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
Last week was a dark one in the history of Memphis music, as two of its legends passed away. The deaths of Stan Kesler on October 26 and Rance Allen on October 31 were noted around the world, as each of them, in their own way, had made profound marks on the musical achievements of Memphis for many decades.
In honor of their memories, we present a few of the masterpieces of the recording arts that they made possible, too often neglected in the standard top 100 lists of hit records from this city.
Rance Allen, known as the “Father of Contemporary Gospel Music” and ultimately attaining the position of Bishop in the Church of God in Christ for the Michigan Northwestern Harvest Jurisdiction, grew up in Michigan and formed The Rance Allen Group with brothers Thomas and Steve in his early twenties. In 1972, Stax Records signed the group to newly formed subsidiary label The Gospel Truth, and the combination of their vocal and instrumental talents with Stax created an unforgettably funky version of gospel that is still hard to beat.
RIP Rance Allen & Stan Kesler: Deep Cuts from the Lives of Two Lost Legends (6)
Here they are performing that same year at the historical Wattstax festival in Los Angeles.
RIP Rance Allen & Stan Kesler: Deep Cuts from the Lives of Two Lost Legends (2)
They went from success to success over the coming decades, eventually scoring their first gospel #1 in 1991. In 2007, the Rance Allen Group brought the house down at Stax’s 50th Anniversary celebration at the Orpheum Theatre.
RIP Rance Allen & Stan Kesler: Deep Cuts from the Lives of Two Lost Legends (3)
Stan Kesler was born in Mississippi but moved to Memphis in 1950 and was soon playing with the Snearly Ranch Boys, who ultimately gravitated to Sam Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service and Sun Records. Here’s one unforgettable track they cut there in 1955, co-written by Kesler, released on Sun offshoot label Flip Records. He went on to write many songs, including “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone” and “I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” both recorded by Elvis Presley.
RIP Rance Allen & Stan Kesler: Deep Cuts from the Lives of Two Lost Legends (9)
A multi-instrumentalist, he played bass on Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire,” among others. He also picked up his chops as a recording engineer at Sun, which he would make use of throughout his career. Growing into a producer in his own right, he developed an ear for artists and bands with character in their sound, helping to develop their distinct identities. Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs was the ultimate expression of his production style, and tunes like “Wooly Bully” and “Little Red Riding Hood” have entered the pantheon of pop achievements from that era. Here are two other deep cuts, not heard often enough, from that same brilliant band.
RIP Rance Allen & Stan Kesler: Deep Cuts from the Lives of Two Lost Legends (4)
RIP Rance Allen & Stan Kesler: Deep Cuts from the Lives of Two Lost Legends (5)
Later, at Quintin Claunch’s Goldwax label, he worked primarily as an engineer, but it was Kesler who assembled the crack backing band for soul artist James Carr: guitarist Reggie Young, drummer Gene Chrisman, keyboardist Bobby Emmons, and bassist Tommy Cogbill. These players were later recruited by American Sound Studio and became known for all time as The Memphis Boys. Here they are on two of Carr’s masterpieces, while still working for Goldwax.
RIP Rance Allen & Stan Kesler: Deep Cuts from the Lives of Two Lost Legends (8)
RIP Rance Allen & Stan Kesler: Deep Cuts from the Lives of Two Lost Legends (7)
Through the 80s, he joined a group of former Sun session musicians who traveled the world as Sun Rhythm Section, then retired from music. Looking back on his career in a 2014 profile in The Bartlett Express, he deemed “If I’m A Fool (For Loving You),” recorded by Presley at American Sound Studio in 1969, as his finest achievement as a songwriter.
RIP Rance Allen & Stan Kesler: Deep Cuts from the Lives of Two Lost Legends
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.”
