Last Train to Memphis Page 8

  He showed up at the office of the Memphis Recording Service sometime in mid to late summer 1953, two or three months after graduation. Sun Records, and the Memphis Recording Service, were a two-person operation set in a storefront next to Mrs. Dell Taylor’s restaurant and renting for $75 or $80 a month. Venetian blinds made it impossible to see through the plate glass window from the outside, but when you walked in the door into a shallow reception area that had been partitioned off from the studio directly behind it, you saw a blond woman of thirty-five or thirty-six behind a desk wedged into the far left corner of the room. Marion Keisker would have been a familiar voice to virtually anyone who listened to Memphis radio over the past twenty-five years. A native Memphian, she had made her radio debut on the weekly children’s hour Wynken, Blynken, and Nod on WREC in 1929 at the age of twelve and had been appearing on one show or another ever since. A 1938 graduate of Memphis’ Southwestern College, where she had majored in English and medieval French, she had been the host of the very popular Meet Kitty Kelly since 1946, a talk show on which as the eponymous hostess she interviewed visiting celebrities or simply discoursed on subjects of her own choosing if a guest didn’t happen to be on hand. In addition to Kitty Kelly, which was on the air five days a week, as well as the nightly broadcasts of Treasury Bandstand from the Peabody Skyway, she wrote, produced, and directed as many as fourteen other programs at a time on WREC and was an industrious on- and off-air personality. It was at WREC, located in basement offices at the Hotel Peabody, that she first met Sam Phillips.

  Phillips, a native of Florence, Alabama, had arrived in town at the age of twenty-two with four years of broadcast experience under his belt. The youngest of eight children, he had originally intended to become a criminal defense lawyer and help the downtrodden, like Clarence Darrow, but he had been forced to give up that ambition when his father died and he dropped out of high school in his senior year to help take care of his mother and deaf-mute aunt. As the captain, occasional drummer, and sousaphonist of Coffee High’s seventy-two-piece marching band, perhaps it was only natural that he should think about entering into a career involving music, but he saw himself as possessing no appreciable musical talent and nothing like the personality of his flamboyant older brother Jud. “I was the greenest persimmon on the tree. If you took a bite of me, you didn’t like me too much.” Jud was the guy “with the overwhelming personality, it was impossible not to like Jud Phillips,” but Sam valued himself for his ability to perceive, and bring out, the best in others; he believed in communication. And he believed unwaveringly in the communications possibilities that radio had to offer.

  His first job was at Muscle Shoals’ WLAY, where Jud managed, and occasionally sang in, various gospel quartets and where Jake Hess (later to join the Statesmen) got his start. He moved from there to Decatur, Alabama, then, very briefly, to Nashville’s WLAC, finally arriving at WREC in the summer of 1945 with his wife and infant son. He went to work as an announcer and maintenance and broadcast engineer, supervising the big band broadcasts from “high atop the Hotel Peabody Skyway” every night with Marion Keisker. He was inspired equally by the well-bred elegance and “fanaticism for sound” of station owner Hoyt Wooten, who had started the station in his hometown of Coldwater, Mississippi, in 1920, and Phillips himself cut a handsome, almost matinee idol–like figure, though he remained quiet and reserved, a strict teetotaler who continued to be overshadowed by his more gregarious older brother (Jud was now broadcasting on WREC with the Jolly Boys Quartet).

  Much as he loved music, though, and, more important, much as he continued to prize radio as an instrument of communication, Phillips was dissatisfied. He found the big band performances drearily predictable—as lofty as the inspiration for the music might be, the musicians, he felt, were mostly just going through the motions. Phillips, a man of fiercely independent spirit, wanted to do something different—“I was shooting for that damn row that hadn’t been plowed.” He also had a vision that no one else at WREC, evidently, shared: Sam Phillips possessed an almost Whitmanesque belief not just in the nobility of the American dream but in the nobility of that dream as it filtered down to its most downtrodden citizen, the Negro. “I saw—I don’t remember when, but I saw as a child—I thought to myself: suppose that I would have been born black. Suppose that I would have been born a little bit more down on the economic ladder. I think I felt from the beginning the total inequity of man’s inhumanity to his brother. And it didn’t take its place with me of getting up in the pulpit and preaching. It took on the aspect with me that someday I would act on my feelings, I would show them on an individual, one-to-one basis.”

