A great shot of the performers and some of the staff and exhibit curators who worked on the tribute concert, Get Rhythm: A Tribute To Sam Phillips, held at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on August 29, 2015 in Nashville. The concert celebrated the opening of the exhibit, Flying Saucers Rock & Roll: The Cosmic Genius of Sam Phillips, co-curated by Peter and CMHoF curator Michael Gray, currently open and running through June at the Country Music Hall of Fame!
Standing: Abi Tapia CMHoF, Lydia Rogers and Laura Rogers (the Secret Sisters), Kevin McKendree, Billy Swan, Luther Dickinson, (Charles Myers, James Moon, Frank Howard, of the Valentines), Gary Craig, Colin Linden, Charles Esten, Chuck Mead, Nikki Silva (of the Kitchen Sisters), Dave Roe, Mark Collie, Carolyn Tate CMHoF and Michael Gray CMHoF.. Seated:.Eric Heatherly, W.S. Holland, Peter Guralnick, J.M. Van Eaton, Jerry Phillips, Valerie Woodhouse (of the Valentines), Marvell Thomas, Sonny Burgess, Charlie Rich Jr., Davia Nelson (of the Kitchen Sisters) (Photo by Rick Diamond/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum)
But then so did everyone else who really knew him.
I could try to be clever and say it was for his virtuosity (Roland, a master of mischievous word play, would undoubtedly frown on that), because he was indeed a brilliant guitarist, who provided all those carefully calibrated, arrestingly spontaneous solos and rhythm patterns on so many of the Sun Records classics.
But that, of course, is not what I am speaking of here.
I’m speaking, really, of a virtuosity of spirit, which no one who ever encountered the man could miss. A virtuosity – a generosity of soul that is universally praised, often sought after, but rarely attained. And in Roland’s case, like his guitar playing, it was achieved without visible effort, scarcely ever calling attention to itself.
If you ever visited the Sam C. Phillips Recording Studio at 639 Madison Avenue in Memphis, you would know Roland Janes. He was there managing the studio, engineering sessions, greeting the world, every day more or less for the last thirty years, working with everyone from Charlie Rich to Memphis rappers Three 6 Mafia and Al Kapone to Bob Dylan, Jerry Lee Lewis, and anyone who might wander in off the street looking to cut a “personal” record, the same way Elvis once did at Sam’s original studio at 706 Union around the corner.
At that original Sun studio Roland played on just about every hit (and, he would be quick to point out with a dry chuckle, on even more misses) that came out on the label from mid-1956 on. He arrived with Jack Clement and Billy Lee Riley that summer, going on to play the blazing double-whammy solo on Riley’s “Flyin’ Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll.” But it was, really, with Jerry Lee Lewis’ arrival at the tag end of the year that he would cement his place in rock ‘n’ roll history. How many times have you heard Jerry Lee’s exuberant shout, “Ro’ Boy,” as he exhorts the otherwise nameless guitarist to take yet another perfectly conceived, perfectly concise solo? It’s for his musicianship most of all, of course (along with his own short-lived but influential Rita label and his Sonic Recording Studio, one of the principal progenitors of the Memphis garage-band explosion of the ‘60s), that Roland was named to the Memphis Music Hall of Fame just last month.
But forget that. I mean, don’t forget the music – don’t ever forget the music. But forget the brilliant solos, and forget the accolades (as Roland said about fame, “I never really cared about any of that”) if you want to try to understand the spirit of the man.
Anyone who stopped by the studio, I don’t care for how long, could not miss that spirit. He was such a kind man. He was such a smart man. He was such a decent and committed man – and by “committed” I don’t mean to suggest anything like the quality that politicians often cite when referring to their own inflexibility. I mean, he was committed in the same way that Sam Phillips proved himself to be over and over again in the studio, committed to bringing out the best in you, committed to exploring the you of you, whoever you were, however you presented yourself, however sophisticated or unsophisticated your tastes. Not that Roland was above kidding around with you. Sometimes after a particularly bad pun, Roland might simply engage you with a quizzical look, as if to say, I hope you got that, it wasn’t really that hard. But mostly he was in the business of encouraging you to be the best “you” you could possibly be.
