Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  This particular night, though, there wasn’t any arguing. Sam had something he wanted to play for Dewey, he said right off, and he was uncharacteristically nervous about it. Sam Phillips didn’t like to ask a favor of anyone—and he didn’t really consider that he was asking a favor now—but he was asking Dewey to listen to something, he was asking him to consider something that had never previously existed on this earth; this wasn’t just a matter of sitting around and bullshitting and letting Dewey absorb whatever happened to come his way. “But, you know it was a funny thing,” said Sam. “There was an element of Dewey that was conservative, too. When he picked a damn record, he didn’t want to be wrong. ’Cause he had that thing going, ‘How much bullshit have you got in you, man, and when are you gonna deliver?’ It so happened, by God, that people believed Dewey, and he delivered. ’Cause when he went on the air [he didn’t have any scientific method], he just blabbed it right out, ‘It’s gonna be a hit, it’s gonna be a hit, it’s the biggest thing you ever heard. I’ll tell you what, man, it’s gonna knock you out.’ And, you know, as much as he respected me and loved me, Dewey had some real hang-ups about what could be done locally—it was like if somebody was five hundred or a thousand miles away there was more intrigue about them. So it was an elongated education process, really, he wanted to make you prove it to him unequivocally. And he was so into the finished product he didn’t care how it came about, it was just, what did you deliver for him to make his show great? I think he was just beginning to feel that by God, there was a legitimate record crusader in this town.”

  Dewey opened a Falstaff and sprinkled some salt in it, then sat back and listened intently as Sam played the tape of the single song over and over. Dewey knew the song, of course; he had played the Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup version many times on his own show. It was the sound that puzzled him. For once there was not much conversation as the two men listened, each wondering what exactly the other thought. “He was reticent, and I was glad that he was,” said Sam. “If he hadn’t been reticent, it would have scared me to death, if he had said, ‘Hey, man, this is a hit, it’s a hit,’ I would have thought Dewey was just trying to make me feel good. What I was thinking was, where you going to go with this, it’s not black, it’s not white, it’s not pop, it’s not country, and I think Dewey was the same way. He was fascinated by it—there was no question about that—I mean, he loved the damn record, but it was a question of where do we go from here?”

  They stayed up listening and talking in comparatively muted tones until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, when both men finally returned home to their respective families and beds. Then, what to Sam’s surprise, the phone rang early the next morning, and it was Dewey. “I didn’t sleep well last night, man,” Dewey announced. Sam said, “Man, you should have slept pretty good, with all that Jack Daniel’s and beer in you.” No, Dewey said, he hadn’t been able to sleep, because he kept thinking about that record, he wanted it for his show tonight, in fact he wanted two copies, and he said, “We ain’t letting anybody know.” His reticence, Sam said, was over on that day.

  Sam cut the acetates that afternoon and brought them down to the station. He called Elvis after work to tell him that Dewey would most likely be playing the record on his show that night. Elvis’ response was not uncharacteristic. “He fixed the radio and told us to leave it on that station,” said Gladys, “and then he went to the movies. I guess he was just too nervous to listen.” “I thought people would laugh at me,” Elvis told C. Robert Jennings of the Saturday Evening Post in 1965. “Some did, and some are still laughing, I guess.”

  Vernon and Gladys did listen. They sat glued to the radio with Vernon’s mother, Minnie, and the rest of the relatives listening in their nearby homes, until at last, at 9:30 or 10:00, Dewey announced that he had a new record, it wasn’t even a record, actually, it was a dub of a new record that Sam was going to be putting out next week, and it was going to be a hit, dee-gaw, ain’t that right, Myrtle (“Moo,” went the cow), and he slapped the acetate—the acetates—on the turntables.

