The tour was trash. A likable guy telling all the stories you and I already know.

But upstairs, after you pay your money to the tattooed clerk, after you wait until the half hour for the tour to begin, you enter a museum, a veritable history of not only Sun Studios, but recording itself.

It’s funny. We’re in an era where everybody with traction wants to stay in the past. They want us to listen to Top Forty radio and buy CDs. Of the same music they’ve been selling for years.

Whereas the history of music is about entrepreneurship, illegality and technology.

Let’s start with the last first.

You should have seen some of the machines Sam Phillips recorded on. With names like "Presto". It looked incredibly crude, but it was cutting edge stuff.

That’s where we’re living today. All this back to analog shit. Go into a recording studio, use the traditional suspects, spent six figures on a record. Don’t you get it, those days are through! The innovators are flying by the seat of their pants, using the technology to create something new.

You know what the number one musical instrument is today?

THE LAPTOP! It fires electronic music. Without the laptop, Deadmau5 is nothing. And you might think that’s a good thing, but the history of music is littered with old farts who think the new thing sucks. And what happens to these people? THEY’RE FORGOTTEN!

Want to last?

Embrace the new technology. In both recording and distribution. Then you might stumble into success. Sam Phillips was barely making a living, he took chances. And that’s how he stumbled into Elvis Presley, who came by to spend four dollars to make his own record, with Sam’s SECRETARY!

Illegality.

Sam cut a hit record with Ike Turner, "Rocket 88", it’s considered to be the first rock and roll track ever. Kudos to both Sam and Ike.

But Sam had no record label. The track came out on Chess.

So when Rufus Thomas cut "Bear Cat" at Sun, Sam decided to put it out on his own label, make all that money for himself.

Which he did.

And it became a hit.

Only one problem… It was a direct rip-off of Big Mama Thornton’s "Hound Dog" and Sun was sued for copyright infringement. And LOST! To the tune of $25,000. That’s still a lot of money TODAY!

And speaking of money, Sam sold the remainder of Elvis’s contract to RCA for 30k. A pittance. But it was the only way to keep the studio doors open. Only Elvis’s last single had made any money.

But that’s what an entrepreneur does. Not what his accountants say to do, but what he feels inside, in his gut.

This big label era, this era of institutions, it’s very recent. And the fact that those running these enterprises want to maintain the status quo is no surprise. When you’ve got something, you don’t want to risk it.

But when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.

Which is why all innovation comes from individuals, who have no safety net, who either do it their way and succeed or return to a life of drudgery. And the public admires this risk-taking. It’s sick of pabulum, it wants edgy and new.

Adele sold 729,000 albums last week. A Grammy record bounce.

That’s supposed to be impossible. Didn’t Napster ruin the record business?

NO!

Adele has sold seven million plus albums in the U.S. because she touches people’s hearts. The rest of the dreck sells much less because people don’t care.

"21" is about honesty.

There’s very little honesty in most of the Top Forty, just crass commercialism.

My heart did not palpitate when we went downstairs into the studio. I unlocked the door to the control room and felt something, this is where Sam sat. But despite the room being the same, you didn’t get the vibe, there were too many tacky museum elements.

But the one thing that impressed me was the acoustic tile. The original stuff. Not the kind you see in studios today. That was cutting edge back then.

Everything Sam Phillips did at Sun was cutting edge. He foraged in the wilderness, came up with not only Elvis, but Carl Perkins and "Blue Suede Shoes" and Johnny Cash and "I Walk The Line".

But before those big successes, he cut records with prisoners. Literally, in jail.

Sam was flying by the seat of his pants.

The big music business is in trouble. Because it’s looking backward instead of forward. It’s your parents, telling you what you can and cannot do.

But the new music business is flourishing. It’s being built day by day by people whose names you’ve never heard of, making records that you might think amateurish, but connect with niches which have more power than ever before.

And to a great degree, it’s not even about records. It’s about the live gig. Which is the way it was and always will be.

Sam had a very brief run at Sun. Ten years in this studio, another decade in the one down the block.

That’s a long time in rock and roll.

That’s how fast it moves. From wire recorders, to tape to eight tracks and "Sgt. Pepper".

And now you can cut your album on a laptop and shoot an HD video on a smartphone.

And seemingly everybody who had success before laments the passage of the good old days.

The good old days weren’t so great. Most people couldn’t get exposure, it was frighteningly expensive to record.

These are the good old days.

I’m going to Memphis, Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee…

The guy on the plane next to me was in the Air Force. He got a call last night to deploy to Tennessee to fire satellites. I asked him if he was afraid of being killed. He told me he put himself in the line of fire so I didn’t have to.

Whew!

No guilt, just a sense of duty. Thank god for people like this.

So I’m on the only direct flight from L.A. to a city that’s located in Tennessee but might as well be in Mississippi. That’s what my driver told me. That the city is located in the southwest corner of the state, Arkansas is across the river and Mississippi is only a hop, skip and a jump away.

In other words, I’m in the south. Where everything’s just a little bit slower and the blacks outnumber the whites and you probably can’t get a decent pastrami sandwich within a thousand miles.

But if it’s soul food you’re looking for, barbecue…

I’m here for Folk Alliance. Which I’ve heard incredible tales about, but one of the reasons I said yes was because I’ve never been to Memphis before.

And I’m stunned, it’s more like Tallahassee than Nashville.

So this driver, he’s got a ’55 Cadillac. He put in a Chevy engine, but most of it’s still sixty years old. And when I start asking him about what to see, where to go, he asks me if I want to take the long way home.

OF COURSE!

