Tag: Knox Phillips

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Rockin’ Troubador: Jerry Phillips on John Prine and the Pink Cadillac Sessions

When you’re with Memphis songwriters and John Prine comes up, you can tell he’s made an indelible mark on them. Last year I spoke with Keith Sykes, who recited Prine’s lyrics off the top of his head. “The first words out of his mouth, professionally speaking, were: ‘While digesting Reader’s Digest in the back of a dirty bookstore, a plastic flag with gum on the back fell out on the floor. I picked it up and wiped it off and slapped it on my window shield. If I could see old Betsy Ross, I’d tell her how good I feel.’ You ask what makes a good song. Well, when you hear something like that the first time, you don’t think. You just know this is good. It’s contemporary, even today. And that was on his first record, that he cut in Memphis — at Chips’ [Moman] studio, American.”

Sykes added, “He also did Common Sense here, and he did Pink Cadillac here. He’s done a bunch of stuff in Memphis, and he loves it down here.”

Diane Duncan Phillips

(above, left to right) Billy Lee Riley, Jerry Phillips, John Prine, Knox Phillips

Indeed, Prine, who passed away last week from complications related to COVID-19, redefined his career more than once in Memphis, especially in the latter example, when recording Pink Cadillac at Phillips Recording Studio. Hearing stories of its making from Jerry Phillips, who co-produced the record with brother Knox (with an assist from paterfamilias Sam), sheds some light on just how much Memphis resonated with the songwriter. The album, an eclectic mix of rock-and-roll, funk, and country styles, with only half the tracks being originals, decisively stamped Prine’s identity as something more than your typical troubadour. I spoke with Phillips recently about all the juicy details.

Memphis Flyer: By 1979, John Prine was well established as a folk-centric songwriter. He was expected to play an acoustic guitar with a lot of finger picking. So Pink Cadillac must have thrown the industry for a loop.

Jerry Phillips: Yeah, it did. John wanted to do something different, and he picked the right people because the Phillips family has never followed the beaten path on anything. We weren’t just going to cut another folk album. Those are great, don’t get me wrong, but to cut another folksy John Prine album like all the rest of ’em would have been of no interest to any of us.

You know, I don’t think John had ever cut an album with his own band. So that’s what he wanted to do. We rented him an apartment, fully furnished, and he stayed in Memphis for three months, him and his whole band. It was crazy. We cut 30 songs on that session. We were supposed to cut 12! And we had everybody from the Everly Brothers to Billy Lee Riley dropping by the studio. There were some other things going on, too, we don’t want to talk about …

MF: I’ve read there were 500 hours of tape cut at that time.What happened with all the extra stuff that didn’t make it to the album? Has any of it come out?

JP: Well, we have it in storage. Knox kept the tape machines running, basically, the whole time the session was going on. And a lot of that stuff, he re-cut. The next album was Storm Windows, and we had already cut that song, “Storm Windows,” in our sessions. But yeah, we’ve got lots of 16 track on John Prine.

MF: The record has proven its longevity. It’s more respected now than reviews at the time would suggest.

JP: Rolling Stone panned that album bad. They said it was the worst John Prine album ever. And The New York Times review [by Robert Palmer] said it was one of his best. So that made all of us feel kinda good. We had defied the corporate mentality in making that record, and the fact that the record company basically hated it [laughs], we thought that was great.

But we weren’t trying to be insane. We were trying to cut a good record. Just one that went off in a different direction. John loved Sam. He would talk about the evangelical fervor he had in the studio. And we can’t leave out my brother Knox, who has his own wild way of producing. Sam only came in for a couple of days. Knox called Sam and said, “You’ve got to come in. This guy sings so bad, you’re gonna love him.” And he didn’t mean he sang off key, but that he sang so different. Like every one of Sam’s artists.

John Prine was no chicken shit, but on “Saigon” and that stuff, we had to really pull it out of him. Sam would say, “Put some sex into it! Slow it down and put some damn sex into it!” Because he was in a different genre than what he was used to. But he pulled it off. I don’t think there was ever a record like that before or since!

