Biography looks at how Sun Records’ Sam Phillips changed the world

It reads: “How One Man Discovered Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley, and How His Tiny Label, Sun Records of Memphis, Revolutionized the World!”

It sounds like circus poster hyperbole, but it’s no stretch. Phillips changed the world. In a one-room studio, he performed alchemy, mixing the sound of black and white voices, and turning the product into gold.

Guralnick, who also has written biographies of Elvis Presley and Sam Cooke and explored Southern soul in such works as “Sweet Soul Music” and “Feel Like Going Home,” will speak about his new book Nov. 12 at the Margaret Mitchell House, in conversation with Emory University journalism professor Hank Klibanoff.

At almost 700 pages, the book is as expansive (and nonlinear) as its giant-sized subject. Phillips was known for volubility, though it took Guralnick, a native Bostonian, almost 10 years to convince him to sit down for an interview.

The writer finally wrangled an appointment in early 1979, through Sam’s son Knox. But when he arrived at Sam’s radio station, WLVS in Memphis, he found the station flooded and Phillips and his sons and employees all squeegeeing floors and salvaging soggy equipment. “I think we’re going to have to postpone,” Knox told him.

Intead, Guralnick grabbed a mop and worked for the next eight hours, helping in any way he could. At the end of it, Phillips took him back to a waterlogged office and sat down to talk.

“It was a short interview by Sam’s standards, no more than two and a half hours,” Guralnick said recently. “It was the shortest interview I ever had with him.”

But it was the beginning of a 25-year friendship that would lead Guralnick into producing not only the biography but also a documentary film.

Phillips was able to recognize genius in artists who had never recorded before, even when they didn’t recognize it themselves. He was also expert at pushing them to make what they were doing original. “If you’re not doing something different, you’re not doing anything,” Phillips liked to say.

Elvis began his first sessions at Sun trying out ballad after ballad, but it wasn't until he was goofing around between takes, singing an Arthur Crudup tune, "That's All Right, Mama," that Phillips heard what he wanted to hear. "Back up," he said, "try to find a place to start, and do it again."

The producer was an enemy of perfection, and if a phone rang in the middle of one of his recording sessions, his feeling was, “Go with it.”

When Ike Turner’s band drove up to Memphis from Clarksdale, Mississippi, for their first date at Sun, they stopped to fix a flat and the guitarist’s amp fell on the pavement, breaking the speaker cone. Phillips was fine with that, stuffing some brown paper behind the cracked membrane, and enjoying the distorted sound.

The result was "Rocket 88," a rock 'n' roll touchstone.

“There’s too much powder and rouge around,” he told Guralnick. “You know, I’m a crazy guy when it comes to sound.”

Guralnick stresses that Phillips didn’t simply stumble onto Presley or Howlin’ Wolf. These artists and their success helped prove a certainty that had been with Phillips since he was a 16-year-old in Florence, Ala., standing outside the Armistead Methodist Chapel on a Sunday afternoon, listening to the fervent harmony of the black church’s choir.

The music of the marginalized, of the dispossessed, of the poor, was the music that, in Phillips’ mind, could soothe an ache in the American soul.

Phillips believed, Guralnick said, in “the intrinsic value of the music of people who had been given no advantages and yet had this enormous talent and inspiration. He saw music as a way of cutting across all the social barriers that had been erected. He saw the music of African-Americans, in particular, as having the capacity to bridge that gap.”