Sam Phillips – Part 02
By 1954, money was tight. “For the first time, there was a strange lack of direction in his thinking. When he opened the studio he knew exactly what he was doing, however much it might go against all the odds…But now, it seemed, he was no longer as certain of his path. Not because the music was any less compelling, or his purpose any less clear. But he had run up against the outer limits of what he felt he could accomplish in this particular way- like the other independent record company owners, he had come to the realization that, no matter how big a hit he had in the r&b field, he was never going to sell more than sixty thousand copies, one hundred thousand at the outside- and for the most part he was going to sell considerably less. And yet he was aware there was an audience out there that was just waiting to be inspired by this music.”
Sam had also been experimenting with studio technology to produce the beginnings of what is now known at reverb and delay. “Sam had long been fascinated with echo…but he had never achieved what he wanted- to his ears, placing the vocalist or lead instrumentalist in a box, or placing a speaker in a resonant hallway or bathroom as many engineers did, created to cavernous an effect…It suddenly occurred to him that in the time it took the tape to move across the three heads of the machine, from record to erase to playback, ‘that would give me a [very] slight delay, [and if] I turned it on playback and fed it back into the board, I would have a controllable sound.’” We teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to learn mixing techniques.
He was at a crossroads. “Lately he had been thinking more and more that the key lay in the connection between the races, in what they had in common far more than what kept them apart…the spiritual connection that he had always known to exist between black and white, the cultural heritage that they all shared ‘to bond this thing together. Not to copy each other but just- hey, this is all we’ve got and we’re going to give it to you.’”
“Over and over I hear Sam say, ‘If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars!”
“Elvis Pressley came into the studio on Saturday, June 26…Sam thought, one of the most introverted people who had ever come into the studio… ‘his insecurity was so markedly like that of black person.’ What Sam sensed was a breadth of knowledge, a passion for the music that didn’t come along every day.”
Sam kept working with him, but it seemed like each recording session was a dismal failure. Then one day, Elvis explained, “‘this song popped into my mind that I had heard years ago, and I started kidding around with [it].’ It was an up-tempo song called ‘That’s All Right, Mama,’ an old blues number by Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup. ‘All of a sudden,’ said Scotty, ‘Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I think had the door to the control booth open- I don’t know, he was either editing tape or doing something- and he stuck his head out and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And we said, ‘We don’t know.’ Well, back up,’ he said, ‘try to find a place to start, and do it again.’”
“The rest of the session went as if suddenly they had all been caught up in the same fever dream. They worked on the song. They worked hard on it, but without any of the laboriousness that had gone into the sessions up to this point…he got Scotty to cut out the conventional turnaround and cut down on all the stylistic flourishes that were mucking it up. “Simplify, simplify!’ was the watchword. Bill’s bass became more of an unadulterated rhythm instrument- it provided both a slap beat and a tonal beat at the same time- all the more important in the absence of drums.”
“We thought it was exciting, but what was it? It was just so completely different. But it just really flipped Sam.’ And the boy? By the end of the evening there is a different singer in the studio than the one who started out the night. For Elvis, clearly, everything has changed.” We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to experiment in creative ways to explore their own artistic direction.
Sam sat in the studio after the session was over and everyone had gone home. He was bone-weary, but he just wanted to savor the moment. When he got home, he woke up Becky, and, as she would always remember it, “he was excited, he was happy, and he announced that he had just cut a record [that was] going to change our lives. I didn’t understand at the time what he meant, but it did. He felt that nothing would ever be quite the same again.”
When they played it over the radio, instantly the phones and telegrams started buzzing. “It seemed as if all of Memphis was listening…But there was, Sam immediately recognized, a real problem with such instant fame. There was no record. There was no other side. They went back into the studio the following night…Once again the song just seemed to spring up like Topsy, as they pursued several different approaches” to the song ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky.’”
Elvis was an instant success with the audiences, due to “the inherent spirituality of the music. It wasn’t just that this young kid had grown up in a religious environment, like so many of the rest of them. It was how he mixed the sound and exuberance, of spiritual music with blues and country in a way that no one else had before.” We hope to inspire students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to understand the inherent spiritual value of music.