I’m not sure when I first met Roland – it must have been over thirty years ago - in the studio, of course – but there was no end to our meetings and, given Roland’s nature, I’m sure there will be no end. I remember when we were recording the Charlie Rich album, Pictures and Paintings, in 1991, it was Roland, who was second engineer on the session, who was, really, the key to its success. It wasn’t that Charlie didn’t have a lot to say; as Sam Phillips always said, it was almost as if he had too much to say, but given his deeply introspective nature too often it stayed bottled up inside. It was hard for Charlie – he had an intrinsic fear of letting go (he would tell you it was “anxiety panic disorder”), but even though Sam’s sons, Knox and Jerry, were present most of the time, and Scott Billington did a wonderfully sympathetic job of producing, it was only Roland who had the capacity to make Charlie feel – I’m not going to say at ease, but at home. And not just because they were old friends and colleagues. And not because of anything special that Roland said. It was just – Roland.
Just like Sam, whom he thought the world of (if Roland was everybody else’s mentor, Sam Phillips was his) he was a teacher – without all the big words that Sam used maybe but with the same sure sense of purpose. Every year his Christmas story provided an illuminating lesson. These were not conventional Christmas greetings – they were not just the usual well-intentioned summaries of family events over the last calendar year. They were more like real-life short stories with a strong moral underpinning. One of my favorites was 2011’s “House of Broken Dreams,” which began, “In my younger days I fancied myself to be a fine guitar player and singer” and then went on to paint a picture of the pawnshop owner who had given him a boost back in those early days. With another aspiring young musician, Roland (or the unnamed protagonist) had rented a room over the pawnshop, which was called “The House of Broken Dreams.” As Roland tells it, the name was something of a misnomer, if only because of the kindness of its owner, Mr. Oscar, a Holocaust survivor. Well, I’m not going to tell you the whole story, it’s more of a meditation, really, but it led Roland to his usual Christmas conclusion: “Let me wish a Merry Christmas to one and all – and to all A GREAT LIFE.”
We shot video interviews for the enhanced digital editions of my books in the studio this past spring. One of the highlights was a conversation with Roland – not an interview exactly, the intention was always conversation. But as we were talking about Jerry Lee Lewis, whom Roland has always cherished not just for his genius but for his fundamentally good-hearted character, Roland evidently decided it was time to turn the tables on me. If this was really a conversation, then he wanted to ask me some questions, too. “Well, how’d you get started, Peter?” he said. “How did you first get into this music?” And while we were at it, he wondered how I had come to write my first book. He imagined I must get quite a bit of satisfaction out of the writing, he said. And then we started talking about the satisfactions to be derived not just from writing or music but from any form of creative engagement.
The last conversation I had with Roland, when he first got sick last month, he wanted to know how the video project was going. I told him it was going great – it was really fun to work with my son, Jake, and Memphis writer and filmmaker Robert Gordon, and it was always great to work on any project with him. “So you feel good about it, Peter?” he said. I told him that I did. “That’s good,“ Roland said. “That’s good.”
For me it’s even harder. Because I speak to him every day.
Well, not literally – not exactly. But I am so caught up in his story, in his voice, in his words that it is (they are) literally inescapable. Sometimes he praises me. More often he belittles me (“If you can’t figure this out on your own, then you are one sorry-ass motherfucker”). But mostly he just exhorts me to get on with the job.
I have been working on my biography for six or seven years now – but, really, I’ve got to say, I think I’ve been building up to it all my life. I first met Sam almost thirty-five years ago. He was fifty-six, and I thought that was really old. (Just to keep everything straight, I was thirty-five.) It was probably the most inspiring meeting of my life. Not only to meet the man behind so much of the music that had shaped my life (blues and rock ‘n’ roll – and, now I’ve got to admit, country, too). But to find him voicing opinions that were – well, inspiring, in the larger sense of the word. His invocations of individualism and democracy and freedom reached out to territory far beyond the bounds of commercial music. (Well, so did his music.) As he said, and as my book, Lost Highway, concludes: “I think that music is a part of a very spiritual aspect of people. I don’t say that there’s a thing wrong with [today’s music], but when you drive so much of the same thing and people get into too much of a pattern – listen, they’re talking about that you’ve got to have, well, what is the trend now? Well, Jesus God, now if there’s anything that we don’t need, it’s a trend.
“One of these days, though, I may not live to see it, maybe you all will, but one of these days that freedom is going to come back. Because, look, the expression of the people is almost, it’s so powerful, it’s almost like a hydrogen bomb. It’s going to get out. I’m not just saying go back to the fifties and this sort of thing. But if it could be worked – and it will be worked – to where just a few like Elvis could break out again, then I would preach, I would become an evangelist if I were alive, saying, ‘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 damn boring your head is swimming. And I’ll tell you, I hope it’s not too long coming, because of the fact as we go longer and longer into the lack of individual expression, as we go along, if we get too far we’re going to get away from some of the real basic things. All of us damn 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.”
