J.M. Van Eaton receives a Founder of the Sound Award from Jerry Phillips in 2020 (Photo courtesy Ameripolitan.org)
Last Friday, on February 9th, drummer James Mack Van Eaton, aka “J.M.” or “Jimmy,” passed away at the age of 86, and with him were lost some of the last first-hand memories of Sun Records’ early days. Any fan of Jerry Lee Lewis knows Van Eaton’s work, for on the day that Lewis showed up at Sun with his cousin, J.W. Brown, ready for his first proper recording session, producer Jack Clement called up Van Eaton and guitarist Roland Janes to fill out the band, and the rest is history.
As described in Peter Guralnick’s Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘N’ Roll, the ad hoc quartet cut over two dozen tracks that day. After they’d played themselves out, Janes took a bathroom break, then emerged only to hear Van Eaton and Lewis playing on as a duo, indefatigable. As it turned out, that stripped down drums-and-piano version of “Crazy Arms” was Lewis’ first hit for the Memphis label. And that was just the beginning, with Janes and Van Eaton going to to accompany Lewis on many of his hits. Ultimately, Van Eaton would record with several other Sun artists, including Billy Lee Riley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Charlie Rich.
To reflect on the passing of one of Sun Records’ giants, I called on Sam Phillips’ son, Jerry Phillips, to share his memories of the man and his music.
Memphis Flyer:Did you know J.M. back in the day, when he was most active at Sun Records?
Jerry Phillips: I’ve known J.M. pretty much all my life. He started young at Sun and was I was young too, and over the years I’ve played with him and he’s played with me. You know, I was in Spain a couple of years ago at the Rockin’ Race Jamboree, a rockabilly festival. I started listening to the drummers, and you know, every one of those drummers was either trying to play like J.M. Van Eaton or they were playing J.M. Van Eaton licks. It wasn’t J.M. Van Eaton, but man, they were trying hard to be him.
He had quite a distinctive approach, didn’t he?
At the 2020 Ameripolitan Awards, J.M. got the Founder of the Sound Award, and they asked me to present it to him. In my speech I said, ‘I don’t know that Sun Records would have been the Sun Records it became without J.M.’s drumming.’ There was a definite sound that he had, and that’s what gave Sun a lot of its personality. I just don’t think we would have had the same sound or the same legacy had J.M. Van Eaton not been playing drums.
Just as my dad would say, ‘If you’re not doing anything different, you’re not doing anything at all.’ And J.M.’s drumming was completely different from anybody else’s that I’ve heard — except for the guys that are trying to imitate him. You never knew if he was going to do a roll, or what he was going to do. And he had that shuffle beat.
J.M. left full-time music behind for many years before coming back to the stage. Did he still have it when he got back in the game?
Oh, he definitely did. Probably 20 years ago, he brought a gospel group into the studio. And he played sessions with different people, just from kind of hanging around at Phillips Recording. Those guys that came out of Sun liked to just hang around. That’s what they did at Sun, they hung around.
Of course, you can’t leave Roland Janes out of the equation, either. Because J.M. and Roland were like a team. When Roland passed, they did a tribute to him at the Shell, and me and J.M. and Travis Wammack all got together and played.
J.M. eventually moved to the Tuscumbia/Muscle Shoals area and bought a house, and he always played quite a bit over there with different people. He played with Travis Wammack a lot. And I saw him and played with him more often there, since I was in the Shoals quite a bit because of our radio stations. We were better friends as adults, you know what I mean? And he just loved the Shoals area, and everybody there loved him.
He was just an extremely likable guy, wasn’t he?
I just can’t say enough about J.M.’s drumming, but also what a great person he was. I mean, I think he knew he was a great drummer, but maybe he didn’t. He never was one to say, ‘Hey, I’m a great drummer.’ But he just was. If you had J.M. on your session, you knew who was playing drums just by listening to him. And that was a signature Sam Phillips/Sun trademark, was that everybody over there sounded like themselves — and different. Tell me one drummer that J.M. sounded like!
Did you see or speak to J.M. soon before he passed away?
I did talk to J.M. the other day, I think it was a day before he passed away. We just had a little brief conversation. I told him how much I loved him and how important he was to everything. But he was pretty weak. He wasn’t really in the greatest shape, you know? Once his kidneys failed, he went downhill fairly quick. But up until that point, he was in pretty good health.
I’m gonna miss J.M. I really am. And I think J.M. was one of the most important people in the history of rock and roll music. I really do.
A celebration of life for J.M. Van Eatonwill be heldon Friday, February 23rd, at First Assembly Memphis, 8650 Walnut Grove Road, Cordova, from 6 to 8 p.m. A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. on Saturday, March 2nd, at Cypress Moon Studios, 1000 Alabama Ave., Sheffield, Alabama. Call (256)381-5745 for details.
Bob Johnson, who coined
“Million Dollar Quartet” (left), with Sam Phillips, Elvis, and UPI’s Memphis bureau chief, Leo Soroka. (Photo: Courtesy The Phillips Archive)
It was sometime in early 1952 when Don Paull and the Canyon Caravan released their debut 78 rpm single “Too Little Lovin’,” a record destined to fall into obscurity not long after. It’s mainly notable for being the first release on a fledgling label that the world might still be celebrating now, 70 years later, if the music had borne any mark of distinction. But you can’t win them all, especially with what was presumably the standard-issue Western swing sound of the day. All that was memorable about that release was the label: Sun. And even that was a flop.
But wait, let’s rewind. A flop? As it turns out, there’s an alternative history here, in a tale filled with what celebrated author Peter Guralnick calls “the other directions that might have been taken.” While the tiny Sun label of Albuquerque, New Mexico, simply evaporated within a year’s time, another company of the same name released its first single, “Drivin’ Slow,” by 15-year-old “alto wizard” Johnny London. There were twin Suns, you might say, born in 1952, only one of which survived. Only one of which went on to change the world.