  That was how he came to open his studio in January 1950, with the idea of providing a service, and an opportunity, for “some of [the] great Negro artists” of the mid South that had simply not been available before. “As word got around,” wrote the Press-Scimitar’s Bob Johnson in 1955, “Sam’s studio became host to strange visitors,” and Sam insisted on plumbing that strangeness, no matter how sophisticated a veneer they might present to him at first. He recorded cotton-patch blues and slightly more sophisticated rhythm and blues, leasing the sides to the Chess label in Chicago and RPM Records out on the West Coast and doing everything from recording bar mitzvahs and political speeches to getting the concession for the PA system at the Peabody and at Russwood Park, the baseball stadium on Madison. He ordinarily worked no less than an eighteen-hour day, putting in a full schedule at the station, getting to the studio late in the afternoon, returning to the Peabody in the evening for the Skyway broadcasts, then back to the studio, where he might have left the Howlin’ Wolf or “Doctor” Isaiah Ross, the discoverer of a cure for the “Boogie Disease,” in the middle of a session. It was not uncommon when he came in to work to be greeted with remarks like “Well, you smell okay. I guess you haven’t been hanging around those niggers today.” The strain of sustaining this kind of schedule eventually led to a nervous breakdown, and he was hospitalized twice at Gartly-Ramsay Hospital, where he received electroshock therapy. It was, he said, the only time in his life that he was ever scared—twenty-eight years old, with a wife and two little boys, no money, no real prospects, nothing but his own faith in himself, and his vision, to sustain him. He quit the radio station unhesitantly, though, when Hoyt Wooten made a sarcastic remark about his absences. “Mr. Wooten,” he said, “you are a cruel man,” and, in June 1951, left the employ of WREC forever. He had business cards printed that stated: “We record anything—anywhere—anytime. A complete service to fill every recording need.” His partner in this venture from the beginning was Marion Keisker, six years older than Sam, well regarded in Memphis even beyond her radio celebrity, a cultured divorcée with a nine-year-old son, who fell hopelessly in love with Sam.

  “He was a beautiful young man. Beautiful beyond belief, but still that country touch, that country rawness. He was slim and had those incredible eyes; despite some of the images that have been given of him, he was very, very particular about his appearance with touches of real elegance, beautifully groomed, terrible about his hair. He would talk about this idea that he had, this dream, I suppose, to have a facility where black people could come and play their own music, a place where they would feel free and relaxed to do it. One day we were riding along, and he saw that spot on Union, and he said, ‘That’s the spot I want.’ With many difficulties we got the place, and we raised the money, and between us we did everything. We laid all the tile, we painted the acoustic boards, I put in the bathroom, Sam put in the control room—what little equipment he had always had to be the best. I knew nothing about the music, and I didn’t care a bit. My association, my contribution, my participation was based totally on my personal relationship with Sam in a way that is totally unbelievable to me now. All I wanted to do was to make it possible for him to fulfill his vision—all I wanted to do was to do what would make him happy.”

  By the summer of 1953 the fledgling record label had already had one big hit (Rufus Thomas’
“Bear Cat”) and was well on its way to two others (both “Feelin’ Good” by Little Junior Parker and “Just Walkin’ in the Rain” by the Prisonaires made the charts in the fall), but the partnership with Jim Bulleit, which had seemed essential to Sam both for Bulleit’s financial investment and his expertise when they were starting up the label just six months earlier, was already falling apart. Sam Phillips was never really one for partnerships anyway (“I’m a competitive bastard. My one big mistake was my inability to delegate authority”), and with Jim Bulleit on the road spending money in a manner that Sam considered profligate and responding to Sam’s concerns with telegrams that declared “Cold words on paper cannot fully explain this,” Sam was in the midst of trying to extricate himself from the arrangement. He had brought in his brother Jud to go on the road with Bulleit, but Jud and Bulleit didn’t get along any better than Sam and Jim, so things were at a frustrating impasse in August 1953.

