Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story(64)

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?”

“For ‘Mean Woman Blues.’”

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.