Knoxville native John Paul Keith is unique on the Memphis scene, a classicist who avoids nostalgia, a roots aficionado who writes his own material, a rock ‘n’ roller with one foot in old school soul. Don Bryant, the local R&B legend staging somewhat of a comeback, recently included “One Ain’t Enough (And Two’s Too Many)”, written by Keith and Scott Bomar, on his latest release. As a songwriter, Keith knows a good tune when he hears one. Here’s his take on a choice cut originally recorded by Warren Smith, “Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache,” the lead track on Red Hot: A Memphis Celebration of Sun Records, to be released nationally June 16th on the Americana Music Society label. All revenues from the release will benefit the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
SONG PREMIERE: John Paul Keith sings ‘Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache’
The album’s house band consists of Luther Dickinson (guitar), Cody Dickinson (drums), Rick Steff (piano), Amy LaVere (bass), and Keith (guitar). This track also has a cameo from Jim Spake on baritone sax. (See the accompanying article below for more on this release). Keith’s voice, familiar to Memphians for a number of years, has taken on a more resonant quality of late, with hints of the young Roy Orbison, a change Keith attributes to one specific change of habit. “You know, I quit smoking a few years ago, and it really did make a difference. I smoked for twenty years and never did get a cool rasp. I just was short winded and couldn’t hit the high notes!”
As for this particular title, Keith notes, “That tune is really melodic. A lot of the Sun stuff is obviously rhythm-oriented and blues based. And I love that, but with ‘Red Cadillac’ it was more of a pop thing: a little lighter, and it had this swinging feel to it. And I love Warren Smith, I think he’s really underrated.”
It’s telling that this was the song Bob Dylan chose to interpret for 2001’s Good Rockin’ Tonight: The Legacy of Sun Records (with cover art by Memphis’ own Lamar Sorrento).
SONG PREMIERE: John Paul Keith sings ‘Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache’ (3)
And finally, here’s the original, performed by Louise, Mississippi’s own Warren Smith. Never released in Sun’s heyday, it surfaced later in retrospectives of the label’s history:
SONG PREMIERE: John Paul Keith sings ‘Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache’ (2)
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.
The big news from the third episode of Sun Records is that Johnny Cash finally got something cool to do.
The episode opened with him hanging with his buddies in a beer hall in Landsberg, Germany where he was stationed in the early 1950s. (Idlewild Presbyterian Church’s Fellowship Hall gets a featured cameo as the watering hole.) At the prodding of his buddies, Cash busts out into an impromptu oom-pah song, wowing the crowd. This is the first time Kevin Fonteyne has shown believable talent as a singer—although I have no idea if he actually sang himself—and I started to possibly buy into his Cash portrayal. Later, Cash shows his introspective side as he passes up the opportunity to see a movie in the base lounge to sit by himself with his guitar, working out some songs. He gets a big idea when his buddy casually mentions Folsom prison. We all know where that’s going.
Col. Tom continues to be the most compelling character in the series. When he first see him this week, he’s getting some heat from his bookie—turns out the Colonel likes to gamble, and his eye for the ponies is not as well developed as his eye for singing talent. Nevertheless, his grandiosity is in full effect. He’s already starting to refer to himself in the third person. “Are you proposing impropriety on the Colonel’s part?” he says to Eddy Arnold.
But while his gambling instincts may be faulty, his hucksterism is on point. He sells fans to the fans at the un-air conditioned Peabody Dog Patch Jamboree. The show is a Memphis musician cameo-fest: The Subteens’ Mark Aiken gets a line as the stage manager, and guitar slinger John Paul Keith gets a double cameo as two different guitar players! He’s like Clark Kent, just take off the glasses and you’re somebody else. Had I not been familiar with JPK, I might not have noticed his duplicity, which is a tribute to the skill of the makeup and costume folks. If there’s one thing Sun Records has been consistently good at, it’s deploying all of the budget- and time-saving tricks in the book.
Meanwhile, Eddy Arnold’s career is blowing up, but he’s getting wise to Col. Tom’s chicanery. The Colonel’s already got another mark—Hank Snow, played by St. Louis musician Pokey LaFarge—so he fires the client before Snow releases him.
