Beginnings Of Things

Sam Phillips and his iconic American record label Sun Records were responsible for launching the careers of countless musicians, many of whom became some of the biggest in music history. Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis are barely the tip of the iceberg. To write a play about one of the most revered record labels and some of the most revered musicians in the history of recorded music, as well as the man behind it, seems, quite frankly, like a gargantuan task, yet it's one that Melbourne playwright Kieran Carroll not only took on, but completed.

The concept of Sons Of Sun – The Sam Phillips Story was put to Carroll by Sydney musician John Kennedy (ex-Love Gone Wrong) who, together with his current band, John Kennedy's '68 Comeback Special, had recorded and released two volumes of covers of songs originally released through Sun Records, called Sons Of Sun. “I've known John on-and-off for about ten years and we had collaborated on a previous play of mine, Ladders By The Sea, where he played five or six songs between the dialogue, which worked really, really well. When that was done, he came to me with the idea of turning the songs he had been recording for Sons Of Sun into a stage show,” says Carroll, “so I went to work on a script to accompany the songs live.” To ease the enormity of the task, Carroll decided to concentrate on one person – Sam Phillips. “He was the founder and sort of the engine behind it all, however, one of the daunting challenges for me was the fairly large span of time that we're covering. We've included a little bit of his childhood and a little bit of his entrance into Memphis when he was in his early 20s, and then really from 1950 to 1959. [While] Sun Records goes to the late 1960s, the '60s are not of such consequence.”

Carroll recruited Sydney actor Matt Charleston to fill the role of Phillips. “He's on the better-looking side of Phillips,” he laughs. Charleston, in turn, recruited Damian Sommerlad and Corinne Marie. Sommerlad has the unenviable task of playing nine different characters, including Presley and Cash, while Marie takes on, among others, the role of Marion Keisker, Phillips' assistant. Unlike in musicals, however, they do not take part in the singing – this is left to Kennedy and his band. “Neil Gooding, the director, was very, very good at making everything swift and dynamic and really smoothed the segues between the songs. You've got that thing where the actors aren't breaking out into singing and the musicians aren't breaking out into acting, so it's not a traditional musical in that sense.”

Thirty-five songs have been utilised in the show, including tracks from the aforementioned high profile artists, however, the less widely-known artists, such as Warren Smith and Joe Hill Louis, have not been forgotten, Carroll assures. “There are some undiscovered tunes which people will hopefully try to track down.” His research actually helped his own interest in this music develop. “What I came to realise is that lots of music that I liked growing up in the 1980s [came out of this music], and I would go and see these bands and not really know the source. I think it's a really interesting point for younger people when they go and see bands now where [this] music originates from. The play is really a good lesson if you want an education in early rock'n'roll, then you can hear things now and realise that it's actually coming from something that was going on in 1952… You know [this music has been around for] 60 years now and it's very interesting, listening to music of the 1950s in 2012, that if we went back the other way, it would be like kids in the 1950s listening to something from the 1890s!”

Sons Of Sun will be playing on the following dates:

Thursday 7 March - The Brass Monkey, Cronulla NSW
Sunday 10 March - The Caravan Music Club, Oakleigh VIC
Thursday 14 March - Blue Beat, Double Bay NSW