“Sam had hoped against hope that the new Presley single would sell well enough to finally put him on a solid financial footing.” But the company was still struggling. About this time, a tall, lanky boy name J.R. Cash came into the studio, having just gotten out of the Air Force, “arriving on virtually the same day that Elvis cut his first record, at the beginning of July.”
When his group played for Sam, they were all nervous and didn’t do very well. “But there was something absolutely intriguing about this little group. Just the difficulty they had putting something together, the very tentativeness that they exhibited in attempting to master their instruments- it was the damnedest thing, it was an original sound…at the heart of it was this Cash boy’s voice, its sincerity, its conviction, its very believability…So he told him to… “Go home and write me an up-tempo weeper love song…It took all of two weeks for him to come up with a fully formed song.”
“For all of his polite, self-effacing manner, J.R. Cash seemed to maintain an unshakable center, with a deep faith, a sly, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, and a broader experience of the world than Sam had seen in most of his artists. He was a voracious reader whose songwriting stemmed as much from imagination as experience.” We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to read widely and to explore multiple avenues of learning in order to have rich resources upon which to draw, in their creative pursuits.
Even though Sam Phillips was pursuing his dream, there was still little financial reward for tireless hours he had spent in the studio. “Lately he had begun to feel more and more like an outcast, sometimes he felt like he might even be sacrificing his own family- not just their future but their present- to a vision that might only bring ruin.”
His doctor suggested that “it might be beneficial to take a drink or two on occasion just to ease the tension…He had up to this point never taken a drink in his life. He didn’t like what it did to Jud (his brother-in-law), he didn’t like the prospect of losing control.”
He decided to establish the first All-Girl radio station in the nation, with the call letters WHER in 1956.
“Elvis was named Most Promising C&W Artist in Billboard’s annual Disk Jockey Poll” and soon contracts were being made and money started to flow. “On November 18, with the $5,000 in hand, Sam put in a rush order at all three of his pressing plants for the new Johnny Cash…singles…The formal execution of the contract took place at the Sun studio, on November 21. Various RCA executives…as well as Elvis and his parents” were there.
“For all of his outward diffidence Sam had no doubt that Elvis understood. He wasn’t so sure about RCA. He didn’t’ know if RCA’s head of specialty singles, Steve Shole, who had been instrumental in persuading the company to buy Elvis’s contract, had the backbone to keep all those **** bureaucrats out of the creative process.”
“Still, Sam knew as well as any man: ‘Anytime you think you know what the public is going to want, that’s when you know you’re looking at a **** fool in the mirror.’”
Sam’s work with the all-women radio station was becoming successful. The women related well with him. “From the women’s point of view, what really won them over was the trust he put in them. He was a good-looking man, and not above a little flirtation, but they felt, almost to a woman, he didn’t condescend to them…’And also he listened. He listened very carefully- to me and my ideas.’ He treated them all with respect…Unquestionably, that sense of complicity spread, as WHER, the home of ‘beautiful music,’ gradually infiltrated doctors’ and dentists’ offices, car-dealership showrooms, supermarkets, and even the operating room at Baptist Memorial Hospital.” In our music school in Odessa, Texas, we believe in the value of listening to one another’s ideas and showing respect to each student in their artistic pursuits.
In the course of all of his work with Sally Wilbourn, they became involved in an affair. When confronted by his wife, “She was devastated. She couldn’t believe it at first…but she didn’t’ blame Sally. Sally was just a poor, silly little girl. She blamed Sam, and she lit into him right away…she brought up the vital interest of their children- but Sam was impervious. And Sally evidently had no shame…She looked at her husband, and she realized with a sinking feeling that nothing she said was making any impression. He didn’t apologize, he didn’t deny- and she knew that this girl, this young girl, played a part in his life that he was not going to disown.”
