Sun Rise

It is one of those facts, like Washington crossing the Delaware and Lincoln freeing the slaves, that American children learn the instant they are weaned: Sun Records of Memphis, Tennessee is the birthplace of rock and roll. It's important because rock and roll--or, to call it by its current signature, rock--was the dominant pop music style of the 20th century, and seems to be storming boldly into the 21st on the broad backs of Creed and Limp Bizkit and Blink-182. Knowing that Sun Records is the birthplace of rock allows us to trace the roots of its many flowerings, of Hanky Panky and Wooly Bully, of Oingo Boingo and Chumbawumba and the Blues Magoos (and of the many songs and bands that cannot boast of an internal rhyme scheme). Just as important, it allows us to trace the origins of the broader rock lifestyle--the traditions of trashing hotel rooms and dating supermodels and using hair to display personal or political leanings. Scratch Lenny Kravitz, scratch Rob Thomas, scratch Melissa Etheridge, and you'll find Sun Records DNA.

OK, you say, so what? If rock and roll hadn't been born at Sun Records, it surely would have been born someplace else. True, pieces of rock were born in other places, and (text concluded on page 86) long before Sam Phillips, the owner, head producer and chief tastemaker of Sun Records, knew a woofer from a tweeter. Sun gave the world Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison and Charlie Rich. It was also home to a legion of rockabilly shock troops who howled and rocked at state fairs and helped wrest public tastes from staid prerock genres. But Chuck Berry didn't record at Sun, nor did Little Richard, nor did Buddy Holly, nor did Fats Domino, nor did any of the doo-wop choirs. Sun was important, you say, but even without Sun Records, we'd still be drooling over Shirley Manson today.

We disagree.

If there were no Sun, there would have been no Elvis Presley. Elvis was a good-looking boy with a good voice, but he was hardly a can't-miss. Although he played some clubs and hops, he was hardly a go-getter determined to make his mark. He did manage to hie himself over to the Sun Studios in the summer of 1953, as legend has it, to cut a record for his mother's birthday. Someone at Sun--Sam Phillips or his assistant Marion Keisker--saw that Elvis had talent. But a full year passed before Sun brought Elvis back into the studios to cut a record. Even then, the first tracks were all ballads, and they weren't very good. It wasn't until Elvis and his estimable rhythm section of Bill Black and Scotty Moore started horsing around on a break and sang That's All Right, which had been an R&B hit for Arthur Crudup, that Sam Phillips heard the sound that would change the world.

Phillips was an R&B aficionado who recorded Rufus Thomas and Howlin' Wolf. He also produced B.B. King sides and helped make him a national act. In 1951 he recorded what is generally regarded as the first true rock-and-roll song. Rocket 88, sung by Jackie Brenston (but arranged by Ike Turner). It was Sam Phillips who has been famously quoted as saying, prior to the advent of the Elvis child, "If I could only find me a white boy who could sing like a negro, I could make me a million dollars." Presley could have walked into any studio in the South. But even if somebody at one of them saw he could sing, it took the marriage of a man looking for a wild sound with a boy who could produce it to ignite the spark. Without Phillips, odds are that Presley would have at best become a country balladeer, a rival to Eddy Arnold and Marty Robbins.

When it came time for the rock-and-roll revolution, Elvis was indispensable. He's the one who got the girls wet. Other singers never lacked for female companionship, but Elvis was the one with atomic sex appeal. He got the girls to buy records and fill the halls and set up fan clubs and get all swoony, putting them in a mood from which a local, readily accessible example of masculinity could benefit. Barring Elvis, there is no real white matinee idol in rock until you get to Johnnie Ray and Fabian and Bobby Rydell. Without all that Elvis excitement and Elvis sex and Elvis mania, rock and roll is not a movement but a moment, a phase kids go through before they grow up. Without Sun, the history of rock and roll starts to include a lot of Bobby Darin, a guy who wanted to be Sinatra.

Then there is Carl Perkins. Let's pause for a moment to recall that it was Perkins who gave the world Blue Suede Shoes, one of the few Sun-like hits Elvis had after he moved to RCA. Carl Perkins, as it happens, is the artist who is most covered by the Beatles. In Liverpool and Hamburg, the Beatles study Buddy Holly, early Motowners such as Smokey Robinson and Barrett Strong, and Perkins. George Harrison, in particular, memorizes every lick and fill. The Rolling Stones, meanwhile, go to school in Chicago, and study Chess masters like Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters.

These are generalizations, mind you, but Sun and Carl Perkins helped shape the tenor of the British invasion. His pull added heft to one side of the light and dark Beatles--Stones dichotomy.

The Sun sound proved gutsy and popular, a formula used by the Beatles to avoid the sideshow elements of the British Invasion (such as I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am and Do the Freddie). They kept British rock interesting and kept it from being as irrelevant as French rock and roll. A Beatles-Sun bloodline transcended the mainstream pop of kids' music, Brill Building music and Lesley Gore, Neil Diamond and the Four Seasons. Even now Sun has a long reach. Witness the second coming of Johnny Cash, the profound Man in Black. His earlier recordings usually get lumped into the country pantheon, but now, 45 years later, he is embraced by modern rock stars as one of their own.

Sun rock and roll is an admixture of R&B and country. It blended black and white at a time when black stayed black or black was bleached. Sun paved the way by marketing a cross-racial sound. Great R&B labels like Atlantic saw the opening and started pushing the Drifters and Ben E. King and eventually Aretha and Otis Redding. The old practice of having white acts like Pat Boone and the Crew Cuts covering R&B hits disappeared right in time for the rise of Motown. The mixing of races at Sun Records and in rock and roll, like the signing of Jackie Robinson, hastened the pace of equality.

