Did Jerry Lee Lewis really try to assassinate his old pal Elvis Presley in 1976?
Before you presume that the headline of this story is a tad over-the-top or sensationalist, it might help to get straight to the nitty-gritty.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most bizarre incidents in rock ‘n’ roll history, when a drunk, bitter, highly confrontational Jerry Lee Lewis, aged 40, showed up outside the Graceland mansion of his old Sun Records labelmate Elvis Presley, wielding a gun and demanding to see The King.
After the Memphis police were called and hauled Lewis away, the story wound up in every newspaper in the country, the latest in a long line of arrests, mishaps, tragedies, controversies, and black eyes for one of the architects of rock music. In the days that followed, Lewis tried to laugh it off.
“It’s so ridiculous to think that I would be going up to Elvis Presley’s house to do anything,” he said, speaking from a hospital bed after suffering from a peptic ulcer later that same week. “I’ve never in my life been jealous of Elvis, and I’m sure he’s never been jealous of me. We’ve always been real close friends.”
If ever there were an occasion for the cliché, “me thinks he doth protest too much,” this was it. In fact, the details of the Graceland incident are actually quite a bit more concerning than the tabloid mythology would suggest, looking less like a Drunk History moment and more like a legit, premeditated attempt to commit a crime of Shakespearean proportions.
Two days before Thanksgiving, 1976, in the wee hours of the morning, Lewis drove up to the gates of Graceland in his Lincoln Continental Mark IV. The guards weren’t surprised to see him. The previous morning, Lewis had shown up in his Rolls-Royce, asking to see Elvis. When he was turned away that time, he left without incident, but ended up crashing the Rolls and getting arrested for reckless driving. Out on bond, he had now returned to Elvis’s abode once again, in a different vehicle, this time armed with a 38-calibre derringer and a decidedly less pleasant attitude.
“He came running up to the gate and demanded I call up to the house and tell Elvis he wanted to see him,” Elvis’s cousin and security guard Robert Lloyd later told reporters. “I told him I didn’t think Elvis would be receiving guests at that hour of the morning [it was 3am], and he started screaming and yelling and waving a derringer in the air.”
Elvis’s uncle, Vester Presley, was also part of the Graceland security team, and said that Elvis was awakened and notified of Lewis’s demands, and had responded by telling his staff to “ignore it”. When Lewis refused to leave, the cops were called. Contrary to what Jerry Lee was saying, Vester Presley also told the press that he didn’t think his nephew was close with Lewis at all, and that there certainly wasn’t any pattern of friendly visits between the two.
While in custody, Lewis complained to the police that the local press hated him and that he resented all the comparatively favourable publicity Presley got. Of course, when he sobered up later, the rock legend ironically known as ‘The Killer’ now claimed that the whole thing had actually been a big misunderstanding.
If you really follow the subsequent bread crumbs of how Lewis talked about Elvis and that night at Graceland, however, they pretty aggressively betray the notion that it was much ado about nothing.
In early December of 1976, just days after the arrest, Lewis was free on bond once again, semi-recovered from his ulcer, and, to the surprise of many, back on stage performing in Johnson City, Tennessee. During the show, he wasted little time making reference to the well-publicised incident.
“I was down in Memphis the other night,” he told the crowd, unsuccessfully trying to cut the tension in the room.
“I didn’t shoot nobody, though. I just wanted him to know I was in town.”
“Me and Elvis are friends,” he said at another point in the show. “He is the greatest entertainer—except for me.” At that point, some attendees started booing and heckling Lewis.
“Shut up!” the ‘Great Balls of Fire’ singer fired back. “People don’t like me because they ain’t got the brains I got.”
Less than a year later, Elvis Presley was dead at the age of 42, but it only seemed to intensify Lewis’s bitterness toward his old rock rival.
“Elvis this, Elvis that,” Jerry Lee snarled during a startling interview with the Austin American-Statesman in 1978, not long after the King’s funeral. “All we hear is Elvis! What did Elvis ever do except take dope that I couldn’t get a hold of?”
During the same discussion, Lewis finally admitted that he and The King weren’t such close friends after all, and quite bluntly implied that his intentions that night at Graceland weren’t friendly either. “I’d never seen him for 15 years,” he said. “I tried to get in his gate and they locked me up. They said I was going to shoot him, and I was if I could have got to him.”
Lewis paused after saying this, then had a verbal aside with himself. “No, you know better than that, Killer,” he said. “I’m just joking ya, feelin’ ya out,” he now told the reporter.
After openly acknowledging that he was jealous of Elvis’s fame and money (“it burned me up”) and suggesting that the King should have been buried in his bed at Graceland, with a “steel vault over him,” Lewis was finally asked about how he squared his deep Christianity with all the constant tumult of his life.
“I know who I am,” the Killer replied. “I am a rompin’, stompin’ piano-playing SOB, but a great one. A good person. I never hurt nobody unless they got in my way. I got a mean streak in me. Elvis did too, but he hid his. I don’t hide mine. I got to lay it open sometimes. Why, son, it would take five men to whup me and at least 20 to catch me.”
