shyGirl
Jul 30, 2003, 10:34 PM
http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Music/07/30/obit.phillips.ap/index.html
MEMPHIS, Tennessee (AP) -- Sam Phillips, who discovered Elvis Presley and helped usher in the rock 'n' roll revolution, died Wednesday. He was 80.
Phillips died at St. Francis Hospital, spokeswoman Gwendolyn McClain said. No details were available about the cause of death or how long he had been hospitalized.
Phillips founded Sun Records in Memphis in 1952 and helped launch the career of Presley, then a young singer who had moved from Tupelo, Mississippi.
He produced Presley's first record, the 1954 single that featured "That's All Right, Mama" and "Blue Moon of Kentucky."
"God only knows that we didn't know it would have the response that it would have," Phillips said in an interview in 1997.
"But I always knew that the rebellion of young people, which is as natural as breathing, would be a part of that breakthrough," he said.
In 2000, the A&E cable network ran a two-hour biography called "Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock and Roll."
Phillips was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.
"When I first heard Elvis, the essence of what I heard in his voice was such that I knew there might be a number of areas that we could go into," Phillips said.
Presley was good with ballads, Phillips recalled, but there was no need to challenge established balladeers such as Perry Como, Frankie Laine and Bing Crosby.
"What there was a need for was a rhythm that had a very pronounced beat, a joyous sound and a quality that young people in particular could identify with," he said.
By 1956, when Phillips sold Presley's contract to RCA for $35,000, the rock 'n' roll craze had become a cultural phenomenon and a multimillion-dollar industry.
"It all came out of that infectious beat and those young people wanting to feel good by listening to some records," Phillips said.
Presley died in 1977 at age 42.
Phillips began in music as a radio station engineer and later as a disc jockey. He started Sun Records so he could record both rhythm & blues singers and country performers, then called country and western or hillbilly singers.
His plan was to let artists who had no formal training play their music as they felt it, raw and full of life. The Sun motto was "We Record Anything, Anywhere, Anytime."
In the early days, before Presley, Phillips worked mostly with black musicians, including B.B. King and Rufus Thomas.
After the success of Presley on Sun, others who recorded for the label under Phillips included Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Conway Twitty and Charlie Rich.
"We were starting from scratch together," he said in 2000.
He got out of the recording business in 1962 and sold Sun Records in 1969 to producer Shelby Singleton of Nashville. The Sun studio on Union Avenue in Memphis still exists as a tourist attraction.
In his later years, Phillips spent much of his time overseeing radio station WLVS in Memphis and others in Alabama. He stayed out of the limelight except for some appearances at Presley-related events after Presley's death.
"I'll never retire. I'm just using up somebody else's oxygen if I retire," he said in an Associated Press interview in 2000.
Born Samuel Cornelius Phillips in Florence, Alabama, Phillips worked as an announcer at radio stations in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and Decatur, Alabama, and Nashville before settling in Memphis in 1945. Before founding Sun Records, he was a talent scout who recommended artists and recordings to record labels such as Chess and Modern. He also worked as an announcer in Memphis.
His sons Knox and Jerry also were record producers.
HMVNipper
Jul 31, 2003, 04:47 AM
This is indeed sad news.
My husband and I visited the Sun Studio when we were in Memphis during our honeymoon. It was by far the coolest thing we did on the whole trip! Sun Studio is still a working recording studio, and the musical history contained in those walls is rather like I would imagine it is at Abbey Road.
They told us when we took the tour that it was because of Sam Phillips that many black performers got to record, because he believed that as long as someone could pay the studio fee, they should be allowed to record -- remember, this was during the days of segregation, and he could have turned these people away even if they had the money, instead of allowing them to use his equipment.
