Fifties (76 page)

Alan Freed was hardly locked into classical music. He was a smart, free-spirited man, who like many of the nation’s best disc jockeys, seemed to be two people: one a rather insecure, ordinary person who went angrily through everyday life and the other, a man in front of an open mike who exploded into a secret confident and audacious self before listeners he could not see. His career, at that moment, had not been exactly brilliant. Even within a profession given over to a significant excess of ego, Freed was considered difficult and abrasive by various employers. At one point he had worked for a station in Akron, had asked for a raise, and had been turned down, so he went to a competing station and offered his services. Unfortunately, his contract with the first station had not yet expired; the first station took him to court and a judge ordered him not to broadcast within seventy-five miles of Akron for a year. Such was the life of a disc jockey who has not yet found his special niche. When his period of disbarment expired he eventually showed up in Cleveland. So when Mintz suggested the new show, he was amenable.

In the summer of 1951, Freed inaugurated the
The Moondog Show
on a 50,000-watt clear channel station in Cleveland, a station so powerful it reached a vast area of the Midwest. His success was immediate. It was as if an entire generation of young white kids in
that area had been waiting for someone to catch up with them. For Freed it was what he had been waiting for; he seemed to come alive as a new hip personality. He was the Moondog. He kept the beat himself in his live chamber, adding to it by hitting on a Cleveland phone book. He became one of them, the kids, on their side as opposed to that of their parents, the first grown-up who understood them and what they wanted. By his choice of music alone, the Moondog had instantly earned their trust. Soon he was doing live rock shows. The response was remarkable. No one in the local music business had ever seen anything like it before: Two or three thousand kids would buy tickets, and sometimes, depending on the level of talent, thousands of others would be turned away—all for performers that adults had never even heard of.

At virtually the same time, Elvis Presley began to hang out at all-night white gospel shows. White gospel singing reflected the region’s schizophrenia: It allowed white fundamentalist groups, whose members were often hard-core segregationists and who wanted nothing to do with black culture—to co-opt the black beat into their white music. Presley gradually got to know some of the gospel singers, and by the time he graduated from high school in 1953, he had decided to become one himself. He was eighteen, with extremely limited options. For a country boy with his background, the possibilities were few: He could drive a truck or hope for a job in a nearby plant—and he could dream of being a singer. Soon he was singing with a local group from his church called the Songfellows. But a few random singing dates were hardly a career, so he was also working at a small plant in Memphis where artillery shell casings were made. By the standards of the time and the region, the pay was not bad—$1.65 an hour—and he made about sixty dollars a week with overtime. Soon he left that job for another that excited him more—driving a truck for Crown Electric. Driving a truck seemed infinitely freer than working in a defense factory. It seemed at that moment he would be driving a truck for the rest of his life. In September 1956, a year after he had exploded into the consciousness of his fellow Americans, he tried to explain the secret of his success to a writer for the
Saturday Evening Post.
“I don’t know what it is ... I just fell into it, really. My daddy and I were laughing about it the other day. He looked at me and said, ‘What happened, E? The last thing I can remember is I was working in a can factory and you were drivin’ a truck.’ ... It just caught us up.”

The Memphis of 1954 was a strictly segregated city. Its officials were white and its juries were white, and as late as 1947 there had been no black police in the city (when the first few were finally hired in 1948, they could not arrest white people). In 1947
Annie Get Your Gun
was banned from Memphis because it included a black railroad conductor, and as the local censor Lloyd Binford said, “We don’t have any Negro conductors in the South.” That same year the American Heritage Foundation, which sponsored the Freedom Train, a traveling exhibition filled with historic documents about American history, took Memphis off its itinerary because local officials there insisted that the train be segregated.