In terms of the business, “There was no question that this was the future. None of his other records were selling- not the hillbilly, not the r&b, just this revolutionary new music that combined raw gutbucket feel with an almost apostolic sense of exuberance and joy. It represented, it embodied in its very essence, the same faith in progress, the same willingness to dare all that had propelled Sam from childhood on. It was the same feeling that Sam had gotten from the black church and from the singing that he had heard in the cotton fields as a boy…he rationalized that what he was doing was not so much deserting the black man as continuing to broaden the base for the acceptance of black music, providing the market with what it needed right now through the almost unstoppable momentum of rock ‘n roll.”
“Probably the most talented of this new wave of ‘second generation’ rockers was Roy Orbison, a twenty-year-old college student from Wink, Texas…for both Roy and the Wink Westerners. The band switched over almost instantly to rhythm and blues and rock ‘n roll, and when Roy transferred to Odessa junior College his sophomore year, he changed the name of the band as well, to the Teen Kings, and got his own television show for the twin cities of Odessa and Midland, Texas. The band’s featured song was one he had picked up in Denton from a North Texas State English major named Dick Penner…called ‘Ooby Dooby’…Roy had met Johnny Cash just a month earlier when he passed through Midland and Odessa and appeared on Roy’s television show…Now, with a record out of his own, he was enjoying even greater local attention. One of the first people he took it to was Cecil Holifield, the proprietor of the Record Shops in Midland and Odessa and one of Elvis’ earliest boosters in the area.” Our music school in Odessa, Texas acknowledges the contribution of this area and region in the history of rock ‘n roll. We are honored to contribute to the value of our community here in West Texas.
Jerry Lee Lewis and his father, Elmo, arrived from Ferriday, Louisiana, at the studio. “When Sam heard the tape, it was is if, he said, Jerry Lee Lewis had stepped out of a dream he was fixing to have… ‘Between the stuff he played and didn’t play,’ Sam said, ‘I could hear that spiritual thing, too. I told Jack, ‘Just get him in here as fast as you can.’…They must have cut thirty songs, one after another, just like that. He sang blues, hillbilly, spirituals with equal ease…he kicked every song off on piano and set such a solid beat, such an infectious beat…I mean, we knew what he was going to do before he did it, and he knew what we were going to do.”
It was with Jerry Lee Lewis that Sam began using his ‘slap-back’ reverb more extensively. Jerry Lee Lewis’ hit single “Whole Lot of Shakin’” had been on the charts for four months. He quickly became an international success with hits like “Great Balls of Fire.” Coming back from a tour of England, however, with his 13-year-old bride began to challenge the financial and social stability of his stardom.
“None of this impinged in any case on the ambitious plans that Sam had formulated for a brand-new, forward-looking, and up-to-the-minute recording studio, with all the latest technology and ultra-modern, space-age design…it was becoming more and more evident that rock ‘n roll was losing its lock on the buying public, whether by accident or design. A little company, a makeshift studio, couldn’t possibly compete under these conditions- unless it provided a service that the big record companies needed….Everybody needed some place to record, a sleek modern studio that could provide quality, service, and guaranteed hits for reasonable rental fees.”
“The new studio had been inaugurated, appropriately enough, by a Charlie Rich session at the end of October 1959. It wasn’t officially open yet” until September 17, 1960.
Sam, however, was becoming less focused, and had developed a drinking problem. Still married to Becky, “she was increasingly unable to deny the concern she felt about the changes that she observed in his behavior, his growing recklessness, what seemed to be a lack of certainty and direction in his life. She never voiced that concern explicitly, but she had seen Sam spin out of control before, and she was desperately anxious not to see it happen again. So she spoke to their long-time pastor- he knew the family so well, and the boys thought the world of him, Sam, too, even though he rarely attended church anymore- and she asked if he would talk to Sam about his drinking. He came out to the house, and Sam heard him out politely and then explained without rancor that this was his life, this was how he chose to live it, and as certain as he was that Pastor Barnick was not going to die for him, Sam sure as hell wasn’t prepared to let some Lutheran minister- let anyone else– live for him now.”