It’s no accident that that resonates with the mythology of Elvis Presley, of course, for the Memphis-based Sun Records kickstarted his global success; for many, that’s where the Sun Records story begins and ends. Yet there are whole worlds and many diverse roads, both taken and not taken, contained in the Sun story. That’s made abundantly clear in a new deluxe volume published by Weldon Owen International, The Birth of Rock ‘N’ Roll: The Illustrated Story of Sun Records and the 70 Recordings that Changed the World. Now, 70 years later, those diverse roads are what make the label’s story so compelling.
That those stories are foregrounded is a testament to the volume’s seriousness of purpose. While it strikes the eye as a lovely coffee table book, the glossy pages and beautifully rendered archival photographs are complemented by the first-class writing of both Guralnick, who penned the definitive biography of Sun founder Sam Phillips, and Colin Escott, best known for his 1991 history of Sun, Good Rockin’ Tonight. All photos and layouts aside, it is their words which elevate The Birth of Rock ‘N’ Roll above the typical coffee table fare.
As Guralnick notes, “I think the book is a tribute to Sam’s statement: ‘If you’re not having fun, it isn’t worth doing.’ For me, this was just a lot of fun. It was such a pleasure working with both Colin and Karyn Gerhard, who was the editor on it. It was really a challenge at times, just making the book live up to what it was about, through its content. I’ve written a lot about Sun and Sam over the years, and when Karyn called up about this initially, ‘No’ was on the tip of my tongue. But I listened to Karyn’s vision of the book and what it could be, and ‘No’ never came out. I just said, ‘Yes.’”
Junior Parker (Photo: Courtesy Showtime)“Mystery Train” Record Label (Photo: Courtesy The John Boija Collection)
Beyond the Hits
It’s fortuitous that such a book might appear now, as Sun turns 70, fast on the heels of Baz Luhrmann’s film Elvis, not to mention the 2017 Sun Records miniseries, for it radically reframes what really mattered about the indie label. “It’s focused, the book. It’s not just all over the place,” says Guralnick. “Colin and I clearly have written so much about so many of the subjects in the book, but just reading Colin’s accounts, to me, they’re fresh. He’s not just recapping what he’s said before. For both of us, the opportunity to write in a somewhat different context about something we’d both written about before afforded us with an opportunity to tell the story in a somewhat different way.”
For his part, Guralnick’s contribution tells the Sun Records story through 70 little slabs of wax: an historical-minded sampling of the singles that made Sun great. And, as the author emphasizes, each selection is notable for how it fleshes out our understanding of Sun, above and beyond any commercial or musical success it may or may not represent. “I tried to use these selections of the different records to tell the story of Sun in a different way,” he says. “They’re not always my favorite. There’s nothing there I would disown, but the point is that in choosing some of the records — whether it was a single by Charlie Feathers, which showed a different direction he might have gone in, or by the Brewsteraires or the Jones Brothers, which suggest yet another direction Sam might have gone in — I’m trying to show that no paths were prescribed and no paths were proscribed. His curiosity was wide-ranging.”
Indeed, specific stories aside, it is Sam Phillips’ curiosity and venturesome taste that are most striking when perusing the 70 singles, underscored by the many blues tracks on Sun, now regarded as legendary. The first four on the list were never Sun releases at all, yet are crucial to the story, starting with the game-changing “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats, whose guitar amp was damaged during the drive up from Clarksdale, Mississippi. As Guralnick writes, “When the incongruously dapper white man [Phillips] plugged it in and turned on the power, there was a loud buzzing noise … but Sam Phillips seemed strangely undaunted. He liked the sound, he said, it was original, it was different — which for him evidently was the hallmark of creativity.”
Joe Hill Louis (Photo: Courtesy The Sheldon Harris Collection, University of Mississippi Libraries)“Gotta Let You Go” Record Label (Photo: Courtesy The John Boija Collection)
It’s the Phillips
Phillips’ embrace of strangeness helped establish his Memphis Recording Service, opened in 1950, as a go-to source of unique tracks for other labels like Chess and Modern to release. Sun Records did not yet exist, but its reigning aesthetic was already in place, expressed in Phillips’ oft-quoted maxim, “If you are not doing something different, you are not doing anything at all.” It turned out that the Delta Cats’ guitar distortion, which has led many to name “Rocket 88” the “first rock-and-roll record,” was nothing new to Phillips by then. A year earlier, he had already put his faith in Joe Hill Louis, the one-man-band.
After recording Louis playing and singing “Gotta Let You Go” and “Boogie in the Park” in the summer of 1950, Phillips was moved to start his own label in partnership with the gonzo Memphis DJ, Dewey Phillips (no relation). Appropriately dubbed “It’s The Phillips,” the label went nowhere, but it did set the stage for Sun. Louis’ guitar sound added a greasy crunch to the instrument’s sound that was nigh-unprecedented, with the exception of John Lee Hooker’s 1948 release on Modern Records, “Boogie Chillen’.” Hooker’s single had become a guiding star of sorts for Phillips. It embodied the very strangeness that Phillips would end up chasing the rest of his life.
Regarding “Boogie Chillen’,” Guralnick notes today that “that record was so influential, on Sam and the whole history of Sun. I forget how many remakes of it there were [on Sun], maybe just two or three, but you also have Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘Whole Lotta Twistin’,’ which is also a remake of John Lee Hooker’s tune.” Indeed, it was boogie and blues that defined the output of the Memphis Recording Service from the start, be it Howlin’ Wolf or B.B. King. It was only natural that Sam Phillips began to chafe at the limited possibilities of simply selling his masters to labels in other cities; serving as both their recording engineer and A&R man, it was his aesthetic that guided the whole process. He deserved a bigger slice, and a greater say in what was or was not released.
Thus was Sun Records born, as Escott limns in his pithy yet brief overview of the label’s history. And if the first release was an uncharacteristically jazzy blues by a teenage “alto wizard,” it was followed, (after a brief hiatus) in January of 1953 with a string of unpolished blues by the likes of Willie Nix, Walter Horton, Rufus Thomas Jr., D.A. Hunt, Memphis Ma Rainey, Jimmy DeBerry, and The Prisonaires. It was a mix of the soon-to-be famous with those consigned to obscurity, all benefiting from Sam Phillips’ ear for unique sounds.