Sam Phillips thought the city’s segregation was absurd. He was not a liberal in the traditional sense and he was not interested in social issues, as many of the activists of the period were. He was a raw, rough man, with an eleventh-grade education, pure redneck in all outward manifestations, such as his love of used Cadillacs. A good country boy, Sam saw Cadillacs as the surest sign of status and comfort, and he would buy a used one and get a good deal and drive it for a few years and then turn it over and get a used but newer one and drive that for a few years. But he was different in one sense: his love of the blues. He had been drawn to Memphis in the first place because he
knew
it was a great center for black music, and he intended to capture some of it on record. Sam Phillips hated the hypocrisy of a city that denied the richness of its own heritage. Sam Phillips, thought his friend Stanley Booth, a talented music writer, was drawn to what he was doing not because he was a liberal and felt that the social order ought to be changed: “It wasn’t a humanitarian gesture, and people like Sam weren’t social activists,” Booth said. “You did it because of the power of the music—you were drawn to the music. It made you hip and a little different, and in addition, in a life which was often very hard, it was the one thing which gave you a little grace.” What others thought about his passion mattered little to him. He held a job as an engineer at the Peabody Hotel, working on a radio show broadcast from there; at the same time he began to record some of the region’s black singers in a small studio he had created. He generally did this on the weekends, and it was great sport among his colleagues at the Peabody to tease him on Monday mornings, “Well, Sam, I guess you didn’t spend the weekend recording all those niggers of yours like you usually do because you don’t smell so bad today.”

He never for a second doubted his own ear. Nor, for that matter, did he doubt his purpose. He wanted to be a pioneer and an
explorer. “I have my faults in the world, a lot of faults, I guess,” he once said, “but I have one real gift and that gift is to look another person in the eye and be able to tell if he has anything to contribute, and if he does, I have the additional gift to free him from whatever is restraining him.” It was a description, his friends thought, that was remarkably accurate.

He had grown up poor in northern Alabama, aware of the tensions between blacks and whites. The whites had their music, country music, and in those years, when poor whites did not yet have radios, they would gather at someone’s home on a Saturday night, put the furniture aside, and have square dances. But their music had none of the power of black music. Every Sunday Sam Phillips went to a white Baptist church in town. About a block and a half away was a black Methodist church. In those days before air-conditioning, the windows of both churches were open during the summer, and the power of the music in the black church was transcendent. “There was something there I had never heard before or since,” he said years later. “Those men and women singing the
Amen.
Not the choir singing it. I mean the congregation. It was a heaven on earth to hear it. A jubilation. The Amen and the rhythm. They never missed a downbeat.” There was, he thought, so much more power in their music than his own, so much more feeling and so much more love. He felt pulled toward it, and he would leave his own church and linger outside the black church to listen.

As he came to adulthood, he began to follow the music, to ever bigger cities, working as a disc jockey. He finally made it to a big, powerful station in Nashville, but he was still restless. Nashville was the capital of white country music, but that music cast no spell on him. He knew he had to go to Memphis. It seemed to be his destiny. Phillips knew that the best and richest soil was in the bend of the Tennessee River near where he grew up and that where there was rich soil, the people were also rich—in sorrow and joy and, above all, in music. Fertile land somehow produced fertile people as well, he believed. “There was going to be no stopping something as big as Memphis and the Mississippi River. I always knew that,
knew that.
I’d driven to Memphis, and the closer I’d gotten to the Mississippi, I knew that there was something rich ahead, this totally untamed place, all those people who had these hard hard lives, and the only way they could express themselves was through their music. You had to be a dunce not to know that.”

He reached Memphis in 1945, and he was not disappointed. “I’d never seen such a gulf between two words. One side white, the other
side black. One world all white, the other world, a few blocks away, all black. There was no street like Beale Street, no street I’d ever seen. It had a flavor all its own, entirely black. Lined with clubs and dives and pawnshops. Lord there were pawnshops! All these black people, some of them rich and some of them poor, they’d come from Mississippi and Arkansas and Tennessee, saved up all their money, determined to spend every bit of it there. No one tried to save money when they came to Beale Street. It was wonderful, all that energy, all those men and women dressed in their best, the country people from those hamlets, black hicks a lot of them trying to pretend that they’re not hicks, that they’re men of the street. It was amazing, there were these people who were rich, and who had saved all their money and were celebrating, and the people who had nothing, who were down and out, they were celebrating, too, and the one thing that was different from white folks was that it was impossible to tell who was rich and who was poor on Beale Street.”