Back at our titular studio, Sam, Dewey, and B.B. King are pretty pleased with their recordings, but label head Joe Bihari (Mike Horton) is not so turned on to “all the hep stuff blasting out of Beale Street.” The future arrives out front of Sun in the form of Ike Turner (Kerry D. Holliday in his screen debut) and his band, causing a commotion with the racist proprietors of the car dealership across the street. On the one hand, I applaud the show for taking the controversial “racism is bad, OK?” stance, but the whole sequence where Sam and Dewey stand up to the bigots—as well as the characterization of Ike is pretty cringeworthy.
Not that Ike Turner was a good guy in real life. Far from it. When they can’t come up with the $3.98 it takes to record at Sun, they naturally head down to Beale Street, where Ike tries to pimp a waitress named Wanda into singing for his band at Sun and paying the bill all herself. When that’s unsuccessful, he just grabs the tip jar and runs out the door, leading the establishment’s proprietor to fire off a blast from a shotgun that damages a guitar amp.
The story of how the damaged guitar amp accidentally created fuzz guitar is the stuff of rock legend, and its treatment here is an example of how Sun Record’s flawed approach to history is counterproductive. As Ike Turner told it, the amp fell off the back of the car. There was no dramatic shotgun chase. Wouldn’t the simple fact that Ike and boys were flat broke, scrounged up just enough to cut the record, and then had to play with a damaged guitar amp that turned out to actually sound good be more relatable? Injecting unnecessary crime hijinx adds nothing. Furthermore, when they actually cut “Rocket 88”, Sam makes noise about being impressed with the novel guitar tone, but we never actually hear the guitar tone isolated so the lay audience can understand what he’s talking about. The good news is, the take of “Rocket 88” recorded for the show is pretty rocking, and Ike’s resentment at being told what to do by Sam, and his subsequent outmaneuvering of Sam is believable and in character.
Sam and Marion takes “Rocket 88” to a pool party where Leonard Chess of Chess Records fame is cavorting with teenage hotties. Marion record scratches the anemic swing on the turntable and busts out “Rocket 88”, sending the greasers and bobby soxers into a spasm of uncontrollable dancing. Mr. Chess is impressed, and soon Sam is hanging his first hit record on the wall—only to find out that Ike Turner has jumped ship, so he’s back to square one. Sam responds to the setback with a one-man, Marshall Avenue DUI party. Marion, meanwhile, gets a radio gig with Dewey to help support the company, setting her up for either an illicit love triangle with her boss or some Mad Men-style sexual harassment. Time will tell.
Down in Louisiana, Jerry Lee and Jimmy Swaggart are getting into more teenage hijinx, stealing porno mags and breaking into the church so Jerry Lee can chase skirts and play the upright piano. Jimmy makes some noise about how Jerry Lee’s sinful ways are going to send him to the pit of fire (“Spill not your seed on the ground! Stay away from loose women!”), but we all know how effective that’s going to turn out to be. Besides, Jimmy’s heart doesn’t seem to be in it. He’s clearly having too much fun tagging along with his cousin. In this comedic sub plot, playing fast and loose with history is yielding some fun comic dividends.
Unfortunately, it’s Elvis’ turn to spin his wheels. He sneaks into Trixie’s room at night and, trying to explain his ahistorical black church attendance, tunes her radio to Dewey’s R&B show. This attracts negative attention from her father, and as Elvis flees through the window, he yells at Trixie “This is the kind of music that makes good girls go bad!”
Dad’s got a point, Trixie. Dad’s got a point.
[Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the site of the beer hall shoot as Rhodes College’s cafeteria.]
In week two of Sun Records, the sprawling scope of the story is starting to weigh the show down, and the limitations of the format are becoming obvious.