An Open Door Policy
As Guralnick puts it, “Sam set the entire direction of everything that was going on there, until Jack Clement came in. He did everything himself, along with Marion Keisker’s assistance in every other aspect except the recording. She was invaluable, and someone he could lean on. But the point is, it was a one-man operation.” A crucial component of the operation was that man’s uniquely progressive vision.
Jerry Phillips, Sam’s youngest son, who oversees the living legacy of Sam Phillips Recording on Madison, reflects on his father’s character today. “Sam had an open door policy, particularly when he started out in 1950 with Black artists. You could walk in there and if he liked what he heard, he’d put a record out on you or lease your record to Chess or Modern or someone like that. He was looking for the talent, man. And he was looking for something different. He was a passionate guy who had to work really, really hard to record all those artists. While I was at home in bed or studying for school, he was up there in the studio, working his ass off with all these Black artists.”
Sam Phillips’ openness to Black music grew from a passionate love of the music itself, more than any sense that he could cash in on a particular sound. As Escott writes, “In 1952, R&B sales reportedly totaled less than kiddie discs. Phillips was chasing a tiny piece of a small market.” Yet, Guralnick writes a few pages later, “There was nothing, Sam felt, that could ‘tell the truth like the blues, something so absolutely true, so close to life’ that it just cut to the core of human experience.” The sincerity of those words was embodied in Phillips’ willingness to take a chance on a relative unknown named Chester Burnett, aka Howlin’ Wolf. Upon first hearing Wolf, Phillips thought, “My God, this is where the soul of man never dies.”
That contrasts starkly with a growing counter-narrative of today, which often paints Elvis, Phillips, or both as the villains in a reductionist cartoon of cultural theft from the African Americans whose music was deeply imprinted in the minds of both. In fact, though he surely hoped to profit from his work, Phillips’ deep appreciation of Black artists in their own right helped launch the music careers of many. According to Guralnick’s write-up of record number three, Wolf’s “Moanin’ At Midnight,” Phillips always believed that Wolf could have been, as Phillips put it, “the counterpart of Elvis — this guy would have been huge with white youngsters, along with Black.”
To Jerry Phillips, this makes sense if one considers how his father grew up, working on a farm in Alabama. “On the tenant farm they had both Black and white cotton pickers on there. He heard them all singing in the fields, and their hearts and souls coming up through that.” Furthermore, Sam was open to people of all classes as well as races. “Most all of the people who came through his studio, except maybe Elvis, but like Carl Perkins or Jerry Lee Lewis, were country people all the way. All those people were. There was nothing sophisticated about them at all, until you got to Charlie Rich, who was pretty much a jazz piano player, actually. That’s what he liked. Yet Sam would tell you that Howlin’ Wolf’s about as sophisticated as you can get.
“His daddy died when he was in 10th grade, and he had to quit school,” Jerry continues. “He never got a high school diploma. He had to go to work. I think he got a lot of his work ethic from having to do that. He wanted to be a criminal defense attorney, and he would have been a good one. He was always for the underdog. He was always for those people who didn’t stand a chance. That’s where his interest in recording Black artists came in. In my family, there wasn’t any racism. There just wasn’t.”
Furthermore, Sam Phillips cultivated a culture within the Sun Records organization that reflected his values. The favorite Sun song of longtime employee Marion Keisker, who put her heart and soul into the organization, was a blues track, “Time Has Made a Change.” Guralnick recalls, “She loved that Jimmy DeBerry song. While she was almost exclusively focused on Sam, who drew her in, it’s a tribute to her that she could be open. She was wide-open to issues of racial justice and to gender equity.”
Carrying the Torch
The rest of the Sun story is burned into our collective consciousness, of course, through countless mythologizing iterations of the Elvis Presley story, not to mention the birth of rock-and-roll and its country cousin, rockabilly. After the first 40 pages of the 70 singles, we finally come to Sun’s first release of a white artist, in early 1954, and of course the discovery of Presley that year. Even there, The Birth of Rock ‘N’ Roll has some surprises, as we learn that the biggest selling artist on Sun was not Elvis, but Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” in January of 1956. That, too, carried Phillips’ democratic ethos: It was the first song in history to top the country, R&B, and pop charts.
The label carried on for over a decade after those initial epochal hits by Perkins, Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and others, finally being sold to Shelby Singleton in 1969. But, according to Jerry Phillips, the label’s continued legacy was still championed by the Phillips family. It was a labor of love. “I can’t leave my late brother Knox out of this,” he says. “When Sam sold Sun to Shelby Singleton, Knox picked the torch up and carried it on through, not letting people forget what Sun Records was. He was always on a crusade to keep people aware of Sun Records and its impact on the world. He was a real torch bearer for our family. And he’s the one who introduced Sam to Peter Guralnick. So we suggested that something Knox had written be used in the book [as the afterword]. Because we felt like Knox needed to be included. I was always the rebel of the family, and Knox was the one who was doing the heavy lifting.”
That heavy lifting has ensured Sun’s legacy, as the new book by Guralnick and Escott marks the Sun catalog once again finding a new home. “After 70 years, it just got bought again,” says Jerry in disbelief. “It sold once in 1969, and then got bought again last year by Primary Wave. Now they’re releasing a new compilation album once a month. That’s 70 years, and they’re treating it like it’s a brand-new product almost, you know? They’re looking at it like this stuff is just timeless. And it is. This new book, it’s educational. At one time, Sam Phillips was the hottest record producer in the world, when you think about it. And none of those artists sounded like each other.”
I love perfect imperfection, I really do. Perfect? That’s the devil. There’s too much powder and rouge around. People want the real thing. — Sam Phillips
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 TheNew 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.
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.”
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.”
Imagine what the world would look like today if Sam Phillips had never started a recording business out of 706 Union. The blues would still have been a fascinating Southern musical style, but would Howlin’ Wolf have ever come to the attention of Leonard Chess’ record label? Would B. B. King have ever moved beyond his career as a radio DJ? Rock-and-roll, or something like it, might have evolved anyway, even if Ike Turner hadn’t been able to take advantage of the Memphis Recording Service’s dirt-cheap rates to bring the Delta Cats in to record his song “Rocket 88” in the spring of 1951. But Elvis Presley would have never had the opportunity to record “My Happiness” for his mom and might have died a truck driver.