John came by the studio last year, and we sat in the mastering room with Jeff Powell while he cut John a brand-new, fresh vinyl master 45 of “Saigon” and “How Lucky,” the two songs Sam recorded on him back then. Both of us had tears in our eyes, listening to that stuff. Because it was a pivotal part of his life, and mine, too.

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Jerry Phillips Remembers Brother Knox: “He Was The Keeper Of The History”

CREDIT: Diane Duncan Phillips

Diane Duncan Phillips

Knox Phillips and John Prine, ca. 1979

Last autumn, I found myself in Jerry Phillips’ office at the headquarters for WSBM and WQLT, the family’s radio stations in Florence, Alabama. The conversation I had with Jerry and his daughter Halley that day ranged from music production techniques to professional wrestling. But one thing kept coming up again and again: Jerry’s older brother Knox, who had been in poor health for some time. “My brother is real ill,” Jerry said. “He used to go all over the country. He’s got every award you can get. And now he can’t do anything; it’s really a sad situation.”

Last night, those words took on an added poignancy when it was announced that Knox Phillips, son of celebrated producer Sam Phillips and his wife Becky, had passed away, bringing closure to a prolonged period of immobilization that had been tortuous for the entire family. “He’s been out of the picture now for about four or five years,” Jerry said, last September. “It’s been a real tough go for our family to see him not be able to even get up and walk anywhere. It’s been a real hard thing for our family, ’cause you know Knox was just as important as Sam in a way. He was the keeper of the history. He was the one that always knew everything about Sun. He was the one that always got things going.”

Knox Phillips’ importance to his family’s legacy, and to the history of Memphis music, cannot be overstated. Though never content to merely live in his father’s shadow, he came to embody his same iconoclastic spirit, ushering those values, and the Phillips Recording Studio, into the 21st century. “He was a great record producer, a great mixer,” Jerry noted, and his role in the co-production of John Prine’s Pink Cadillac at Phillips Recording in 1979 is the perfect example. Recounting the making of that record, Jerry recently interjected, “We can’t leave my brother Knox out of all this, who has his own wild way of producing records, too. He was very effective in those sessions. ‘Cause you know Sam only came in for a couple of days.”
Diane Duncan Phillips

(above, left to right) Billy Lee Riley, Jerry Phillips, John Prine, Knox Phillips

But Knox Phillips’ skill-set went far beyond his recording acumen. “My brother was a political science major in college,” Jerry said. “He gave that up. I think Sam was looking for him to run for governor or something. Knox, he didn’t want to do that. But he was the consummate Memphis music politician. Also he could produce records, and he was a good guitar player, too.”

As for his command of the music scene’s street-level politics, the most obvious example would be Knox’s tireless efforts to establish a Memphis-based chapter of the Recording Academy, formally the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), in 1973. “He got the NARAS chapter here,” said Jerry. “He lobbied for it. Hard. And he paid for, like, 50 people’s dues. For years. Just so there would be members, you know?” To this day, the Memphis chapter, also representing New Orleans, Louisiana, and St. Louis, remains a forward-thinking force in the professional organization.

Beyond that, he took a uniquely personal approach to the Memphis music scene, embracing players from all levels of recognition and success. “You wouldn’t believe how deep his roots went into the love of Memphis music, and the love of people who didn’t have enough money,” Jerry said. “He paid Furry Lewis’ electric bills!”

He was indeed the keeper of the history, and played a decisive role in shaping how the family legacy would be remembered. Discussing Peter Guralnick’s masterful biography, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, Jerry points out that “Knox was the one that got Peter Guralnick involved. When that book came out, Knox could not even go to any of the panel discussions, and he would have been all over that. He would have been up there, he’d have been setting it up, he’d have been doing things. He spent 25 years working to get that book done. Twenty-five damn years. ‘Cause Sam wouldn’t talk to Peter for the longest time. There were all these other writers that were trying to get that story. And Knox kept saying, ‘You don’t want these guys, this is the guy you want to write this book.’ So over a 20-year span, they kept getting together and getting together and getting together, and that book is almost completely Sam’s own words. There’s a lot of Peter’s words in there too, of course, but I’m just saying, it’s not just something that Peter guessed at. Sam wanted to write his own book, he thought. But he would have never done it.”

