Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

"Go home and sin - and then come back with something I can sell." ~ Sam Phillips to Johnny Cash, 1955, Sun Studio, Memphis

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Change, Change, Change

"Jerry Lee Lewis has become a dead ringer for Donald Rumsfeld," L. A. Norma said, facing a small tv on the kitchen table at Squalor Heights. We were watching filmmaker Bruce Sinofsky’s "Good Rockin’ Tonight," an American Masters broadcast about Sam Phillips’ Sun Studio, Memphis. (It aired in New Orleans on WYES-PBS.) Norma blew Camel Cigarette smoke out the side of her mouth and it drifted to the dormer window and out towards the new house building up inside a courtyard three doors down.

During Jerry Lee Lewis’ time at Sun, he became an international star in a firmament sparkling with the likes of Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, B. B. King, Johnny Cash, Howlin’ Wolf, and The Prisonaires -- to name a few who passed through Sam Phillips’ hands.

On tv, an elderly Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records, arrived first in Memphis and then at Abbey Lane Studios, London, in 2000, on a quest to record an album vibrant with Sun rays. This is the thread that wove this remarkable film together. He told former Beatle, Paul McCartney, how he almost bought Presley’s contract from Sun. "Offered twenty-five thousand dollars. RCA offered thirty-five."

Younger musicians joined once younger musicians stepping up to Ertegun’s microphone. Eddie Kowalczyk/Live sang Johnny Cash’s "I Walk the Line" in ways both fabulously reminiscent and nothing whatsoever like the master. Stephan Jenkins/Third Eye Blind did the same with a licky-face sexy version of "Cry, Cry, Cry."

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Sun Shine on Bluff City

"Sun became the most famous recording studio in the world," declared Malcolm Yelvington, Sun artist ("Drinkin’ Wine Spodee-O-Dee").

Sam Phillips vowed when he opened Sun Studio, he would go anywhere and record anything, anytime. He did. He recorded funerals, weddings, and the vast inland sea of blues washing up and down the Mississippi River and making Memphis its major port-of-call in no small part because of Phillips.

All this happened in the mind-numbing Nineteen-fifties, just as that flaccid decade began making eyes at the coming soon-to-be-fabled Sixties. The year Presley came to Sun he was eighteen, and most radio stations were playing songs like, "How Much is that Doggie in the Window". Ike was President, quietly warning us about something called "a military industrial complex." And books mentioning sex were banned in Boston, and never displayed on public bookshelves, anywhere.

Then Came Jerry Lee

Jerry Lee Lewis was a mad music man from Ferriday, Louisiana. He flopped greasy curls around a cherub face, kicked his piano stool across the stage, and slapped at the keys with his feet and his butt. His 1958 British tour was canceled when the press learned his third wife, Myra Gale Brown, was also his thirteen-year-old second cousin. (He is also a cousin to Mickey Gilley and the whore-chasing preacher man, Jimmy Swaggart.)

"God must have loved them, he made so many of them," Norma said.

The now elderly Jerry Lee sat heavily on his piano bench. He hit the ivory more slowly, but with enough soul to shake, rattle and roll your Viagra bottle. And damn, if he didn’t look every bit the image of Donald Rumsfeld -- right down to the wire-rimmed glasses

"Just imagine," Norma said, "if Republicans had sex, they might make music in the White House instead of war." She crushed her cigarette on the window ledge.

I poured a little water on the charred spot, and closed the window.

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That’s All Right Mama

We trudged through the heat to send flowers to Cindy Sheehan, the grieving Vacaville, California mother of Casey Sheehan, killed in Sadr City five days after arriving in Iraq. He was 24. His mother was camped along the road to Bush's vacation ranch seeking a meeting to ask him, "What was your noble cause for which Casey died?" On tv we saw the President drive past Sheehan in a panoply of gas-guzzling limousines. He was on his way to a two-million dollar fund raiser at a neighboring ranch. He did not stop.

An internet search found a fifty-three year old trucker named Craig Delaney. He was in Georgia bound for California when he heard right-wing radio talk-shows deriding Sheehan. He altered his route and headed for Texas. "I felt compelled to come and tell her I support her,'' said Delaney. ''The way they were bad-mouthing a mother whose son was killed in the war is un-American.''

Someone calling themselves "Leather Neck" posted this in our forum: "Did you hear Randy Roads on Air America taking head-on the vast right-wing radio talk shows slandering Sheehan's purpose?

‘Remember those fetuses you love so much?’ Roads asked. ‘Well, Casey was once one living inside his mother. She loves him.’ "

(Air America can be heard in New Orleans on WSMB, The City’s first radio station, at 1350 kHz.)

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Time Slips Away

Later, we drank with a gaggle of scribes and fallen tv-announcers at Spotted Cat. The three-times grand Pfister Sisters harmonized from the stage of this cozy bar, as pretty Julie poured the medicinal red and popped the Abita.

The following Sunday, more of the same suspects gathered at Bacco on Chartres for a ten-cent martini lunch honoring my sixty-second year. Sigh! I mean, HOORAY!

A few days earlier, Royal Street Brennan’s talented Sous Chef, Keith Frentz, presented an exquisite Birthday lunch, and a baguette decorated with rooster-tailed swizzle sticks, colorful fruit, and a single lighted candle protruding from its domed top.

"You know, you now look exactly like that baguette," Norma said, tippling her medicinal red down the front of her dress, "and old ‘Great Balls Afire,’ Jerry Lee Lewis looks like old dumb ass Donald Rumsfeld."

Sam Phillips died at the end of July, 2003, in Memphis, at eighty.

American Masters . Sun Records | PBS