Deprived of its biggest star — indeed, the biggest star the world had ever seen — would rock-and-roll have spread, or would it become nothing more than a regional novelty? Without Sam Phillips or Elvis, the Beatles would have been a skiffle band, if they’d ever bothered to pick up guitars at all. Without Sam Phillips, you wouldn’t know who Johnny Cash was, and country music would lack its greatest poet and its social conscience. Without Sam Phillips, Memphis would be an insignificant backwater, not the origin point for America’s greatest cultural export.
Films and television shows have told the story of the birth of the music before. Elvis himself starred in Jailhouse Rock, which, on some level, was a version of his own origin story. In 1979, Halloween director John Carpenter cast Kurt Russell in a made-for-TV biopic called simply Elvis. Jerry Lee Lewis got the biopic treatment in 1989, when Dennis Quaid memorably played the Killer in Great Balls of Fire!. In 2005, Walk the Line dramatized Johnny Cash and June Carter’s epic love story with Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. But while there have been nonfiction books and documentaries recounting Sam Phillips’ story — most notably Morgan Neville’s Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, based on Peter Guralnick’s book of the same name — Phillips has only played a supporting role onscreen.
CMT
In 2015, Leslie Greif got a call from cable network CMT. Fresh off the success of Nashville, the network was looking for another original TV property to develop. “I had just seen [Broadway musical] Million Dollar Quartet, and it just flashed in my head, wouldn’t it be great to tell the story of the birth of rock-and-roll? It all came out of Memphis. That’s what got me going.”
Greif is a veteran TV producer who developed shows such as Walker, Texas Ranger and the Emmy-winning 2012 miniseries Hatfields & McCoys. Greif says his father was friends with songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who penned early rock-and-roll hits such as “Hound Dog,” “Kansas City,” and “Jailhouse Rock,” and he was a huge fan of the music. “I grew up surrounded by it as a little kid, and I loved it,” he says.
Greif optioned Million Dollar Quartet and started working on the project while he was in production on another show, Texas Rising, which was helmed by director Roland Joffé. “He talked about it quite a lot,” says Joffé. “I loved the area he was looking at — that wonderful time in the 1950s when all of this musical movement, which really gave birth to pop music, and therefore much of modern music as we know it, was actually happening. It was a fascinating time, and it raised really interesting issues about art and music in general.”
On the West Coast, writer and producer Gil Grant needed a change after six seasons’ work on NCIS: Los Angeles. “If I was going to do another show about PTSD, I was going to get PTSD!” he says. “I was looking for something a little more interesting.”
He interviewed with Greif’s ThinkFactory Media. “This was originally designed to be a four-part miniseries. Once they decided there was so much rich material here, let’s open it up and spread it out and see if we can do a series, they realized they needed a show runner who had done it before. Their experience was in miniseries and reality. So, I got the gig. I had done a musical before. Early in my career, I created a show called Hull High. It was a high school musical directed by Kenny Ortega, who went on to do High School Musical. We were only about 20 years ahead of our time. This really was up my alley.”
Drake Milligan (left) and Chad Michael Murray
Meanwhile in Memphis . . .
Around the same time, Memphis Film and Television commissioner Linn Sitler got a call from a producer inquiring about Tennessee’s state film incentive program. The call came at a particularly opportune time. Sitler, with the help of State Senator Mark Norris, state film commissioner Bob Raines, and the county and city offices, had managed to gather state support for new production. There were two candidates: the crime show Quarry and a 20th Century Fox adaptation of Peter Guralnick’s Elvis biography Last Train to Memphis. “Quarry had been gung ho to base here, even though we could not match Louisiana’s incentives. What had happened was that, 20th Century Fox went away — they shelved that project, at least temporarily — and Quarry decided to shoot almost everything in Louisiana. Here we had whined and moaned and bullied, and gotten almost $4 million, and all of our projects had gone away! So when the call came in, I could say, ‘Oh, we happen to have over $4 million for qualified projects!'”
Hollywood accounting is notoriously opaque, and the nuts and bolts of film incentives are even more confusing. But the bottom line is that state film incentives can make or break a production. “It makes all the difference, because if you go to one state, you can buy a Buick for $25,000. If you go to another state, you can get the same Buick for $18,000,” says Sitler.
Greif and Joffé really wanted to base the production in the city where the history had happened. “If it wasn’t for the tremendous help from all of your people in the state of Tennessee and the city of Memphis, Linn Sitler and Senator Norris and Bob Raines. … These people assembled all of the proper entities. The Chamber of Commerce chipped in; the tourism bureau chipped in. They made it possible. And we had great guys like Jack Soden from the Elvis Presley estate. They all supported this project, and once they did that, they opened up the world of the local Memphis community. Everyone in Memphis, the Peabody Hotel, the Gibson Guitar factory, Humes High — every entity was like, what can we do to be helpful? All that spirit, combined with a little good luck, made it so we were able to bring this project to Memphis.”
Chad Michael Murray
Searching for Sam
For months, the production searched for its Sam Phillips before calling on actor Chad Michael Murray, who had worked with Greif and Joffé on Texas Rising. “I just kind of starting looking into Sam’s life, and I fell in love with the guy,” says Murray. “I thought he was insane in the most beautiful way. He was so ahead of his time! … I call him the Wizard of Oz. He was the man behind the curtain pulling the strings for these gigantic legends and icons.”
Murray’s research for the role included spending time in the Bluff City. “One person would tell you one version of the Sam Phillips story, another person would tell you another version of it. I just kind of took pieces from what people told me in Memphis, and everything that I studied and read. … Sam was a charming, sophisticated, complicated motor. He was just go, go, go, go, go. When I sat down with Roland, we really wanted to make sure these things came through in the work. That passion, that drive, that charm, and charisma.”
