Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [42]
Phillips had come up as the youngest of eight kids, and he lost his father early, seeing his dream of becoming a criminal defense lawyer go up in smoke. But the music business had nearly killed him, too. In 1949 he’d had a nervous breakdown but, “I got off my back after ten shock treatments and I was back working in a couple of months—less than that—because I had just worked myself to death with a lot of responsibility for a young person.”
Now that he had small children, he didn’t want to put himself at risk like that again. He needed a commercial act, and he needed it soon. Though it was never really money that drove Sam, Marion knew the refrain. “Over and over I heard Sam say, ‘If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.’ ”
The newspaper story Elvis read on July 15, headlined “Prison Singers May Find Fame with Record They Made in Memphis,” focused on Phillips’s newest find, the Prisonaires. Phillips had transported the quartet from the Tennessee State Penitentiary under armed guard, bringing them to his studio on Union, where they recorded an original song, “Just Walkin’ in the Rain.” Phillips would release the song on Sun Records, with its bright yellow label depicting a spindly rooster greeting the day, music notes forming a circle around SUN RECORD COMPANY, and its location, “Memphis, Tennessee.”
By 1953 Phillips was already expanding his original intent with Sun, working with white artists, as well as black. Meanwhile, his bread-and-butter business, the Memphis Recording Service, was scrambling, too, advertising that “We Record Anything—Anywhere—Anytime.” Phillips wasn’t kidding—he’d lug the equipment out to weddings and bar mitzvahs, or make dubs, transfer tapes—in short, do anything to keep the doors open. His first big financial outlay was a neon sign in the window, which he hoped would lure drop-in customers. But parking was always a problem because of the way the streets formed a triangle, the building tucked behind the intersection of Union and Marshall, with Taylor’s restaurant next door.
Elvis would have noticed the newspaper story immediately, as would everyone else in his household, both for the word prison in the headline—no one could pretend to forget that Vernon had done his time—and for the novelty of such a recording service. Sometime that summer 1953, Elvis, who worked as an assembler at the M. B. Parker Company until the end of July, when the job ran out, took his guitar over to Union and plunked down four dollars to make a two-sided acetate of “My Happiness” and the Ink Spots’ “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.”
Marion, a bespectacled, blond, thirty-five-year-old divorcée who handled all the distributor relationships, bookkeeping, publicity, billing, and secretarial work (“I was the entire office”), was swamped that day. But she vividly remembered Elvis, a fidgety boy looking for a break.
“He came on a Saturday afternoon, a very busy afternoon. For some reason, I happened to be alone at the time. The office was full of people wanting to make personal records. I told him he would have to wait, and he said he would. Of course, he had his guitar, so while he was waiting, we had a conversation. He [asked] if anybody needed a singer. He said, ‘Somebody out there must want to hear me.’ I said, ‘What kind of singer are you?’ He said, ‘Well, I sing all kinds.’ I said, ‘Who do you sound like?’ And he said, ‘Like nobody. I don’t sound like nobody.’ It was true, of course, but it seemed so impossible.”
Marion went back to make the ten-inch acetate, and halfway through the first side, she thought she heard what Sam was looking for, “this Negro sound” in a white man. Quickly, she grabbed a piece of recording tape and threaded it through the two-track Ampex. “This was not something