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Memphis Shaken as Rock 'n' Roll Heart Is Stilled

August 1, 2003
  By DAVID M. HALBFINGER


MEMPHIS, July 31 - He had been ailing for months, his
friends all knew, but Sam Phillips's death on Wednesday
still knocked the wind out of Memphis.

The man who discovered Elvis Presley and in many people's
minds invented rock 'n' roll, who gave the world Jerry Lee
Lewis and Roy Orbison, Howlin' Wolf and Johnny Cash, who
carried a childhood yearning with him from small-town
Alabama to the biggest city in the mid-South and in short
order set off a musical and cultural revolution that
literally changed the world - a man like that, no matter
how old, does not leave this earth quietly.

His relatives were struggling to make funeral plans for Mr.
Phillips, who was 80. His surviving Memphis recording
studio was fielding condolence calls from strangers oceans
away and old Sun musicians like the guitarist and bassist
Dusty Rhoads. And in living rooms and music-industry
offices across town, jogged memories were spilling forth.

James Lott, a studio engineer at Sun since 1986, recalled a
recording session not long ago with the band Matchbox 20
and Mr. Lewis, the rock legend, and Ahmet Ertegun, the
chairman of Atlantic Records. "We were recording the old
Charlie Rich song, `Lonely Weekends,' " he said. "And with
all this talent in the room, Sam just dominated the place.
Jerry Lee was calling him sir - `Yes, sir, Mr. Phillips.' "


Jim Dickinson, a piano player and singer who recorded at
Sun with the Jesters in the 1960's, talked about the crazed
look Mr. Phillips would get inside the control room. "You
looked into his eyes and saw that madness," he recalled.
"It was something beyond passion. His eyes would get black
like they were all pupil - he'd just take on the fervor of
a preacher."

Sun Records, the tiny studio at 706 Union Avenue that Mr.
Phillips opened as the Memphis Recording Service in 1950 to
promote the music of people who had nowhere else to make
their voices heard, is now mainly a tiny tourist trap, a
monument to a moment, a man and his music. Yet just a few
of the visitors lining up for the hourly walk-through this
morning had an idea beforehand of Mr. Phillips's
importance.

Joe Coleman, of Farmborough, England, did. He was on his
third pilgrimage to Sun with his wife Karen and 10-year-old
son, Joseph. "We were going to come anyway, but when we
heard the news we wanted to be on the first tour," he said.
"It's our way of showing our respects. To us, in England,
he was as big as Elvis."

In the grand scheme of musical and American history, Mr.
Phillips, who died of respiratory failure after a year-long
illness, may have been bigger. It was Mr. Phillips, after
all, who, well before an 18-year-old Elvis walked into his
studio in 1953, had hungered for just such an artist: one
who could accomplish his subversive goal of breaking down
the barriers between black and white music and musicians.

He had set out in 1950 to record the great black musicians
of the South: B. B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Joe Hill Louis and
others. But when none of them could break into the mass
market, said Peter Guralnick, the Elvis biographer and
music writer, Mr. Phillips became convinced that "a white
artist with a Negro sound and feel" could accomplish his
purpose. "It was a secret assault on a racist system - the
realization of a true sense of democracy, something very
much against the mores of the time and place they lived,"
Mr. Guralnick said.

"He felt that you had to disguise it, that you couldn't be
too explicit in your rebellion," he said. "If he'd said,
`I'm recording this music because I want to break down all
segregation barriers,' nobody would ever have listened to
it. But it was so implicit in the music, he felt that by
pursuing it, it was bound to happen."

As much as this city has showered Mr. Phillips with honors
in recent years, his start here - fresh from Florence and
Muscle Shoals, Ala., entranced by Beale Street's
rhythm-and-blues vitality - was one of unrequited love, Mr.
Guralnick said.

"I wouldn't say Memphis really embraced Sam until recently,
any more than the world embraced the music Sam recorded
until relatively recently," he said. "I would bet he was
dismissed by most people as a nut, but not as a danger.
Sort of like Elvis."

The 1954 production of Elvis's first record - "That's All
Right" and "Blue Moon of Kentucky" - changed everything,
more or less. Farther down the list of Mr. Phillips's
achievements and claims to fame, his admirers here said,
was what he did for the city itself.

"With his early rhythm and blues, and then with Elvis, and
Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison, and even later on with
Charlie Rich, he was showing the world that there was a
unique style of performance and recording that was
developing in Memphis," said John Fry, who grew up here
listening to Sun's records before founding Ardent Studios,
producing ZZ Top, in 1966.

"It's been hard for the public to get hold of what Memphis
music is," Mr. Fry said. "Nashville, it's easy, it's
homogenous, it's country. Memphis has always been a place
where two or three unlikely things meet and form something
new. We truly are a crossroads or a melting pot. A lot of
the music that Sam pioneered is exactly that confluence of
styles. And that's made musicians around the world
fascinated with Memphis."

Far more important, Mr. Dickinson said, was Mr. Phillips's
influence on society, all the more amazing because it
stemmed from a simple statement - that he would record
anything, anywhere, any time. "It's hard to imagine the
world before rock 'n' roll, before Elvis, or before Sam,
however you want to put it," he said. "We were not nearly
as free as individuals, because that was what Sun Records
was about, was freedom of expression.

"The last time I heard Sam speak, he said a line about the
significance of every soul to God," Mr. Dickinson added.
"Maybe all those souls are equal to God, but to man, some
are more equal than others."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/01/national/01MEMP.html?ex=1060752307&ei=1&en=6fca2ddefff9caec


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