#harmonica frank

Epilogue

SAM PHILLIPS TALKING

 I’ve got the same problem here as in the last chapter – only more so. So I’m just going to throw together a serendipitously arbitrary (and, suited to its source, unquestionably oddball) selection to show off a little bit of the range of talent that Sam Phillips discovered and produced, from Howlin’ Wolf to – well, just follow the bouncing ball. But remember: this is the merest sampling. We’ll do a really comprehensive selection when the Sam biography comes out. (And just to anticipate another question, I’m working on the final draft now – hoping to finish by the end of the year.)

Howlin’ Wolf: “Evil”

You knew I couldn’t resist.         

Sam Phillips’ favorite artist, along with Charlie Rich. They were the two, he always said, who had the greatest reservoir of talent (though he would give nobody the edge over Elvis in the way of charisma or Jerry Lee in terms of sheer performing genius). But each of them, he said, possessed a depth – of knowledge and emotion – that couldn’t be measured. The Wolf, Sam said, volunteered scarcely anything when they first met – he would have been very easy to underestimate. And yet, Sam felt, he possessed “a certain element of confidence, he knew he had something to say,”and as they talked, Sam could sense that as much as he might be reading the Wolf, Wolf was reading him, too.“He was highly, highly intelligent,” Sam said, “in many ways the sweetest man you’ll ever know, and the strangest man in many ways, too.”

Harmonica Frank: Untitled (by me), “Ditchin’ Man Blues,” “Shake a Little Shimmy”

Sam recorded Harmonica Frank at almost exactly the same time as Howlin’ Wolf, and Frank’s first single came out on Chess, too – though unlike Wolf, Frank would eventually have his own Sun release, which came out on the same day as Elvis’ first record in July 1954. According to some revisionist thinking, history might have been different had it not been for that confluence of events, but Sam Phillips was under no illusions about Frank’s commercial potential. To him Harmonica Frank was not a great artist but a great original. “Frank Floyd was a beautiful hobo. He was short, fat, very abstract – and you looked at him and you really didn’t know what he was thinking, what he was going to say or sing next. He had the greatest mind of his own – I think hobos by nature have to have that – and that fascinated me from the beginning. And then he had some of these old rhymes and tales and stuff that he had embellished, and some of them were so old, God, I guess they were old when my father was a kid.”

If you weren’t doing something different, according to Sam you weren’t doing anything. And Frank was definitely doing something different. Check out the way he holds the harmonica in his mouth, like a chewed-up old cigar, as he sings. Listen to the eccentric tone and phrasing and the cheerful non-sense of the songs – kind of like a demented Woody Guthrie.

Dr Ross: “Dr. Ross Boogie”

This is a clever video collage (you should recognize the MC from the Big Joe Turner clip) of a Dr. (Isiah) Ross recording derived from “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” once again from 1951 and once again released on Chess. It should be noted that though Dr. Ross was in fact a one-man band, the guitarist on this selection was his friend Wiley Galatin. And it should be further noted that this song pretty much sums up Sam Phillips’ rhythm impulse and the inexorable forces that were leading him from his earliest recordings of Wolf, Ike Turner, and B.B. King to find the path to rock ‘n’ roll. As Dr. Ross proclaimed in a 1954 Sun single, released in the midst of all the excitement about Elvis: “Gonna boogie for the doctor/Gonna boogie for the nurse/Gonna keep on boogiein’/Till they throw me in the hearse.” Or as Jim Dickinson declared in a mantra that has never ceased to have relevance: “World Boogie Is Coming.”

Carl Perkins: “Matchbox”

This is the song that Carl was cutting with an unknown Jerry Lee Lewis on piano, when Elvis walked in and interrupted his December 1956 session – and then joined in for what would become known as the Million Dollar Quartet (if you include Johnny Cash, who was only there for the picture-taking). Here we have Carl a year or two after his departure from Sun, with a performance nowhere near as cleanly chiseled as the Sun sides, and a persona far removed from his latter-day incarnation (see below). But there’s a spark to this that brings to mind some of the desperate drive that Carl depicts in his terrific biography/autobiography, Go, Cat, Go! (written by and with David McGee), and the song itself (a wonderful example of the shared black and white tradition that goes back at least as far as Blind Lemon Jefferson’s 1927 recording) was by his own assessment, and Sam’s too, about as good as rock ‘n’ roll music could get. You should definitely go back to the original with Jerry Lee firing boogie woogie fusillades at Carl and Carl shooting back with triple-string runs of his own, but this has a crazy concatenating logic of its own. And, of course, you wouldn’t want to miss the hop-skip-and-jump move (delighted or demented?) that signals Carl’s enthusiasm (and that might suggest a little bit of the reason that Carl Perkins could have never have been Elvis – though Elvis could never have been Carl Perkins either), or the great Merle Travis’ (“Sixteen Tons,” “Dark as a Dungeon” – he’s on the far right, playing a very controlled rhythm) appreciation for some of the boogie-woogie fever that his own music has spawned.

Jerry Lee Lewis: “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On”

I know, I know, this is the most obvious choice, right? But it isn’t, exactly – this is Jerry Lee’s second appearance on Steve Allen after his first, two weeks earlier, broke the record wide open. (If you don’t believe me, note the proliferation of chairs, benches, and piano stools flying back and forth across the stage. In his first appearance, only the piano bench came sailing back, after Jerry Lee, presumably to his host’s surprise, kicked it away as he launched into his ecstatic conclusion.) And, you know, it’s kind of like with the earlier Big Joe Turner selection, it’s not just because it’s an iconic moment, it’s because it’s “the best.” By which I don’t mean that it’s The Best – just that you need to see it for its sheer abandon (to use a Sam word), for its irrepressible exuberance and for its embodiment of the Life Force that Sam was seeking in all of his recordings (and probably found the most perfect expression of in Jerry Lee’s music). And once you’ve watched it four or five times, then you need to spend the next two weeks watching nothing but Jerry Lee Lewis videos – any era – including the first.

Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Eric Clapton: “Matchbox”

I think Sam must have really gotten a kick out of this – I’m sure he did. Here we have another Million Dollar Trio, with Johnny Cash not only singing but taking the lead this time. There are lots of great clips of the original Johnny Cash trio from early in his career (I’m sure we’ll get to those eventually, at least with the video companion to the Sam Phillips biography), but what I think is so cool here – and one of the things that Sam admired most about an artist he found almost as original as Howlin’ Wolf in his sound, with the added originality of his songwriting, too – is the direction, the command, and the graciousness that John displays, as he did on every one of his television shows. Also the freedom. Starting with his duetting with Bob Dylan, his special guest on the very first Johnny Cash Show. It’s hard to imagine something like this happening today (though I don’t know, maybe it does – and don’t forget Tom Jones’ brave musical adventures with all of his guests, from Jackie Wilson to Jerry Lee). Carl is at his gentlemanly best, Eric Clapton (on the show with Derek and the Dominos) is properly deferential but musically unabashed. And Johnny Cash’s hums and shouts of encouragement keep up everybody’s spirits through yet another spontaneous iteration (you’ve got to check out Jerry Lee’s early version on Sun as well) of Carl’s very spirited, very Sister Rosetta Tharpe-influenced classic blues.