  The response was instantaneous. Forty-seven phone calls, it was said, came in right away, along with fourteen telegrams—or was it 114 phone calls and forty-seven telegrams?—he played the record seven times in a row, eleven times, seven times over the course of the rest of the program. In retrospect it doesn’t really matter; it seemed as if all of Memphis was listening as Dewey kept up his nonstop patter, egging his radio audience on, encouraging them to join him in the discovery of a new voice, proclaiming to the world that Daddy-O-Dewey played the hits, that we way uptown, about as far uptown as you can get, did anybody want to buy a fur-lined duck? And if that one didn’t flat git it for you, you can go to…. And tell ’em Phillips sent you!

  For Gladys the biggest shock was “hearing them say his name over the radio just before they put on that record. That shook me so it stayed with me right through the whole song—Elvis Presley—just my son’s name. I couldn’t rightly hear the record the first time round.” She didn’t have time to think about it for long anyway, because almost immediately the phone rang. It was Dewey for Elvis. When she told him Elvis was at the movies, he said, “Mrs. Presley, you just get that cotton-picking son of yours down here to the station. I played that record of his, and them birdbrain phones haven’t stopped ringing since.” Gladys went down one aisle of the Suzore No. 2, and Vernon went down the other—or at least so the story goes—and within minutes Elvis was at the station.

  “I was scared to death,” Elvis said. “I was shaking all over, I just couldn’t believe it, but Dewey kept telling me to cool it, [this] was really happening.”

  “Sit down, I’m gone interview you” were his first words to the frightened nineteen-year-old, Dewey told writer Stanley Booth in 1967. “He said, ‘Mr. Phillips, I don’t know nothing about being interviewed.’ ‘Just don’t say nothing dirty,’ I told him. He sat down, and I said I’d let him know when we were ready to start. I had a couple of records cued up, and while they played we talked. I asked him where he went to high school, and he said, ‘Humes.’ I wanted to get that out, because a lot of people listening had thought he was colored. Finally I said, ‘All right, Elvis, thank you very much.’ ‘Aren’t you gone interview me?’ he asked. ‘I already have,’ I said. ‘The mike’s been open the whole time.’ He broke out in a cold sweat.”

  It was Thursday, July 8. Elvis escaped out in the hot night air. He walked back up Main to Third Street and then over to Alabama. Dewey wound up his show and called his wife, Dot. How’d she like it? he asked. “I told him I loved it,” Dot told the Trenton (Tennessee) Herald Gazette in 1978, ten years after Dewey’s death. “He went on to say that he believed Elvis had a hit…. Dewey cherished that moment with Elvis. He would tell it time and time again.”

  Sam Phillips was at the studio that night. He didn’t see Elvis, and he didn’t see Dewey until after the show, but he knew what had happened, he knew that the reaction had come, the phone lines had lit up without anyone thinking about what the singer looked like, “they didn’t give a fuck about classifying him, in Memphis, Tennessee, they liked what they heard.” He knew, too, that now the real work would begin.

  THE NEWS TRAVELED like wildfire. Billie Chiles, a classmate of Elvis’ at Humes who had never been exactly entranced by his music, was at a sock hop at the Holy Rosary Catholic Church. “Sometime during the evening a couple went outside to the parking lot,” Billie told former Press-Scimitar reporter Bill Burk thirty-five years later, “and turned their [car] radio on…. They came running downstairs yelling, ‘Come up here quick! You ain’t going to believe what Dewey Phillips is playing on the radio!’ ” Another classmate, George Klein, who had been president of the class of 1953, stopped by Dewey’s radio show that Saturday night. He had just completed his freshman year at Memphis State, where he was majoring in communications, and had served as a gofer for Dewey, “kind of a baby-sitter,” the previous summer, and in fact for much of the past school year. For this summer he had gott
en a job working at KOSE, in Osceola, Arkansas, hitchhiking the fifty miles home after his Saturday shift to spend Sunday with his mother and his Memphis friends. This particular Saturday night he stopped by the station, as he generally did, just as Dewey was about to go on the air, and Dewey greeted him, as he generally did, with, “ ‘Hey mother, when’d you get in?’

