Million Dollar Quartet: Making history

Rock and roll musicians Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash as "The Million Dollar Quartet" December 4, 1956 in Memphis, Tennessee. Photo / Getty Images

Three young men crowd around a piano at Sun Studio, Memphis, Tennessee.

They are Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash, early aristocrats of what we now call popular music; at the keyboard sits Elvis Presley, the monarch receiving his courtiers. It's December 4, 1956; the four are singing, enjoying an informal jam session.

Between them they will change music forever; none of them would be there without Sun Records boss Sam Phillips.

Phillips had little musical talent of his own but knew it when he heard it in others. As the person who discovered Elvis, Cash and Lewis, and made important early recordings of Roy Orbison, Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, Ike Turner and others, a case can and has been made for Phillips as the most influential person in rock history.

As well as an unparalleled talent spotter, Phillips was a businessman. He made sure tape was rolling, preserving the foursome's impromptu sing-along if not for posterity then certainly for commerce.

He knew the value of publicity, too, calling reporters when Elvis dropped by for a social visit and telling Bob Johnson, of the Press-Scimitar, that this was his Million Dollar Quartet.

The four may well have been worth a collective million but at the time the bulk of that value lay with Elvis. In 1956, Cash was a promising country singer - and failed vacuum cleaner salesman - with a couple of solid hits behind him, including I Walk the Line.

By contrast, Perkins was a gifted songwriter whose career had already peaked. His million seller, Blue Suede Shoes, was about to be eclipsed by Elvis' superior version. Perkins' star waned in the following years, before The Beatles revived his reputation when they included three of his tunes on their early albums.

Lewis, with just one Sun single to his name, still had it all before him. A tyro rockabilly pianist, he was only at the studio to play on Perkins' latest recording being cut that day.

Elvis was no one's idea of a great pianist, yet he sits at the keyboard in the famous photo captured on the day. He could sit wherever he wanted; he was a star. Phillips had sold Presley's contract to RCA the previous year, and by December 1956 Presley was the undisputed king of rock 'n' roll.

It's no surprise, then, that he dominates the session, singing lead on most of the tracks, but the recording is ropey, to say the least. Songs are begun then abandoned, the audio quality is rudimentary and the piano is in tune only by a hair's breadth. Combine that with the legal wrangling necessary to unravel permissions involving four artists across various record labels, and an album of the Million Dollar Quartet only gained official release in 1981, four years after Elvis' death.

There are hints of greatness, though. The boisterous interweaving of voices in I Shall Not Be Moved; Lewis showing everyone who the real pianist is on At the End of the Road. Despite the thumb smudge of a recording, this is the sound of gifted young men thrumming with potential.

Don't expect to hear Cash. He swore to his dying day that he was on the record but there's no audible evidence of it. Peter Guralnick, the definitive biographer of both Phillips and Presley, believes that Cash only turned up for the photo and left soon after.

Whatever the truth, you'll be able to hear Cash's bass rumble - or an impression of it - when the Million Dollar Quartet stage show reaches Auckland.