Biography tells the perfectly imperfect story of Sam Phillips, inventor of rock 'n' roll

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      With its white frame and pale venetian blind, the street-level door at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee, couldn’t be plainer. Yet, in the 1950s it served as a passage for an American form of genius that changed the century.

      In the space of a few short years, a line of obscure musicians with names like Rufus Thomas, Riley “B.B.” King, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, and Jerry Lee Lewis—even a handful of rank amateurs, such as a nervous young truck driver named Elvis Presley and an appliance salesman from Arkansas who introduced himself as J.R. (soon to be “Johnny”) Cash—stepped though this door and into the confines of the Memphis Recording Service, seeking out the advertised help of Sam Phillips, the tiny operation’s suave, intensely polite owner. The hand-built studio behind the reception area became the birthplace of a feral art form called rock ’n’ roll, overseen by Phillips through the soundproof window of his control room, and set down on his own label, Sun Records.

      Howlin' Wolf, the artist who arguably had the most powerful effect on Phillips.
      Courtesy of Bill Greensmith/Blues Unlimited

      Phillips was, without writing or playing a note, one of the great musical artists of the era, as master historian and critic Peter Guralnick makes clear in his definitive, heartfelt new biography, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll

      “He wasn’t somebody like Phil Spector, who would be the most obvious example,” Guralnick explains to the Straight by phone from Nashville, distinguishing Phillips from the archetypal record producer. “When you hear an artist that Phil Spector is producing, you’re going to think first and foremost, ‘This is a Phil Spector production.’ The artist’s individuality is not front and centre on it….Which is not what Sam did at all. Sam certainly had the capacity to do that, but what he was doing was to get people to dig down and find something in the deepest part of themselves, something they might not even be aware they had, and to bring that out of them.”

      Guralnick is uniquely qualified to describe this process, and not only because he’s written a shelfload of essential books about great American blues, soul, and country artists, including a landmark two-volume biography of Elvis. He also enjoyed a complicated friendship with Phillips himself, which lasted until Phillips’s death in 2003, some 25 years after Guralnick first interviewed him (an experience which, the author says now, was “maybe the most inspiring meeting I’ve ever had”).

      Phillips characterized his own work as a quest for “spirit feel”, an attempt to map out a musical no man’s land “where the earth meets the sky”, guided by intuition and a deep belief in the beauty of “the big original mistake”. It was Phillips who convinced Ike Turner’s band that the blown speaker in their guitarist’s amp wasn’t a setback at all, but rather an opportunity for a thrillingly fuzzed-out new sound. (The outcome was “Rocket 88”, the 1951 song widely recognized as rock ’n’ roll’s founding statement.) Likewise, it was Phillips who, in the late hours of a frustrating session with the unproven, 19-year-old Presley, suddenly heard the future calling in the trio’s jokey rendition of an old tune named “That’s All Right, Mama” and told them to take it again from the top. The resulting single made an instant star out of the gawky kid and married the blues to country, black sounds to white sounds, with a joyous energy never heard before.

      Phillips (at right) in the studio with Elvis Presley, Bill Black, and Scotty Moore, on the brink of international fame.
      Courtesy of the Sam Phillips Family

      Phillips was on a kind of mission, says Guralnick. His studio and label were founded on the idea of “giving voice to those who had no voice, recording those who had no other opportunity—not because he was trying to be a benefactor or provide charity service, but because he believed so strongly in the talent, the eloquence, and the poetry and beauty of what they had to offer.”

      Expressed mainly through the music itself, a broader philosophical context was always at work, a zealously democratic, gut-level idealism that confronted the basest legacies of the American South. Guralnick isn’t presenting a saint’s life in The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll. The care he takes in documenting Phillips’s personal failings makes this obvious. But he does argue that Phillips’s achievement parallels one of the greatest social movements of the time.

      “I think that he had a vision of what life in 20th-century America could be, and he did as much as anybody toward realizing it,” Guralnick explains. “Martin Luther King and all the civil-rights pioneers had visions which took place in a larger context, a greater context, but Sam’s vision was that the music could break down the walls of segregation—that the music could reach white America, reach mainstream America, and turn people around, turn their heads around. And that the music was itself a kind of life force, something that was so great and so eloquent and so full of life that it couldn’t be denied.”

      Given the scope of those aims and Phillips’s sprawling personality, this is a tale that resists neat summary. Even so, Guralnick doesn’t hesitate to cut to its heart, placing it in stark contrast to the tale of Elvis himself, whose decline and early death once prompted him to declare in writing “I know of no sadder story.”

      “I think Sam Phillips’s story is the most exuberant story you’re ever going to run into—at least that was my intention in conveying it in all of its perfect imperfection,” Guralnick states. “His big thing was that if you don’t fight against the latest trend and conforming to what everybody else is doing, then you’re going to lose your freedom. And one of these days, he said, we’re going to wake up in jail and not even know it. I would say that’s as true a prophecy as there could ever be, and it would be just as true today as it was then—maybe even more so.”

      Phillips with Jerry Lee Lewis.
      Courtesy of the Nashville Tennessean

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