Sun Records Founder Talks about Memphis, Rock 'n' Roll and Life

" So many people get too damn close to the scene, it's like, if your daddy is a doctor, you probably don't want him treating you. "

By Norm Shaw

Sam Phillips loves Memphis.

He's one of those people - mostly folks who came here from somewhere else - who realizes how great this city was, is and can be. He still gets chills walking down Beale Street. He knows there is rare air inside Sun Studio, the recording facility he founded in 1950 at 706 Union Ave. Most of all, he knows that music - gospel, county, rock 'n' roll, and above all else, the blues - is the thing that makes Memphis great.

And Phillips should know. He helped make Memphis what it is: the coolest place on Earth.

Phillips was the one who took elements of all the musical styles he had heard before and turned them into rock 'n' roll. By all rights, he could claim the title as the father of rock. But if you spend a few hours with Phillips, you learn he is a proud man, but not a boastful man. He cares about his personal reputation, but not his fame.

He has a remarkable memory for names, places and dates. Phillips is passionate about what he believes. He is an animated speaker. He is part phychologist, part anthropologist and part preacher.

And in all of those incarnations, Sam Phillips is a talker. But he's still a tough interview. If you ask him who he thought would buy the earliest records he was making for his Sun label, you get a 25-minute answer about a tax problem he had in 1955. In that 25-minute monolog, you get the answer to your question - and you get so much more.

A friend of his likes to say Phillips talks in parables, and there's a lot of truth in that. The goal was to do a question and answer session covering Memphis, the blues, rock 'n' roll and Elvis Presley. He covered all those topics - and more - but not in a way that could be transcribed as a Q and A.

And through it all, his love of Memphis and Beale Street comes through.

"Can you picture anything more beautiful than Beale Street."

Sam Phillips first came to Memphis in 1939. He and his family were on their way to Dallas to hear a preacher. But Phillips had another goal in mind as well. He wanted to see Beale Street.

"When I got to Beale Street, I fell totally in love," he says. "I said, 'Can you picture anthing more beautiful than Beale Street.' And I was born and raised on the Tennessee River, beautiful river. But to me it wasn't near as pretty as that might old muddy at the end of Beale Street, the Mississippi River. In its own way, that river fed us all and it gave us music. It gave us a way to think. It gave us something to think about."

And today, Phillips remains as staunch a supporter of Beale as he was then.

"We've got to look at Beale Street and remember how dead that damn place was," he says. "When they came in with urban renewal was going to knock down every goddamn building down there. It was blighted area, quote unquote, by then. We're going into the '50s now. Thank God there was an intervention.

"By the time they built the MLG&W headquarters, it was like, woah, wait a minute. Wait a cotton picking minute. It's Beale Street. So many people get too damn close to the scene, it's like, if your daddy is a doctor, you probably don't want him treating you.

"If you live in this town, you should know you have something precious that cannot be duplicated."

"I almost have a religious fervor about this town."

After Sam Phillips sold Elvis Presley's contract to RCA in 1955, he could have moved anywhere. He could have sold his little studio and moved to New York or Los Angeles. But the thought, he says, never entered his mind. He had come to Memphis by choice. As he talks about the city at his home on the near east side of town he becomes very animated.

At times, he drops to one knee as he speaks. He commands your attention. He says his brother was a preacher. You realize Sam Phillips is a preacher as well. His sermon topic is the city he loves.

"What I'm saying is, think about it this way," he says. "I was a very religious thinking person at that time when I lived in Alabama. My brother was a preacher, and a damn good one, but when I came to Memphis, I didn't want to see the wide streets of Memphis. Memphis had more wide streets than all the rest of the cities of Tennessee put together. It was a beautiful town. I swear to God, when we left Florence, Alabama, in 1939, there were two things I wanted to see more than anything in the world. I wanted to see Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, even though it was pouring down rain and I was in a rumble seat. And the next one was to see Dr. George W. Truitt, the preacher."

Phillips moved to Memphis to stay in 1945. In many ways, his life here mirrors that of the city. He was put down by whites for recording blacks. He was then put down by blacks for recording whites. He saw the civil rights movement coming before most. He worked to build bridges between the races.

And he has worked to keep the city on track. Phillips says he fought like hell to bring the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame here. He knew it belonged here. The fact it wound up in Cleveland doesn't change his feelings about the city. And he wishes we all realized how fortunate we are.

"I almost have a religious fervor about this town," he says. "Because we've got something no one else has. I don't give a damn about Picadilly Circus, Bourbon Street. I've been around a little bit my self. I've been all over this damn country. I've been to Harlem, I've been to the Gas Light District before it folded in St. Louis. We can't have that happen here.

"I'm going to make a statement you may not agree with, but our music is damn near as much a part of everything we have got to sell - and I don't mean sell in the commercial sense - but to sell as something that's good and enjoyable, as the damn Mississippi River. It's that fundamental as far as I'm concerned.

"If we don't look at these things and see how blessed Memphis is to be where it is, where it was and where it's going to be, we're damn fools. We damn fools, too, if we get into an argument about whether more should be done on Beale Street or if it should be done in the Pinch District or at a private club at the airport.

"There is nothing that can be stronger than to have a healthy, vital Beale Street. It may have to be a little, quote unquote, commercial for the folks who are not into it the way we are, the blues and rock 'n' roll. Let's face it, Beale Street is too much of an institution. To me, it is too precious for it to be hurt too bad. It was on its death bed for so damn long, and it came so close to being completely run over, when they were going to bulldoze everything.

"I want us as a community - this is politicians, this is preachers, this is just plain old laymen, this is musicians - these are people who need to care about one of the outstanding places on the face of this globe. And that is Memphis, Tennessee, and the environs of this whole area that produced Memphis, Tennessee. And its most profound way changed the whole world when it comes to being able to get acquainted a little easier and a little better.

"The very thing we've got to keep alive here is the spirit, the love of what is here. And most of all, we should be proud as hell of it."