WHENEVER I HEAD for Memphis, one of my first ports of call is the site of the original Sun Studio at 706 Union Avenue. For it was from there in the early 1950s that its founder Sam Phillips, who died on Wednesday at the age of 80, set about changing the course of popular music and the world along with it.
Phillips, a radio station engineer and little-known radio announcer, had originally set up Sun Records so he could record both rhythm and blues singers and country performers. His plan was to let artists who had no formal training play their music as the spirit moved them. The Sun motto was: “We Record Anything, Anywhere, Anytime”.
One day in early 1953, however, Phillips turned to his secretary, Marion Keisker, and declared: “If I could find a white man with the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.”
It was a preposterous claim. In 1953, the turnover of the entire record business was estimated at about one-fifth of that sum — and that included everybody from Patti Page to Frank Sinatra. But thanks to a young, white-trash teenager who had recently graduated from Humes High School and was at the time driving a truck around Memphis for Crown Electric for a dollar and a quarter an hour, Phillips’s prediction was soon to come true — although he himself was to see little of the billion dollars.
The white man with the Negro sound who was to come knocking at Phillips’s door was, of course, Elvis Presley. When he first walked unannounced into the Sun front office one afternoon in 1953, Phillips wasn’t there. But in the tiny studio, Presley recorded an acetate of a couple of Ink Spots numbers as — he claimed — a birthday present for his mother.
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Several months later, Phillips got around to listening to the tape and Presley was duly summoned back. The conversation that took place between the two in the Sun studio one night in January 1954 frankly sounds like something dreamt up in Hollywood. But you won’t convince me or anyone else who loves rock’n’roll that it didn’t take place. The will to believe is simply too strong.
“What can you do?” Phillips allegedly asked.
“I can do anything,” Elvis replied.
“Do it,” Sam commanded.
Presley then started singing a mix of gospel, country, hymns, the standards of the day — anything and everything. It was obvious he had the talent. But just how significant a part should history allocate to Phillips in moulding the Presley sound? The fact that at the time Elvis appeared to be modelling himself on Dean Martin suggests that his intervention was vital.
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Phillips began assembling a band to back Elvis. He found guitarist Scotty Moore in a country group called the Starlight Wranglers. Bill Black came in on double bass, and they rehearsed as a trio until they were ready to cut their first record. The date that Phillips first threaded a reel of tape into the machine at the Sun Studio and announced “OK, this is the session” is etched in my memory. It was July 5, 1954. I was one day old at the time and the odd coincidence that I was born in almost the same instant as rock’n’roll has always had a powerful fascination for me, ever since I discovered it in my teens.
Presley, Moore and Black started out that night with some nondescript country numbers and the ballad I Love You Because. When they began playing That’s All Right, a blues number by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, they were really just fooling around in a break between recording. “Just making a racket we thought,” as Moore later recalled.
Then, legend has it, Phillips came running from the control room, shouting: “What the devil are you doing?” The trio answered that they did not really know. “Well, find out real quick and don’t lose it,” Phillips commanded. “Run through it again and let’s put it on tape.”
He knew that he had finally found his “white man with the Negro sound and the Negro feel”. Elvis had his first hit record and the billion-dollar industry that rock’n’roll was to become was on its way.
Under Phillips’s guidance, Presley cut four more singles — Good Rockin’ Tonight, Milkcow Blues Boogie, Baby Let’s Play House and Mystery Train. But by the end of 1955, Phillips had sold his contract with Presley and his rights to the material they had recorded to RCA for just $35,000.
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Phillips invested the money in the fledgeling Holiday Inn chain and eventually made a far greater fortune from the hotel industry than he did from the record industry, although he also went on to help to launch the careers of Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis. In later years he spent much of his time operating radio stations in Memphis and Alabama.
Before then, though, he had ensured that the world would never quite be the same again.
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TEN SUN SHINERS
That’s All Right
Elvis Presley
Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On
Jerry Lee Lewis
Blue Suede Shoes
Carl Perkins
Ooby Dooby
Roy Orbison
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Great Balls of Fire
Jerry Lee Lewis
New York’s A Lonely Town
The Tradewinds
I Wanna Love Him So Bad
The Jelly Beans
Iko Iko
The Dixie Cups
Goodnight Baby
The Butterflies
I Can’t Let Go
Evie Sands