Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (15 page)

Above all, Ackerman actively transmitted to writers and readers alike the spirit of enlightened record men. “His heroes were Ralph Peer and Frank Walker, explorers who went with portable equipment to the Smokies, the Delta, the Savannah, the Piedmont, and the cotton bottoms to find Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, Jimmie Rodgers and Robert Johnson and Hank Williams. That’s the stuff that Paul loved best—the beginnings, the earliest strain. He also identified with the pioneers who started the independent blues and country labels. He introduced me to many of these men, later to become my competitors—Herman Lubinsky, Syd Nathan, Leonard Chess, Saul Bihari. He dug them because they broke the stranglehold of the pop record labels.”

When Jerry Wexler joined Atlantic, Ahmet Ertegun explained to him, “Here’s the sort of record we need to make; there’s a black man living in the outskirts of Opelousas, Louisiana. He works hard for money; he has to be tight with a dollar. One morning he hears a song on the radio. It’s urgent, bluesy, authentic, irresistible. He becomes obsessed. He can’t live without this record. He drops everything, jumps in his pick-up, and drives twenty-five miles to the first record store he finds. If we can make that kind of music, we can make it in the business.”

Getting records to rural audiences relied on airplay. Most of the urban markets had at least one R&B maverick on the airwaves: Alan “Moondog” Freed in Cleveland; Zenas “Daddy” Sears in Atlanta; Hunter Hancock in Los Angeles; Hoss Allen, John Richbourg, and Gene Nobles in Nashville; Clarence “Poppa Stoppa” Hamann in New Orleans; Daddy-O Dewey in Memphis.

Wexler soon began noticing a sea change. “The rhythm and blues of the late forties was adult in flavor and often spiked with booze,” but suddenly, what was being colloquially termed
cat music
began creeping into the traditional R&B market. “A picture was beginning to emerge: Kids, especially kids down South, were taking newly invented transistor radios to the beach,” noted Wexler. “White Southerners, I believe, in spite of the traditional aura of racial bigotry, have always enjoyed the most passionate rapport with black music, itself a Southern phenomenon. And in the fifties, white Southern teenagers started the charge towards ballsy rhythm and blues. As the Eisenhower decade became more conformist, the music became more rebellious, more blatantly sexual.”

In 1953, Atlantic found its game changer in Ray Charles, whose slick musicianship took R&B into a new sound. For obvious reasons, the same task was trickier for Sam Phillips, operating as a lone ranger in Memphis. Everywhere Sam Phillips took his rougher-sounding R&B records, he’d hear the same refrain from storekeepers, café proprietors, and small-town deejays: Black music was corrupting the children of decent, white folk. Avoiding any moral arguments, he’d just lean on the counter and listen. Phillips knew these prejudices ran generations deep.

Whether it was a reward for persistence or simply good luck, one Saturday afternoon in August 1953, a strange-looking kid walked in off the street to record a ballad for his mother. Spotty, nervous, and sporting a big mop of greasy blond hair, the eighteen-year-old was dressed up in a pink and black outfit bought on Beale Street.

Keisker invited him to take a seat. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Elvis Presley.”

As she misspelled his name and settled the $3.98 fee, the teenager tried to strike up a conversation, with a twitchiness that betrayed his best efforts to appear nonchalant.

“If you know anyone that needs a singer?”

“What kind of a singer are you?” asked Keisker.

“I sing all kinds.”

“Who do you sound like?”

“I don’t sound like nobody.”

“What do you sing, hillbilly?”

“I sing hillbilly,” said Elvis, nodding.

“Well, who do you sound like in hillbilly?”

“I don’t sound like nobody.”

Phillips appeared and ushered the young man into the studio, where Presley sang two old ballads. Within less than half an hour he was led back to the reception with an acetate under his arm. “We might give you a call sometime,” said Phillips, running off to his next job.

Over the next ten months, Presley kept dropping by, almost making a nuisance of himself but remaining sufficiently polite—almost pitiful—for Phillips to joke as they watched him cross the street, “Here’s ol’ Elvis, coming to see what kind of a star we can make of him today!” Phillips kept his distance inside the studio while Elvis would always ask, “Ma’am, if you know anyone that needs a singer?” Keisker’s answer would always be a gentle no, followed by a few courteous niceties. Presley would close the door behind him, trying to conceal his dejection.

