Johnny London, “Drivin’ Slowly.” The B-side was “Flat Tire.”
Peter Guralnick published Sam Phillips The Man Who Invented Rock and Roll in 2014. With 661 pages of text it is, to say the least, very thorough. If you have an interest in the birth of rock and roll and a person’s struggle to achieve a dream, then I highly recommend this deeply researched book.
There were many times during Sam Phillips’s 18-hour work days that he could simply have walked away from his dream and earned a profitable living as a radio engineer.
From an early age, Phillips believed that “music will take you anywhere you want to go.” His father was a farmer and Sam grew up listening to the sharecroppers’ stories and songs while they worked. The feeling their sound’s emoted was his holy grail: the “purity of emotional communication, not perfection.”
Sam Phillips’s CV might both impress and worry a potential employer. Certainly diligent, meticulous, and capable, but he was those things at many places since he didn’t stay anyplace too long.
His dream of having a recording studio was always primary. Having a record label for those recording was secondary, so at first he’d search for “that” performer or band that had “that” sound. Then he’d record take after take waiting for “that” to happen.
Most of the people he recorded had not been recorded before or had had limited exposure. Neither mattered to Phillips. Did he get the gut bucket feeling he sought?
Phillips had opened Memphis Recording Service on January 3, 1950 in Memphis, Tennessee. His early recordings included such future stars as BB King, Junior Parker, and Howlin’ Wolf. In fact, Phillips recorded “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats. The real band leader and person who wrote the song was Ike Turner. To many rock and roll critics, “Rocket 88” represents the first rock and roll record.
Sam PhillipsSun Records
Sun Records
By 1952, after recording hits for other labels, Phillips decided he needed his own label. Unfortunately, the Sun Record label quickly failed, but not for lack of effort. Phillips’s drive to showcase the music left him little time to understand the intricacies of distribution, pressing, and publishing.
Phillips’s doggedness led to Sun Records resurrection in January 1953. It continued to struggle until Phillips thought the voice of young white kid who recorded a song on his own might be someone worth working with. At first nothing happened, but soon local successes followed and Elvis Presley put Sun Records on the map.
Jazz drumming is all about keeping time. And what Paul Motian did with time, starting with Bill Evans, and more notably as his career progressed, was to prove that it was elastic. Under his touch, the steady ding-ding-a-ling of swing could be implied, rather than explicitly played, and yet still keep the music grooving. ( 2011 NPR article )
Paul Motian
I became a volunteer at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in 2011 and since then I’ve collected information about the Woodstock Music and Art Fair and those associated with it, particularly the performing artists,
Of course we immediately recognize names like Hendrix. Slick, Santana, Joplin, Townshend, and many others. Those who visit the site ask first about them. About their performance. Aware of their part not just in the festival itself, but in establishing and contributing to the music that came out of the 1960s’ counterculture.
And then there are others. Performers who left the music scene because they were hardly a part of it to begin with. Performers who despite a claim to fame, few others found interested. Performers who hardly appear anywhere in the seemingly infinite world wide web.
Drummer Paul Motian
An Interesting Neither
Paul Motian is an interesting neither. Neither a name that anyone ever asks about, nor someone who left the scene. He was also a part of the scene long before 1969.
He played with Arlo Guthrie at Woodstock, but that is far down on his list of claims to fame.
Motian was born in Philadelphia on March 25,1931 and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. He played guitar for awhile, but by 12 was playing the drums.
I cannot find the connection between Arlo Guthrie and Motian, but Paul played with Arlo between 1968 and 1969. I was able to contact Arlo (or someone speaking for him via Instagram). I asked about their connection. The response was, “Paul worked with me back in the mid to late 60’s. Forget how we met, but he was a master, and a pleasure to work with.”
Personal Calendar
With permission of the Paul Motian Archive
I first made this post in 2016 and luckily I sometime come across new information. Paul Ditmer did not attend Woodstock, but there are few people who have done more to research the festival’s pictures than he has. 1000s!
In 2024, he sent some pictures of Paul Motian’s personal calendar for 1969. He found them at a the Paul Motian Archive site. For those interested in the life of a musician, it is a wonderful inside look at their day-to-day life.
Besides 1969’s mundane quotidian activities like dentist appointments, jury duty, paying bills, dentist visits, and travel arrangements, we can see Motion worked with lots of “names” over that year.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if he attended a concert or was doing a concert, but some of the names that stick out before Woodstock were: Charles Lloyd, Donald O’Connor, Keith Jarrett, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden, and Mose Allison.