Well, all right. I’m still inspired. (And that’s just the condensed version.)
But I’ve got to tell you, after working on the book all this time, I’m no less convinced. Sam, as anyone who ever met him (or listened to him on stage, screen, or radio broadcast) knows, could be a little discursive. But he always had a point; in fact, it would be fairer to say, he always had a larger point. I spoke to him off and on for nearly 25 years, during the last fifteen of which he talked often about his book – well, for the last few years it was going to be our book, which I agreed to gladly – as soon as I was done with my Sam Cooke biography. (“When the hell are you going to finish that damn book?” Sam kept asking. I tried to enhance his appreciation of the other Sam by sending him a tape – mostly of gospel sides – but he was not to be bought off.)
Now to tell you the truth I didn’t think Sam was ever going to get around to his book – our book. Not because he didn’t want to – part of him certainly did, and a bigger part of him thought he did – but mainly because Sam, even in his late seventies, remained a forward-thinking, not a backward-looking) man. What I didn’t realize for the longest time, though, was that, whether by intent or not, Sam was actually writing it.
I’ve got hundreds (and hundreds) of pages of interview transcripts. The ostensible subject of most of the early interviews was Elvis Presley (this was when I was working on Last Train to Memphis primarily) – but Sam was never one to confine himself strictly to the subject at hand, and he introduced elements of his schooling, his upbringing, his perception of race as a child, the role that growing up on a farm at the Bend of the River outside of Florence, Alabama, just before the Great Depression hit, played on his life. But these were sandwiched in between his very sober (I’m talking her about mood) reflections upon the more familiar past, from Charlie Rich and Howlin’ Wolf to the course of Elvis’ early musical development and career.
It wasn’t until we did the documentary, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, in 1999, though, that I realized what was really going on. My friend Morgan Neville, the director and co-producer of the show, knowing Sam’s penchant for prolixity (but not knowing Sam) devised a strategy that he thought might help cut down some on the cost of actual filming. What we could do, he suggested, was interview Sam in a series of pre-production meetings, on audiotape – that way Sam could get it all out of his system before we ever switched over to the far more costly videotape and film.
Well, we did interview Sam, on more than a dozen 90-minute audio tapes, and I watched the beginnings of despair (well, not despair exactly – but I think you get the picture) begin to dawn on Morgan’s face, as Sam talked, it seemed, about just about everything under the sun except those things which would necessarily be the principal subject of the documentary. He talked at length about Silas Payne, the black, blind ex-sharecropper who had exerted such an influence on his life. Also his deaf-mute Aunt Emma, who was the smartest person in the family, maybe in North Florence, and how, like Silas Payne, she had provided him with the truest of role models. He talked about his eighth (maybe ninth) grade teacher, Mrs. Mary Alice Lanier, who spanked the hell out of his hand with a ruler. He was a “mean little bastard” until then, he said (“I was just very, very convinced of things”), but that finally set him off on the right path. He talked (a lot) about going to the superintendent of schools, Mr. Powell, to get Sousaphones for the Coffee High School marching band (Sam was its first captain, as a high school Sophomore) and working with the dapper new band director, twenty-six-year-old Floyd McClure, who wore spats and a Homburg, drove a black 1937 Ford, had played tuba with the Tidy Hill Dance Band in Chicago, and had just as passionate a commitment to the band as Sam did.
It was fascinating. Even if all the while Morgan was tearing his hair out. And needless to say, Sam kept talking about all these things (and much, much more) once the cameras started rolling. He would get really caught up in trying to describe his interaction with Wolf, Elvis, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Little Junior Parker – but he would get just as caught up in teaching us the Lesson of the Telephone that went off during a Jimmy DeBerry session – and the fact that you can still hear that telephone on the recording, because, Sam said, “You think I was going to take that telephone ring off the record? It was R-E-A-L, do you get me? Real.”
I miss Sam every day. Occasionally I dream about him. But, you know, I can visit with him any time I like. Which is most of the time. And if I run out of steam occasionally and don’t feel like visiting any more, for all of Sam’s vehement protests, I can always shut off the tape recorder, the computer – the whole process – if only for a little while, until I go back to work the next day.
I wrote this at the request of my friend Trevor Cajiao, and it first appeared in his magazine, Now Dig This, which bills itself without exaggeration as"100% Rock ‘N’ Roll.“ To find out more, check out www.nowdigthis.co.uk
Trowbridge’s, Florence, AL (Sam Phillips’ Favorite Hometown Restaurant)
Sorry to have been out of pocket for so long.