  “Then he said, ‘Guess what? Come here.’ And he took a record and put his hand over the label and put it on the turntable. He played the record and said, ‘Guess who that is.’ I said, ‘Shit, Dewey, I don’t know. Who is it?’ He said, ‘You know this guy, you went to school with the boy,’ and I knew then it had to be Elvis. ‘Sam brought the record by the other night,’ he said, ‘and I played the sonofabitch fourteen times, and we got about five hundred phone calls. It’s gonna be a hit!’ ”

  With all the excitement, Sam Phillips realized, now they were really going to have to come up with something else in a hurry; they needed a second side just to be able to put a record out. He felt that nothing they had recorded to date was suitable, so they went back into the studio on Friday night, and sometime in the next couple of days they came up with something equally improbable, equally “different,” and equally exciting.

  “Blue Moon of Kentucky” had been a hit for Bill Monroe in 1946, well before the term “bluegrass” came into popular usage. In Monroe’s version it was a beautiful waltz familiar to anyone who listened to the Grand Ole Opry and revered by every hillbilly musician who had ever picked up a stringed instrument. “We spent three or four nights trying to get a back side,” Scotty said, “something that would be in the same kind of vein. We’d gone through this song and that song, just running through them—I don’t think any of them were ever put on tape—and then Bill jumped up and started clowning, beating on his bass and singing ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky,’ in a high falsetto voice, more or less mimicking Bill Monroe. And Elvis started banging on the guitar, playing rhythm and singing, and I joined in and it just gelled.

  “It’s funny how they both come about by accident. There was nothing like a direction, there was just a certain… feel. You know, Elvis wasn’t considered a real good rhythm player on guitar, but you listen to ‘That’s All Right, Mama,’ he starts with the rhythm, just the open rhythm, and then the slap [bass] starts—he had a feel for rhythm on the stuff that we did that’s very hard for anybody to do the same way.”

  “Blue Moon of Kentucky” evolved from a slow, bluesy version in 4/4 time with tentative instrumentation and a rather ornate vocal into a high-spirited declaration of exuberant self-discovery, driven by Elvis’ ringing rhythm guitar and a propulsive mix of Scotty’s chording riffs and single-string filigree. For the first time Sam made extensive use of what he had come to call slapback, a kind of homemade echo device that was created by running the original recording signal through a second Ampex machine and thereby achieving an almost sibilant phased effect. This undoubtedly added not only to the presence but to the excitement of the recording, and, of course, echo had the capacity of covering up a multitude of sins, but what held it all together most of all was Sam’s belief in the uniqueness of what they were doing. What kept the musicians from ever giving up was Sam’s lulling faith: “All right, boys, we just about on it now,” you can almost hear him saying. “Do it again. Just do it one more time for me.” When he felt like he had reached the limit of his creativity, Carl Perkins said of recording for Sam just a year or two later, Sam would coax him to “walk out on a limb, I’d try things I knew I couldn’t do, and I’d get in a corner trying to do it and then have to work my way out of it. I’d say, ‘Mr. Phillips, that’s terrible.’ He said, ‘That’s original.’ I said, ‘But it’s just a big original mistake.’ And he said, ‘That’s what Sun Records is. That’s what we are.’ ”

  “That’s fine now” you can actually hear Sam say, at the end of one early take of “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” He speaks in a soothing, almost crooning voice, the voice of reason, the voice of confident imperturbability. “Hell, that’s different,” he says to the three musicians awaiting his verdict. “That’s a pop song now, nearly about.” And Elvis, Scotty, and Bill all burst out in nervous, self-reassuring laughter.