Clearly, Knox’s extended illness and passing have left a huge void in the family. “I was always the rebel of the family. I was always more interested in the performing side of it, the playing side of it, than the politics of the music'” Jerry mused. “So when Knox had to get out of the picture, I had to step up to the plate and do some of the stuff he was doing. Showing up at these functions and speaking to the press.

“We’ve got Knox to thank for a lot of stuff. We really do. I try to always share the spotlight with him, ’cause he’s really the guy that deserves it.”

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Music Music Features

Memphis’ Lost Decade of Bohemia and Music

For many Americans, the death of Elvis Presley in 1977 marked the end of an age of innocence in rock-and-roll. But it had more significance in Memphis, a capstone on a series of events that decimated the musical momentum the city had gathered in previous decades.

Pat Rainer, who documented those times in her photography, puts it this way: “Stax was bankrupt, Beale Street was boarded up, the major record labels had moved out, and it was like, ‘Wait a minute! We’re still here!’ Jim Dickinson coined the phrase that what we did was ‘guerrilla video’ or ‘guerrilla recording.’ I was his disciple, and I would have walked the fires of hell for him.”

Pat Rainer at Graceland the day after Elvis died

Rainer, a Memphis native who studied radio, TV, and film production at Memphis State University, was dissatisfied with academia and struck out on her own, working in record stores and falling in with a tight-knit community of bohemians and creators who came to define the post-Elvis era. She worked at the Yellow Submarine record shop on Poplar, whose owner, Jim Blake, would eventually start the maverick independent label, Barbarian Records. “Blake founded the company when Dickinson told him, ‘You know, you should make a record of Jerry Lawler and sell it at the wrestling matches.’ And I saw a light bulb go off over Blake’s head. The three of us kinda pitched in together, but Blake was the figurehead.”

The Lawler records sold, helping to fund hours of recording sessions by Dickinson, Lesa Aldridge, the Klitz, and others — mostly unreleased. The label was emblematic of a whole scene germinating through the 1970s. “It was a community of artists who all worked in concert with one another, whether it was the musicians or the sculptors or the painters or the photographers or whatever. Our little group of people included Dickinson, [Sid] Selvidge, Lee Baker, Mud Boy, Alex [Chilton], John Fry, Knox Phillips, Bill Eggleston, and Tav [Falco]. We all wanted to create art. I just kinda fell into photography.”

Now, we’re all the beneficiaries of Rainer’s chosen path, as the Stax Museum of American Soul Music opens Rainer’s exhibit, “Chaos and the Cosmos: Inside Memphis Music’s Lost Decade, 1977-1986,” this Friday.

Sam Phillips

“There’s great pictures of Sam Phillips,” Rainer says. “There’s pictures of Willie Mitchell and Al Green in the control room at Hi; Knox and Jerry in the control room at Phillips; Alex and Jim in the studio; Johnny Woods and Furry [Lewis] when we recorded the Beale Street record.”

That 1978 record marked a turning point, where the fringe took up the mantle as guardians of both past and future. “I mean, think of what would have happened if we hadn’t fought to keep them from letting the Orpheum be bought by the Jehovah’s Witnesses!” Rainer exclaims. “And there’s a big thanks due Jim, because he went down there to those guys at the Memphis Development Foundation and struck a deal to make this Beale Street Saturday Night record to raise money to restore the Orpheum.”

It was that concert that seemed to chart the course for independent music-makers in the city. While Mud Boy, Chilton, and Falco ultimately became guiding stars of the “guerrilla” music that has come to define 21st century Memphis, there was little inkling of such possibilities at the time. “Looking back on it,” says Rainer, “it still blows my mind.”