Grant says getting the character of Sam Phillips right was crucial, particularly the love triangle between Sam, his wife, Becky, played by Jennifer Holland, and his assistant at Sun, Marion Keisker, played by Margaret Anne Florence. “Sam was a very complicated individual. He was a very flawed individual — his family will talk about that — but he was a brilliant individual. On the one hand, here was this guy who, musically, he would get whatever he could get out of you to make you better than you are. And yet at the same time, he’s fooling around on his wife with Marion. I think he had a great deal of guilt over it, but it certainly didn’t stop him. And it doesn’t end there. Yet he stayed married to Becky his entire life. It’s a tough role. You have what could be a very unsympathetic character, but Chad is naturally very charming, kind of like Sam was, and he played into that. I think you can see the conflict on his face. He loved Becky, but he loved Marion in a different way. And you also see the raw passion when he sees a musician that sparks him. Chad really prepared for the role. He took it to heart.”
Margaret Anne Florence
Marion
Florence’s mother was born in Memphis in 1948. “My grandfather actually owned a couple of restaurants: The Riviera Grill and a place called The Old Master Says,” says the actress, now based in New York City. She says her familiarity with the city’s culture and music helped get her the part but that she was not familiar with Marion Keisker, the woman who was the first person to record Elvis. “Unfortunately, the women are not well documented in this time period. It’s been the blessing and the curse of the role. It’s nice that I don’t have that same pressure of being somebody like Elvis or Johnny Cash, that people are so familiar with and have an idea of how they should be played,” she says.
Keisker, who died in 1989, was a graduate of Southwestern in Memphis (now Rhodes College) and had a radio career of her own before joining Sam at Sun. “I don’t think she took a lot of flack from anybody,” says Florence. “That’s been an awesome part of the character to play. Luckily, the writers built that in to what we’re doing. I think it’s really important that you see her standing up for herself all the time, in any situation, whether it’s with Sam or with other producers who come into the studio. … That’s something the director really stressed, just to keep her as intelligent and on top of things and respectable — a woman that people could admire, even though she was maybe not doing the right thing, having this affair with Sam.”
Romantic tension between Sam, Becky, and Marion is crucial to Sun Records‘ drama, but the facts of the affair are unclear. “Some people believe it happened, some people say it didn’t,” says Murray.
“We’ve always been very, very clear that we’re not a documentary,” says Grant. “We’re doing a show that’s inspired by true events. We try to be respectful of the characters we’re portraying. We try to get the big moments right. But within that, we’re a dramatic piece of fiction.”
But there’s no doubt that the spark between Murray and Florence gives Sun Records life. “Chemistry is a very strange thing,” says Joffé. “It’s not something you can talk about. You’ve got to find a way to get those actors to sort of engage with each other. You can do that by telling them slightly different things that they want to get out of the scene, so they’re discovering what the scene is about as they go. A lot of the chemistry is discovery. When the actors are starting a scene, they don’t know where it’s going to end up. I think that keeps it very alive and helps the birth of chemistry. It also helps if the actors both have a sense of humor, because a lot of chemistry is in humor. In those little looks they exchange. They have lovely chemistry, those two.”
Drake Milligan
Elvis
Drake Milligan’s first screen role was playing Elvis Presley in the 2014 short film, Nobody. “The producers saw the short, and they brought me out to the calls in Memphis,” says the Fort Worth, Texas, native.
Playing one of the most famous people who ever lived is a heavy burden for a novice actor. “My goal is to portray him as humanly as possible, and to get the feel of what it must have been like to be Elvis, coming from Tupelo and not having a lot of money,” he says. “Then all the sudden, fame hits, and it’s a roller coaster ride. He went from government housing and Memphis public high school to being the biggest star in the world in a matter of a year and a half.”
“He did brilliantly,” says Joffé. “Drake is a natural. I loved working with him, because it was almost like doing a documentary. He has a natural charm and a natural Elvis shyness in him that I really like. That’s a side of Elvis that people don’t remember, the fact that the young Elvis was very shy. A lot of things he did afterwards was his way of dealing with his shyness. A lot of the pain of Elvis’ life, and there was quite a lot of it, had to do with that fact that in some ways, he was a home body, and in other ways he was an icon and a wild man.”
Milligan, Joe Chrest, and Billy Gardell
Memphis Makes It
According to documents provided by the film commission, the total expenditure in Shelby County exceeded $6 million. Sun Records shot in Memphis for 70 days in 2016. “That was longer than most films I have catered,” says Erik Proveaux, owner of Fuel, the restaurant, food truck, and catering firm that provided food for the mammoth production. “That’s a huge deal for the economy. Each of those days is like a big production. It’s like doing a wedding every day for 70 days. It paid for a new truck for me and allowed me to move ahead on other aspects of my business.”
It was the biggest production Memphis had seen in a decade, and that had a big impact on local crew members who had been struggling. “Some crew people, I know of one for sure, had not had health insurance,” says Sitler. “Even though this guy was not a union member, he still had to receive union benefits. He was able to have surgery he had put off because of Sun Records.”
Joffé, who has had a long career in film and TV and has shot all over the world, says his experiences in Memphis were unforgettable. “The show hinges on Memphis’ heritage in many ways, and I think Memphis should be very proud of it. The history of Memphis is the history of your parents and grandparents and their parents. That’s really important, when people live in a city that has a sense of past lives lived. Those lives affect the city. … I felt when I was there that this is a city that’s getting itself together, a city that’s re-finding its voice and its confidence. It has a lot to offer. I really enjoyed being there.”
Grant says the city’s stock of varied architecture, much of which is still standing from the 1950s and ’60s, made it easy for the production to get the necessary vintage look. But he could tell the future was bearing down. “I feel like Memphis is ready to pop. Downtown Memphis is ready to become one of the great small cities in the United States,” he says.
It’s beginning to look like I’m not going to get the call to appear in the new television series, Million Dollar Quartet, currently filming in Memphis. Actually, we did get a call from a set designer who had heard that we had some period furniture that might fit the production. Since half of my home is still furnished in Mid-Century Parents’ House Modern, I thought we might make the cut. But after my wife told him we’d be glad to rent him some stuff, but we weren’t going to give it away, he never called back.
Those Hollywood types.
