
Your Guide to Touring Sun Studio
Home of the Million Dollar Quartet - Sun Studio. Photo by Dan Ball.
Planning for your first visit to Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee? You may be in for a surprise.
It’s a magnetic contradiction, really: that this place, so unassuming, could score the genesis of rock ‘n’ roll.
From the get-go, this studio—built of blend-right-in brick and tucked into an intersection—can be a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it affair. Tour buses and groups posing for photos give it away. Inside, it’s no more imposing: just a cozy-cool bar and a few booths where you can buy your tour tickets, make a jukebox selection, order a milkshake or soda, and shop for t-shirts, music, and such. I like hanging ’round to count how many different accents I can pick up: The world comes together here in the name of rock ‘n’ roll.
Your Tour of Sun Studio
When your tour time’s up, your guide will call you to the back of this anteroom with the cadence and projection of a showperson—because he or she likely is. Many gig by night and shepherd music pilgrims through Sun by day. But their tale burns in awe of what happened here.
Today is my fourth Sun tour in as many years and Nick Redmond, a local musician, is my guide. He sweeps our group upstairs, where we crowd into a cave of a room, close and dim. No matter. The Sun story and its stars are set to light us up. Surrounded by cases of vintage recording equipment and memorabilia, Nick introduces us to our hero, Sam Phillips, who quit his steady radio job to chase his passion: blues music. Who recorded funerals, pageants—anything—to make his way. Who crammed newspaper into a busted speaker cone to salvage studio time with Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats, chiefly Ike Turner. Nick cues what came of that experiment, “Rocket 88.” I feel the crowd around me simmering in its sound—the driving rhythm, the delicious distortion of the guitar. Some hear in it the origins of rock ‘n’ roll. Everyone dances.