“Outta The Groove” opens with the final character introduction of the Million Dollar Quartet: a teenage Jerry Lee Lewis roaming the streets of Ferriday, Louisiana with his cousin Jimmy Swaggart. Jerry Lee and Swaggart are played by identical twins Christian and Jonah Lees. The jobs makeup and wardrobe have done in making them look like they’re related, but not twins, is an object lesson in the power of the two crafts. Later, when the two are banging on an upright piano in Jerry Lee’s home, Christian nails Jerry Lee’s bug-eyed mania. I’m interested in seeing more of the character, but Jerry Lee gets so little screen time in this episode I question the need to introduce him at all.
Back in the Sun lobby, Sam and Marion are getting themselves back together after a night of illicit carnal enjoyment. I’m increasingly impressed with the performance of Margaret Anne Florence, a veteran of both 30 Rock and Inside Amy Schumer. Even though her non-sexytime role in the studio storyline is to introduce inconvenient exposition, she shines in all of her scenes. Sam’s attempts to hide the affair are comically lame, and the climactic scene of the episode is a bait and switch where Becky Philips seems to be confronting Marion about the affair, but instead thanks her for her dedication to building Sam’s dream. Isolated in the Sun lobby, the two most prominent women on the show pull off the classic soap opera move with aplomb. But the scene also exposes something profound about Sun Records: It’s essentially Nashville dressed in 1950s Memphis drag.
On the one hand, it’s obvious why. Empire, the great late night soap opera of our time, continues to ride high in the ratings, and CMT wants a Knots Landing to go along with its Dynasty. But it’s also frustrating. Sun Records is, could, and should be about the humble genesis of the American pop cultural juggernaut. The meat of the story is how the mom and pop music business transitioned into the world-spanning sound of empire (or at least hegemony), and how a bunch of weirdos from the sticks’ schemes blew up beyond their wildest dreams. Those elements are there, to be sure, but at this point I’m skeptical that a history story filled with colorful characters and incredible music can make a good framework for melodrama.
Case in point is Elvis’ storyline. Sure,we need to boil down a lot of elements of Elvis’ not-so-eventful teenage life into a few scenes, but the “going to a black church” narrative—something which simply didn’t happen—doesn’t accomplish anything more than the actual truth would have. Elvis was exposed to black music in the record stores, on the radio, and on Beale Street. He wasn’t popular at school not because of any rubbed-off racism, but because he was a poor, shy mama’s boy. There’s plenty of fodder there for both teenage romance melodrama and Jim Crow South world building, so the writing choices here are baffling.
Sam Phillips story is better in this respect, and in episode two, we get to see director Roland Joffé’s version of the immortal beat making scene from Craig Brewer’s Hustle and Flow. Phillips gets B.B. King in the studio rearranges a song on the fly. Although abbreviated and simplified (hey, it’s TV), the scene gives a good sense of how Philips’ worked, pioneering the still unsung and misunderstood role of the music producer. B.B. is played by Castro Coleman, an International Blues Challenge winner from McComb Mississippi who doesn’t even have an IMDB page yet. Coleman looks the part and displays confidence as he shares the screen with the manic Chad Michael Murphy.
Sam’s skills and the intimate connection with his dark side is this episode’s most successful storyline. If I’m going to fault Sun Records for historical inaccuracy, I’ve got to give the show credit for its unflinching treatment of drugs. Rock and roll was always amphetamine music. During World War II, amphetamines, a relatively new chemical compound, were widely used by soldiers and airmen on all sides. Aircrews got hopped up on speed to fly long missions, and introduced their ground crews to the drug. When the mechanics who kept the planes flying during the war demobbed, they took the drug with them into civilian life. Benzadrine, the first and most common amphetamine, spread illicitly through truckers and biker gangs. Touring musicians took it up for the same reasons truckers did—it helped them drive all night from one gig to another. When bluesmen took speed, they played faster, a rock and roll was born. The motormouth Dewey Phillips is the show’s amphetamine avatar, and he’s a bad influence on Sam. The two of them cutting their bennies with whiskey outside the Bon Ton Cafe is probably the most historically accurate thing on the show so far. Speed plays a role in both Sam’s greatness—his uninhibited, early morning underwear dancing that embarrasses Becky in front of the neighbors—and his darkness—the 4 AM amphetamine psychosis that warrants a Becky intervention.
