‘Sam found artists that everyone would love’
On December 4, 1956, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash partook in an impromptu ‘jam session’ at Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee. Perkins, Lewis and Cash were on the roster of Sam Phillips’s Sun Records. Presley had left the year before.
Phillips’s engineer Jack Clements recorded the session, Philips called the local paper and a story and picture of the superstars-in-waiting appeared in the next day’s Memphis Press-Scimitar under the headline The Million Dollar Quartet.
In 1981, an album of part of The Million Dollar Quartet session was released, with more material surfacing in 1987.
Some 20 years later, the musical of the same name dramatising the events opened and its 2010 Broadway version earned three Tony awards. The West End production opened a year later.
The current UK and Irish production features Peter Duncan in the role of Phillips. Duncan found fame in the eighties as a presenter on BBC’s long-running children’s programme Blue Peter, and later Duncan Dares, and says Phillips was ahead of his time.
‘Sam had a talent for spotting and nurturing people, often into something other than what they wanted to become,’ Duncan says of the producer who died in 2003.
‘Elvis wanted to be like Dean Martin. Johnny Cash wanted to sing gospel songs.
‘He worked a lot with black artists, during the time that America was racially divided. He says in the play, “If [only] I could find a white guy that could light a fire under a song like ‘dem great negro singers”. He knew that the heart of the music came from the hardworking black community. Even though Elvis, Johnny and Carl were white, they had been heavily influenced by black artists.’
Phillips, who had nurtured Elvis into being the world’s first rock and roll star, had sold 21-year-old Elvis’s contract in 1955 to RCA for €35,000. The money saved Phillips from going bankrupt and he shrewdly invested in the recently established Holiday Inn chain.
‘Sam found artists that would make music that everyone loved,’ he says.
‘What the play portrays is pretty close to what the man was all about. Also, nearly everyone he worked with were poor, almost literally hungry. He said, “I ain’t never heard any music made by a rich man that was worth a damn”.’
Duncan, whose parents were both performers, had found some success in the seventies as a musician and actor before he shot to fame on Blue Peter. He also gained a reputation as the go-to presenter for all manner of derring-do.
‘I was sent up on a hoist to clean the clock face on Big Ben on my first day on the job,’ he says.
‘I went fire-walking. I drove across the Irish Sea in a Volkswagen Beatle in Duncan Dares...’
On one occasion, Peter found himself singing a song he’d written himself in front of Elton John.
‘I had just brought out a single Cold As Ice. Elton John and [his manager] John Reid came [to the Blue Peter studio]. Elton was charming. It was nerve-wracking to sing a song for Elton live in front of me but it was great. He took me out for a drink with them afterwards; of course, me being quite a pretty boy then, I realise it possibly wasn’t Elton’s only motivation!’
At 65 now, Peter says that the art of the musical is imitating life for him a little bit with his daughter.
‘My daughter [Lucy] has a double A-side single out right now under the name Luki and I’ve become a bit of a Sam Phillips in real life pushing that,’ he says.
‘I had those ambitions to be a musician myself. I know the tribulations of it. Now I play someone who made so many musicians’ dreams come true.’ And changed musical history along the way.
The Million Dollar Quartet runs from April 28 to May 2 at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. (Coronavirus restrictions permitting.)
‘Nearly everyone he worked with was poor, almost literally hungry’