And that’s what they wanted.”

Oh, let me be your little dog

Till your big dog comes



After a take or two, Jerry Lee looked up to see Sam Phillips walking toward him.

“You gonna be around a while?” he asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Why?”

“Elvis called. He said he’d be by in a while and wanted to meet you.”

Jerry Lee told him he reckoned he could hang around a little bit more.





6


“I BEEN WANTIN’ TO MEET THAT PIANO PLAYER”




Memphis

1956

He was the most famous man in the world, at that moment. He pulled up to Sun Records in a white and brown Lincoln Continental convertible, slid out of the new leather, and glided into the lobby with a brunette chorus girl from Las Vegas on one arm of his chocolate-colored sport jacket. Her name was Marilyn Evans, and she was almost as pretty as he was.