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1 Programmed Chaos: Dewey Phillips on the Air Oh, yessuh, good people, this is ol’ Daddy-O-Dewey comin’ atcha for the next three hours with the hottest cotton-picking records in town—(aside: Ain’t that right, Diz? “That’s right, pahd’ner.”). Yessir, we got the hottest show in the whole country—Red, Hot and Blue coming atcha from W H Bar B Q right here in Memphis, Tennessee, located in the Chisca Hotel, right on the magazine floor—I mean mezzanine floor (aside to himself: Aw’ Phillips, there you go again, you’re always messin’ up!). On the air, the real Dewey Phillips was always a bit stranger than any fictional radio character ever invented. The style was without precedent. He made no effort to imitate anyone on the airwaves or in the entertainment business. Most fans agree that they had never heard anything quite like him and no doubt ever will again. In essence, he did nothing less than deconstruct Memphis radio entertainment during the 1950s, and in the process he proclaimed a kind of Declaration of Radio Independence for all future programming. Like Elvis, his style not only violated a staid and conventional past but also marked a quantum leap into an irreversible future. Above all, there was no one around for comparison. One writer, noting that Dewey was a one-of-a-kinder, quickly added, “One was enough.” Elvis’sfamousresponsetoMarionKeisker’squestion,“Whodoyousound like?” (“Why, I don’t sound like nobody, m’am”) could also apply perfectly to Elvis’s close friend and unofficial mentor, Dewey. Dewey didn’t sound like anybody but Dewey. On his show, he was a combination of a kid in a candy store and a bull in a china shop. A master of unpredictability, his anything-goes-and-tohell -with-the-rules-and-the-regular-format-approach-cause-I’ll-do-any01 .7-29_Cant.indd฀฀฀7 2/8/05฀฀฀1:50:44฀PM DEWEY฀AND฀ELVIS 8 damned-thing-I-want-toattitudeontheairmadehisnightlyRed,Hotand Blue program synonymous with radio entertainment in Memphis and the Mid-South during the 1950s. His WHBQ studio was the broadcasting epicenter of the rock ’n’ roll revolution. “He was completely without a governor,” exclaims Charles Raiteri, a professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi, Dewey Phillips expert, and a longtime observer of the Memphis music scene. “There was no way you could control him. When he was in that broadcasting booth he was going to do and say what he wanted to and that was it.” Sun Records legend and Dewey’s consummate lifelong friend Sam Phillips , who with every utterance on the topic normally exuded respect and admiration for Dewey, was no apologist for his behavior on the air, beginning with his celebrated manner of operating the control board: “Dewey was not too mechanical,” he recalled. “When Dewey Phillips was in a little control room, I mean things were flying off the wall. I mean it was a three-ring or a four-ring circus.” Pointing out that it was absolutely necessary for WHBQ to always have someone else in the studio with Dewey to make sure things were reasonably under control, Sam said diplomatically, “Dewey was not into production. Dewey had a little problem with his mouth [laughter]. Whatever came in his mind, he would say it.”1 His performance between records could best be described as one endless stream-of-consciousness monologue. So rapid-fire was his machinegun delivery that there was never time for him to think out what he was going to say, let alone carefully plan a structured program. Above all, there was never a hint of order or sanity. The foot-to-the-floorboard personality and the revved-up rhetoric spewed forth in a constant fusillade of senseless non sequiturs. Most of the time, listeners felt they were being bombarded by what one writer termed a “verbal assault.”2 The immediate audience reaction was one of unalloyed fascination— albeit not always positive, especially among those accustomed to “normal ” radio programming. Robert Johnson, the Memphis Press-Scimitar entertainment writer, was closely acquainted with Dewey and observed that the Memphis listening audience of the 1950s was divided into two groups: Those taken by everything Dewey did, and “those who, when they accidentally tune in, jump as tho stung by a wasp and hurriedly switch to something nice and cultural, like Guy Lombardo.”3 Dewey’s on-the-air escapades are now the stuff that help manufacture legends. In order...

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