Sam Phillips always said that Scotty may have been the most honest man he ever met. That was as high a compliment as Sam could bestow. In fact, Sam almost went on to imply, if it came down to a choice between Scotty’s version of a story and his own, choose Scotty’s! Now don’t get me wrong – Sam never actually said that. But that was how much he thought of Scotty. And he wasn’t just talking about facts – he was talking about character.
That was one of the main reasons he put Scotty together with Elvis in the first place. Elvis was nineteen, Scotty was twenty-two, and Elvis referred to him as “the Old Man” almost from the start. Scotty was always the one to provide a calming influence, even as all hell was busting loose around them in new and unpredictable ways.
But it wasn’t just a matter of temperament. His easy-going manner could not fully disguise the depth of his intellect or musical ambition. Of all the artists who found their way to Sam’s studio, Scotty was the one to whom Sam most readily revealed his vision of the future. They started meeting at Taylor’s Restaurant three or four afternoons a week, when Scotty was trying to get his own hillbilly group, the Starlite Wranglers, recorded, several months before Elvis Presley entered the picture. “By doing the record I became pretty good friends with Sam. He knew there was a crossover coming. He foresaw it, and practically every day after work [Scotty worked as a hatter at his brothers’ dry-cleaning business, which left his afternoons free] I would drift by the studio, and we would sit there over coffee at Miss Taylor’s Café and say to each other, ‘What is it? How can we do it?’”
There were times when I first met Scotty in 1976, when I wasn’t sure that he could even be lured into a conversation, let alone an interview. He was forty-four years old, and as proud as he was of his historic contributions and accomplishments, he had little interest in dwelling on them. He had his own friends, his own enthusiasms, his own tape-duplicating business, his own life. Why should he live in the past? In fact, were it not for the help of Gail Pollock, his employee at the time and devoted companion until her death in the fall of 2015, I’m not sure if he ever would have entertained the idea of doing a full-length interview, let alone a succession of them over a period of more than twenty years. But Gail persuaded him that I had a good track record (she checked) and an honest face (we soon became good friends, all three of us). And once he started to talk, once he agreed to start scrutinizing the past, he gave it his full attention, just as he did with any of the endeavors upon which he seriously embarked: his guitar playing, his engineering, his producing –well, let me take it several steps further, just the whole manner in which he conducted his life.
“Ooh, you’re making my brain hurt,” he would say when we really got into it some years later, after I had started my Elvis biography. But he never dismissed any line of inquiry, no matter how far afield it might seem (or actually be); he took every question seriously and always provided the facts as he knew them, or, upon consideration, as he came to understand them. He never exaggerated his role, he never fabricated a connection, he never answered a question when he didn’t know the answer – he just gave the matter his careful, considered attention.
I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m making Scotty out to be some kind of brooding introvert. Nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, there are introverts, and there are introverts. Someone like Sam Phillips, for example, for all of the brilliant extroversion of his work, was at heart a solitary figure. But Scotty loved to have fun – there was no question about it, there was no piety about it, there was certainly never any boastfulness about it, but there was never any doubt that Scotty in his own quiet way – sometimes with a soft chuckle where from others you might expect a loud guffaw – always had a good time. It was no different from the day we first met: Scotty valued his life, he valued his music, above all he valued his friends.
Guitar players of every generation since rock began have studied and memorized Scotty’s licks, even when Scotty himself couldn’t duplicate them afterwards. (“It was all feel,” Scotty said of the early RCA sessions. “On 'Too Much’ we just got lost, but somehow or another we finally recovered!”) He lived long enough to see himself sought out and celebrated by rock icons from Keith Richards to Bruce Springsteen to Paul McCartney. Those tributes, both genuine and personal, certainly meant a lot to him. But I’m not sure if it wasn’t the informal “thumb-picking” sessions with old friends like Chip Young and Thom Bresh (maybe with Tracy Nelson singing!) that didn’t give him the most satisfaction.
He remained to the end a deeply thoughtful, deeply modest man with a twinkling manner and a dry sense of humor (“Very dry,” Scotty would say), whose intentions were to celebrate the moment, place no faith in the business part of the music business, and always maintain the kind of informal convivialities that make life worth living. I never saw Scotty seek out a public moment, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him happier than he was at his 80th birthday party at the Gibson Beale Street Showcase in Memphis (see accompanying photograph). There, in a packed room full of family and friends, for a moment the private became public, and despite a number of offers to see him back to his hotel room, Scotty stayed well into the early hours of the morning, when the party was finally over. That’s the way I like to remember Scotty – well, I like to remember him in so many ways – but always as a man surrounded by friends, happily enjoying not the limelight but a lifetime of shared experiences.