When Sun Records Blew The Lid Off Rock And Roll-With The Show “Million Dollar Quartet” In Mind  

By Sam Lowell

“You know they are right whoever said it sometimes a picture, a photograph, tells more than a thousand words, or you name the number of words,” Jack Callahan was telling his lady-friend, wife, and number one companion of forty-odd years, Chrissie (nee McNamara and so as Irish as her beau and husband), as they exited the side door of the Ogunquit Playhouse, the non-profit theater group up in the town of the same name up in Southern Maine which in the fall of 2016 had brought back by popular demand the hit show-The Million Dollar Quartet. (Although it is really a story for another day that forty-odd years started back in high school where Jack was the high-flying ace back for the Blue Devils and Chrissie, who had been smitten with him since junior high school, and he her, finally took matters into her own hands and planted herself smack dab in shy, socially backward Jack’s lap at Tonio’s Pizza Parlor one lonely Friday night and dared him to pull her off. They say in the town legend about that night it would have taken the whole football team to get Chrissie off his lap. Not to worry though the legend also goes on to state that it would have taken the whole football team and the water-boys thrown if somebody had tried to get her off Jack’s lap. Yeah, a story for another day though.)        

Jack’s photograph reference was to the now famous one of the key creators and interpreters of rock and roll, ouch, now called the classic age of rock and roll Elvis (no last name needed at least for anybody who knew anything at all about rock and roll and maybe just about music and maybe even know if you look at a recently issued United States postage stamp with the solo moniker on its face), Carl Perkins (who actually had first dibs of right on a song, Blue Suede Shoes, that Elvis blew everybody out of the water with but had been sidelined when the deal went down although he eventually made something of a hit of his own version when it was released), Johnny Cash (a name known as much for good old boy black-attired country and gospel-oriented music later but a serious rocker out of the blocks when he was starting out who travelled  with the previously mentioned artists as they wowed the young things in the backwaters of the South), and, Jerry Lee Lewis, in the end the most long-lived and perhaps if he could have as Jack’s grandfather put it, “kept his pecker in his pants” the most prolific of the lot. Certainly the way he was highlighted in the show, the way the actor who portrayed him did his bit, stole the damn show in fact there was much in that possibility. All four, had at various times been under contract to legendary Sun Records owner Sam Phillips and that photograph taken in the end of 1956 represented the only time all four were under one roof singing together. Beautiful.

Chrissie had had to laugh when she thought about how they had come to be in Ogunquit in the late fall, a time when she normally did not even want to think about north, north of their home in Hingham a town on the coast south of Boston. (And more frequently of late in winter not even that close to north as she kept hammering Jack, strictly a New England hearty type to get them a nice winter condo in Florida or California.) The hard fact was that Jack and Chrissie had had another of their periodic falling-outs and Jack had, in the interest of preserving the marriage, taken one of those periodic “sabbaticals” from Chrissie that had helped in the past to salvage their marriage. So Jack had taken a small off-season cottage in Ogunquit, a town he, they knew well for almost as long as they had been together having “summered” up there for many years.  (A standing joke between them making “summer” a verb since they had both grown up in Riverdale on the “wrong side of the tracks” in Irishtown and the only summering they had done was walking to Adamsville Beach some five or six miles away.) While he had been in “exile” he would frequently pass the Playhouse and notice the billboard how long the show was playing for. If Chrissie relented before the first week in November he was determined to take her to the show. As it turned out, as usual but nothing negative should be made of the idea, Chrissie had gotten lonely for her Jack and suggested that she would head north (a real sign that she was missing her guy) and stay with Jack before the end of October). Hence the conversation on Friday night as they exited that side door to reach their automobile for the short ride to Jack’s “exile” cottage.

Of course “luring” Chrissie to the show was a no-brainer since they both had grown up, had come of age during the second wave of the rise of rock and roll coming to smite down their parents Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Peggy Lee et al. music that they had been previously enslaved to without recourse. (Their respective older brothers and sisters were the first wave and they passed the torch on.) On any given Friday or Saturday night Jack Callahan, a legitimate high school football hero who would go on to be a good if not great college career, and his corner boys, everybody had corner boys in the old Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville, would hang around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor putting dimes and quarters into the jukebox to hear (and re-hear) the newest big rock hits.

