DEWEY PHILLIPS: BLABBERIN' GENIUS

"The King's 1950s musical ideas were, at their essence, the compression of a Dewey Phillips radio show into a single song, a single person," writes Robert Gordon in the liner notes to It Came from Memphis (Upstart), the musical companion to Gordon's book of the same name. That album bookends a potpourri of past and present Memphis music with a couple of Dewey's radio promos. Combined with Dewey Phillips - Red, Hot, and Blue (Memphis Archives), it gives an audio portrait of the life and times of this rock-and-roll pioneer.

In October 1949 in Memphis (two years before Alan Freed debuted in Cleveland), a radio station on the verge of bankruptcy gave Phillips a 15-minute evening slot to play R&B records, hoping to snatch the black audience just as all-black station WDIA signed off for the night. In less than a year he was up to three hours; in 1956, a year before American Bandstand, he had a show playing rock-and-roll records on television (it was simulcast on radio). In the process, Phillips casually destroyed the rules of the visual medium in the same way he'd already mangled the conventions of radio.

His audience? Predominantly white teenagers who didn't know quite what they were looking for, except they knew Dewey had it. Sam Phillips (no relation) knew it too; it's no coincidence that Peter Guralnick's Elvis Presley biography Last Train to Memphis begins with a meeting between Dewey and Sam. When the time came, Dewey was the first person outside Sun Records to hear Elvis Presley, and the first to play him. Legend has it he played "That's All Right (Mama)" more than a dozen times in a row before calling the boy down to the studio for an interview.

But that's the epilogue. Dewey Phillips - Red, Hot, and Blue has 15 newly unearthed minutes of the prelude to the 20th century's most important cultural revolution (plus another hour of snippets from Dewey's later career, previously available only as an import LP). You hear him on the air blabbering in a hillbilly drawl, pushing CV beer with the religious fervor with which he promoted every sponsor and his favorite records. "Getcha girlfriend or somebody else's girlfriend ta carry on down any tavern and get her a lotta CV and she'll flat love ya, I'm tellin' ya now," he spews. "Go down an getcha bald-headed nanny goat, tie a tin pole on his tail, tell 'em Phillips sentcha from Red, Hot, and Blue! Aw, gonna buy a duck!" He's singing shamelessly off-key over Amos Milburn's "Put Something in the Pot, Jack," like a drunk in the shower, then slipping in a quick "And buy CV!" in the middle. Roscoe Gardner gives a particularly tortured moan on "No More Doggin' Around," and Dewey talks back at the record: "Whassa matter, you dyin', boy?"

It was a hint of something that couldn't be contained, wouldn't play by the rules, and couldn't help raising a ruckus - a recklessness that served as a beacon of liberation to the teenagers who would become rock and roll's first audience. It also drove the curt, slick radio establishment crazy. Eventually the same impulses lost him all his friends, ruined his career, and drove him to an early death. But for a few brief moments at the birth of rock and roll, Dewey was indistinguishable from the music. On Red, Hot, and Blue there is no beginning and no conclusion, no breaks or pauses, only a constant stream of Daddy-O Phillips and whatever he might throw on, from Piano Red to Red Skelton - Dewey is already talking when the CD starts, and he's still blabbering when it ends.

- Carly Carioli