I was born in Memphis in 1945. There was a judge named Knox in Lauderdale County, Alabama, where my parents are from. My father always loved that name, so that's where mine came from. When I was younger, I wanted to be a Bill or Jim! My brother, Jerry, is three years younger than me.
It was not a life of luxury. At first, we lived in a garage apartment on North Waldron where, as a baby, I slept in a dresser drawer. Later, we lived on the bottom floor of a duplex on Vinton in Midtown. Sam was totally consumed with radio — it was his first love, and it was his last. He always believed in its possibilities for communication, but he couldn’t put out of his mind the music he had heard on Beale — the same music he had heard as a boy growing up in Florence: the black spirituals and cotton patch blues that had inspired him and that he saw as the highest form of musical expression he had ever encountered. Against all the odds of that time and that place, he decided to build a studio to record that music.
It was a huge risk. Keep in mind, this was 1950. Segregation was at its height, and we're in the South. He had a young family and a good job with the certainty of advancement in his chosen field. He had to give up his job. He had to weigh the risk to his family. But as he always said, he couldn’t not do it. The only failure would have been in not trying.
He opened Memphis Recording Service — what later became Sun Studio — at 706 Union in 1950. He built the studio himself and bought used equipment. I was five or six years old, and I'd be in the studio with Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Rufus Thomas, Little Junior Parker, Joe Hill Louis the One-Man Band, and Little Milton — to me, it was the greatest music in the world.
Sam's deal was that he had no interest in recording anyone but the untried, the unproven, the dispossessed — black and white. Every one of the people he recorded — including Elvis Presley — was frightened when they came into the studio. And if they weren’t frightened, they were insecure. They had never been given a chance. It was Sam’s mission to give them that chance, to bring something out in them that they might not even know they had themselves.
Sam’s first hit was “Rocket 88” by Ike Turner and Jackie Brenston. It went to No. 1 on the R&B charts in the summer of 1951 and has often been called the first-ever rock ‘n’ roll record. Ike and Jackie’s band broke up, but we ended up with their “Rocket 88” bus out in front of our place on Vinton! Sam had helped Ike put that bus together for them to go on the road, but I don’t think it ever ran. The point is, Jerry and I ended up with the bus to play in. It said "Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm" and "Rocket 88" in letters that were as tall as the bus. We had cap gun fights in it and imagined blasting off in our own, personal rocket ship!
None of that today sounds like your normal nuclear family experience, but it was my life, so it seemed pretty normal to me.
I remember the Prisonaires recording at the studio. My father talked the governor into transporting them here from the maximum-security prison in Nashville. Sam asked the governor to give them a chance. There were five black guys — I think they had 599-year sentences between them. To see these guys singing — voices only. "Walkin' in the Rain" was a kind of prisoner's prayer. There were two big, white guards in full regalia standing around. You wonder how anybody could sing in that atmosphere, but my old man was pretty good at bringing people's dreams into focus and helping them block out some of the obstacles in their way.
When my mother took us Downtown on the bus, I would see "white-only" and "colored only" signs. I couldn't understand what it meant. It was just so contrary to everything I had been brought up to believe. I mean, we all drank Cokes together at the studio!
Elvis came over to our house more than any of the other musicians — we saw him all the time, even after Sam sold his contract and Elvis was a superstar! Most of the time, he'd come over after midnight, knock on the door, and maybe have 12 or 15 people with him. No matter what time it was, my mother would always say, "Sure, come on in, Elvis!" And then she’d wake us and say, "Boys, Elvis is here. Do you want to get up?" We'd say, "Yep, probably so, Mom!"
How cool was that? You know, I think Jerry and I never got in any real trouble because we were in the middle of it all the time. For us, that was normal.
Sam had a pinball machine and a pool table. Nobody drank much; it was all pretty mild — but fun! We shot pool, played the pinball machine, and had conversations with Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis. One time, Roy Orbison spent three weeks with us. We'd shoot marbles together.
When Jerry Lee played the Paramount Theatre in New York, Sam took us to see him. Jerry Lee was the hottest thing in the world at the time. I was about 12, and it was an amazing thing to see. It's also pretty amazing to watch movies about it now because I was there — and it never seems quite the way it was!
My dad needed a bigger space, so he built Phillips Recording Studio at 639 Madison in 1959. He designed every echo chamber. This was a fabulous facility: two studios, two Neumann lathes, one stereo lathe, and one mono.
I worked there all through high school and college — packaging records, learning the console, engineering, producing. I recorded some bands during college, and it was pretty much jumping into the deep end of the swimming pool. I didn't know what I was doing; the band didn't know what they were doing; so we figured if we didn't know what we were doing together, maybe we'd get something! And that's what happened.
When I graduated from Rhodes — Southwestern — Sam encouraged me to go into law and definitely discouraged me from going into the music business mainly because he thought the independent record companies, like Sun, Chess, or Atlantic, didn’t have much of a future. He may have been right, and I was sufficiently convinced to get acceptance to, and enroll at, Vanderbilt Law School. But when it came right down to it, at the last minute, I thought: I don’t want to miss all this. If it doesn’t work out, I can always go to law school later. I just wasn't sure that if I didn't give this a shot, I might regret it.
One of my best memories of all of us together was when Jerry and I did an album with John Prine for Warner Bros. In the middle of the session, I called up Sam. I said, "Dad, we're stuck on a song called 'Saigon.' Could you come down?" Well, he did, and he listened, and then he said to the band, which was playing the song at 160 miles an hour, "Do you know what half speed is? Well, play half of half speed." We got it on the next take! It's a great album, and John Prine is one of my best friends in the world. But the greatest thing about it for me is that it was the one creative musical project that Jerry, Sam, and I all worked on together. To me, that's one of the highlights music-wise because it brings together family and history. I'm real proud of that.
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