One of the biggest reasons is that we (Alexandra and I, with Robert Gordon and Jake coproducing, and David Leonard and Robert shooting) have been doing video interviews for the enhanced digital versions of the various books, which are slated to start coming out in December.
We shot in Memphis, Florence and Muscle Shoals, Nashville, and Chicago – at Phillips Recording Studio, Lauderdale Courts, Audubon Drive, Fame, Stax, and Sun International. Much of the interview material was with me alone, talking about how the books came to be written as well as some of the different approaches that I took to the material (like the huge difference required – just from the standpoint of structure and style – in telling the two contrasting stories of Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love).
But then we had conversations, too, with old friends like William Bell (straight from the White House celebration of Stax to the Stax Museum itself), Rick Hall, Dan Penn, Jerry Phillips, Roland Janes, L.C. Cooke, and Sleepy LaBeef, among others. It was really fun (with the one unavoidable downside the bittersweet memories of all those now gone), and here are just a few pictures from our trip.
With Roland and Robert at Phillips Recording
Roland, in case anyone doesn’t know, played guitar on every big Sun record from the arrival of Jerry Lee Lewis on. He has managed the Phillips studio for the last thirty years and writes the most wonderful short stories, which he sends out every Christmas. Around the middle of our conversation, Roland announced, “Now I’m going to interview you.” And he did. Robert’s new book on Stax, Respect Yourself, is at this moment just about to go to press
With Alexandra and Jake at 706 Union Avenue
The last time I had been here was with Steve Bing and John Fusco, who was researching the script for Last Train to Memphis at the time. Matt Ross–Spang was just beginning to put together recombinant versions of all the original Sun equipment then. Now he has it nearly assembled, with the equivalent of Sam’s RCA 76-D console and, I believe, two Ampex tape recorders. So for anyone who wants to record just like Elvis did, you can have your chance soon. And who knows, maybe we’ll even start shooting the movie before too long!
With Rick Hall at FAME Studios
A couple of nights after this interview we went with Rick to the Nashville Film Festival screening of the documentary Muscle Shoals, a vivid evocation of the music (produced by Stephen Badger and Greg Camalier) in which Rick was characteristically and irrepressibly himself. In fact, he pretty much stole the show, leaving the way wide open for a sequel focusing on some of the other aspects of the story. Rick’s still-unpublished memoir, Hell Bent For Fame, as told to Muscle Shoals historian Terry Pace and edited by Robert Gordon, is an even more amazing and graphic story, particularly of his early years, growing up in the desolate badlands of the Freedom Hills. He wanted it to be like a combination of Harry Crews and Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, he told me when he first began work on it more than ten years ago – and it is
With L.C. Cooke at his home in Chicago
L.C.’s got a new album coming out only 48 years after its originally announced date. Well, that’s not quite true – I mean, not literally true in that it’s not exactly the same album as the one SAR Records would have released if his brother Sam hadn’t died. This one will have some of L.C’s pre-SAR Checker and post-SAR Destination sides as well. But, as you can imagine, it’s very cool – totally cool. There’s one song on it that as we listened to it, L.C. said, “That was probably the best song I ever did in my life – to me. You know, sometimes you cut a song and you listen and you say, I could have done that better. But ‘If I Could Only Hear’ – if I’d have sung that song about 100 years, I couldn’t have done that song no better. And that’s always been my favorite song.” And then we listened to it. Watch for a fall release on ABKCO!
Next up on Our Tour: Thomson, Georgia, Birthplace of Blind Willie McTell
One of the great thrills of my life was getting a note on Beale Street in 1999. Memphis had always meant so much to me, long before I ever arrived there thirty years earlier, and Beale Street, of course, was the very emblem of the music and culture I had come to love. Not as much as Sam Phillips perhaps, who had first landed on Beale on his way to a religious revival in Dallas as a sixteen-year-old in 1939. It was four o’clock in the morning and pouring-down rain when Sam and his brother Jud and three friends from Coffee High School in Florence, Alabama, all members of Highland Baptist Church, drove up and down the fabled avenue in a 1937 Dodge coupé. To Sam Broadway at its most bustling could never have been as busy.