(Although it is really a story for another day that forty-odd years started back in high school where Jack was the high-flying ace back for the Blue Devils and Chrissie, who had been smitten with him since junior high school, and he her, finally took matters into her own hands and planted herself smack dab in shy, socially backward Jack’s lap at Tonio’s Pizza Parlor one lonely Friday night and dared him to pull her off. They say in the town legend about that night it would have taken the whole football team to get Chrissie off his lap. Not to worry though the legend also goes on to state that it would have taken the whole football team and the water-boys thrown if somebody had tried to get her off Jack’s lap. Eventually, after Chrissie had gotten under Jack’s skin and had done something about it that one Friday night, a story in itself worthy of telling, she and Jack would spent those Friday and Saturday nights spinning tunes-and other stuff too. Yeah, a story for another day though. This is about rock and roll legends and not the hi-jinks of 1950s teenagers so we will move on.)

Back to the show though. They had had dinner at a local restaurant and then headed to the Playhouse a little early since neither in all the years they had collectively been going to Maine had set foot in the place. So they were thrilled when they saw the stage all festooned with the Sun Record label in bright lights and with the stage set up to be like Sam Phillips’ wreck of a low rent storefront recording studio. To top that off in the background rock and roll music was being played over the loudspeakers- Jack laughed (and sang along) when he heard Warren Smith doing his classic Rock and Roll Ruby followed by Jerry Lee’s Mona Lisa. Jack admitted and Chrissie would too at intermission that they were amped up, expected to be thrilled to hear a lot of the songs they had grown up with and hadn’t heard for a while. And they were not disappointed, no way.

Of course the core of the show was about the fabulous four (not to be confused with the other fabulous four the Beatles who had worshipped at the shrine of these older rockers over in Britain when the American teen audience was gravitating toward bubble-gum music). But there also was a sub-story line dealing with the hardships of a small record company promoting talent, promoting rock and roll talent, and in those days most of them were small and would be out of business without some kind of hit to keep them afloat. So the story line was as much about the trials and tribulations of Sam Phillips’ trying to keep his operation afloat-including the unfortunate selling of Elvis’ contract to big dog RCA for what in the end was chump change in order to keep above water-to keep his dream of creating rock legends alive.

The other tension was between the various performers and their desires to make the big time which at times did not coincide with what Sam was trying to. At the edge of the Phillips story though is what to do after Elvis got away, and Johnny and Carl wanted to sign with a bigger record company. And that is where grooming Jerry Lee came in, the next big thing that Phillips seemed to be able to draw to his little two-bit operation. Like Jack’s grandfather said if Jerry Lee could have just kept it in his pants once maybe he could have ruled the whole rock and roll universe. That was the way the story played here.  

Story-line or no story line (including an additional female singer, a girlfriend of Elvis’ who represented the seriously under told story of female singers in the early days of rock and roll) the show was about the songs that Jack and Chrissie came of age to from Elvis’ classics like Jailhouse Rock, that previously mentioned Blue Suede Shoes, and the amped up cover of black rhythm and blues guru Smiley Lewis’ One Night With You,  including those hips moving frantically to Carl’s great rockabilly guitar (he dubbed the “king of rockabilly” back then) to Johnny’s deep baritone. And the topping-the actor doing Jerry Lee’s role doing things with a piano (including blind-folded) that would seem impossible. Made the joint jump and made both of them wonder why they had been so enthralled and entranced by Elvis after the first couple of years when Jerry Lee had more energy in on fist than Elvis had in his whole body. (In preparation for a class reunion one time some classmate, Jack though it was probably Frank Jackman but they decided to let the instigator tab remain nameless, posted a comment, a provocative comment as it turned out on the class reunion website,  about who was the “max” daddy, that is the word the instigator used, Elvis or Jerry Lee. A cold civil war brewed up over that one with Jack taking Jerry Lee and Chrissie swooning over Elvis but after the show Chrissie said she probably had to rethink her position on that burning historical question.) What there was no question about, well let’s put it this way after that night Chrissie was seriously thinking about taking Jack back-again. Enough said.