Free Screening Room by Alan Lightman

and a few other Memphis musicians of the time combined the blues with a gritty boogie-woogie rhythm, a heavy beat, and sexual lyrics to create rhythm and blues. Some of King’s best songs were “You Know I Love You,” “Woke Up This Morning,” “When My Heart Beats like a Hammer,” and “You Upsets Me Baby.”
    Joel and I were more enamored of rock and roll and jazz and the new British sound. There was plenty of that at the Lemon. When we came in the door, there would often be four guys on the tiny stage, playing so hard the veins were popping out on their faces—a saxophone, keyboards, electric guitar, and a drum set. The whole place was the size of a large closet with twenty customers crammed together, and I could
see
the music in the vibrations of the Suicide in my plastic cup. The guitarist—a lean young man wearing jeans and a white shirt with ruffled front and sleeves and a bowler hat because the Beatles and the British motif had hit hard—was starting to wiggle his body like he was receiving electric shocks, but the shocks were the sounds that he was making himself as his fingers pranced over the taut strings of his music machine, and he was creating the sound as if the idea had just come into his head at that instant, as if this riff had never existed in the universe until then, yet every note was perfect, every note sang and vibrated and blasted through the air completely right, as if it had been laid down a billion years ago in some cosmic pattern, and the guitarist was gone, he was somewhere in Nirvana, but at the same time he had his bowler cocked back on his head like he knew he was being watched and admired. Psychedelic paint on the walls, crazy pictures of lotus petals and spirals, checkerboard floor littered with straw wrappers and bottle caps, six or seven tables with rickety wooden chairs but nobody cared about where they were sitting, a front wall of solid glass with “Bitter Lemon” painted above a yellow lemon; nobody knew where the name came from, not evenJohn. Joel and I would sit at a table near the back of the room, pressed against the glass, swimming in music, and we would swivel around in our chairs just for a moment to look out at the endless black night, our personal kingdom, and Poplar Avenue, the cement spine of Memphis that stretched all the way from the funky river and Downtown to out east where the affluent white people lived, past street lamps and parked cars and little storefronts lit up with neon. Maybe later we would go to a hamburger joint, or sometimes we would just hang at the Lemon until it closed, when the musicians were totally dripping in sweat. Either way, we would let the music and pizza churn in our bodies until we ourselves hummed and popped and controlled the world. We were fifteen, and we owned it all. It was all ours.
    Among the first to record and produce B.B. King was an out-of-the-box white music man named Sam Phillips. Appearance-wise, Phillips progressed from skinny ties and a clean-cut look in the 1950s to long bushy hair, scraggly beard, and dark glasses in the 1960s. He was what one might call an establishment hippie. He could get down and dirty when the situation warranted it, yet he could also wear a suit and nice shoes. Phillips hung out with black musicians, yet he was part of white society. And he had an ear for new sounds. In January 1950, Phillips opened what would become one of the legendary studios in music history, Sun Studio, located in a rented building on Union Avenue. In addition to B.B. King, Sam Phillips and Sun recorded Howlin’ Wolf, Little Milton, and Rufus Thomas, all black. This sound was called “race music.” People in Nashville had their own music, “country music.” People in Nashville wouldn’t get within a hundred miles of race music.
    In 1951, Sun recorded “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats. This tune was considered the beginning of rock and roll. The tools included a couple of electric guitars, one