Then one day in May 1954, while Phillips was visiting a Nashville prison, a black inmate presented him with a ballad that made him think of Elvis. When Keisker found his number and called him up, Elvis literally ran across Memphis so fast she got a shock to see him burst in the door so soon after putting the phone back on the cradle. The ensuing experiment didn’t gel, but Phillips was curious to see what Elvis had in his belly. He stopped taping, and for three hours, Elvis sang everything he knew.

At the time, Phillips had a kindred spirit in a local electric guitarist named Scotty Moore. In their discussions of music over coffee in a nearby diner, Phillips had come to the conclusion that R&B records “appealed to white youngsters just as Uncle Silas Payne’s stories and songs used to appeal to me … but there was something in many of those youngsters that resisted buying this music. The Southern ones especially felt a resistance that they probably didn’t quite understand. They liked the music, but they weren’t sure whether they ought to like it or not.”

Everyone had noticed Bill Haley, who recorded a softer cover of “Rocket 88” in 1951, omitting its references to pills. In 1954, Haley scored two massive hits for Decca, “Rock Around the Clock” and a version of Atlantic’s “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Joe Turner. Jerry Wexler was so intrigued by the phenomenon that he picked up his pen and wrote an essay for
Cash Box
exclaiming, “It happened in the twenties when Perry Bradford and Spencer Williams were as hot as Irving Berlin; it happened when Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters sold their records into millions of white parlors. Now it’s happening again.”

It proved to be Sam Phillips’s conversations over coffee with Scotty Moore that led to the eureka moment. When Phillips started mentioning Elvis Presley as an example of this unfathomable white youth, Moore got curious and invited Elvis to a jam. Moore called Phillips to give him his thumbs-down, but Phillips persuaded Moore and bassist Bill Black to try Elvis out in a proper audition at Sun. One Monday evening in July 1954, the three musicians arrived. Sam Phillips sat waiting in the control room. The session began awkwardly with the Bing Crosby ballad they had been jamming at Moore’s apartment. Feeling they were stuck in corny territory, Phillips stopped the session and came into the studio.

Beginning to loosen up, Elvis suddenly began goofing around in a very unfamiliar direction, strumming into a jiving version of an old blues song, “That’s all right mama, that’s all right with me…” Black perked up at the bouncing energy and joined in. Scotty followed with some darting riffs in the Bill Haley style. Phillips was amazed that Elvis even knew the 1946 number by Delta blues singer Arthur Crudup.

“What are you doing?” Phillips asked excitedly.

“We don’t know,” the musicians laughed back.

“Well, back up. Try and find a place to start and do it again.”

Moore and Black worked out a structure while Phillips advised Elvis to sing it raw, warning that if he was too fake, he wouldn’t be able to keep it up for the whole take. Phillips hit the red button, and the musicians launched in.

Listening to the playback, nobody knew what to think. After two evenings of tighter, more polished renditions, Phillips came to the conclusion that the very first take possessed a magic that outshone all the others. It was time to consult the wildest character on the Memphis airwaves, Daddy-O Dewey—tastemaker, verbal acrobat, disc addict.

At around midnight, Dewey strolled in. As “That’s All Right” played over and over, the two men sat drinking beer, brooding in an uncharacteristic silence. The song made Dewey visibly uncomfortable, even wary, but he kept listening. “It’s not black, it’s not white, it’s not country,” thought Phillips, “and I think Dewey was the same way.”

Next morning, Phillips was awakened by a call from Dewey, who hadn’t slept all night. Whether it was because of amphetamines or Elvis, he wanted two copies of “That’s All Right” sent to the station before his show. When Phillips telephoned the Presley house to warn that the legendary deejay would be playing the song that night, Elvis went into a fit of panic. He set the station on his mother’s radio, asked her to listen in, and ran out to a movie theater—too frightened to hear his own voice all over Memphis.