  Almost as soon as the song was cut, Sam got two-sided dubs not just to Dewey, who had had an exclusive now for a couple of days, but to Bob Neal, the early-morning DJ and host of the High Noon Round-Up at WMPS, Dick Stuart at the West Memphis station, KWEM, and Sleepy Eyed John, a country jock at WHHM, who also led a big western-style swing band and booked the Eagle’s Nest out at the Clearpool complex on Lamar. All three got on the record right away, playing the second side mainly, but Sleepy Eyed John evidently showed some business interest in the young singer, which disturbed Sam. “Sleepy Eyed John hated what we were doing at 706, he made no bones about it. I continued to carry records to him because he played them, but I think he played them because he thought by picking them apart he could make people see that this was not really music.” Sleepy Eyed John was a “businessman,” not the lowest form of life in Sam’s eyes, because Sam considered himself a businessman, but if you were a businessman exclusively, solely interested in making money, you were worth little more than a bucketful of warm spit. To forestall Sleepy Eye, Sam suggested to Scotty that he become the manager of record, just as he was already manager of the Starlite Wranglers. “He was exactly what we needed. Scotty had the demeanor and the manner—he wasn’t going to give Elvis any unnecessary problems about ‘You do this’ and ‘You do that,’ and you could trust him all the way. We didn’t need some hotshot manager—hell, Scotty just wanted to help keep the vehicle together.”

  On Monday, July 12, just a week after they had first met, Scotty became the official manager. “Whereas, W.S. Moore, III, is a band leader and a booking agent,” the agreement read, “and Elvis Presley, a minor, age 19 years, is a singer of reputation and renown, and possesses bright promises of large success….” Scotty got 10 percent off the top, and then at Sam’s suggestion the group would divide any income with a 50–25–25 split. The original idea was that Elvis would become part of the Wranglers show, a kind of added attraction, which would make “two acts in one,” Scotty said, and in fact that was the way it was set up for the following Saturday at the Bon Air, the Wranglers’ regular weekend gig. The record was manufactured that week at Buster Williams’ Plastic Products on Chelsea Avenue, in Memphis, and by the time that it was officially released as Sun record number 209 on Monday, July 19, six thousand local orders had already come in. Ed Leek, a Humes classmate who was premed at Memphis State, described going down to the plant and watching the first records come off the press with Elvis, who was “like a little kid at Christmas.” Others were hearing the record for the first time. Jack Clement, who was singing with Sleepy Eyed John’s band occasionally and studying English and journalism at Memphis State, turned on the radio one morning and heard “Blue Moon of Kentucky”—“it was just what I’d been wanting to hear. It was real. I loved the simplicity of it, and so did everybody I know that heard it. There were some people I know that quarreled with the look, but everybody loved the way that it sounded. All it took was one play.”

  Meanwhile, Dixie was still down in Florida with no idea what was going on. There was only the mysterious telegram that she got at her cousin’s house (“We were on the move all the time, so we didn’t talk to each other on the phone”)—“HURRY HOME. MY RECORD IS DOING GREAT,” it read. “I thought, ‘What!’ And I thought, this can’t be for real. But I knew it was.”

  ON SATURDAY, JULY 17, Sam Phillips carried Elvis out to the Bon Air Club, at Summer and Mendenhall, to execute the first part of the plan that he and Scotty had devised. Dewey mentioned on the air that night that he might stop by after his show, and perhaps that added to the crowd, but it was a normal Saturday-night crowd, “pure redneck,” according to Sam, loud, hard-drinking, a little rowdy, in love with their hillbilly music, out for a good time. Elvis and Sam sat at a little table while the band finished its set, and Elvis got mo
re and more nervous. “This was Elvis’ first appearance, period, and he was absolutely mortified. Now look, this was a small club, and it was all rednecks—and I don’t mean any bad connotation by that—but you had better be careful looking like Elvis did in a redneck joint and not singing hillbilly songs and you want to live. You got a bunch of people drinking, and then you try to come on with some music, untried, unproved, you’re unknown. I swear, he just came off real good.”

  He sang his two songs—they were the only songs the trio really knew—and Scotty and Bill hung around for a few minutes, but then it was time for the Wranglers to go back up on the bandstand, and Elvis and Sam left. At that point all of the confidence that he had generated onstage seemed to deflate. “He said, ‘Mr. Phillips, I just feel like… I failed.’ I said, ‘Elvis, are you kidding? You were really good.’ I didn’t say great, I said, ‘The only thing that could have been better would have been if you had enjoyed it onstage.’ You see, I was honest with him, I didn’t feed him a line of bullshit, and he couldn’t shoot any holes in that.”