A sad loss to the heritage of rock and roll... graemlins/cry2.gif
Paolo Meccano
Jul 31, 2003, 05:07 AM
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Sam Phillips was perhaps the most important producer in the history of music: apart from signing and recording the likes of Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Howlin' Wolf, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis and yes, Elvis Presley, he also made hundreds of amazing records which still sound fantastic today. If you haven't got any Sun recordings, do yourself a favour and go get some..! graemlins/thumbsup2.gif
Paolo Meccano
Oct 08, 2003, 10:16 AM
Here are the obituaries from 'Record Collector' and 'Uncut' magazines:-
''Sam? He's a crazy son of a bitch. He's as nutty as a fox squirrel. He's just like me. Birds of a feather flock together. It took all of us to get together to really screw up the world, and we've done it' - Jerry Lee Lewis
There was indeed some craziness in Sam Phillips - some manic energy which flew out of his mouth like a fireball and allowed him to bend men's souls. Under his influence, a shy and inarticulate Memphis teenager became the most famous man on the planet. An alcoholic guitar-picker from the cottonfields was transformed into the King of Rockabilly. An all-but-unhinged piano-pumper from Ferriday, Louisiana, burdened by a massive religious guilt complex, became a teen idol. A mean-eyed Air Force veteran with minimal musical range and a penchant for pill-popping metamorphosed into one of the most influential figures in the history of country music.
Together, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash - and their stablemates, such as Roy Orbison, Charlie Rich, Sonny Burgess and Billy Lee Riley - turned American music on its head in the mid-50s, and sparked a revolution which is still echoing around the world. They made the name of Phillips' company, Sun Records, synonymous with the earthiest rock 'n' roll, rockabilly and R & B ever recorded. "I really wanted to work with people that had not made a record before," Phillips said in 2000. His achievement was to make those men realise who and what they could be; his vision was that this modest self-fulfilment could change the history of the 20th century.
"Music to me is a form of very personal religion," Phillips once said, and both he and his Sun Records artists worked with the compulsive fervour of God-filled, God-fearing evangelists. Speaking during his first visit to these shores, Phillips revealed the secret of his command in the studio - the charismatic sway of his voice, the way he'd sink to a whisper and then explode into a deafening roar as if he was fuelled by no lesser a force than the Holy Spirit.
When he made that trip to London three years ago, for the UK premiere of a documentary about Sun Records at the National Film Theatre, it was impossible to believe that Sam Phillips could be 77 years old. Pulsing with almost supernatural energy, his barely-lined face framed by jet-black hair and beard, he carried himself with the power and certainty of a man half his age.
Just as hard to comprehend was the fact that this irrepressible man, who "mixed the grand presence of a lion with the passion of a pentecostal preacher", had effectively been sidelined as a creative force for 40 years. Although Sun meandered on into the psychedelic era, its golden age ended when the last of its rock 'n' roll geniuses, Jerry Lee Lewis, jumped ship in 1963. Aside from an occasional evening when he'd wander into the studio during a session which his sons were producing, Sam Phillips never made another record after he sold Sun in the late 60s.
Before and after, Sam was a radio man, who started out connecting bare wires to broadcast his voice to the nieghbourhood and ended up owning a network of stations that stretched across the South. But what history will remember is the studio at 706 Union Avenue that housed the Memphis Recording Service. This legendary venue opened its doors in 1950 for sessions by pioneering bluesmen such as B.B. King and Ike Turner, and two years later it became the home for a record label that specialised in ridiculously raw rhythm and blues, downhome hillbilly, and gospel.
It was there that Elvis Presley came in 1953 to discover the sound of his own voice, and where he was called back in by Phillips in July 1954. "When Elvis came along, he had everything you need to be a star," Sonny Burgess told me. "Sam had recorded a lot of black artists before that, but he couldn't get the white stations to play them. That's why he was looking for a white guy who could play the black music. Elvis had that something that Sam recognised right away."
That's the myth that has passed into rock history, but the guitarist on Elvis' Sun sessions, Scotty Moore, remembered things differently: "The stories say that Sam was looking for a white man who could sing black music. Well, he never mentioned anything like that to us. Maybe in the back of his mind that's what he was looking for, but I can't recall any songs that Elvis sang where Sam said, 'That's a black man singing!'".
Talking in 2000, Phillips himself could only approach the mystery in conceptual terms: "I knew what we were attempting to do was the hardest route we could take. We were messing with the intuitive powers of people who were there to display their talents. It was difficult for Elvis to take on the burden of what I wanted him to do." Most enigmatic of all was his insistence that "I wanted Elvis' voice to be analysed in your head as you heard it."
