Word: label
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Mount Ramelau, or Tatamailau, as the maps label it, was once the highest point in the Portuguese empire. Located in East Timor's central region, about 30 kilometers north of Maubisse, the 2,963-m-high peak can be reached by turning off the main road to Ainaro and negotiating a rough trail to the town of Hatu Buliko, built at its base. It's easy to feel like an intrepid explorer in this backcountry. Foreign faces are seldom seen and the villagers linger to watch you pass...
...Anyway, this is a time to celebrate a hallowed anniversary. Fifty years ago, Sam Phillips, who ran the Memphis Recording Service (Preserve those weddings and bar mitzvahs forever on wax! Bring your child in to sing "Jambalaya" - he could be the next Hank Williams!), started his own record label. He called it Sun, and it was good...
...started out as a "race music" label, as Phillips brought into his modest studio some exemplary blues shouters and players: Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, James Cotton, Sleepy John Estes, Herman "Little Junior" Parker and the Blue Flames, Little Milton Campbell, Ike Turner (yes, Tina's future...
...Claudette. Charlie Rich came in as a staff songwriter and soon had his own smash, "Lonely Weekends." All of these performers got the can't-miss slapback echo-chamber treatment, and all eventually bolted Sun. By the end of the '50s the revolution was over for the bright yellow label with the sun-ray stripes, the rooster and the encircling clef notes...
...groups are integrated on a couple of Sun anthologies: the newly issued two-CD set "Sun Records: The 50th Anniversary Collection" (from BMG Heritage); and the older, fuller three-CD opus, "The Sun Record Collection" (on the ever-dependable Rhino label). The BMG set has some strange omissions: there's no Howlin' Wolf, whom Phillips called the greatest artist he ever recorded ("This is where the soul of man never dies"); no "Good Rockin' Tonight"; and, criminally, no "Great Balls of Fire," the Jerry Lee Lewis number that ... well, I'll save those superlatives for later...