Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick (Review)
I strongly gravitate toward historical biographies with a leaning toward the American presidency. So a departure to the history of rock and roll was a fun departure from my norm. Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick was an interesting take on music and the incredible confluence of star power that Sam Phillips helped nurture.
The book opened with this quote by Holland Cotter, an art critic, who offered the following take on Henri Matisse: “Value the original, fragile, and rough. That’s the art.” It was fitting, because the theme permeated through everything Sam Phillips did. He liked the rough and gritty, particularly when it was unique, which gave him an unwavering belief in singers that did not fit a previously popular mold. Phillips hammered into people a mindset of individual self-expression—whatever hand you’re dealt, play it in the best way possible that only you can.
The iconoclastic nature of Phillips made for an enjoyable and quick read. Because Guralnick knew Phillips, there was an added personal touch to the biography. Usually, a personal connection between the author and the author’s subject can undermine the story, but it worked in this instance. As suggested above, I tend to prefer focusing on the big-picture history that accompanies politics, but it is hard to ignore the historical significance of rock and roll. If you enjoy music, this Sam Phillips biography is worth your time.
Here are some of the other points I found interesting in Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock and Roll:
The idea of self-expression that Phillips emphasized reflects a deep love of music and appreciation for the power it can hold over people. The wide range of music he captured shows that it was not just one idea of music but the full breadth of style and message—just so long as the music spoke truth.
As Sam Phillips was on the precipice of making it big with Sun Records, he had encountered enough barriers that he thought it might be time to quit. He knew he could make a good living as a radio engineer, but he didn’t want to just make a living. He wanted to be able to bring black and white communities together—to show how much commonality there was through the power of music.
The story seemed to lag a bit between introducing Sam and Sun Records until the singers I knew—Elvis, Cash, and Perkins—started recording. Then, Guralnick’s description of how country and blues evolved into something more turned the story electric.
Sam Phillips had a capacity to make people feel better about their talents than they felt about themselves. Billy Lee Reilly observed, “He could make you feel like you were somebody whether you were or not. He never criticized; he would always come up and say, ‘man, you are doing great. I want you to just do it this way.’ [And] he would make you so comfortable that you would just go in there and turn loose.” There is some wisdom in leading with this approach.
The ending—after the sale of Sun Records—felt like reading Ecclesiastes: “What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” Sam achieved everything he set out to achieve and then his life seemed to float with an longing for something more.
When Elvis died, Sam was most troubled that for all Elvis experienced, he didn’t find any sense of fulfillment. Sam believed he could have saved him, which seems interesting given the wandering that Phillips experienced after he sold Sun Records.
“Perfect imperfection” was a regular theme of Sam Phillips and Peter Guralnick’s book. When they were working together on a documentary of Sam’s life, the message they tried to present was, “whatever [your] course of life, music would always enrich it…Don’t cheat yourself by not getting everything you can out of music. But in the meantime, have a hell of a lot of fun doing it.”
Overall, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock and Roll is an informative biography that will resonate with anyone who is interested in the history of rock and roll or the recording industry. Peter Guralnick keeps the book moving and there is plenty of intrigue along the way.