Johnny Cash’s time Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio is represented by a pair of sequences at Skateland, giving Kevin Fonteyne an opportunity to schtick it up on skates and meet cute with his to-be first wife Vivian Liberto (Nashvillian Anna Grace Stewart). The Skateland scenes, which feature some excellent cinematography courtesy of the rink’s disco ball, highlight once again the superb job the behind the camera crew is doing. Col. Tom Parker’s comic relief storyline with Eddy Arnold and the suits at RCA Records in Nashville give another opportunity for our criminally under-photographed city to shine. Monroe Avenue and the Exchange Building stand in for Nashville, and they look fantastic, and the Citizen Kane shot where Parker reveals his bluff to Arnold is the best looking image in the entire series so far.
On the acting front, Billy Gardell’s Tom Parker remains the most fully realized character, and once he and Drake Milligan’s Elvis get together, I expect some sparks to fly. But we’re not there yet, and in episode 2 Sun Records struggled to advance the sprawling storylines. This is a common problem on contemporary TV, exemplified by the one-too-many subplots plague that afflicted Game Of Thrones’s later seasons. GoT’s solution to the problem was simple: When someone’s story gets too boring, simply lop off their heads, or burn them at the stake, or flay them, or have them eaten by ice zombies or… well, you get the idea. Sun Records can’t avail itself of this remedy, and episode two, while it contains much promise, shows the strain.
It’s finally here! Sun Records the CMT series formerly known as Million Dollar Quartet, was filmed here in Memphis last summer. Like everyone in the city, the crowd at the official red carpet premiere at the Paradiso was eager to see the results. Local cast and crew, as well as a smattering of political dignitaries, munched hot dogs and heavy hors d’oeuvres, swarming the table for slices of cake during the commercial breaks. The mood was jubilant and, by the time the closing credits rolled, satisfied with the first of eight episodes retelling the story of the birth of rock and roll.
Drake Milligan as Elvis Presley
The opening image of S1:E1 is instantly familiar for Midtowners—an exterior shot of one of the 50s era apartment complexes that dot the Parkways, standing in for Lauderdale Courts. We meet The Man Who Will Be King (Drake Milligan) as a shy teenager strumming his guitar in the breezeway, talking to his mother Gladys (Walking Dead vet Ann Mahoney) through the open door. Vernon (Joe Crest, most recently of Stranger Things), just wants his progeny to get a haircut and be a man. After Gladys calls him out on his drinking, Vernon storms out, leaving Elvis to sing “Are You Lonesome Tonight” in an angelic voice to his mom.
Elvis’ prodigious vocal gifts being ignored is a recurring theme in this episode, as is Presley’s penchant for crossing racial lines, which both enriches his musical and spiritual side and makes him even more of an outcast than the poor Mississippi boy already is. His music at first endures him to Trixie (AlexAnn Hopkins), and then, when her parents see him out front of a black church on Sunday morning, it alienates her.
Milligan, who has only ever played Elvis on screen—having being cast for the part on the strength of his performance in the 2014 short film “Nobody”—is the most promising characterization in the series. This is excellent news for the future of the series.
Chad Michael Murray as Sam Phillips
Arguably, the main character of Sun Records is Sam Phillips, played by Chad Michael Murray, a North Carolina actor who got his start on Gilmore Girls. This first episode introduces Sam and his wife Becky (Jennifer Holland) as Sam drags her to see Dewey Phillips (Keir O’Donnell) doing a live broadcast from a
Margaret Anne Florence as Marion Keisker
juke joint. Sam is trying to stand up his Memphis Recording Service with the help of Marion Keisker (Margaret Anne Florence) in time for a first recording session with the Skunk Mountain Boys, an Arkansas hillbilly combo clearly ripped off from O Brother! Where Art Thou?. Unlike the doubting Becky, Marion shares Sam’s vision, and by the end of the episode, an affair breaks out in the claustrophobic confines of 706 Union Ave.