Kicking off at ten o’clock, even by his own pumped-up standards Daddy-O Dewey was in flying form. He predicted to his listeners that local boy Elvis Presley would be a star. He played “That’s All Right” seven times in a row as calls flooded the station’s switchboard. Theatrically, Dewey then demanded, live on air, that Elvis come to the studio right away. He phoned the Presley home and spoke to Mrs. Presley. When Elvis returned from the movies and saw the pandemonium, he ran to the radio station. Shaking with fear, he was asked which high school he had attended. Dewey’s question was, of course, loaded; the answer would tell the audience the singer was white. Dewey thanked the young man for coming in. “Aren’t you going to interview me?” wondered Elvis, who didn’t realize he was already on air.

Sun received six thousand preorders. Two nights before the record’s release on June 19, Phillips asked Moore to give Elvis a slot with his Starlite Wranglers. The venue was at a run-down roadhouse, but the awkward experiment showed Phillips that even put up against a hostile adult audience, the petrified Elvis could belt it out. In the stage light, his neck sweated profusely, his pimples glistened, and his tatty blond hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks. Realizing that to reach young people, they were going to have to find venues that didn’t serve alcohol, Phillips telephoned a booker and deejay, Bob Neal, who found Elvis a more appropriate slot at a show headlined by a hillbilly yodeler. When Elvis arrived at the venue and saw the size of the crowd, he experienced another rush of terror. Ushered onstage, he broke into “That’s All Right” as his legs went into a nervous spasm. The more he shook, the louder the kids screamed.

Sucking all the youth hysteria into his whirlpool eyes, Sam Phillips saw stars. Sure enough, despite plenty of hostility from local deejays who thought the record was an ugly mutant, by the end of August “That’s All Right” appeared on the
Billboard
charts. To win over the small-town stations, Phillips needed some kind of blessing from the old guard. Carrying some Elvis records under his arm, he paid a visit to the biggest power broker in Nashville, Jim Denny. “I’ve heard it, Sam,” Denny said. “I just better not put him on right now because we might do something to
The Grand Ole Opry
, and it’s
so
traditional.”

“But these people used to drive to town in a wagon,” implored Phillips. “The world has changed—we got jet airplanes!”

“The door is not closed,” conceded Denny like a true pro. “I think it’s an interesting record, but I don’t want to get sponsors canceled.”

Inevitably, as Elvis grew too big to snub, he was cordially invited to play on
The Grand Ole Opry,
followed by
Louisiana Hayride,
the most popular show among Southern youngsters. With nonstop live performances and a further single, Elvis fever was spreading through the South.

Unlike in his R&B years when he struggled to keep up with the genre leaders, Sam Phillips was by now an all-around record man with his finger firmly on the pulse of the nascent rock ’n’ roll wave. Drawn to his corner shop, rockabilly hopefuls began knocking on his door. Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis—all of Sun’s biggest stars
chose
him as midwife. Unlike any of his competitors, Phillips spent hours, even days, auditioning, experimenting, looking for that little flash of magic. As Johnny Cash explained, “Phillips was very smart, with great instincts, and he had real enthusiasm; he was excitable, not at all laid back. When he’d put something on tape he liked, he’d come bursting out of the control room into the studio, laughing and clapping his hands, yelling and hollering, ‘That was great! That was wonderful. That was a rolling stone.’ His enthusiasm was fun. It fired us up.”

Phillips demanded anything up to forty takes from his artists. When it came to picking
the one,
Cash said, “we both felt that if the performance was really there at the heart of the song, it didn’t matter much if there were some little musical error or glitch in the track somewhere. There are mistakes on several of my Sun records—Luther fumbling a guitar line, Marshall going off the beat, me singing sharp—and we all knew it. Sam just didn’t care that much: he’d much rather have soul, fire, and heart than technical perfection.”

When it came to sound, however, Phillips
was
technically conscious. Despite his rudimentary equipment, having spent years running PA feeds from a ballroom to a radio network, he understood room acoustics. He constantly moved the musicians around and even placed cardboard boxes over the amplifiers, directing the sound through a hole into the corners. These techniques, topped off by his hallmark slapback delay (a short, single-repeat echo), created an itchy, churchlike atmosphere that pushed the record industry into a new age of sound manipulation. “You have to have a good song, of course, but atmosphere is nearly everything else,” said Phillips. “With great artists, almost fifty percent of something good they might do happens because of an almost instant reaction to what is taking place around them … There is so much psychology in dealing with artists … Sometimes you can be too cocky around people who are insecure and just intimidate them … I tried to envelop them in my feelings of security … Atmosphere is so important.”