He built his own studio, a small storefront out at 706 Union Street. He laid the tile on the floor and on the walls himself, to maximize the acoustics, and created a raised control room so he could see the musicians who were recording, and finally installed an air conditioner, which always dripped. It cost about $1,000 to fix the place up, and he was paying about $75 a month rent.

In January 1950 he quit his job at the Peabody to record full-time himself. Almost all his white friends thought he was crazy, giving up a good solid job at the grandest hotel in the entire region to go off and record black music. “Hell, Sam,” one friend told him. “You’re not only recording them, you’re going to shake hands with them too.” As a white man recording black singers he offended local mores. Phillips himself, however, was absolutely sure of his mission. In Memphis there was all kinds of talent around: B.B. King, Phineas Newborn, Howling Wolf. B.B. King was typical of the music and the region: His real name was Riley B. King, and he came from Indianola, in the Delta. He had grown up picking cotton (he once noted that he could pick four hundred pounds a day and make as much as 35 cents a hundred pounds—no one, he thought, could pick more cotton than he could). He had driven tractors, sung spirituals, and had finally ended up in Memphis in 1947, where he had worked his way up and down Beale Street playing in different clubs. He was good, authentic; everyone knew it—no one had to be told. It was even in his nickname—Beale Street Blues Boy, which eventually was shortened to B.B. There was nothing smooth about his sound: It was raw and harsh—almost angry. Eventually, he got a job on
WDIA. It was not an auspicious beginning. He started by singing commercials for Peptikon, a patent medicine guaranteed to cure all the things that ailed you and a few things that did not. Soon he got his own half-hour in the midafternoon, the “Sepia Swing Club,” and his popularity began to grow. In those days B.B. King was young and shy, particularly around white people. The first time he recorded for Sam Phillips, he revealed that he could not play the guitar and sing at the same time, which made him different from most singers. “Can’t you sing and play at the same time?” Phillips asked him. “Mr. Phillips, that’s the only way I ever played,” he answered. “Whatever you do,” Phillips told him, “don’t change it. Just keep it natural.”

The last thing Phillips wanted was sweeteners: “I didn’t build that studio to record a big band. The big bands didn’t need me. I wanted to record the local talent. I knew the talent was there. I didn’t have to look it up to know B.B. King was talented. And I knew what I wanted. I wanted something
ugly.
Ugly and honest. I knew that these people were disenfranchised. They were politically disenfranchised and economically disenfranchised, and to tell the truth they were musically disenfranchised.... The big trouble in those days, if you were recording black musicians, was that they would start changing what they were doing for you because you were white. They did it unconsciously. They were adapting to you and to the people they thought were going to be their audience. They’d look up in the recording booth and see a white man and they’d start trying to be like Billy Eckstine and Nat King Cole. I didn’t want that. The things that RCA and Capitol winced at, I loved. I didn’t want anyone who had ever recorded before, and I didn’t want to do what other recording studios did.”

So word got out that there was this slightly crazy man who had set up his own studio and was taping black people. B.B. King told Ike Turner, who was from Clarksdale, Mississippi. Phillips recorded Turner and his band, and soon Turner became a kind of one-man talent scout for Phillips, finding people throughout the region. One memorable receipt in Sam Phillips’s office for the early fifties was for one hundred dollars paid out to a small town in Mississippi for bailing Ike Turner and his band out of jail for driving an overloaded auto—Ike had strapped his bass on top of the car, and that had been enough to enrage the local authorities.

It was a simple operation. He called it the Memphis Record Service. The studio was so small that Phillips did not even have a real office. His office, his friends like to point out, was the simple café next door, Miss Taylor’s, third table back. That’s where he’d meet someone
who wanted to do a business deal. When he recorded black musicians he could not take them to Miss Taylor’s, so he would take the food out himself and bring it back for them. To make enough money to survive, he also advertised that he recorded weddings, banquets, bar mitzvahs. “We Record Anything-Anytime-Anywhere,” was his motto. His gear was portable, and he hustled around Memphis in those days, recording happy occasions for posterity and grieving with loved ones. He even did funerals, which cost about eighteen dollars—that is to wire it, tape it, and then transfer the tape to a disc. A wedding cost a little less.