Murray looks the part of Sam Phillips more than Milligan looks like Elvis, but his performance in the initial episode is shakier. It’s hard to portray people like Sam Phillips, who was larger than life in real life, without tipping over into cartoon character territory, and Murray occasionally seems like he’s doing a Hunter S. Thompson imitation. But I did leave episode one encouraged by Murray’s serious commitment to the role.
Less encouraging is Sun Records’ handling of Johnny Cash. Arguably the most fascinating real life character in the Million Dollar Quartet, Cash is played by Kevin Fonteyene, who neither looks the part nor shows the ability conjure The Man In Black’s sad-eyed gravitas in the initial episode. Admittedly, Fonteyene starts with a disadvantage of following up Joaquin Phoenix’s star-making turn in Walk The Line (a film which just gets better with each passing year), but the writers are doing him no favors, introducing him long after the life-derailing death of his older brother, opting instead to give him a cornpone monologue at his brother’s grave site that is clearly just a prop in an Arkansas field. Maybe it will improve when Cash joins the Air Force, but right now what should be the most fascinating subplot seems like an afterthought.
Kevin Fonteyene as Johnny Cash
The forth major player introduced is Col. Tom Parker, played by comedian Billy Gardell. In no uncertain terms, Col. Tom is drawn as a shyster, as his “dancing ducks” act at a county fair is revealed to be a big scam, angering the local hayseeds so much that is is only saved from a riot by the swift intervention of Eddy Arnold (Trevor Donovan).
Billy Gardell as Col. Tom Parker
Parker’s promotional antics for Arnold echo John Landis’ comedy scenes from The Blues Brothers, illustrating a go-to strategy by director Roland Joffé. There’s a lot of history to be covered in a short time, and the production needs to find shortcuts to get the information in the mind of the audience without sacrificing time better spent on character beats. Gardell’s performance is the most assured and confident in the show, which also bodes well for the future of the series as Parker’s dark side emerges more fully.
The brightest spot in the first episode is Memphis itself. The city looks great, and the mix of studio and location shooting is flawless. The lighting, set design, and art direction are as good as anything currently on television that’s not called Game Of Thrones. Memphis audiences will enjoy looking for easter eggs and critiquing the jumps of logic and landscape. In one particularly hilarious (to me, anyway) moment, a geography challenged Elvis forgets the Mississippi river runs North/South instead of East/West. But those quibbles will mean nothing outside our borders, while the potential for introducing new audiences to the richness of Memphis music history is vast. With the first episode, Sun Records is off to a promising, if imperfect, start.
The CMT series filmed in Memphis under the name Million Dollar Quartet will premiere on Feb. 23, 2017—but it won’t be called Million Dollar Quartet.
The eight-episode series is based on the 2010, Tony Award-winning jukebox musical by Floyd Mutrux and Colin Escott. Today’s announcement of the premiere date was accompanied by the news that the show will now be called Sun Records. No reason was given for the name change.
The series, which was filmed in Memphis in the spring and summer of 2016, stars Chad Michael Murray as Sam Phillips, comedian Billy Gardell as Colonel Tom Parker, Drake Milligan as Elvis Presley, Kevin Fonteyne as Johnny Cash, Christian Lees as Jerry Lee Lewis, Jonah Lees as Jimmy Swaggart, Trevor Donovan as Eddy Arnold, Keir O’Donnell as Dewey Phillips, Jennifer Holland as Becky Phillips, Margaret Anne Florence as Marion Keisker, Kerry Holliday as Ike Turner, and Dustin Ingram as Carl Perkins.
Diane Duncan Phillips 
Diane Duncan Phillips 
