Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll

In which SAM PHILLIPS addresses the AUTHOR: excerpted from a real-life PLAY IN ONE SCENE

It's a great story, and it will go down in history. I don't know how great the book will be—but it's a great story. Peter, look, let me just tell you like I told all of my children, like I told every artist that walked in the door. Don't be afraid of it. No matter what I say to you, don't be afraid of it. But be frightened to death of not giving your best judgment to everything. Don't let history down. Fuck Sam Phillips. Fuck anything that goes. It's an important era—you got so much more responsibility to that than you got to any one person, including my ass.

The AUTHOR acknowledges that this is so. The AUTHOR suggests that if he doesn't come in for criticism, in Sam's terms he will have fucked up.

If you don't, you're just another one of the motherfuckers that are using this thing to the detriment of the beautiful changes it wrought. That's not right. If you let that happen, you ain't a very conscientious, dedicated, devoted person. It ain't for you to put me in a good light. Just put me in the focus that I'm supposed to be in. Man, I don't give a damn if you say one good thing about me. Your charge is to put all of it in focus and ferret out the bullshit. There's been enough of that. I'm going to tell you, Peter, Ferret it out, for God's sake. Look, and tell your damn publisher, "Hey, if it takes me forever to write it, it's going to be the most authentic thing that has ever emanated from this era. With all the contradictions to the contrary." You read me?

AUTHOR: I do. (And he does.)

"From this, he took a lesson: value the original, fragile, and rough. That's the art."—HOLLAND COTTER on the art of Henri Matisse

"To us, their less tried successors, they appear magnified… pushing out into the unknown in obedience to an inward voice, to an impulse beating in the blood, to a dream of the future. They were wonderful; and it must be owned they were ready for the wonderful."—JOSEPH CONRAD, Lord Jim

Author's Note

IT WAS A HEAVY CHARGE, as I think should be evident from the dramatic reconstruction on the opposite page—but one from which I never felt I could shrink.

I met Sam Phillips in a flood (see chapter 9), and as I wrote at the time, from that first meeting his words had all the weight of vatic truth. He seemed like an Old Testament prophet to me, in both looks and manner. Or, as singer-songwriter John Prine said, in describing his own first meeting with Sam: his eyes would grow wide, "like fire and brimstone. It looked like his eyebrows and his eyes themselves were on fire—they were just wild—you'd swear that his hair would kind of get curly, and his hands moved like a preacher's."

I mean, it was something!

But that wasn't it—not really. At least not all of it. I suppose I should confess at the start what I am sure will become immediately apparent to the reader: this is a book written out of admiration and love. Nor will it be any less evident that this book is different from the two other biographies I have written, on Elvis Presley and Sam Cooke. Not that there was any less admiration or love in those books. But I knew Sam Phillips, I knew him for almost twenty-five years, I was with him through good times and bad, and while I might not necessarily have chosen to have my responsibilities read to me by my subject, they are the same responsibilities felt by any other biographer (ferret out the truth, don't be afraid of it, and, in the end, "Fuck anything that goes")—they are the self-imposed responsibilities taken on by every writer, of fiction or nonfiction, for better or worse.

In that spirit perhaps I should also add that Sam would have disclaimed the subtitle of this book—well, to be perfectly honest, he would have both claimed and disclaimed it, as he frequently did, more often than not in the same elongated sentence. "I didn't set out to revolutionize the world," he said one time. Instead, what he wanted to do was to test the proposition that there was something "very profound" in the lives of ordinary people, black and white, irrespective of social acceptance. "I knew the physical separation of the races—but I knew the integration of their souls." That was what he set out to capture when he first opened his studio in January of 1950, "when Negro artists in the South who wanted to make a record," he declared early on, "just had no place to go." It went against all practical considerations, it went against all well-intended advice. He considered himself not a crusader ("I don't like crusaders as such") but an explorer. To Sam, "Rock and roll was no accident. Absolutely not an accident at all." "You can say," he told me, "he had the light coming on, and it spotted the possum. Right there."

Well, I guess that's one way of putting it. Let's just say Sam was the man who discovered rock 'n' roll. But more to the point, he considered it his mission in life "to open up an area of freedom within the artist himself"—whether that artist was Elvis Presley or Howlin' Wolf or B.B. King or Johnny Cash—"to recognize that individual's unique quality and then to find the key to unlock it." That is what he sought to do with every artist who entered his studio, whether or not they ever achieved worldly success, whether or not they were ever likely to achieve it.

It might have seemed sometimes to an outsider as if the musicians were just fumbling around, and the producer (a term that did not even exist then, and that Sam to some extent would always disdain: I think he might have preferred to be called a practicing psychologist) was just letting things go to rack and ruin. But he wasn't. He was simply trying to pare things down to their most expressive essence. Michelangelo said: "In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it." That was what Sam Phillips saw not in marble but in untried, untested, unspoken-for people: an eloquence and a gift that sometimes they did not even know they possessed. Like other celebrated American artists—like Walt Whitman, who sought to encompass the full range of the American experience in his poetry; like William Faulkner, who could see past prejudice to individual distinctions; like Mark Twain, who celebrated the freedom of the river and a refusal to be civilized—Sam was driven by a creative vision that left him with no alternative but to persist in his determination to give voice to those who had no voice. "With the belief that I had in this music, in these people," he said, "I would have been the biggest damn coward on God's green earth if I had not."

From the day I first met him in 1979, Sam Phillips began telling me the story of his life. Not in so many words, of course. But then, given his discursive nature, it may well have been so many words. To Sam his life was epic, mythic, intimate, and instructive by turns, and the tone he used to describe it was casual, colloquial, lyrical, thundering, and eloquently collusive. All of which pretty much ruled out any hope of linearity. What you were going for, in Sam's terms, was "just another swinging day at the fair."

He saw himself as a teacher and a preacher. That was the motivation that drove him to expound his message to the world, long after he had stopped making records. But in a very real sense the persona that he created in later life to convey that message did a disservice to the watchful, reactive role he had fashioned for himself when all of his attention was focused on no more than "to bring out of a person what was in him… to help him express what he believed his message to be." To Sam every session was meant to be like "the making of Gone with the Wind," with all its epic grandeur—but at the same time every session had to be fun, too. If it wasn't fun, it wasn't worth doing, he said, and if you weren't doing something different, of course, then you weren't doing anything at all. As far as failure went, there could be no such thing in his studio, because in the end, Sam insisted, it was all about individuated self-expression, nothing more, nothing less.

"Perfect imperfection" was the watchword—both in life and in art—in other words, take the hand you're dealt and then make something of it. If Ike Turner's guitarist's amp fell off the car on the way up to Memphis to cut "Rocket 88," well, stuff some paper where the speaker cone was ruptured, and THEN YOU HAD AN ORIGINAL SOUND! If a telephone went off in the middle of a session, well, you kept that telephone in—just make sure it's THE BEST-SOUNDING DAMN TELEPHONE IN THE WORLD.

You can see how this could affect a person—and by "person," in this instance I mean me. Meeting Sam for me was a life-changing event—but for all of the impact of his message, and for all of the fact that in retrospect I think I can say he hit virtually every point in his narrative at that first meeting, I soon discovered that it was a message that could all too easily be misunderstood. When Sam referred to his mental breakdown and electroshock treatment, for example, not long after opening the studio (he even called his wife, Becky, to verify the dates of his hospitalization), I thought it represented a triumph over darkness once and for all. But that wasn't quite what Sam meant, although there would have been no telling that at the time. (He didn't mean the opposite either.) So many of the conclusions I came to, after that first immersion in the Book of Sam, the conclusions to which Sam was pointing, in a sense was always pointing, were so much more nuanced than the supremely confident language in which they were clothed. I mean, it wasn't that they didn't hold up over the years. They did. They were, if anything, reinforced. But they were modified, as all of our truths are modified, by the life that was lived. They were like the family anecdotes that we all tell one another, a neat summation that encapsulates a far deeper and more complex reality.

Since that time I have continued to be engaged in a running dialogue with Sam, as I'm sure will escape the notice of no one who reads this book. The conversation is never anything less than lively—it is thought-provoking, engaging, frequently as challenging as it was in real life. The difference is, simply, that in real life, there was no shut-off valve. Now, more than ten years after his death, I can simply take my leave of Sam after three, four, maybe even five hours, and go on to other pursuits. It is, I suppose, more civilized—but given the choice, I'm not sure with Sam polite discourse would ever be the preferred mode.

How many times have I wanted to ask him questions of both fact and opinion? I study the transcripts of our conversations, I pore over other interviews and try to read between the lines, attempting to gauge what his vocal and facial expressions must have been—I torture my brain sometimes trying to interpret Sam's Ciceronian syntax or, in many instances, guess at the periodic conclusion at which he never quite arrived.

Occasionally—well, more than occasionally—I think of Sam's reaction. More than once I've hesitated momentarily at revealing some of the things he appeared to have kept secret. Or at least that I didn't know about. Which, of course, are by no means the same thing, though often one is tempted to conflate the two. But in the end I hope I've kept faith with Sam's charge of total honesty ("I don't want any accolades. I just want the truth. And, God believe me, Peter… if you fuck it up, then you're a goddamn crook as far as I'm concerned, and I'll tell you to your teeth"), tempered with the same consideration for people that Sam so often showed, in his own way, particularly in his creative endeavors. I've also tried to hold up as an example to myself his inextinguishable faith in humanity. Not soppy inextinguishable faith. What I'm talking about is the broad framework that would banish forever the exclamation "That's disgusting" with reference to behavior with which we're not familiar or of which we do not approve, and substitute instead the recognition That's human. There was nothing, in other words, in Sam's cosmogony that could make us less than human, even if it didn't conform to the more convenient tale we would like to tell about ourselves.

