Salon.com > Alex Halberstadt

Long live the King

Fri, 16 Aug 2002 20:00:00 +0000

"Some of y'all never been down South too much ... Down there, we have a plant that grows out in the woods, in the fields, looks something like a turnip green. Everybody calls it poke salad."

Soft white leather boots planted at his sides, Elvis Presley grinds slowly in a matching jumpsuit decorated with beaded fringe and silver buckles running down the sides. Tan and slender, he looks at once menacing and on the verge of laughter. He whips his arm into the air and the audience lets out an involuntary scream.

"Lord have mercy."

Along with five or six other guests, I'm huddled around a faux-'50s television in the lobby of the Heartbreak Hotel in Memphis, watching Elvis perform "Polk Salad Annie" in Las Vegas, circa 1971. It's 2 a.m. Though she has seen the footage countless times, a woman in a baby blue parka sitting beside me sighs loudly as she watches Elvis pace up and down the stage.

Sam Phillips, the Sun king

Mon, 29 Oct 2001 13:00:00 +0000

Hiding from the heat at an East Memphis bar, I mention to a friend that I've come to town to interview Sam Phillips. A bearded middle-aged white man at the adjacent stool turns towards us slowly, and in a sarcastic voice says: "How original."

It seems as though everyone in Memphis knows the story of Phillips, which, like the man himself, has become a classic of 20th century American pop culture. In 1954, in a one-room storefront studio called the Memphis Recording Service, home of a fledgling label called Sun, Phillips recorded a teenaged truck driver named Elvis Presley performing an old Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup song, "That's Alright Mama." The record had a feel somewhere between rhythm and country, recognizable as neither black nor white. Several days later, when deejay Dewey Phillips (no relation) played a test pressing of it on his popular "Red Hot and Blue" broadcast on station WHBQ from the Hotel Chisca, the response was instantaneous. He played the record 7 times or 12 times or 4 times in a row, depending on who's telling the story. It didn't matter -- in two years Presley would became the best-known singer in the world. In the half-decade that followed, Phillips launched the careers of some of the greatest performers of American music: Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Charlie Rich and numerous others, cementing his reputation as the finest record man of his time.

Merle Haggard

Tue, 14 Nov 2000 16:18:00 +0000

Merle Haggard is wandering through a Holiday Inn in Denver, looking for a chiropractor. He is touring again, and his back is stiff from the days spent on the bus. Yesterday he played the Rosebud Casino in Valentine, Neb., an establishment so rural that it is actually located in South Dakota but uses Valentine as an address. Before that he appeared at the Pepsi-Cola Roadhouse in Burkettstown, Pa., where a rib dinner was served during Haggard's performance. Denver is the last stop, but after a week at home Haggard will be back on the bus, stopping at the Horseshoe Casino in Bossier City, La., and at Billy Bob's in Fort Worth, Texas.

Back at his hotel room, he submits to a series of telephone interviews, staggered 30 minutes apart. Haggard has been known to be evasive with the press, but today he seems unfazed by the questions. All the activity is part of an effort to promote "If I Could Only Fly," his new CD for his latest record company, Epitaph/Anti, where he is now a label mate with Tom Waits and bands like Rancid and Agnostic Front.

Jerry Wexler

Tue, 05 Sep 2000 19:00:00 +0000

"Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone, oh whoa whoa," Jerry Wexler sings into the receiver, enunciating the doo-wop embellishments that soul singer Solomon Burke grafted onto the Jim Reeves country hit. Hearing Wexler describe the early-'60s session in his unique mix of New York Jewish jive and high-flown diction is at once disarming and disconcerting. At 84, he speaks about the musicians he has known with the easy mix of affection and familiarity one might use in talking about a childhood friend or an alcoholic uncle. And while the trepidation that one might feel is quickly deflected by his charm and humor, it is difficult to reconcile Wexler's casual magnanimity with either the fantasy of the intimidating and brilliant producer or the factual enormity of his achievement. "Solomon was beautiful, baby. He sounded just like Dean Martin."

The blues according to Peter Guralnick

Fri, 16 Jun 2000 13:36:00 +0000

"My aim in everything I write is to disappear into the world I'm writing about," says Peter Guralnick. More often than not, that world has been one of rural juke joints and dance halls, "brush arbor" revivals, fish fries and old primitive recording studios -- the sites of the music that is often reverently and sometimes condescendingly referred to as "vernacular." As an undergraduate in the early '60s, Guralnick turned in a paper about Roman poet Catullus and bluesman Robert Johnson, and ever since he has written about blues, country, rockabilly and soul with the sweep and depth of a cultural historian and the boundless enthusiasm of a longtime fan.

His "Feel Like Going Home" (1971), "Lost Highway" (1979) and "Sweet Soul Music" (1986) -- a trilogy of books that have acquired something of a cult following since they were originally released -- are collections of revealing, remarkably affectionate portraits of musicians that, taken together, read like an atlas of Guralnick's own musical journeys and discoveries.