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Sun Studio Makes a Comeback

CREDIT: Jamie Harmon

Sun Studio is the body around which Memphis music orbits — and where it all began. Jim Stewart at Stax saw Sam Phillips selling records and bought his own recorder. Two of the founders of Hi Records came from Sun. Phillips showed everybody the way. The radio engineer from north Alabama set Memphis music in motion from 706 Union Avenue.

“There are a lot of people who think the music is magic, and it does have a magic quality to it,” says Jerry Phillips, Sam’s youngest son. “But my dad always said it’s who you’ve got in there. Who knows how to operate the equipment and place the microphones? You’re not necessarily going to have a hit because you’re in that room. Or get that sound at all.”

The person operating Sun Studio today is Matt Ross-Spang, who was a Germantown High student when he set his sights on the room that Phillips opened as the Memphis Recording Service in January 1950. Ross-Spang is finishing a years-long effort to return the hallowed studio to its original condition, complete with period-correct equipment and all the discipline that old gear forces onto engineers and artists alike. It’s not the sort of task a typical person assumes, but Sun Studio was never a place for typical people.

“He’s a young man with an old soul. Matt’s got a lot of Sam Phillips in him,” Jerry Phillips says. “He loves that equipment and the simplicity of it all.”

Sam Phillips was famous for his ability to sense the emotional content of a recording and to anticipate how listeners would respond. Phillips’ intuition came from a childhood exposure to African-American sounds that he heard in the cotton fields of north Alabama. His love for music drew him into the radio business, where he learned to work a nascent technology through which he commanded the airwaves, electronic signals, and a generation of American teenagers to dance to those sounds. Phillips had a gift for musical intuition, but he was also an engineer.

“He took a course at Alabama Polytechnic Institute and an engineering course at Auburn. I don’t think he went to Auburn, but it was through the mail” Jerry Phillips says. “Of course, when he got to his recording studio days, he installed his own equipment, hooked it all up, built the speakers. I wouldn’t necessarily call him a gear-head, but he was a gear-head by necessity. He had to do the things he was capable of doing, because he didn’t have much money. As a general rule, he was very interested in equipment and technology.”

Phillips worked in audio when audio was new. He became a radio engineer in Muscle Shoals in the late 1940s. At that time, music was cut onto lacquer discs by a lathe. It was not until after World War II that Americans became aware of recording to magnetic tape, a technology developed by the Germans. “Tape recording” as we know it was originally funded in the U.S. by Bing Crosby, who saw that the possibility of recording sound to the quieter, longer-format medium would allow him to spend less time in the broadcast studio and more time on the golf course. Crosby spent $40,000 to bankroll the Ampex tape corporation in 1947. Phillips opened Memphis Recording Services two years later.

Matt Ross-Spang sits in the control room of Sun Studios, surrounded by machines that seem to have come from a 1950s sci-fi movie. On the other side of the glass, a large tour group sings along to Elvis’ “That’s All Right.” The tourists peer through the window at Ross-Spang as he talks about his job.

“Sometimes its like being in a zoo. You’re in the cage,” Ross-Spang says. His “office” is historic, a fascinating place. But it’s also a working recording studio as well as something of an ad hoc mental health facility. Like Sam, Ross-Spang has to understand both human and electronic circuitry.

“When people come to [record at Sun], they are freaked out. You have to let them Instagram and calm down. If you’re not a sociable, welcoming guy, they’ll be puking or freaking out. You won’t get anywhere.”

Ross-Spang asked for these problems. He’s had Sun on his sonar since he was a kid.

“I recorded here when I was 14,” Ross-Spang says. “I did this god-awful recording, I mean god awful. It was so bad. I played acoustic and this guy played a djembe drum with eggs. That’s how bad it was. But I met James Lott, who had been the engineer for 20 years at the time. So, to me, it was like the coolest thing in the world being in Sun. A lot of people get captured by sound. I wasn’t captured by sound at that point, but when I watched him manipulate the sound, I was like ‘You can do all of that?’

