--Opening Worm Cans--

Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley were contemporaries. Who was better? Wow! How to start something! Look at some facts. They both have about 15 million web sites. Elvis was a very good singer and had a sultry sexy look about him. Girls went crazy. Jerry Lee was very attractive too, blond, smiling, affable in a realistic happy way. Girls went crazy. Elvis stank, never bathed, and had blond hair he died black as a teenager. He never wrote a song and could not play a guitar. Did you ever hear an Elvis guitar lick, or a solo? Of course not--it was a prop. And, no, you can't say he wrote "Love Me Tender." The song sheet says "Words and Music by Elvis Presley'' but he had nothing to do with the words and the melody is directly from an old song called ''Aura Lee.'' You think corporate crime is rampant in business? The music business makes that all look like a picnic. As Tchaikovsky was said to have said--or was it Stravinsky?: "Composers don't borrow; they steal."
Jerry Lee wrote his own songs, altogether as good as songs Presley sang, and he played a piano like he was born on one. Elvis himself said that if he could play the piano like that he'd give up singing. Jerry Lee married a cousin and the press did him in for it. His career was nipped in the bud.
Elvis sang for only two years, got drafted and returned with an amphetamine habit, to make terrible movies at the insistence of his unsavory manager Col. Tom Parker. The movies made money. Elvis got further into drugs, lived in bed, got so fat he couldn't perform, and finally died sitting on the can trying to deconstipate himself. He was 42.
Jerry Lee had alcohol and drug problems too. But he pulled through, and kept on playing and singing. And he's still doing it. When they were both singing in the mid-'50's, Jerry Lee was preferred to Elvis by a mile. Jerry Lee was a musician; Elvis was a showboat. And the kids knew that! "Shake baby shake!"