House of Pain: New and Selected Essays

Blue Memphis

B L U E M E M P H I S Driving from the Memphis airport to the Peabody Hotel, I happened to pass Sun Studio. I hadn’t expected to see it so soon.Without thinking , I changed lanes and turned into the parking lot accompanied by a chorus of angry horns. I’d written the name on a list of civic shrines I wished to visit, but I’d had no idea, in fact, where it was located: yet here it was, with “SUN” written in neon above the picture window, a small beaten-down white frame building set amid hospitals and housing projects beside a barren lot now engulfed in the furious ravening of weeds, which bloomed in crazed profusion with tiny white flowers. Cairns of cracked concrete were set here and there in a squirming sea of rebar hydras. This then was the cradle of civilization as we now know it,the place where“Rocket ”was recorded,considered the first white rock and roll, and then “Mystery Train,” Elvis Presley’s first record, an old Mississippi Delta blues song, which had been reanimated with upright bass fiddle and the syncopated whacking of a drum kit. A tour of the studio was already under way. Chris, a recent émigré from Poland, a thin young man with hooded eyes, was explaining about the song“Bloo Zeud Zshoes”to a small crowd of tourists assembled inside the studio, twelve or fifteen fans, one of them confined to a wheelchair, an aging rocker in T-shirt and sneakers. “I mention name Johnny Cash,” intoned Chris. “Here recorded Johnny Cash a song,‘I Walk a Line.’”Chris pressed the play button on a reel-to-reel tape deck at his side and played a few bars of the song. The studio was no larger than a living room, covered wall and ceiling in old acoustic tiles, floriated with water stains, a dismal and unpretentious place, where Jerry Lee Lewis recorded the largest-selling rock-and-roll record in history,“Great Balls of Fire,” which sold eight million copies  at a time when Elvis’s biggest record had sold only six million. Thirty years later in this very same room, U recorded a Dylan-Bono composition ,“Love Rescue Me,”for its Rattle and Hum album. Chris went on about Roy Orbison, saying, “He didn’t do nothing special here,wan song,‘Ooobie Doobie,’beeg hit he recorded here.”And he played the tape while the visitors let their jaws go slack in gaping reverential solemnity: “Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie, Ooobie-doobie.” Behind Chris lay the heart of the recording studio,the control room. We could see it through the soundproof glass.A band entered from the parking lot behind the building, where I had parked my car beside a great green steel coffin labeled “grease only.” Now this quintet milled about in the control booth, talking soundlessly with Gary Hardy, the owner of Sun Studio,a man in his forties with long reddish-brown hair and a drooping moustache, who gesticulated, laughing wildly, as the band of twenty-year-olds with buzz cuts and goatees fixed him with disdainful looks of disbelief at his outrageous squareness. Chris stood beneath a huge grainy black-and-white enlargement of what must have been a -millimeter photograph. It depicted Elvis seated at a spinet piano.Jerry Lee Lewis,Carl Perkins,and Johnny Cash stood behind him. Elvis had been caught in the act of turning around, beautiful and boy-like,hands on the keys,as he gazed up with a dreamy smile at the trio.The picture hadn’t been very sharp when it was small, and now it was huge and spectral as if it still expanded from the Big Bang, its light reaching us after traveling a billion years. Chris said, “Carl Peer-kins, he was doing here his session. Elvis was hang around here with his fraands and sits at this piano—not this piano but piano much like thees wan. Is part of session from .” And he began the tape once more. Through the glass I could see Gary’s arms shoot up...