In reality, these folks are Nashville showbiz types who are filming an eight-part mini-series based on the Tony-award-winning musical of the same name to air in November on the CMT Network. An open casting call was held in February for local talent to show their stuff. I was in the process of brushing my blue-suedes when I noticed that the only character over 35 was Colonel Tom Parker — an obese, avaricious poltroon — so it would demand method acting. My hopes for trying out for Uncle Vester were dashed when I heard most of the action takes place in the studio. Not the Sun Studio, mind you, but a look-alike soundstage similar to the one used in the Jerry Lee Lewis “mockumentary,” Great Balls of Fire.
The CA‘s Bob Mehr reported that the film score and other recordings are to be done in Nashville with Nashville musicians. Not to denigrate the excellent musicians of Music City, but that plan seems a little counter-intuitive, considering that you’re documenting an event that never could have happened in regimented Nashville. Only in “real gone” Memphis could such a confluence of talent assemble in one place, a recording studio no less, to basically goof off.
We have world-class musicians and recording studios here, so why spend the extra gas? Back in 1966, the Lovin’ Spoonful sang “There’s thirteen-hundred and fifty-two guitar-pickers in Nashville.” I’ll bet there’s 100,000 by now. The executive producer of the series is Leslie Greif, who actually is a Hollywood type, whose credits include the vastly entertaining mini-series, Hatfields & McCoys, which won several Emmy awards, and Gene Simmons Family Jewels, because a brother’s got to make a buck. However, he also produced Meet Wally Sparks, with Rodney Dangerfield, which makes him a hero in my eyes.
I’m reasonably familiar with the tale of the Million Dollar Quartet. First, because I was a Sun artist only a decade removed and a mile east of the actual event, and secondly, I was employed as a tour guide at Sun Studio for a time until they fired me because my tours went too long. It was my fault. I was always thinking of one more tidbit to tell the tourists, and I was gumming up the works. The boss said I just wasn’t fitting in with their “formula.” But before I was relieved of my duties, the management treated the staff to a viewing of Million Dollar Quartet musical at the Orpheum, for which I am grateful.
The story is loosely based on a historic gathering at Sun Studio, December 4, 1956. Carl Perkins was recording his hit song “Matchbox” with new artist Jerry Lee Lewis on piano, when Elvis strolled in, flush with the first success of his meteoric rise to superstardom, and escorting a Las Vegas showgirl named Marilyn Evans. The accepted story has Johnny Cash arriving from an afternoon of Christmas shopping, although Cash denied it. “I was the first to arrive and the last to leave,” Cash wrote in his autobiography. “I was there to watch Carl record.” Whatever the sequence, when the group gathered around the piano, Sam Phillips immediately called a newspaper columnist and a photographer while his engineer, Jack “Cowboy” Clement, pushed “record.” The result was an indelible photograph and a spontaneous jam session that included snippets of nearly 50 songs and studio conversations that weren’t released in their entirety until 1990.
The TV series expands upon the musical, featuring the greatest hit songs you’d expect, plus Memphis characters like Dewey Phillips, B.B. King, and Ike Turner. But there is one more prominent character who should be in the film.
Before the historians and the discographers descended on Sam Phillips, he was an approachable man who loved sitting behind his big desk reflecting on his glorious career. I once asked him who was the most exciting artist he ever recorded, and without hesitation, he replied, “The Howlin’ Wolf.” He said that Jerry Lee and Charlie Rich may have had the most talent, but the Wolf had a presence in the studio that you could feel. Mr. Phillips said, “His band knew not to mess up, or the Wolf would give them a look that put the fear of God into them.”
I never knew any of those guys in that famous photo. I’m content in knowing I was a tiny part of it. That’s why I hope this series can capture the essence of these now legendary characters. In 2000, the A&E Network premiered their documentary, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, at the Cannon Center. There was a meet-and-greet beforehand, and I waited my turn while former Sun luminaries surrounded the great man. Finally, I was able to say, “Congratulations, Mr. Phillips. This is really exciting.” He looked at me askance and asked, “Randy, how long have we been knowing each other?” I did some quick math and said, “I guess about 35 years.” He smiled and said, “Don’t you think you could call me Sam?” I instinctively replied, “Sure, Mr. Phillips.” I trust this mini-series will treat him with the same due respect.
It’s a well-known fact that Johnny Cash walked the line — and he had the size 13 boots to do it. That may not be the reason he wrote a song called “Big Foot,” but, regardless, Johnny Cash left some pretty large shoes to fill.In order to finish writing Hello, I‘m Johnny Cash, the first picture book for young people about the Man in Black, I knew I had to walk in his footsteps. I needed to put myself in those big boots of his, to feel the soil under my feet. I needed to head back to the beginning, to a place called Dyess, Arkansas — a town so small, it wasn’t on any map I saw. Even a good friend who lived about 45 minutes away in Memphis had never heard of it. So when the “highway” on my GPS turned into a dirt road, I knew I was on track.
Greg Neri
The dirt road leading to Cash’s Dyess, Arkansas, childhood home
My first impression of the road leading into Dyess was a perfect Cash image: lonesome. It was so desolate, I could park my car in the middle of the highway, sit by a trickle of a river that weaved its way through the Deltalands, and never feel the urge to move the car. I could look in any direction as far as the eye could see and not spot a single living soul.
This was where Cash came from. An extreme landscape that had room enough for dreams to form but was tough enough that he had to fight to attain them. When I found his childhood home, a dilapidated house with a few bare trees, it was no Graceland. I stepped onto the gravel and was hit by the wind sweeping off of the endless horizon. It actually howled.
Greg Neri
Cash’s childhood home
The home seemed old and uncared for. There was a metal sign that made this monument to the man official, but the place itself was far from being worthy of his name (though that would soon be rectified). I walked around the property, alone. It seemed odd that on this day, the day of his birth 80 years ago, nobody would be here. Where was the parade, the ribbon cutting for this giant of a man? It seemed far away at the moment.
When I stepped onto the fields surrounding his house, I felt an immediate connection to young J.R. (as he was known in those days). My boot sank ankle deep into the mud, and when I attempted to extract it, only my bare foot emerged. The shoe and sock remained stuck in this gunk he’d called gumbo. Now I knew why. I realized why his father had to stop the truck far from the house when they first arrived back in 1935: it would go no farther in this gumbo. I couldn’t imagine what it took to clear this land of thickets and boulders and scrub oak to turn it into cotton.
