Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(56)

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: