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.”
The fateful encounter with Colonel Tom Parker happened in February 1955, just before a show in Memphis. Huddled with Elvis and Phillips around a table at a nearby restaurant, Parker set the tone by confidently lecturing Phillips on why Sun Records could never break Elvis nationally. The streetwise Phillips saw Parker was a shark—a bigger shark—and sat glumly over his coffee, knowing the crushing analysis was correct. Sun was broke. Elvis, visibly impressed by Parker’s spiel, was about to get snatched.
Because Elvis was legally underage, Parker charmed Gladys Presley, even persuading country legend Hank Snow to explain her the harsh realities of the music business. So Gladys Presley signed the extraordinarily convoluted “special adviser” contract on her son’s behalf, effectively giving Parker total managerial control. Turning his attentions to the Sun contract, Parker asked Phillips to name his price. The telephone call descended into shouting. Phillips spat out a figure of $40,000, in two weeks, then slammed down the receiver.
Parker pitched Elvis to Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, who considered picking him up, but as the deadline neared, Parker had just one firm offer, $25,000 from RCA Victor. On the final day, Parker convinced RCA’s singles division manager, Bill Bullock, to find another $15,000. The relieved Parker sent a telegram to Memphis confirming he’d raised the money.
Although the seemingly puny sum of $40,000 has long been questioned, in late 1955, it was nonetheless an expensive deal for a Tennessee boy. Truth is, Phillips urgently needed a cash injection. He was nervously sitting on a surefire hit from Carl Perkins. As soon as the check from RCA cleared, he scheduled “Blue Suede Shoes” for release on New Year’s Day 1956—the year rock ’n’ roll exploded nationally. Sam Phillips got his timing right.
As RCA’s better-equipped producers struggled to get Elvis soundin
g as good as he had on his final Sun record, the haunting “Mystery Train”—even offering Phillips a fee to produce him—“Blue Suede Shoes” hit the big cities like a freight train. A million copies sold that year. With Presley covering his own version on the B-side to “Heartbreak Hotel,” Phillips was even collecting publishing points on both records through his Hi-Lo publishing company.
Touring, crowd violence, car crashes, nonstop amphetamines, painting hotel rooms black—Sun’s rock ’n’ roll explosion was as dazzling and fleeting as a shooting star. Fueled by Phillips’s fascination with the diabolic Jerry Lee Lewis, the defections began. First, the estranged Marion Keisker resigned. Then tensions erupted with Carl Perkins over the $26,000 he received for “Blue Suede Shoes.” Told by seasoned vets that a gold disc should have earned him about $100,000, Perkins waded through his royalty statements and noticed, among other abnormalities, that his “gift” of a Cadillac was a deduction. When it came to sharing the spoils, as Rufus Thomas later quipped, Sam Phillips was “tighter than the bolts on the Brooklyn Bridge.” In the end, both Perkins and Cash, feeling shortchanged and burned-out, jumped ship to Columbia’s country music label in Nashville.
Although Sam Phillips would never again have a magical run of hits the way he did between 1954 and 1957, his record company generated about $2 million, allowing him to invest in the hugely successful Holiday Inn hotel chain and set up WHER, the first all-female radio station.
As a cultural event, not since the wartime outbreaks of Dixieland jazz and Frank Sinatra had there been such hysteria. Unlike jazz, however, which emphasized virtuosity, three-chord rock ’n’ roll popularized the idea that anybody can be a star. Sam Phillips found boys from down the road and let their inner lunatics loose on record, confident in the knowledge that the youth of America were craving raw characters they could identify with.
Sam Phillips also proved to wannabe producers that small, unfunded independents in small towns could conquer the world and create millions. All these themes, echoing the David and Goliath parable, form the very essence of rock ’n’ roll—both as art form and entrepreneurial model. For decades since, generations of nobodies driven by a religious sense of entitlement have ventured out and heroically banged their heads against the edifice—the lucky ones releasing a dammed-up river of dollar bills and pretty girls.
10. LUCKY CHILDREN
Everyone wanted an Elvis. In England, Decca amassed an entire roster of copycats complete with shaking legs and fake Memphis accents: Tommy Steele, Billy Fury, Eden Kane. French Elvises with anglicized pseudonyms like Johnny Hallyday, Eddy Mitchell, and Dick Rivers invented foreign-language versions. Elvis impersonation was becoming such a global industry, Colonel Tom Parker should have patented the formula.
Thanks to this wave, RCA’s 7-inch format came into its own and by 1960 accounted for 20 percent of overall industry turnover. Economically, the 7-inch single was ideal for independents; costing relatively little to make, a smash hit was the musical equivalent of a winning lottery ticket.
In this three-chord gold rush, there was one conspicuous absentee: Columbia. Throughout the late forties and fifties, Columbia had boomed into a highbrow label whose impressive catalog was based largely around the company’s great technological discovery, the LP—which, it should be noted, was by no means welcomed by everyone at the time. After fifty years of four-minute sides, the LP represented a niche format that, beyond classical music and cast recordings, had not yet explored its full potential. One famous jazz fanatic, the poet Philip Larkin, wrote that he was “suspicious” of the LP at first; “it seemed a package deal, forcing you to buy bad tracks along with good at an unwontedly high price.”
With formats following generational chasms, the record industry was splitting into different markets. Singles were flutters and could sell by the millions in short spurts, whereas costly long-playing albums, although selling smaller quantities, yielded the highest profit margins and typically stayed on shelves longer. Formats aside, Columbia’s unwillingness to blindly jump on the Elvis bandwagon was ultimately an issue of corporate culture. Its editorial line throughout the late fifties was marked by a number of influential characters, especially Ted Wallerstein’s chosen heir, Goddard Lieberson.
Having started out as an assistant, thanks to his warmth and rapier wit, Lieberson had become everyone’s favorite—janitors and artists included. An English-schooled, classically trained composer with the gift of perfect pitch, he wrote poetry and spoke four languages. Jewish, dapper, handsome, and lighthearted, he had won the hand of the stunningly beautiful Russian ballerina Vera Zorina. In the forties and fifties, anyone who was anyone in New York either knew or wanted to know him. For a start, once you’d heard it, you couldn’t forget such a bizarre name. Groucho Marx once telephoned a musician friend and asked, “Would you like to dine out with a man named Goddard Lieberson?” The friend accepted enthusiastically, to which Marx quipped, “Okay, I’ll find one.”
In New York’s community of musicians, film stars, and producers, Lieberson was a living legend for his telegrams and memos, which he signed “God.” They read something like this. “Sunday, at Andre Kostelanetz and Lily Pons home, I met—I don’t know if you can stand it, so prepare yourself—I met—GRETA GARBO! You will want to know that her feet are not big, that she has very charming speech, is curiously (for a movie star) intelligent, and she has the chest of a small boy, which I know because she went swimming only in her man’s type linen shorts … I went swimming too, but in the most embarrassing bathing suit of this century, a little number which Andre brought back from Hawaii—very Pago-Pago and very large for me, with the result that everybody looked at me as though I were a dirty French postcard—which I was.”
The aging Ted Wallerstein, recognizing Goddard Lieberson as a natural-born star magnet, respectfully passed over the reins in June 1956. Beginning a golden age in Columbia’s long history, as president Lieberson chose to retain his A&R functions in the classical and original cast recordings department. Lieberson had been the one who convinced the parent company, CBS Inc., to finance the entire production of My Fair Lady. Opening in March 1956, the show netted $66 million at the box office, while the original cast recording sold 6 million copies. The sale of film rights raised a further $5 million. “Musicians make the best businessmen,” quipped Lieberson to Time magazine in 1959. “I’d much rather be represented in a business deal by Stravinsky than any lawyer you could name.”
Columbia was also a leader in jazz, thanks to in-house producer George Avakian, who arranged and supervised a string of classics: Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” three stunning Miles Davis albums, and Louis Armstrong’s brilliant tribute to W. C. Handy. The ultimate in prestige, Columbia attracted most of the old legends like Edith Piaf, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday. Lieberson frequently reminded his producers never to yield to the pressure of sales departments, whose contributions to staff meetings generally cited the latest hits on other labels. He firmly believed it was smarter to make unique records and hope for the best.
He also believed that Columbia had certain responsibilities as cultural guardian. When he bumped into Alan Lomax in a New York diner, Lieberson commissioned a seminal sixteen-volume series called Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music. With liner notes written by Lomax, the logistically complicated project showcased traditional music from around the British Isles, continental Europe, Venezuela, India, Japan, Indonesia, New Guinea, Australia, French Africa, and British East Africa, as well as music of the Sioux and Navajo Indians. Although it wasn’t a commercially successful operation in itself, when George Avakian played the Spanish recordings to Miles Davis, two traditional airs inspired Sketches of Spain.
Flying high above the clouds, it was no wonder that Columbia was not too concerned about Elvis and rock ’n’ roll. One exception was Mitch Miller, Columbia’s pop A&R man, who produced the likes of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Johnny Mathis. At the first-ever disc jockey convention—in Kansas City in March 1
958—Miller gave a vitriolic speech, asserting that “Much of the juvenile stuff pumped over the air waves these days hardly qualifies as music!” Although this speech was warmly applauded, Lieberson wasn’t so categorical. He was receiving calls from his superiors at CBS Inc. to invest in youth sectors and began noticing the ebbing numbers on Broadway. A generational shift was in motion. These bubblegum-chewing youngsters were tomorrow’s adults. A company as old and as large as Columbia could not ignore them indefinitely.
In a remarkable twist of fate, it would be Columbia’s long-lost producer John Hammond who would find the ideal candidate to rejuvenate Columbia while retaining its elitist aura. Having been persona non grata at Columbia for over a decade, Hammond was formally pardoned by Goddard Lieberson in 1959 and offered a modest salary of $10,000 per year. “God” announced to the staff in nuanced language, “John Hammond is one of the deans of America’s recording industry and we are happy to welcome him back to Columbia, where he made his first discs twenty-seven years ago.”
Hammond was about to turn fifty and the lines in his face revealed the private wilderness he’d traversed—divorce, psychotherapy, his father’s death. His sons had been all but disowned by his mother, who gave away his father’s prize farm to a dubious charity before passing away herself. Neither he nor his four sisters could afford the upkeep of his parents’ estate. The privileged world of his childhood had all but evaporated. It was as a divorced loner battling through middle age and paying monthly alimony that Hammond found his soul mate, Esme Sarnoff, the ex-wife of Robert Sarnoff, son of the fearsome RCA mogul. The two aging divorcés began a new life, spending weeks in Manhattan, weekends in Westport.
Still trawling through the papers, snooping around clubs, and producing records for independents, Hammond hadn’t wandered far from the cutting edge. In fact, his time at the bottom brought him to a new underground. In November 1953, he had published a hard-hitting article in The New York Times blaming modern production methods for compressing the sound on jazz records, thus killing the genre commercially. His purism caught the attention of Vanguard Records, which invited Hammond to conduct some jazz experiments.
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