Studio of The Giants

Jack Clement and Johnny Cash photo by Marty Stuart

“I want you to sing like this.”

That was what Sam Phillips told Roy Orbison after bringing out a stack of records by Arthur Crudup and Little Junior Parker, Orbison told me years ago. “What he was trying to get across to me,” Orbison continued, “was to sing with feeling, to put everything I had into it. He wasn’t concerned with enunciation or even style. He just wanted us to be into it all the way, and we all tried our best to do that for him.”

Phillips, the legendary founder of Sun Records, forever altered the course of American popular music by spearheading the rock ’n’ roll revolution in the mid 1950s. Orbison’s widow Barbara is behind the release of four new, crisply remastered CDs on the newly formed Orby Records. Each disc chronicles the Sun careers of four Rock and Roll Hall of Famers; Orbison, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. (The label’s most famous alum, Elvis Presley is not included, as Phillips sold Elvis’ master recordings in 1955 for $35,000 to RCA.)

The four CDs serve as a primer 101 on the history of rock ’n’ roll—music that inspired The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen and countless other generations of rockers.

Since Phillips died in 2003, the man who knows the most about Sun’s operations—and also produced many of its biggest hits during his 1955-1959 tenure at the label—is “Cowboy” Jack Clement. Clement, now 73, is living comfortably in Nashville and recently released I Guess Things Happen That Way, his ?rst new album in 26 years.

Recalling the fateful day he was hired—June 15, 1956—Clement explains, “Sam Phillips at that time was almost as famous in Memphis as Elvis. The ?rst time I had auditioned for him about six months earlier, he thought I was a little too slick for him, but when I came back again, Sam was just kind of burnt out. He was originally the only guy who was working the board at Sun, and he was looking for somebody like me.”

Eventually, Phillips allowed his ambitious young protége to oversee sessions by Orbison, Perkins, Lewis, Cash and many others. Clement fondly remembers the night he cut what was by far the biggest selling record in the label’s history. Originally, Lewis and his band were supposed to be cutting a new song Clement had co-written called “It’ll Be Me,” but everyone in the studio, including Clement, was getting bored with it. He recalls, “Jerry Lee’s bass player, J.W. Brown, who was his cousin and later became his father-in-law [Lewis married Brown’s 13 year-old daughter, Myra], called out, ‘Hey, Jerry. Do that song that we’ve been doin’ on the road that everybody likes so much.’ So, I just went and turned the machine on. We didn’t even run the song down or nuthin’. It was just done in one take …. That was ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.’”

The original studio on 706 Union Ave. in Memphis—arguably the most revered address in rock folklore, which has since been restored and opened to the public—was incredibly primitive by today’s standards. The performances were all recorded live with almost no overdubs, with the engineers constantly having to “ride gain” on the volume of the individual instruments as the music was being taped.

The famous Sun “slapback echo” which most people wrongly assumed was an echo chamber, was actually, according to Clement, the result of two hooked-up tape machines, with one running about a seventh of a second later than the ?rst one. While generations of rockers, especially in England, have paid homage to this unique sound, for years Clement modestly downplayed the signi?cance of something he was instrumental in perfecting.

“While I was working at Sun, I thought that was all a bunch of prunes,” he says laughing with typical Southern politeness. “It was only after I went back to the original studios to work with U2 (in 1987 for three tracks on Rattle and Hum) that I realized what everyone loved about it. It just had a presence to it. It had a sort of a magic leakage or something. Leakage to me is what gives records their life, like the sound of drums bleeding into the vocal mic.”

“Back then we didn’t have stuff like baf?es. I would put the drums on one end of the room and have the singer on the other end of it. It was still a ?ght to keep the drums from drowning out the vocals. All that banging and bouncing off the walls is what gave the music its charm.”

Of all of the artists Clement worked with at Sun, who does he now consider the greatest? “Well, great is a relative term,” he says thoughtfully. “Jerry Lee Lewis was the most fun—as far as working with and getting our kicks. [But] Johnny Cash was my all-time favorite. He would always try different things and never got jaded. He never turned his back on his fans, and became a ‘star.’ You know? He was always very humble and kind and courteous to his fans, and kept right on playing music right up to the end. I was still making records with him until a few weeks before he died. He was a wonderful, wonderful person and I loved him. I still do. I miss him every day.”

As for label boss Phillips, who passed away a few months before Cash, Clement remembers, “He was one of my favorite nuts,” he says affectionately. “I would say Sam was a genius. I didn’t realize it at the time. I think his genius was making people want to please him, even at the low rates he paid them.”