On July 18th, 1953, Elvis Presley drove his truck from Tupelo, Mississippi to the Sun Record Company in Memphis, Tennessee. He then paid $3.98 to record two songs as a gift for his mother’s birthday.
Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Record had been looking for someone like Elvis for some time. Phillips had this idea that the combination of road house boogie and black blues would capture white listeners if packaged correctly. That package was and would become Elvis Presley.
That chance meeting between Presley and Phillips changed the world. Elvis becomes the first truly international superstar. His celebrity changed the way music was listened to and by who. It gave music a new identity. Rock ‘n Roll would became a symbol of America to the rest of the world. It would come to represent freedom, independence and democracy. When Eastern Europe became closed off to the rest of the world, it was food, blue jeans and Elvis records that got smuggled across borders.
That’s right, owning an Elvis album become a political act of defiance. All because these two men met back on a hot summer’s day in 1953.
Except of course… it never happened.
Elvis did come in that day in July but Phillips wasn’t there, He was in an another county recording a gospel group. It was his assistant, Marion Keisker, who did the actual recording and who had the foresight to take down his contact information. And, it was Marion who, when Phillips listen to the acetate months later and couldn’t identify the artist, told him about the young Elvis. It was Marion who suggested to Sam to invite Elvis to audition for the label.
Elvis did… and he bombed it. Seriously, he was awful. He couldn’t play well enough, he didn’t sing well enough. Sam Phillips couldn’t see the potential and sent him on his way. The truth was Elvis wasn’t ELVIS…yet.
But again, Marion convinced Sam to give Elvis one more try a couple months later. Elvis was far from great, but this time, Sam saw something in him. Something he could mold. Someone he could work with. And he did. He assigned Scotty Moore, their studio guitarist, to be Elvis’s first manager. Along with drummer DJ Fontana and bassist Bill Black, they began to practice. A lot and hard. Philips then sent them on tour throughout the South. Lots of gigs. Elvis was not so much born as he was made. The rest as they say, was history.
As impressive as a Elvis would become as a talent and Sam Phillips was as a producer, it’s is Marion Keisker that intrigues me most. In our time when apathy seems to rule day and cognitive disengagement tends to be the new normal, Marion Keisker is a reminder that being engaged and passionate in the everyday things we do can make history.
Sometimes we are Elvis, sometimes we are Sam Phillips, however, we are always Marion.
Cheers!
7:30 at Tres Hermanas, my favorite Mexican restaurant, and the wait would make a lesser man weep. I put my name in with the hostess, but already know I have no intention of sitting at a table. I make for the bar and hope to find two empty seats. It’s a tight squeeze, but I get my wife and me in, between two guys doing shots and what has to be a couple on a first date. The bartender looks at us and smiles. Without asking he puts two of his famous top-shelf margaritas in front of us and asks how the hell we are doing.