Equally important was the success of Jerry Lee Lewis, king of the barely veiled sexual innuendo. R&B songs, of course, were full of double entendres, most of which were scrubbed clean by the white artists who covered them (although Bill Haley left in Shake, Rattle and Roll the line, "I'm like a one-eyed cat, peeking in a seafood store"). But Jerry Lee had no truck with subtlety, as Great Balls of Fire shows. Jerry Lee got the preachers roused, got them thumping against the devil's music and its power to bring out animal passions in young people. (The sort of stuff his cousin Jimmy Swaggart would rail on about.) Which, of course, they were right about. Without Sun, without Jerry Lee, young people would have had to channel those passions through Neil Sedaka, Paul Anka and Connie Francis. Think how that would have slowed the sexual revolution.

As for Roy Orbison, yes, Roy was originally on Sun and had a few hits. However, the label did a poor job of recognizing his talent, which did not really flower until he went elsewhere.

There's more, of course. You can credit Sun artists with advancements in the design, architecture and engineering of the pompadour. They also gave the world of novelty songs such classics as Ooby Dooby, Shoobie Oobie and Flying Saucer Rock and Roll (the last by Bill Riley and His Little Green Men). And then there was Sun's enduring contribution to the music industry tradition of cheapness.

Perhaps pompadours and goofiness and stinginess would have prevailed elsewhere, but all the contributions come down to the same thing: The right people were in the right place at the right time, and when they intersected, magic happened. There were a lot of singers who thought they had every bit as much talent as Elvis had. They didn't. They thought that they deserved all the acclaim he received. They didn't. Indeed, in the late Fifties and the early Sixties, better singers than Elvis worked with producers who were better musicians than Sam Phillips only to produce boring, derivative records. But in the Sun Studios in 1954, Sam Phillips coaxed out of Elvis Presley the spirit of rock and roll, and set it loose. That spirit conquered a nation, changing the way we live, and then went around the world. You can say it mighta-coulda-woulda happened some other way. But you know what? It didn't.

Sam Phillips: "I never saw black and white as separate. When it comes to hillbillies and when it comes to the blacks on Beale Street, the expressions of their experiences, their hopes, their heartaches were close to the same thing. But I knew I had to concentrate initially on black music. And I knew I could get out of black musicians something that was not being gotten out of them if I could hang on long enough without going broke or starving to death."

Sam Phillips: "We could have cut a ballad with Elvis the first night, the guy had such a beautifully untrained voice. I wasn't interested in that. I wanted to do something that wasn't being done. But we were packing up one night, and Elvis cut into That's All Right. Listen, it didn't take a damn genius to say, 'What in the hell, Elvis--have you been holding out on me all these damn months we've been working here?'"

Scotty Moore: "I put together a country-western band in Memphis in 1952, and Sam put out a record. I don't know if we sold 12 copies or 14, but Sam and I became good friends. Sam's secretary, Marion Keisker, told me about this kid and got me his phone number. So I called Elvis and got him to come over. I told Sam, 'He doesn't have any original material, but this guy is young, he knows every song in the world and he has real good rhythm.'"

Sam Phillips: "Jerry Lee Lewis had the spontaneity of the greatest evangelist in the world. I'm not talking about the fact that he had studied at a little Bible college, but Jerry had that evangelical feel about what he did. And he was an absolute genius--and I don't use that word very often--at the piano. Musically, Jerry Lee was probably the most spontaneous human being I've seen, or expect to see."

"The devil's music? Says who? I'm dealing with my music. Hell, the archangel has a lot of power. He was probably the director above all the music, I don't know. But if people think Jerry Le Lewis ever thought or ever would think he's playing the devil's music, that's as much shit as I've ever hard in my life. It wasn't the devil's music, son. It was Jerry Lee Lewis' music."

"I never did like musical bags or categories, you know? We busted out on our own at Sun Records with our long hair and sideburns and black clothes, and they called us every name under the sun, from rockabillies to white niggers."

Sam Phillips: "Ike Turner brought his band up, and they got in an accident on the way when they were stopped by the police. They had an old bass amplifier, and it fell off the car. After that, the amp couldn't handle the bass anymore but it could take the guitar. So we just switched and used a smaller amp that wasn't busted, turned it down and got a bass sound. Then we put the guitar through the torn woofer of the bass amp. When they started to play, I thought, Man, this is a real different sound."

Sam Phillips: "I was like a scientist in his lab who knows there is a bug or something he can find if he just keeps going, you know? There was something in that studio I had to find."

Studio equipment (from left): Ampex three-track tape recorder, the original microphone and Wurlitzer piano, the front desk--Marion Keisker's domain--acetate lathe and original master-tape boxes.

"Johnny Cash was on Sun, and he was making unusual records. Presley was on Sun and so was Carl Perkins. So when Johnny came to Odessa and did a show. I said to him, 'How do you get on Sun Records?' Johnny said, 'Call Sam.' So I called Sam and said, 'Johnny Cash said I might be able to get on your record label,' and he said, 'Johnny Cash doesn't run my record company,' and slammed down the phone. But we sent him a demo record, and he called me back and said. 'Can you be here in three days?'"

(Quotes on pages 83 to 85 compiled by Steve Pond.)