  At least that was how Marion always remembered it when she painfully tried to reconstruct the moment when an eighteen-year-old Elvis Presley, shy, a little woebegone, cradling his battered, beat-up child’s guitar, first walked into the recording studio. Marion remembered that there had been an argument—she recalled that she was herself in tears because Sam had spoken harshly to her. Sometimes in her memory of that moment Jud was in the back room arguing with Sam over money, sometimes Sam and Jim Bulleit were at Miss Taylor’s restaurant next door (“third booth by the window” was the Sun Records office in the absence of any extra space in the crammed storefront headquarters), sometimes the reception area was jammed with people waiting to make a record, sometimes not—but always the young boy with the long, greasy, dirty-blond hair poked his head in the door shyly, tentatively, looking as if he were ready to withdraw at a moment’s notice if you just said boo to him, using that look to gain entrance, determined somehow to make himself known.

  Elvis had passed 706 Union often, walking, driving—perhaps he had hesitated once or twice outside the door, simply wanting to make sure of the location. When he finally entered, there is little question that he stepped through the doorway with the idea, if not of stardom—because who could imagine stardom? what could it mean?—at the very least of being discovered. In later years he would always say that he wanted to make a personal record “to surprise my mother.” Or “I just wanted to hear what I sounded like.” But, of course, if he had simply wanted to record his voice, he could have paid twenty-five cents at W. T. Grant’s on Main Street, where Lee Denson had made dozens of records, which he kept at home and played for his friends. Instead, Elvis went to a professional facility, where a man who had been written up in the papers would hear him sing.

  It was a Saturday. Elvis was working five days a week at M. B. Parker Machinists’ Shop, though he would switch soon to Precision Tool, where he and his cousin Gene would work on a shell assembly line. It was hot, and there was no air-conditioning in the waiting room, but the woman behind the desk looked cool in her cotton dress, her blond hair set in a permanent wave, her face a picture of genteel composure and kind respectability. Marion looked up from her typewriter to see the boy approach her almost sideways, figurative hat in hand. Can I help you? she said. She could barely hear his stammered reply—but, of course, she knew what he was there for, what else could he be there for with his guitar and that desperate look of need in his eyes? She told him how much it would cost to make a two-sided acetate—$3.98 plus tax, for another dollar you could have a tape copy as well, but he chose the less expensive option. While he sat there waiting, Marion told Jerry Hopkins in a 1970 interview, “we had a conversation, which I had reason to remember for many, many years afterwards, having gone through it with every editor that I tried to talk to during the time that I was promoting him for Sun.

  He said, “If you know anyone that needs a singer….”

  And I said, “What kind of a singer are you?”

  He said, “I sing all kinds.”

  I said, “Who do you sound like?”

  “I don’t sound like nobody.”

  I thought, Oh yeah, one of those….“What do you sing, hillbilly?”

  “I sing hillbilly.”

  “Well, who do you sound like in hillbilly?”

  “I don’t sound like nobody.”

