Hayden Thompson lives in Highland Park and makes his living as a chauffeur, but he has a past that includes playing rockabilly music at countless road gigs all over the south, and recording at Sun, the very same studio that hatched Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Roy Orbison. And although there was a time when he thought he’d hung up his rock ‘n’ roll shoes for good, now his blood is running again.
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After Sam Phillips of Sun Records sold Elvis Presley’s contract to RCA in 1956, Presley broke big nationally and the face of southern music was forever changed. Thompson embraced the new sound, formed a new band, and toured the southern theater circuit with the movie Rock Around the Clock. Around this time he also wangled his first recording session at Sun. The results weren’t released, but he was sent out on a package tour with Sun artists Billy Lee Riley (“Red Hot,” “Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll”) and Sonny Burgess (“My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It”). The following year saw Thompson’s first and only release on the new Sun subsidiary label, Phillips International. Unfortunately for Thompson, his “Love My Baby” (featuring a then-unknown Jerry Lee Lewis on piano) with “One Broken Heart” on the B side came out concurrently with Bill Justis’s “Raunchy,” which was on the same label. “Raunchy” exploded on the charts and demanded all of Phillips’s attention and resources, leaving Thompson’s record without the promotion it deserved.
The European albums draw largely on old stuff: the Southern Melody Boys single, the seven tracks Thompson cut at Sun, various demos he recorded with band backing in Chicago, and assorted solo tapes and acetates Thompson has from the 50s and early 60s. When first approached by European labels about putting out these musically first-rate but technologically dated recordings, Thompson was skeptical: “I was presenting this stuff to Dave Travis when we were putting the album together. He said, “What have you got laying around that we might use?’ And I was ashamed to play him some of this stuff. But he just flipped over it!”
Since the resurrection of his performing career in Europe, Thompson has also begun playing intermittent gigs locally at clubs like FitzGerald’s and Justins. This Saturday at 11 PM, he’ll be performing at Gaspars, 3159 N. Southport (871-6680); cover is $5. “I’ll be doing some of my Sun material,” says Thompson, “and some of the standards–you know, ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll,’ standard rockabilly music–plus my new record, of course. No country, I’m positive. ‘Cause I tried doing a little country at a couple of clubs in the city, but people really didn’t come to hear me sing country, I found that out real quick.”
