JERRY LEE LEWIS & ELVIS PRESLEY
JERRY LEE LEWIS & ELVIS PRESLEY
On 22 November 1976, Jerry Lee Lewis and his wife drive to Elvis Presley’s Graceland home in Memphis. Lewis asks Elvis’s security guard Harold Loyd (who is Elvis’s cousin) that he wants to see Elvis. Loyd tells Elvis was asleep, Lewis thanks Loyd and drives away.
On 23 November at 3am, Jerry Lee Lewis returns to Graceland alone, he is drunk, angry, and has a pistol. He smashes his vehicle into Elvis’s gate and demands to see the ‘King’. Lewis attempts to throw champagne bottles out of the window and smashes them both inside his vehicle. Lewis screams out, ‘tell him I wanna visit him. Who the hell does he think he is? Tell him the Killer’s here to see him.’ Loyd attempts to calm him down.
Elvis is home and watching the commotion on his security screen and rang Loyd to ask him what was going on? And then tells Loyd to call the police. The police arrive at the scene, they find Lewis inside his car with a loaded pistol resting on his knee. The officer ordered Lewis out of the vehicle, Lewis tells him, ‘I just wanted to see Elvis.’ Lewis is wobbly on his feet; slurring and his breath stinks of alcohol. Elvis tells the police to, ‘Lock him up’. Lewis is later released from prison on a bond.
Lewis later said that Elvis had invited him to his home to talk and alleged that the officer gave him the pistol. This isn’t true, Lewis got the pistol at a Memphis nightclub.
Elvis and Lewis knew one another previously after having worked with Johnny Cash. The two men had bumped into each other in 1975 in Las Vegas. Lewis said to Elvis sarcastically, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing – you’re just Colonel Parker’s puppet’. Elvis returned with, ‘Well, if I’m so dumb and you’re so smart, how is it that I’m playing the main room and you’re playing the lounge?’
Elvis died in 1977, Lewis told the press, ‘I was glad [Elvis died]. Just another one out of the way. I mean, Elvis this, Elvis that. All we hear is Elvis’. He then said, ‘Elvis that son of a bitch died on dope… he was a dope addict.’
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