“Trying to save what I did out in the studio, I just bugged him a bunch, and he told me to come back and intern with him,” Ross-Spang says. “I came back when I could drive. So I came to work here when I was 16. The other intern didn’t last that long. I started interning for him when I was about 17 or so. After high school, I would come down and do tours as a tour guide. And then I’d intern until about two or three in the morning. I did that for about six or seven years and then took over as head engineer about five years ago. I’m one of the few people who figured out what they wanted to do really early on. And it was Sun Studio.”

Long before Ross-Spang arrived, the facility had been abandoned by the Phillips (who never owned the building) in 1959. It sat empty, then housed other businesses. According to Jerry Phillips, a combined effort by Graceland, the Smithsonian, and Sam himself saved the place from the typical Memphis fate of abandonment, demolition, and dollar store. The studio was rebuilt according to Sam’s memory before being purchased by Gary Hardy in the late 1980s. The current owner is John Schorr. But Ross-Spang is the driving force behind rebuilding the room to Sam’s specs.

“It’s fantastic that [Ross-Spang] has pursued this with such scholarly devotion,” says Peter Guralnick, author of the definitive, two-part Presley biography, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love, who is currently at work on a biography of Sam Phillips. “Sam was systematic in thinking about sound and gave great thought to it — no square angles; the tiles. In addition, he felt there was something unique about the room at 706 Union. He didn’t know it when he rented it. To have reconstituted it is an exercise in creative archeology.”

Ross-Spang is certainly diligent, but there were some lucky (and unlucky) breaks along the way.

“I became the head engineer at Sun Studio when I was 22. I didn’t have any money. I had one guitar. It was a beautiful, big Guild. It was signed by Robert Plant, Elvis Costello — people I’ve met over the years and hung out with here. One night, while I was away, it got smashed, and I got an insurance check from the studio for it. It was a huge chunk of money for me. The whole time I’ve been at Sun, I’ve wanted to put the original stuff in. Sam used this old 1930s RCA tube console. But you could never find those things. People just threw them out in the 1960s. But one popped up on eBay, two days after my guitar was smashed. The only way I could have bought it was with the insurance check. To this day, I think my X-Men ability is that if I need something and I think about it hard enough, it pops up on eBay. I bought that, and the studio bought other stuff. It’s taken about five years, but now it’s all here.”

Ross-Spang bought a 1936 RCA radio mixing console, the same model Phillips paid $500 for when he opened Memphis Recording in January 1950. Phillips originally cut records onto discs with a lathe and switched to analog tape in late 1951.

“I’ve got the same 1940s Presto lathe that I can cut 45s on. All the Ampex, all the microphones are period-correct to what he used in the day. It’s becoming exactly like it was in 1956.”

In 1956 at Sun, Johnny Cash recorded “I Walk the Line.” Orbison cut “Ooby Dooby.” Billy Lee Riley recorded “Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll.”

“Mark Neil, who did the Black Keys’ Brothers album, is a huge Sun fanatic,” Ross-Spang says. “He helped me locate stuff and figure out how Sam did it. Back then, there was no ‘normal’ way to do things. A lot of the stuff was homemade. We really had to use our ears and listen to records. There were only five pictures in the studio back then. It’s not like the Beatles, where we know exactly on June 2, 1966, George Harrison sneezed. We don’t have any of that kind of info. A lot of the old guys don’t really remember. Scotty Moore was an engineer after Sun, so he remembered a lot more than anybody else. But even then, Scotty might say one thing, somebody else might say another.”

Moore, who played guitar on all of the better Elvis records before the late 1960s, proved to be more than a historical resource for Ross-Spang.

“I’m lucky enough to have known the Sun guys for a long time,” Ross-Spang says. “I’d go visit [Moore] every couple of months in Nashville. Once, Chip Young was there and they both busted out guitars. Chip brought out his Gibson Super 400. Chip Young is one of my favorite guitar players of all time. He played with Elvis and some other people. So they are all playing at Scotty’s, and then they passed it to me.”