  The truth, Marion discovered, was not that far removed from the boy’s improbable self-description. From the first quavering notes of the first song that he sang, it was obvious that there was something different about him, something unique—you could detect his influences, but he didn’t sound like anyone else. There is a quality of unutterable plaintiveness as Elvis sings “My Happiness,” a 1948 pop hit for Jon and Sandra Steele that he had performed over and over in the Courts, a sentimental ballad that couldn’t have been further from anyone’s imagining of rock ’n’ roll, past or present, without a hint of foreshadowing or any black influence other than the clear tenor of Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots—it is just a pure, yearning, almost desperately pleading solo voice reaching for effect, a crying note alternating with a crooning fullness of tone that in turn yields to a sharp nasality betraying its possessor’s intentions. The guitar, Elvis said, “sounded like somebody beating on a bucket lid,” and the record represents almost exactly what the boys and girls in the Courts must have heard over the last several years, with an added factor of nervousness that Elvis must surely have felt. But even that is not particularly detectable—there is a strange sense of calm, an almost unsettling stillness in the midst of great drama, the kind of poise that comes as both a surprise and a revelation. When he finished the one song, he embarked upon “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” a smooth pop ballad that the Ink Spots had originally cut in 1941, with a deep spoken part for their baritone singer, Hoppy Jones. Here he was not so successful in his rendition, running out of time, or inspiration, and simply declaring “That’s the end” at the conclusion of the song. The boy looked up expectantly at the man in the control booth. Mr. Phillips nodded and said politely that he was an “interesting” singer. “We might give you a call sometime.” He even had Miss Keisker make a note of the boy’s name, which she misspelled and then editorialized beside it: “Good ballad singer. Hold.”

  When it was all over, he sat in the outer lobby while Miss Keisker typed out the label copy on the blank sides of a Prisonaires label (“Softly and Tenderly,” Sun 189). The singer’s name was typed underneath the title on each side. Mr. Phillips never came out front, though the boy hung around for a while talking with the woman. He was disappointed that he didn’t have a chance to say good-bye. But he walked out of the studio with his acetate and with the conviction that something was going to happen.

  Nothing did. Nothing happened for the longest time. All through the fall he would stop by the studio, park the old Lincoln precisely by the curb, turn his collar up, pat down his hair, and manfully stride in the door. Miss Keisker was always very nice, Miss Keisker never failed to recognize him. He would try to make small talk, he would ask if, possibly, she had run into a band that was looking for a singer—he conveyed an impression of longing, of neediness, that always stayed with her. Sometimes Mr. Phillips might be present, but he didn’t have time for small talk, he was always busy, he was making records. That was what Elvis wanted to do—that was what he wanted to do more than anything else in the world, but he didn’t know how to go about it, other than to put himself in the way of it at the only place he knew to do so. Each time he entered the waiting room it was with a somewhat heavier step and somewhat lowered expectations, but he forced himself, he didn’t know anything else to do. Gradually he began to doubt that anything would ever happen, and his visits became less frequent. He tried to appear indifferent, but his need showed through. In January 1954 he went in again and cut another little record—Joni James’ “I’ll Never Stand in Your Way” and an old Jimmy Wakely tune, “It Wouldn’t Be the Same Without You,” but his lack of confidence betrayed him, and he sounds more abrupt, more insecure, this time than he did the firs
t. He was at an impasse—unlike the hero in comic books and fairy tales, he had not yet been discovered in his true guise, underneath his outer rags. And yet, Marion felt, almost maternally, he was a child who was clearly marked for success of some kind. “He was,” she said, “so ingenuous there was no way he could go wrong.”

  “WITHOUT YOU”

  January–July 1954

  WITH DIXIE LOCKE, SOUTH SIDE JUNIOR PROM, 1955.

  (MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES)

  IN JANUARY 1954 he started attending church regularly for the first time since the family had left Tupelo. Vernon and Gladys occasionally went to a service at one of the nearby churches or missions, but for the most part they were content to remain at home, secure in their belief if not in their observance. Vernon was out of work more and more with a bad back; at forty-two—though she admitted to only thirty-eight—Gladys had put on a considerable amount of weight, and Elvis told employers and fellow workers alike that all he wanted to do was to make enough money to buy his mama and daddy a house. For her part, Gladys simply wanted to see her son married, she wanted grandkids, she wanted to know he was happy and settled before she died.