Greg Neri
The ‘gumbo’ muddy sludge Cash referred to in the fields surrounding his Dyess home
Little details like that ground a story. I imagined 5-year-old J.R. sitting on the porch as his family picked cotton in the fields, listening to the classic train song “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride” on his small battery-powered radio. One of his earliest memories was of his father jumping off a train in front of their old home in southern Arkansas. Unlike Hobo Bill, they’d survived the Great Depression — barely — and began eking out a meager life in a New Deal farming community that was opened by Eleanor Roosevelt herself.
But being a cotton farmer was hard work, and as I stood there in the harsh winter sun, stuck in the mud with my face sandblasted by the wind, I could see why J.R. might spend so much time escaping this harsh reality for one filled with music from faraway places.
I ambled down a long, empty road that led to the town of Dyess. It took a good hour. Empty fields lined both sides of the road and a dead, dark creek sat alongside. A vulture or hawk circled high overhead waiting to see if I was going to make it to town.
This was the road J.R. had followed in the pitch-black night, singing to himself to ward off the growling wildcats. There was the fishing hole where he heard the news from his father that his closest brother, Jack, had been sucked into a circular saw and was close to death. There was the shack where he’d first heard a crippled boy playing guitar as good as Jimmy Rodgers and then asked the boy to teach him to play. Every detail came to life.
The community of 402 townsfolk had a small circle with a flagpole planted in the middle. Surrounding that was a partially destroyed theater, an old community center, a gas station/café, and a high school. J.R.’s school. Just as when J.R. had seen his radio heroes, the Louvin Brothers, perform for the first time at his school auditorium, something very special was happening this day in the same building: The extended Cash family was gathering from all over to celebrate what would have been Johnny’s 80th birthday.
Greg Neri
The event wasn’t advertised or Tweeted. You couldn’t buy tickets because they weren’t for sale. I’d seen a small personal mention of it through my research and knew I had to go. Rosanne Cash was going to be there, and by coincidence, a friend of a friend knew her manager and I had an in. It was a family reunion: Johnny’s brother Tommy, his sister Joanne, and his children — John Carter, Kathy, Cindy, and Tara were all coming. As I sat in the parking lot waiting for everyone to arrive, I slowly became aware that I was an outsider. My first clue was from an Arkansas State Trooper wearing a big hat, mustache, and mirrored sunglasses who leaned over me and said: “You ain’t from ’round here, are you?” I played friendly though, and as soon as he heard I was from Tampa, stories of his cousin came bubbling up and all was good.
People started arriving — nephews, nieces, cousins, second cousins, friends from back in the day, about 100 Cashes from the extended clan, some locals … and me. A smattering of small-town media and a few folks from Arkansas State University milled about, recording and helping with the event. Family mingled, most looking country; one — a niece, looking lost, like she’d wandered off the pages of teen Vogue: black mini dress, hoop earrings, and navigating the gravel in high heels. Johnny’s surviving sister, Joanne, spotted the original family piano that her mother played back in the old house and started tinkling on it. I gazed at old family photos blown up and framed for the gathering. Rosanne’s manager saw me and took me to a back room where Rosanne and John Carter were busily going over last-minute notes. A show was about to begin.
Greg Neri
A 1949 Cash family photo
It was thrilling to see the immediate family take the stage. This could have been a big media event but it was more reminiscent of an old Carter family barn stomp. It felt homey and right, and I was honored just to witness it. The family traded licks on folk and gospel songs from that era, and then joined together to sing some of Johnny’s songs about cotton and mud and the Flood of ’37.
There was much talk of the restoration efforts being made to save Johnny’s boyhood home. If done right, it would save the town as well.
Author Greg Neri with Johnny’s daughter Rosanne Cash
When Rosanne introduced me to her sisters by saying “he’s writing a book about daddy growing up here,” their eyes lit up; that alone was worth the trip.
I left that gathering floating on air, much as J.R. did when he saw his radio heroes come to life. But I quickly came back to earth. I was heading out for a more remote and heartbreaking location: the grave of Johnny’s beloved brother, Jack. The death of Jack Dempsey Cash probably haunted Johnny the rest of his life. Not a day went by where he didn’t think of his brother or ask himself ‘what would Jack do?’ Jack’s tragic death and its effect on his brother’s life became the spine of my story. His grave was a necessary stop.
I assumed the family would probably go and pay their respects, but I wasn’t prepared for how isolated and lonely the place felt. There was no one there, no signage that there was even a cemetary. Tombstones just appeared along the side of the road. I wandered for a while, until I stumbled across Jack’s small tombstone. I imaged Johnny digging the grave on a warm spring day back in 1944. Not only was he heartbroken and dirty during the service, but his foot swelled up from stepping on a rusty nail. Still, he sang Jack’s favorite gospel songs before they had to return to the fields to work the next day. I righted some old plastic flowers that seemed like they’d been there forever and quietly walked away.
When Johnny Cash left Dyess at 18, he joined the Air Force and was stationed in Landsberg, Germany. But when he returned home, with a new bride in tow, he settled in Memphis, Tennessee, where I was heading next. “I’m going to Memphis,” Cash famously sang. Memphis, Tennessee, birthplace of rock-and-roll and the city where Johnny Cash became a star. These roads were paved, not with gold, but with cement and asphalt.
The first place I stopped was the first stop Johnny made when he arrived: his brother Roy’s workplace, the Automobile Sales Company on Union Avenue. It appeared deserted. There was no placard marking the historic meeting that occurred on that day back in 1953. This was the spot where Johnny’s music career really began, because it was here that his brother introduced him to two mechanic friends who later helped create that famous boom-chicka-boom sound: Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins. On this day, all I heard was the traffic passing by, drivers unaware of the significance of this closed-up building.
My next stop wasn’t far and turned out to be an empty parking lot with an arrow pointing over an empty sign frame, as if to say this spot was important. The first job Johnny had out of the Air Force was at the Home Equipment Company on Summer Avenue. He made for a lousy door-to-door salesman, preferring to listen to his car radio instead. But it was his boss who knew he had talent for singing, not for selling, and loaned him money to pursue his dream, even sponsoring a small-time radio show featuring Johnny and the Tennessee Two. Without that support, Johnny might’ve high-tailed it back to Dyess or signed up for another round of active duty.