None of that rhetoric and significance was apparent to Sonny Burgess when he recorded for Phillips: "In the studio, Sam got behind the board and would just say, 'Play'.Whatever felt good, that was what he wanted. It didn't have to be artistically correct; in fact, if you listen to our records, we made a lot of mistakes, and I'm embarrassed by some of them. But as long as it had a good feeling, he would keep it." As Phillips once noted, "I never like to call anything finished. I really kinda like it unfinished a little bit."
Back in 1954, Phillips told a local paper, the 'Memphis Press-Scimitar', that he preferred "genuine, untutored negro jazz" to the more cultured big-band sound of Duke Ellington. By "negro jazz", he meant what we would now call blues and, in his eyes, the prime exponent of the genre was Chester Burnett, better known as Howlin' Wolf. "To me," Phillips explained, "he had a voice so different that you had to listen. He looked for a choice of words, a sound, that let you know he had experienced what he was singing about, or if he hadn't experienced it, then he had at least thought about it."
That was exactly the quality that Sam Phillips sought in everyone he recorded. What impressed him when he first heard Carl Perkins, he said, was "the pain and feeling in his country singing. There was no way Carl could hide that pure country in him". Under Phillips' tutelage, Perkins was able to bring out that pure country, and that pain, in everything he sang.
As Sam hinted, it was what lay underneath the surface that most intrigued him, not the gloss of first appearances: "Any idiot but me would have had Elvis singing ballads, because he was the best ballad singer you could ever hear in your life, from day one." Only Phillips could see what Presley couldn't: that the boy who wanted to imitate Mario Lanza or Dean Martin could invent the future instead.
Once Elvis Presley and then Carl Perkins hit the airwaves, Phillips was inundated by potential rock 'n' roll stars. "The table was set for me," he said, "and all I did was take my pick." "The one thing that comes through on everything that Sam cut," said Sonny Burgess, "is that he had an ear for what sounded good. Thousands of people wanted to be on Sun at that time, but he only chose about eight of us. He knew what he wanted."
Two men epitomised that quest: Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich. Phillips has often been criticised for selling Elvis to RCA on the verge of national fame, but without that money he would not have been able to invest thousands of hours, and dollars, in letting the untamed genius of Jerry Lee Lewis loose in the Sun studio. The result is a body of work - not just the hit records, like 'Great Balls of Fire', but a hundred off-the-cuff experiments and late-night improvisations - that, to these ears, rivals any catalogue in the history of popular music. Lewis could play and master anything, and he knew it; by contrast, the equally talented but altogether more reserved Charlie Rich only wanted to be a mellow jazzman, and it took all of Phillips' legendary persuasion to turn this troubled man into a rock 'n' roll star.
In Messrs Presley, Perkins, Cash, Lewis, Rich and Orbison, Phillips assembled in three years what would become the royal family of Southern rock 'n' roll. Each man was plagued and sometimes destroyed by demons; each was touched by genius; with the exception of Orbison, each arguably made his purest and most enduring music with Sam Phillips as his guide.
Maybe Sam knew that you could only remake the world once, because no sooner had he created the Sun Records legend than he passed it into the hands of employees like Jack Clement. "Jack was a super, nice guy," Sonny Burgess reflected some 35 years later, "but he couldn't pick the artists and songs the way that Sam could. No-one else at Sun could do that like Sam. That's when Sun really went downhill, when Sam brought in Jack and all these other guys."
By the mid-60s, when all of the giants had left Sun, and Phillips had effectively retired from record producing, his music seemed like a quaint forerunner of the kaleidoscopic rock music newly emerging from Britain and America. Yet with each passing decade, the majesty and might of the Sun catalogue has become more obvious. In an age where voices can be twisted into tune by computers and instruments synthesised at the touch of a dial, there is something gloriously defiant about the legacy of a man who sculpted great art and peerless rock 'n' roll out of a mixture of intuition, raw talent and sheer willpower.
