Daily Mail 6.11.15
The body of Elvis Presley was lying on view in an open coffin at his home Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee, in August 1977, when a man in his late fifties stepped forward. With long wavy hair and a beard, and looking not unlike a general from the American Civil War, he bent over, tapped Elvis gently on the cheek and told him he loved him.
He had reason to. He was Sam Phillips, the record producer, who 24 years earlier, had discovered the singer, and in so doing, had not only ignited Elvis’s extraordinary life, but his own, while justifying the title of this book along the way.
By spotting something in the boy who, until then, had never sung in public, Phillips opened the flood gates of rock talent. Soon Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis would also begin their careers at his tiny Sun Records, making his brand of echoing guitars drums and bass, the sound every rock band would want for a generation.
Yet his great success came about almost by accident. Because Phillips had originally built his studio as a place where the ignored black blues singers of the time could go to record.
Born in Florence, Alabama in 1923, his route in life was determined early by a blind old black man who his family took in called Uncle Silas Payne. Uncle Silas, who ‘knew every chicken in the yard by its distinctive clucking’, taught the boy Sam to listen keenly, and to admire the dignity and the culture of the black workers in the cotton fields.
So, soon after moving to Memphis to work as a radio engineer in his mid-twenties, Phillips began moonlighting from his job by renting a single story shop nearby. Equipping it as a recording studio, he then invited black artists to audition. Within months he’d recorded Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King and Ike Turner, selling the recordings cheaply to record companies in Chicago and Los Angeles.
His white friends laughed at him for championing ‘niggers’ in that segregated world, not least, when he paid for a group of singing rapists and murderers in the Tennessee State Penitentiary to be brought 200 miles under armed guard to his little studio to record a song he liked. They called themselves the Prisonaires and the song was Just Walking In The Rain, a local hit for them, but two years later a very big hit for Johnnie Ray.
Phillips didn’t care what people thought. He was a driven man, seeing himself as both a teacher and preacher, and had no room for self-doubt. His daytime employers at the radio station were less certain, however, and, after Phillips submitted himself to electroshock treatment during a nervous breakdown, they let him go.
With no other source of income than his little studio, and with a family to support, Phillips was heading towards bankruptcy when, in 1953, an 18 year old local white boy walked in and paid four dollars to make a private recording.
It was Elvis, just a couple of weeks after he’d left school. It took a while, with Elvis calling in at the studio from time to see if they knew of anyone who was looking for a singer, but eventually the boy was given an audition and, out of nowhere, began singing an old blues song he liked called That’s All Right, Mama.
A couple of weeks later he made his stage debut at a Memphis concert, where, nervously moving his legs to keep the beat he was met with screams of excitement. ‘What happened, Mr Phillips,’ the confused Elvis asked as he came off stage.
Phillips was smiling. ‘I don’t know, Elvis, but whatever it was you were doing, get out there and do it again.’ So Elvis did. And this time the girls went wilder.
Eighteen months later Phillips would sell his contract to RCA for $40,000, at the time the biggest fee ever paid for a singer to change labels, on his way to becoming the famous singer in the world. By then, however, Phillips and Sun Records had hits with Carl Perkins’ Blue Suede Shoes, Johnny Cash’s early hits and Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On from Jerry Lee Lewis. He was a highly successful man, who had also now set up America’s first all-women radio station, WHER.
Then it all began to go wrong. The black artists who Phillips had first recorded felt abandoned as he concentrated on his new white new rock and roll stars, only for Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins to, like Elvis, leave him when other companies offered bigger royalties and exposure.
Jerry Lee Lewis stayed. But when on a tour of Britain it was discovered, by the Daily Mail no less, that Lewis had bigamously married his thirteen year old cousin, Phillips was overwhelmed by an avalanche of the pianist’s records being returned to him from shops all over America. Deported from Britain by order of the Home Secretary, Sun’s biggest star was suddenly completely unsellable.
Sam Phillips’s dream was dead. And pursued by lawsuits and broken by the power of the big record companies, his heart had gone out of making music. Instead, selling his original studio, he built a fortune mainly in radio.
In many ways Phillips was years ahead of his time. He was right about black music. It would, from the Sixties onwards, become increasingly important, while, what he called his ‘All Girls’ radio station, was pioneering.
At the same time, in various contradictions, he was rooted in the Deep South’s culture of church, family and machismo. While a Sunday school teacher in his late teens, with a show as a disc jockey on local radio playing hymns, Saturday afternoons would find him visiting ‘Kate Nelson’s whorehouse’ in Florence, Alabama, where he would get a discount on the usual two dollars fee.
‘I was going to church…deeply dedicated,’ he would say. ‘But the Bible says, “Better to spill your seed in the belly of a whore than on the ground”, and I took that to heart’ – which was not an interpretation of the Bible shared by everyone.
Married at 20 and a great believer in family, he broke the heart of his ultra-religious wife Becky when he openly set Sun up with the help of his mistress, Marion Keisker, who would always claim that it was she who first spotted Elvis.
Meanwhile wife and mistress would then work happily alongside each other at WHER radio, before Phillips then virtually pushed Marion out of the door when he replaced her with a new girlfriend he employed. And never, it seems, did he think he had anything to apologise about. When he died in 2003 both wife and mistress were tending to him.
I remember spending a day with him years ago, and a more articulate man you couldn’t wish to meet. He just loved to talk and to argue – whether it be politics or the Bible. Indeed Jerry Lee Lewis’s recording of Great Balls Of Fire was interrupted for hours while he and Phillips fell out over whether rock and roll was the Devil’s music or not. Jerry Lee thought it was, but, in the end, he still sang it.
Author Peter Guralnick has no equals when it comes to researching the characters around Fifties and Sixties rock music and this biography has been many years in the writing. He honestly admits that he massively admired Phillips, which is understandable. Sometimes, however, that admiration does tend to topple over into hagiography, which, in this very long, valuable and fascinating book, is a shame.