It was not the same for his friends, he realized – to them it was mostly just a place to gawk – but to Sam, drawn not just by the stories he had heard from an old blind sharecropper named Silas Payne but by the true facts and life of a fellow Florentine, W.C. Handy, who had himself arrived in Memphis some thirty-five years earlier (“I had seen pictures of him, I had read about him – look at the courage that man showed when he came to Memphis, a black man trying to make a name for himself in the white man’s world”), Beale Street represented the sum total of everything he had ever imagined. For a boy who had never even been as far as Birmingham, Beale Street and the Mississippi River were nothing less than the spelling-out of his dreams and his destiny.
It was like a beehive, a microcosm of humanity – you had old black men from the Delta and young cats dressed fit to kill. But the most impressive thing to me about Beale Street was that nobody got in anybody’s way – because every damn one of them wanted to be right there. Beale Street represented for me, even at that age, something that I hoped to see for all people. That sense of absolute freedom, that sense of no direction but the greatest direction in the world, of being able to feel, I’m a part of this somehow. I may only be here a day or two, but I can tell everybody when I get back home what a wonderful time I had.
It was at that point that he determined that Memphis would one day be his home.
Well, I can’t match that, obviously – but it meant an awful lot to me. And, however secondary any kind of public recognition may be to the work itself, it meant even more to be recognized by the very city to which I had always aspired to some kind of honorary citizenship.
Frank Stokes was one of the other recipients of the award that day, and although he was not there to accept it (he died in 1955, in his mid-to-late sixties, and in fact made no records after 1929), it was genuinely exciting not only to meet his surviving family but simply to be part of a ceremony honoring one of the greatest proponents of the Memphis blues, past, present, and future. His driving, propulsive beat, frequently complemented by the second guitar of Dan Sane (they were billed as the Beale Street Sheiks), was a forerunner not only to much of the blues that Sam Phillips recorded at his little studio at 706 Union Avenue from 1950 on but to the rock ‘n’ roll that would follow pell-mell in its wake and soon engulf the world. There are many songs that epitomize that ebullient but hauntingly melodic, not to mention unrelentingly rocking (in the best Memphis tradition), sense of style and grace that Frank Stokes exemplified but “Downtown Blues” to me was always the one that captured it best. Even with that old-timey wobble in the voice (and the scratchy sound of an old 78), there is nothing antiquarian about it in the least.
It’s a source that has never ceased to replenish musical inspiration and imagination, but the first time I think I actually heard this particular song was on a compilation album called The BluesProject (it was Blues Project group founder Danny Kalb’s participation on this same 1964 Elektra album that suggested his yet-to-be-born band’s name). To me Geoff Muldaur, possessor of one of the great voices of the blues revival (he may well have been the great blues-revival voice, a torch he picked up again with his transcendent 1998 return to recording, The Secret Handshake) didn’t just capture the spirit of the Memphis blues with his version of “Downtown Blues” - he actually took it a step further in the company of his own brand of latter–day Sheiks, an acoustic ensemble that included John Sebastian (soon to found the Lovin’ Spoonful) and an anagrammatically pseudonymous Bob Dylan (as Bob “Landy”) on treble piano. Well, take a listen for yourself, and see if it doesn’t presage the popular ascendance of the Rolling Stones and the electric Dylan - at least that’s how it sounded to me at the time, and it still does.
Well, I’ve come quite a ways from my Beale Street note. As I tell my students (and as Tristram Shandy never fails to underscore): Prize the digression. But, you know, the funny thing was, I never saw it. My note, I mean. It wasn’t that I wasn’t down on Beale from time to time – but I mean, what kind of egomaniac (or in Sam Phillips’ terms, what kind of ignorant sonofabitch) walks down Beale Street with his eyes cast down in continual search of his own name? I was beginning to suspect the whole thing might have been a sham, maybe my note had simply never been cast – which would have been okay, I mean, I had shared a stage with Frank Stokes’ granddaughter. But then one hot summer day in 2002 I went down to interview the great Memphis photographer Ernest Withers, whose documentation of the music and the Movement are unsurpassed, when what to my surprise, as I reached the threshold of his studio at 333 Beale, I saw my name.
Now I had known Mr. Withers a little before this, not much – but for some reason, contrary to all my natural inclinations, I just couldn’t help but gush out my excitement over my discovery. Yes, nodded Mr. Withers, who was unfailingly kind to me and so many others but was not without his acerbic moments. He was well aware of my note, he said, and I’d like to think he winked at me then, but I really have no evidence to support that conclusion. “You know,” he said without a hint of a smile, “I walk on you every day.” Well, what the hell, it was an honor just to be recognized by Mr. Withers, wasn’t it?
