The greatest ever jam session occurred on December 4, 1956. The jam session seems to have happened by pure chance. Carl Perkins, who by this time had already met success with “Blue Suede Shoes,” had come into Sun Record Studios in Memphis on that day, accompanied by his brothers Clayton and Jay and by drummer W.S. Holland, their aim being to cut some new material, including a revamped version of an old blues song, “Matchbox.” Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records, who wished to try to fatten this sparse rockabilly instrumentation, had brought in his latest acquisition, singer and piano man extraordinaire, Jerry Lee Lewis, still unknown outside Memphis, to play the piano on the Perkins session. Armed with a long list of Christmas presents to buy for his parents and friends, 21-year-old Elvis Presley slipped behind the wheel of his shiny black truck and set out to drive the five miles from his home in Memphis to the city center. Presley’s girlfriend, Marilyn Evans, had tagged along, with instructions from his mother, Gladys, to make sure he finished the shopping, ‘and don’t you let him spend too much of his pay.’ But Presley and Marilyn never did buy any presents that day. Along the way, he took a detour down Union Avenue to show her the little Sun Records studio which had been his springboard to world stardom. As they drove past the red brick building at No706, Elvis saw several cars parked outside and the soundproof shutters closed. It could mean only one thing: a recording session was in progress. Leaping out of the truck, he hammered on the locked door until it was opened by Phillips. ‘There’s some friends in here makin’ your kind of music,’ he told Presley. After chatting with Philips in the control room, Presley listened to the playback of the Perkins’ session, which he pronounced to be good. Then he went into the studio, grabbed a microphone and began singing, and the jam session began. Phillips left the tapes running in order to “capture the moment” as a souvenir and for posterity. At some point during the session, Sun artist Johnny Cash, who had also enjoyed a few hits on the country charts, popped in. For the next 90 minutes the four rockers belted out whatever songs came into their heads, with Phillips shrewdly letting the tape run throughout the impromptu session, recording even their banter. And so the first supergroup was born. December 4, 1956, has gone down in the chequered history of rock ’n’ roll as the day of the Million Dollar Quartet.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 11:14:07 +0000
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