Good Rockin', Tonight- The Legacy of Sun Records

DVD REVIEW



Good Rockin' Tonight- The Legacy of Sun Records, PBS American Masters, 2001



Howlin’ Wolf, Roscoe Gordon, Rufus Thomas and an assortment of black blues notables in the early days. Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnnie Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis and an assortment of white rockabilly notables in the mid to late 1950’s. What do they have in common? Well, one thing, and make that an important one thing, is that they passed through Mr. Sam Phillips’ Sun Records recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee on the way to some kind of career. Amazing. With the possible exception of Chess Records in Chicago, that moreover concentrated on the blues, no other studio can claim so much as the catalyst for what became rock and roll in the mid- 1950’s, the youth of the present writer and of his Generation of ‘68.

The format here, as in most of the Public Broadcasting Station’s American Masters series, is to have a generous round of ‘ talking heads’ interspersed with some performances, in this case, to honor the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Sun Records (1950). An added touch here is that some of the performances by the old Sun recording artists are covered by more recent performers like Paul McCartney and Kid Rock.

The ‘talking heads’ here also include many of the old Sun artists who did not attain the stardom of those mentioned in the first paragraph yet who nevertheless had some interesting things to say about the meaning of the Sun Record experience. A recurring theme is that mainly it got them the hell off the farms and out of the fields, especially those damn cotton fields or out of those dead end jobs. And they had fun and got paid for it. And met girls. How can you beat that? My take on this is that they were good old boys who got more out of the Sun, if not financially then musically, than they had originally bargained for. And all of this trip down memory lane is presided over by the impresario himself, the late Sam Phillips.

Along the way there are discussions, sometimes heated, about the roots of rock and roll- black blues or white country. That will never, ultimately, get resolved although I think the case for the blues gets stronger the more I see and read about the early 1950’s and the shift of the blues from a country sound to a city sound. But that can be argued another day. What we have here is recollections, funny and bittersweet, by those who were either one-shot johnnies or were ‘put on the shelf’ by one Sam Phillips. That is the kind of influence that he had for that one golden decade of the 1950’s. Another nice touch here is that the one- shot johnnies not only get their ‘hit’ covered by currently popular musicians but they get one last 15 minutes of fame by belting out their own classics. Who can forget Lonely Weekend or Rock and Roll Ruby after this retrospective to speak nothing of Good Rockin’, Tonight.

A note on sound- no, not of this American Masters production which like virtually all PBS productions is technically of high quality. No, I am referring here to the sound in Sun Studio. I do not believe in ghosts or other such things but tell me this. Why, for example, does Johnny Cash in his Sun Records days sound like god’s own creation when on work from other recordings I can take him or leave him? And that goes for Elvis, Carl, Jerry Lee and the others as well. The gods and goddesses of Rock and Roll were smiling on that joint- thanks.