Turns out he’s a tour guide. I heard the whole story. From Kansas to the University of New Mexico to teaching English in Saudi Arabia to deciding to get into the tourism business in Memphis because he loved the blues.

I just spent an hour with Tad and he’s my new best friend. You know how some people are just easy to talk to? How the music connects you?

That’s him.

Hell, I decided to take him out to dinner, at Alcenia’s, the joint he made a detour to point out. But he couldn’t, he was off to see James McMurtry, because the music comes first.

And it does in Memphis.

He drove me by Stax.

This is where it happened. Sam & Dave. Rufus Thomas. THIS IS WHERE THEY CUT SOUL MAN! When confronted with greatness your jaw drops, you’re speechless…this is where it all went down?

And Tad drives me past Rufus Thomas’s high school. And the soul food place where they all went during studio breaks… It’s the Four… I can’t remember the name, but it’ll never leave my mind’s eye. Across the street was a juke joint, looked like you could fit maybe thirty people inside. These are not the AEG and Live Nation "clubs" that hold thousands, they’re barely bigger than living rooms.

And he’s telling me all about Booker T., Jones, who played the organ, and Washington, whose name is on the aforementioned high school.

And Steve Cropper went to high school across town. At Messick.

I could just see these guys working it out, it seemed like fun. That’s what’s gone from too much music today, in the dash for cash, the fun’s been squeezed out.

Then, after driving through the projects, we drove by Sun Studios. Laughing, Tad said he was gonna do the full-on tourist trip, he pulled up "That’s All Right" on the CD player.

I shivered.

I was never a big Elvis fan. But hearing this rootsy music, I got it.

And then we drove down to Beale Street. Which is touristy, but still has decent music.

And then by the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot.

It’s just a low-rise sixties model. It’s a civil rights museum now. Tad pointed out the window across the street where James Earl Ray took his shot. Hell, Martin Luther King, Jr. was outside his room discussing the music for that evening’s event when he was cut down.

And on the other side of the building was 422 Main Street. Where James Earl Ray ran out after doing the deed. Big man with the rifle was a coward after the fact.

And then down to the Mississippi itself. Ole’ Man River, absolutely.

It was all about cotton. And when the industry became mechanized, the workers went north, that’s what brought the blues to Chicago.

And now Memphis is most famous for being a distribution center. It’s the home of FedEx, and the warehouses nearby set for instant delivery.

But first and foremost it’s a music town.

Maybe not the only home of soul music, but probably the foremost.

And it’s such a revelation, such a head-turner in a modern economy where everybody prays to the almighty dollar to think back to a time when the music was not only enough, it was more than enough, the grease that got us through.

I would have driven with Tad all night. He had stories galore, he made the history come alive.

You see it all comes down to people. Not the famous ones, but the Americans who industriously do it their way.

If you’re ever in Memphis hire this guy.

Not because I want to pay him back, but because he makes the city come ALIVE!

American Dream Safari

P.S. I looked it up, that soul food restaurant by Stax is called the "Four Way":

Four Way Restaurant

Enough with the self-congratulatory backslapping. Despite the stratospheric ratings, the Grammys were positively antiquated, with a ton of duets/medleys and staging that was state of the art ten years ago.

Look at this:

2012 – Ed Sheeran ‘Lego House’ (live)

The special effects blow everything at the Grammys away. This performance makes Nicki Minaj look like someone who took a left turn on her way to a high school fashion show.

Last time I checked, music was something that went in the ears. And to see Ed Sheeran perform solo is to be touched, in a way that only music can. How many of these moments did we have at the Grammys? Maybe thirty seconds of the Civil Wars?

Music is healthier in the U.K. Because it’s first and foremost about music. There’s an excitement, show biz is secondary. Can you imagine Adele emanating from the U.S? Hasn’t happened yet.

The U.S. story is how Adele got cut off mid-speech. And I’m not condoning that, but you can see her performance from last night online. If you live in the U.K. of course, it’s region restricted, as if I don’t get e-mail from the U.K. every damn day, as if the Internet ends at the Atlantic Ocean.

There’s a plethora of performances from the Brits online. Very few mashups, just people getting to perform their entire songs, solo. Sometimes less is more.

But even better, you can buy last night’s performances on iTunes already!

Brit Awards Downloads

You can’t even watch the Grammy performances online, never mind buy them.

Not that you’d want to.

Ever listen to the BBC World Service? The news looks completely different from a British viewpoint.

We’ve been telling ourselves the United States is the greatest country in the world for so long that we refuse to take chances, to innovate, all we can do is self-congratulate.

Compare the Brits website to the Grammys’:

Brit Awards

Grammy Awards

The U.K. site looks like it was designed yesterday.

The Grammy site looks like it was designed by someone’s nephew in 2004.

Music is supposed to be cutting edge.

Cutting edge is not pairing Chris Brown with David Guetta or Dave Grohl with Deadmau5.

We laughed at the Grammys.

I dare you to laugh at Ed Sheeran’s performance above.

Click quick, this should be down soon:

"Prince – Original Live Reco…"
This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NPG Records.

This is the original version of "Purple Rain". Cut live at First Avenue.

If I knew that, I’d forgotten it. That "Purple Rain" was live, along with "I Would Die 4 U" and "Baby I’m A Star".

It doesn’t sink in until Prince hits the mic at 3:51. You start to tingle. You’re witnessing history. You don’t believe someone, that a band can be this good. In a year where seemingly every Grammy appearance was lip-synched, you’d think the ability to deliver sans crutches is a lost art. But it’s not. That’s why Prince owns the Super Bowl crown, that’s why he still does great business today.

Yes, MTV blew him up. But before it all began, before you knew who he was, he and his band could BLOW!