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A new musical resurrects an unheard rock-and-roll hero
BY CARLY CARIOLI
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The Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips is not as well known to most people as Alan Freed or Dick Clark, and that’s one reason to welcome a new musical that will get its world premiere this Tuesday at the North Shore Music Theatre. Memphis, with book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro (I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change; The Thing About Men) and music by Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan, centers on one Huey Calhoun, a freely fictionalized Dewey doppelgänger. The real Dewey was dramatic enough: he was the first to play Elvis Presley on the radio, and by then he was already a pioneer (the pioneer) in playing, in the late ’40s and early ’50s, on a program he called Red Hot and Blue, a mix of black rhythm and blues, white country music, boogie-woogie, and jazz for a mixed-race audience. His personal style was as unhinged, unkempt, and unruly as rock and roll would soon become. A pill-popping hillbilly speed freak shouting and singing and talking back to the records as he played them, he invented and personified the image of the fast-talking, jive-spewing madman DJ. The musicologist Robert Palmer once wrote that Elvis Presley’s early "musical ideas were, at their essence, the compression of a Dewey Phillips radio show into a single song, a single person." In Memphis, Huey Calhoun is a disc jockey who grows up poor, falls in love with both black music and a black woman, and alters the course of American culture. "We used the rough outline of Dewey’s professional life and then fictionalized it for dramatic purposes," says DiPietro. Think of it as a Hairspray with less John Waters than Muddy Waters. "It’s about the rise of rock and roll as seen through the eyes of the early white DJs who were the first people playing race music for white audiences. What was compelling about the story to me was the joy and freedom of this new type of music, and this dramatic conflict — a time where what this music represented racially was so frowned upon that it was downright dangerous to play these records, let alone make them." In the end, Dewey Phillips was a tragic figure: his wild-man persona was no act, and it combined with years of drug abuse to form a volatile man who after pioneering the idea of playing records on television (two years before American Bandstand) proved too reckless for the air. He was fired when his co-host, in a monkey suit, manhandled a girl on a live broadcast; he sank into depression, drug abuse, and obscurity and died early. Is Memphis a tragedy? "To some degree," says director Gabriel Barre, "although I think the audience will find that the show is a celebration of Huey’s life, and certainly wonderful things come out of his efforts. And in the end, what will be inspiring is that he stuck to his guns. But there are tragic things about his life that we don’t shy away from, that give it tension and truth. Our Huey takes painkillers, which in our show was the result of, at first, self-medicating an injury from an attack by three white racists, and we see that as well. We’re making a careful attempt to tell it like it was. "I especially love doing musicals that are about music, because you ease that tricky leap that people in the audience seem hard-pressed to make — people singing their thoughts — when music is the lifeblood of the show itself, as it is for Huey. And one of the things I was drawn to is, it’s a great metaphor for the arts in general — breaking down cultural and racial barriers even if that wasn’t the goal originally. He really just loved the music, and inadvertently woke people up to the fact that we’re all of one race, the human race." Memphis runs September 23 through October 12 at the North Shore Music Theatre, 62 Dunham Road in Beverly. Tickets are $26 to $63; call (978) 232-7200.
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