Wandering around this industrial area of town seemed far from the honkytonks and blues clubs on Beale Street. I could feel his frustration on this stretch of used car lots.
My next stop was in a hipster neighborhood on Cooper Avenue, at the old Galloway United Methodist Church. What happened in its basement was a major event in music history. After playing at Grant’s or Perkins’ house for months, the boys decided it was time to perform in public. The only problem was they couldn’t convince any club that they were good enough, especially with their hillbilly music. But a friend asked them to perform some gospel music in a basement at Galloway Methodist.
Johnny loved gospel, so it seemed like the right place to start. Having no proper clothes for a band, they decided to wear the only matching color they had: black. Thus, the Man in Black was born. Funny how accidents can change the face of music.
I then made my way over to another parking lot behind a Save-A-Lot store. It was mostly empty, except for a man washing his car. He probably had no idea that on this very spot at the Lamar Airways shopping center, 21-year-old Johnny Cash first met a country boy named Elvis Presley, who woke him up to a new sound that would take the world by storm. It was supposed to be just a drug store opening with a band on a flatbed truck. But with 19-year-old Elvis singing, Johnny witnessed a hoard of screaming girls and the pulsating music that drove them into a frenzy. He knew that’s where his future lay. He and Elvis became friends. The next day, Elvis told him about his producer, a guy named Sam Phillips over at Sun Records.
If there’s one spot people know about Johnny and Memphis, it’s Sun Records. Here Johnny ambushed Phillips in the parking lot and convinced him to listen to his music. He played gospel and folk, any song he knew from the radio. But when Sam asked him to play something he wrote, Johnny sang “Hey, Porter,” and history was made. Within months, the birthplace of rock-and-roll would produce Elvis, Johnny, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy Orbison. To stand on the spot in the studio and hold the very mic into which Johnny sang “I Walk the Line,” made his whole story seem real.
A.G. Ford
It was a do-or-die moment for Johnny, because he had run out of money and had a daughter (Rosanne) on the way. Right before he cut his first record, his wife Vivian gave birth, and they moved into a duplex on Tutwiler Avenue. Driving by it now shows how much Memphis has changed. The house remains very much as it was. You can imagine Johnny sitting on the porch, strumming his guitar as he wrote the B-side to his first record, “Cry Cry Cry.” But today, it’s a poor neighborhood, far from the suburban block it used to be.
Author Greg Neri holding Cash’s microphone at Sun Records
I went back to Union Avenue to see where the first Johnny Cash song was ever played on the air. Sam asked Johnny to run the first pressing of his single over to WMPS radio, where it would be played live. He watched that golden Sun label spin around as “Hey, Porter” went out over the airwaves. But when the DJ flipped the record, it slipped and broke on the floor. Johnny thought it was the only copy and was devastated until Sam pulled out a box of them.
My final stop at sunset seemed frozen in time. I stood on the stage of the Levitt Shell amphitheater and gazed out at the grassy slope surrounding it, picturing it filled with Memphis teens in their 1950s’ best, plus all of Johnny’s family and friends who’d turned out to see him open for Elvis. It was the first time anyone saw the true power and magnetism he had as a performer, even giving the future King a run for his money. He sang his only two songs, electrifying the crowd so much, they kept calling him back for more. After singing those songs twice more, he pulled out a new one. It was the first time he’d perform the classic that would define his music personality: “Folsom Prison Blues.”
A.G. Ford
I stood there for a long time, marveling at the journey this 23-year-old man had taken from the son of a cotton farmer to music legend. Only 55 miles separated the world of cotton and mud he grew up in and the heyday of Sun Records and rock-and-roll, but it might as well been two different planets. As the sun set and the stars came out, I couldn’t help but wonder at the thrill he surely felt when the crowds wouldn’t let him leave. Standing in his shoes, I could feel the country boy grinning at his good fortune — and a wide open future.
Greg Neri‘s illustrated children‘s book, Hello, I’m Johnny Cash, will be available in September.
Elvis Presley didn’t just walk into Sun Studio fresh off the streets of Memphis and instantly give birth to rock-and-roll. It was his fifth visit to Sam Phillips’ Union Avenue recording service, and his first two attempts of the night were both ballads. Phillips felt the boy’s emotion, but didn’t hear a hit, and he was ready to end the session when Presley relaxed and started goofing off with his guitar, jumping around and playing Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right.” The recording equipment was turned back on, and two days later WHBQ DJ Dewey Phillips played the song on the radio. History. So this isn’t just Independence Day weekend, it’s Rock Week, when the whole world turns toward Memphis to salute the 60th anniversary of Elvis’ first full recording session, and all the magic that happens in the meantime, when you’re just goofing off.
Anniversary festivities kick off Friday, July 4th, at 9:45 p.m., with a very Elvis installment of the Mud Island River Park’s Fireworks Spectacular. Sun Studio hosts the official grand opening of its newly installed “60 Years” exhibit Saturday, July 5th, at noon with a ceremony and cake-cutting event. Visitors to Graceland on July 5th will receive a free limited-edition poster featuring a young Elvis Presley with his 1956 Gibson J200 guitar. Graceland is also offering a special VIP tour package exploring Elvis’ transformation from truck driver to megastar.
Later that evening, Elvis bassist Bill Black will be honored at a Levitt Shell concert and with a Brass Note to be placed on the Beale Street Walk of Fame. The free concert showcases contemporary Memphis artists paying homage to Elvis, Booker T. & the MG’s, Sam & Dave, Al Green, the Staples Singers, and more.
If that’s not enough Elvis for you, there are a variety of special tours, and you can always drop in on the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum’s “60 Years of Rock,” an ongoing timeline exhibit, tracing the history of rock-and-roll beginning, of course, with Elvis, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black’s recording of “That’s All Right.”
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.”
Diane Duncan Phillips 
Diane Duncan Phillips 
Diane Duncan Phillips 
Greg Neri 
Greg Neri 
Greg Neri 
Greg Neri 
Greg Neri 
A.G. Ford 
A.G. Ford 