dream club Listen to the Dawn of Rock ’n’ Roll, Captured at Sun Studio

By Lindsay Zoladz

On this day, exactly 75 years ago, a crucial event in American musical history took place: the producer Sam Phillips opened his studio at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis. He initially called it the Memphis Recording Studio, but after he started his own label it took the name by which it’s still known today, Sun Studio.

A murderer’s row of musical legends recorded debut singles at Sun — among them Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Howlin’ Wolf — and several of the tracks that critics have claimed as the first rock ’n’ roll songs were laid down within its walls. But plenty of amateurs cut their songs onto wax at 706 Union, too; Sun Studio’s initial motto was “We Record Anything, Anywhere, Anytime.”

In honor of Sun Studio’s 75th anniversary, I put together a playlist highlighting some of the most enduring singles recorded there. To best illustrate the specific and gloriously gritty “Sun Sound” that helped define the aesthetic of early rock ’n’ roll, I limited my selections to songs recorded during studio’s first decade of operations, before Phillips temporarily moved to a larger building in 1959.

But just know that this playlist represents only one sliver of the studio’s history. It reopened in its original location in 1987, and since then it’s done double duty as both a popular tourist attraction and a functioning studio that has hosted sessions from the likes of U2, John Mellencamp and plenty of other artists. (Last August, Danny Freedman reported a great Times piece that captured Sun Studio’s busy dual life: “By Day, Sun Studio Draws Tourists. By Night, Musicians Lay Down Tracks.”)

To celebrate this rock ’n’ roll holiday, grab the keys to your Rocket 88, slip on your blue suede shoes and press play.

I keep the ends out for the tie that binds,

Lindsay

The first eruption came as a shock. But today, lava regularly snaking across the landscape is the new normal. “This was so strange at the beginning,” said Rebekka Hlin Runarsdottir, a geologist and technician at the University of Iceland. “And now, we’re just living in this reality.”

For over a century, these depths were scoured by miners in search of gold. Now they hold the Sanford Underground Research Facility, or SURF. In the coming years, some of the world’s top particle physicists plan to transform this realm into the listening end of an 800-mile, $5 billion tin-can telephone. With it, they hope to hear a whispered answer to an existential question: How did we get here?

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