“Many of those around Sam were as bewildered as Becky, even some of his fiercest admirers, as the label and the brand-new Memphis studio seemed to mean less and less to him, and while there was no diminution in the certitude of his pronouncements, there was a disturbing lack of certitude in the steadiness of his course…observed the incontestable playing-out of Sam’s undeclared withdrawal…as Sam to all intents and purposes simply stepped off the world stage and disappeared from public view for the greater part of the next two decades.”
“Sam moved Sally into his Mendenhall home in January 1968. There was never any talk of divorce, there would never be any talk of divorce, but he bought a house for Becky nearby, which Jerry, unencumbered at nineteen by any pressing obligations or relationships, moved into as well. For Becky it was a crushing blow, challenging her faith…that in one way or other never failed to put the blame on herself.” Their son Jerry became estranged and hateful toward his father as a result.
“He hadn’t seen Elvis in quite a while, not from any lessening of admiration or affection.”
“In 1975, two years after putting his new radio stations on the air…one of those events occurred that no one could ever have anticipated…For it was at this point that Sam, a man who had always prided himself on his control of self, people, situations, and events, lost his head- in love, lust, desire, remorse, call it what you will, but it seemed for a time as if he was no longer in command of his own emotional destiny.”
“There had been women before, of course, and there would be women again- it wasn’t that Sam was not capable of having affairs…There was a kind of loneliness, an almost desperate need for company that had been with him since childhood and seemed to grow more pronounced, especially late at night, with every passing year.”
“He met the young woman in question, Sylvia Guidry, a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring singer with three children, through his good friend and drinking buddy…Sally knew all about it from the start…it embarrassed Sally deeply, it made her look- well, it might very well make her look to the world like a kept woman.”
“Elvis’ death on August 16, 1977, seems to have marked a sea of change in Sam’s life…It brought an almost anguishing sense of guilt. He blamed himself for not having made time to see Elvis over the last two or three years. What never ceased to gnaw at him was that for Elvis, that most self-directed of all his discoveries, there had been in the end not sense of personal fulfillment. I could have saved him, Sam said to me the first time we met, some eighteen months after Elvis’ death. And as messianic as it may have sounded (and as messianic as it would continue to sound when Sam repeated it with ever more outlandish insistence over the years), there was as much introspection as self-regard in the statement.”
In 1986, Sam was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was one of two nonperformers so honored.
Sam’s story began with a mission. “My mission was to bring out of a person what was in him, to recognize that individual’s unique quality and then to find the key to unlock it.”
“His ultimate goal? To somehow or another protect them- or was it perhaps, ultimately, just as much to protect himself? ‘This is the void,’ he declared. ‘When they get out on the stage of life, the first thing that starts in their mind [is]: when am I going to be rejected?’
“This…was the very foundation of Sam’s story. This was the text of his lesson. All of it. Freedom. The democratic process. The vast, untapped talents of those who had been ignored, set aside, scorned, and reviled by a world that, without even knowing it, was waiting for the bestowal of their gifts. Most of all, individualism– but individualism at any cost, individualism in the extreme.”
In Sam’s own words, “For God’s sake, don’t let’s become conformists- please. Just do your thing in your own way. Don’t ever let fame and fortune or recognition or anything interfere with what you feel is here- if you feel you are a creative individual. Then don’t let the companies get this going real good and buy up all the rights of the individual some way or the other. That’s not right. We’ll go back in another circle. Till it gets so **** boring that your head is swimming…All of us **** cats that appreciate not the fifties necessarily but that freedom are gonna forget about the feel. We gonna be in jail, and not even know it.”
It is amazing to me how much of the impact that Rock ‘n Roll has had, from Elvis to the Beatles, to Coldplay, etc. started in the foundations of Pentecostal church music. It is also amazing to me that those who started out in church, from B.B. King to Elvis, Jerry Lee all embraced the Biblical verbiage, yet ran as far the other direction in their life-style as possible, through unabated sexual promiscuity to drug and alcohol addiction. Sadly, every story seems to start and end the same way.