For Ross-Spang, who plays guitar in the Bluff City Backsliders, it was terrifying: “I’m thinking ‘What am I going to play in front of y’all?'”

The job and the friendship with Moore later put Ross-Spang in an awkward place.

“A year or two ago, I did a record with Chris Isaak here. And, this January, the BBC wanted to do an interview with Scotty, but about his life, not about Elvis. They called me up and we kind of got some things together. We got Chris Isaak to host it. Then about a week before the producer called and said, ‘Hey, we thought it would be great if they cut the Elvis songs again.’ That’s great, but Scotty hasn’t played guitar in like five years; he just doesn’t do it anymore. They said, ‘That’s fine, you do it.’ I was like, ‘Great, you’re going to make me play my hero’s guitar licks in front of him in the place where he did it.’ Of course, I know all his licks. I’ve stolen them a thousand times. He’s saved my butt on sessions. But I’ve never had to do it front of everybody. And to make matters worse, I had invited Jerry Phillips, J.M. Van Eaton, everybody.”

But things got even weirder.

“A side funny thing was that Chris wanted to do the songs in E,” Ross-Spang says. “If you’re a guitar player, you know they’re in A. You can play them in E, but they don’t sound the same. I’m setting up the mics and I hear ‘Let’s try this in E.’ I’m going, ‘crap.’ I told Chris, ‘You know these songs are in A,’ and he says, ‘E is better for me.’ I’m wondering how I’m going to save my butt. I’m just thinking about me at this point. I know one person in this room who can get him to go with A.

“I said, ‘Scotty, Chris is talking about doing ‘That’s All Right’ in E.’ He was like, ‘What? Why?’ I said, ‘You should go talk to him.’

“We did them in A, and it sounded great. It came out really well. But I had bought a tube tape echo because of the one Scotty had at his house. Afterward, he said, ‘You know I’ve got one of those.’ I said ‘I bought one because of you.’ He said, ‘Well, hell, I’ll just give you my old one.’ About a month or two later he called me up and asked ‘When are you going to come get this thing?’ I wasn’t about to bug him about it. So I went up there as fast as I could. He gave me whole live rig setup from the ’90s. It had his tube echo. He used [effects] to try to simulate the quirks of tape. They all have his hand-written notes on them. It was one of the greatest days of my life. It’s like Yoda giving you his light saber.”

Working with the limitations of the last century might seem like a pain, but Ross-Spang, who was recently named governor of the producers’ and engineer’s wing of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences’ Memphis chapter, appreciates the discipline it takes to record an entire group’s performance without stopping — an art many consider lost.

“When you look at old pictures of Willie Mitchell and Sam, they’re kind of crazy looking,” Ross-Spang says. “They’re smoking, and they’re hunkered over a big piece of metal and knobs. Nowadays, if I get tagged in photos, it’s me hunkered over a mouse. Why would you take a picture of that? The magic is gone when you go all digital.”

Recording a whole room to mono means everybody has to get their parts right. You can’t fix a mistake. Perhaps the reason Al Green, Johnny Cash, and the Killer keep selling records 60 years later is that they made great music together at the same time.

“I love that way of making records. Everyone has to pay attention to each other instead of themselves. It’s a team effort, including me,” Ross-Spang says. “It’s not very forgiving. But I think one of the reasons people come here to do that is because it makes them a better musician. With the computer, you can play five solos, go home for the day, and the engineer will make a solo for you. But here, if you don’t get a solo right, you may have just wasted a great vocal take. There’s so much more on the line. But that makes you play better too. It’s the only way I like to work now. People hire me to work in other studios, and I try to take the same mentality. It doesn’t always work, because they’ve got booths and headphones. You say, ‘Can you turn your amp down.’ They say, ‘Can I just put my amp in the booth?'”

He shakes his head.

“If you give a mouse a cookie, it wants a glass of milk.”