WS Holland remembers the million dollar quartet How the stars aligned one day at Sun Studios
Akid from Saltillo, Tennessee, with no musical ambitions whatsoever, WS “Fluke” Holland was roped into playing the drums by his friend Carl Perkins. in 1956, he borrowed a drum set from a friend, piled Perkins and his band into his huge Cadillac, and headed to Sun Records in Memphis, where the band cut “Blue Suede Shoes”. A few months on, he played drums for a jam session between Perkins, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash – now known as the Million dollar Quartet.
“After ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ was such a big hit,” Holland recalls, “Sam Phillips had us back in december of 1956 for us to record a new song. That was ‘Matchbox’ Sam had hired Jerry Lee Lewis to play piano with us. But we didn’t have any idea that Johnny Cash and Elvis were going to be in town recording. They dropped by Sun, and everything
just stopped. They all started singing and having a jam session.
“Jack Clement was the engineer, and he didn’t think anything about it when those boys dropped in. He decided he was going to go next door to the Taylor Café and get him a sandwich, and he left the big reel-to-reel machines running. if he hadn’t done that, you would never have heard those sessions. We’d have jammed for a bit and then said, ‘Hey, good to see you,’ and that would have been it.
“We all thought it was just another session for Carl Perkins and his brothers. There was no million dollars, nothing, no big stars. Sam did think to have a photographer come out and take their picture, and i told him one day, ‘Sam, if you’d have been half as smart as people think you are, you’d have had that photographer pan over about three feet. Then i would have been in the picture and it would have been multi-million!’”