Sam always made it plain—not just to me but to everyone around him—that he wanted hard, unvarnished truths, and I never doubted for a moment that he did. As Jerry Phillips said at one point while pondering whether or not to tell a particularly uncomfortable story about his father, "Sam would just say, 'Tell the goddamn truth'"—and that is what he and every other member of Sam's family was committed to. Not so much in the sense of, Let the chips fall wherever they fucking may (his wife, Becky, was too kind for that, his older son, Knox, too devoted, and his longtime companion, Sally Wilbourn, underneath a fiercely protective outer shell, perhaps in the end too fragile), but there was never any sense on anyone's part, least of all Sam's, of hiding his humanity under a neatly formed construct, of sacrificing the truth at any point to an invitingly colorful legend.

There were so many crazy times, so many two-fisted drinking dinners (I'm speaking here of Sam's two fists)—Knox and I discussed all the time the wreck of all our well-conceived plans and expectations. ("That was a weird interview with Sam," Knox might say. "I mean, weird good.") But without meaning in any way to equate my own outsider status with Knox's own indissoluble bond with his father—I mean, close doesn't even begin to describe it—there was not, we always hasten to agree, there was not one single moment either of us would not give everything to have back. As Sam would certainly say, they were all great, they were all to be prized—because they were all, each and every one of them, indubitably real. R-E-A-L.

As you can see, nearly everyone who loved Sam has contributed to this book. Not all of them understood Sam. In fact, outside the immediate family, most—with the notable exception of self-proclaimed-and-proud-of-it "nuts" like Jack Clement and Sputnik Monroe or more reserved wisemen like Roland Janes—probably did not. Some preferred to think of him as a kind of high-achieving "rodeo clown"—and permitted themselves to be, simply, amused by some of his more outrageous pronouncements or actions (cf. his appearance on the David Letterman show). But there was no one that I encountered who was untouched, or was not in some way inspired, by Sam. There was no one who failed to recognize his unique—well, if they wouldn't give him "genius," every one of them was ready to concede they had never met anyone else even remotely like Sam.

Which brings me back to my role in this book. Because, of course, like everyone else in Sam's life, I was assigned a role, however small—and like everyone else, as should be clear from just a smattering of our dialogue, I was expected to carry it out. In writing the book I felt I had to take advantage of that role, not to enlarge myself but to give the kind of firsthand insight that however well I might feel I knew Elvis or Sam Cooke, I simply was not afforded by personal experience. It's not that the events that I witnessed were magnified in any way by my presence—but they were no less colorful or characteristic either, and it was, of course, a rare opportunity to report from the front lines.

Occasionally (very occasionally) I was a witness to history, more often to the unfettered expression of personality—but, most important, I was afforded a glimpse, whether advertent or inadvertent, as Sam might say, of some of the dramedy of real life. Sitting with Sam just before (and just after) he delivered his paean to Johnny Cash and Jesus and the Hotel Peabody at a NARAS celebration in Memphis that shocked and offended half the audience while raising Sam up even higher in the shockabilly esteem of the rest. Private moments of desolation and despair (well, perhaps despair is too big a word for his feelings—doubt maybe?), when he might unburden himself of his frustrations, then castigate himself for giving in to negative thinking, against all of his strongly held beliefs. Those times when he would call up a long-since-forgotten past and summon up unsung heroes (unsung even in the body of this book) like Alex "Puddin'" Beck, an African-American plumber's assistant, who was as brilliant as any advanced-degree sanitary engineer, Sam said, and could emerge from the messiest and smelliest job as clean as a whistle. "Hey," said Sam without a smidgen of irony, "are you gonna tell me people like that are not brilliant?" And then there were those rare exposed moments when all pretense was cast aside and Sam stood, like Lear upon the heath, raging at unseen cataracts and hurricanoes.

One thing that for me can be difficult about many biographies—well, about so many stories in general—is the predictable spinning out of the tale. With Elvis Presley and Sam Cooke that issue never really presented itself—they both died so young. But Sam Phillips lived to the age of eighty, and to all intents and purposes he had by then been retired from any active engagement in the record business for over forty years. Sam was never boring—at least not to me—but a recitation of all his accolades and honors would have been. I have done my best to avoid that recitation. Instead, I have attempted to write a book that conforms to Sam's definition of what a recording session ought to be, as epic as, well, take your pick of epics, but as intimate as sexual relations. That tells a story that, like most stories, can be both heroic and tragic at the same time, in its own mortal way.

Sometimes in the middle of the night he arrives unbidden. He even sets me riddles. In one dream he said to my bewilderment (both then and now), "I am nothing if not an idealist.… I am everything but an idealist.… The boy cannot fully understand." I dream of Sam. I dream of my grandfather. I dream of Solomon Burke and the songwriter Doc Pomus. All gone. They come around less frequently now. But whenever Sam arrives, as often as not rattling at the window in the midst of a torrent of conflicting concerns, I always listen.

Sam at eight. Courtesy of the Sam Phillips Family