The first rehearsal with Arlo Guthrie was on Wednesday 4 June. A number more rehearsals and apparent shows followed.
They got back together on Sunday 13 July. A few other dates with Arlo (including Central Park in NYC on August 11), then Woodstock (“one set”).
There is one more Arlo entry on Sunday 17 August in Massachusetts, but after that the two appear to separate.
Drummer Paul Motian
Jazz Greats
2006 Garden of Eden album cover
That a musician temporarily plays with another musician is as common as broken drumsticks. That a drummer who had already played with such jazz luminaries as Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Paul Bley, and Keith Jarrettand then plays with folkie Guthrie seems unusual.
For example, Bill Evans’s Wikipedia entry has the following: In late 1959, Evans left the Miles Davis band and began his career as a leader, with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, a group now regarded as a seminal modern jazz trio.
The trio recorded the album Explorations in 1961. Writing for Allmusic, critic Thom Jurek said of the album: “Evans, with Paul Motian and Scott LaFaro, was onto something as a trio, exploring the undersides of melodic and rhythmic constructions that had never been considered by most… Explorations is an extraordinary example of the reach and breadth of this trio at its peak.”
WOW!
Drummer Paul Motian
Woodstock alum Harvey Mandel
Harvey Mandel, in a 1986 “Downbeat” interview, said of Motian, “Drummer Paul Motian, like many a jazz player, lives in the eternal present” and then quoted Motian as saying, “When there were bohemians, I was a bohemian; when there were beatniks, I was a beatnik; when you were a hippie, I was a hippie, when you were a yippie, I was a yippie! I’ve been through the whole thing and even before there were bohemians, there was something else – I don’t know what it was – and I was that.”
The list of projects that Paul Motian was a part of during his six decades of performing feels endless. Here’s the All Music link to that list. You’ll need a few minutes!
Paul Motian performing at the Village Vanguard in 2008. Credit Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
Steve Futterman described Motian this way in a New Yorker articleafter Motian’s death on November 22, 2011.
Rhythm, for Motian, existed to be messed with. He could swing his ass off when called upon, but, given his druthers, Motian would break up time signatures with impunity, dangling himself and his bandmates in space until he miraculously brought them home safely. There was an edge of anxiety to watching Motian at work. He knew it and exploited it to everyone’s advantage.
Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton was 26 when Peacock Records released Hound Dog in March (or February) 1953. Written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in 1952, it spent seven weeks at number one on the Billboard R&B charts and sold almost two million copies. Big Mama saw very little of that money.
78 rpm of Rufus Thomas’s Bear Cat
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then Sam Phillips, the young record maker and founder of Sun Recordsin Memphis, flattered Hound Dog by writing “Bear Cat.” He knew Rufus Thomas and decided he’d be the ideal person to sing the song.
Rufus Thomas as a DJ at WDIA in Memphis
Click below to hear “Bear Cat”:
Willie May Thornton Hound Dog
Bear Cat
Though Rufus Thomas wasn’t familiar with the term, where Phillips grew up in Alabama, a bear cat was “the meanest goddamn woman in the world.“
Thomas and Phillips knew they had not come close to the superior “Hound Dog” but were satisfied with the results and released it on March 22, just a few weeks after the release of “Hound Dog.” Even the full title told you what you could obviously hear: “‘Bear Cat’ (The Answer to Hound Dog)”
“Bear Cat” was an immediate hit. The first in Sun Records young but turbulent history.
Willie May Thornton Hound Dog
Answer songs
“Answer songs” were very popular and Sam Phillips innocently didn’t realize he had struck a hornet nest of problems by releasing the song without permission from Lion Musical Publishing Company which held the rights to “Hound Dog.”
Sam Phillips ended up writing a check to Lion and gave up all claims to the publishing.
“Bear Cat” eventually reached #3 on the R & B charts and did not leave the charts until June.
Willie May Thornton Hound Dog
Hound Dog
Of course, three years later a young white singer named Elvis and his cover of “Hound Dog” would forever displace Thornton’s version.
Ironically, Big Mama would write (in 1961) and release (in 1968) a song (“Ball and Chain”) that would be taken by another young singer.
I highly recommended book about early rock and roll and Sam Phillips: Sam Phillips, the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick.
The subtitle of the song is “How One Man Discovered Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley, and How His Tiny Label, Sun Records of Memphis, Revolutionized the World.”