There will never be another man like Sam Phillips, because he was a man of his time, and that time passed away in the instant that he created it. But he was the midwife to music that will last forever - 'Blue Suede Shoes', 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On', 'Mystery Train', 'I Walk the Line', 'Lonely Weekends', 'Rocket 88', 'Flying Saucer Rock 'n' Roll' and hundreds more, a bottomless storehouse of the finest imaginable blues, country and rockabilly. "I would have liked Howlin' Wolf to be my eternal bodyguard", Phillpis said with his customary air of mystery in 2000. After a career as rich as his, he deserves nothing less.'
Peter Doggett (copyright 'Record Collector' 2003)
'One day in early 1953 Sam Phillips, a little-known radio announcer who had set up a modest sideline in Memphis recording local blues singers, turned to his secretary Marion Keisker and declared, "If I could find a white man with the negro sound and the negro feel, I could make a billion dollars."
That August, a white-trash Memphis truck driver walked unannounced into the front office of Phillips' Sun studio at 706 Union Avenue. Phillips was out. But in the tiny studio, Elvis recorded a couple of Ink Spots numbers anyway.
Several months later, Phillips got around to listening to the tape, and Elvis was summoned back. The conversation that allegedly took place between the two in the Sun studio one night in January 1954 sounds like it was dreamt up in Hollywood, but it's engraved in the heart of every rock 'n' roll fan.
"What can you do?" Phillips asked.
"I can do anything," Elvis replied.
"Do it," Sam commanded.
Presley then started singing a mix of gospel, country and the standards of the day - anything and everything. But while it was obvious he had talent, it still wasn't rock 'n' roll.
Phillips then began assembling a band to back Elvis. He found guitarist Scotty Moore in a country group called The Starlight Wranglers. Bill Black came in on double bass, and they rehearsed as a trio until they were ready to cut their first record. Finally, on July 5, 1954, Phillips threaded a reel of tape into the machine at the Sun Studio and announced, "OK, this is the session."
Presley, Moore and Black started out with some nondescript country numbers and the ballad 'I Love You Because'. Then, in a break between recording, they began playing 'That's All Right'. It was little more than fooling around. "Just making a racket, we thought," as Moore later recalled.
When Phillips came running from the control room, shouting "What the devil are you doing?", they told him they didn't really know, "Well find out real quick and don't lose it," he told them, "Run through it again and let's put it on tape."
He knew that he had finally found his "white man with the negro sound and the negro feel", and in that instant rock 'n' roll was born. "It was the day that changed all our lives and changed the world," Emmylou Harris told 'Uncut' on hearing the news of Phillips' death last month.
Under Phillips' guidance, Presley cut four more singles - 'Good Rockin' Tonight', 'Milkcow Blues Boogie', 'Baby Let's Play House' and 'Mystery Train'. But by the end of 1955, Phillips had sold his contract with Presley and his rights in the material they had recorded to RCA for $35,000.
Phillips invested part of the money in the fledgling Holiday Inn chain. Ultimately, he made a greater fortune from the hotel industry than from music, although he also launched the careers of Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison. But long before then, he had ensured the world would never be the same again.'
Nigel Williamson (copyright 'Uncut' 2003)
[ Oct 10, 2003, 04:30 AM: Message Edited By: Paolo Meccano ]
Legs
Oct 08, 2003, 01:38 PM
Thanks for posting that Paolo, gives me something to do later, haven't read everything carefully yet. Another big loss for the music. I've been to Sun Studio to, in 1996, it was for me the coolest part of my visit to the U.S. My profile picture is taken in Sun Studio.Elvis's mic!
[ Oct 08, 2003, 01:39 PM: Message Edited By: Legs ]
FPSHOT
Oct 08, 2003, 11:54 PM
Originally Posted By Legs:
Thanks for posting that Paolo, gives me something to do later, haven't read everything carefully yet. Another big loss for the music. I've been to Sun Studio to, in 1996, it was for me the coolest part of my visit to the U.S. My profile picture is taken in Sun Studio.Elvis's mic!<font size="2" face="Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif">Hey that is cool Legs, "The Sun Studio BootLegs pictures" would do nice on an album graemlins/smile1.gif
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