CARL PERKINS 1932-1998

Well it s a one for the money . . .
Rock n Roll. It s a term that s misused, abused and vastly over-used. It s there to describe everything from the Rolling Stones to Oasis and back again. But let s be specific for a moment. Rock n Roll authentic Rock n Roll, is a very particular music precisely located in time and place.
Carl Perkins is dead. And where Carl Perkins is concerned there s no other definition possible. He was Rock n Roll. When you hear Carl Perkins, you hear quintessential flat-earth rock primitivism from a lost age of innocence. One take says more about the grassroots cross-overs between Hank Williams and the birth of Rock than libraries full of textbooks.
He was born (as Carl Lee Perkins) into clichid White Trash poverty in Ridgely, West Tennessee, in what he d much later song-title Lake County Cotton Country , and was raised on a plantation as part of its only white Sharecropper family. His father, Buck, was long invalided with a lung disorder.
Married at 21, Carl found himself spending days dragging a nine-foot tarbottom sack along the cotton rows, while his wife took in laundry. To meet mounting bills, he took to spending evenings with brothers Jay and Clayton hanging out playing local bars on the Honky-Tonk circuit, picking cotton by day and guitar at night . He d learned the rudiments of guitar as a kid on the plantation thanks to the indulgent tuition of a black musician called John Westbook, stealing individual teeth from the family s only comb to use as D.I.Y. plectrums.
And what The Perkins Brothers played is what they were immersed in, Juke-Joint R&B, Country Boogie and Western Swing, alongside that Hank Williams Hillbilly stuff and what Perkins used later describe as John Lee Hooker songs done Bill Monroe style . One feels it. He becomes it. He is it. Until that August 54 High School Date in Bethel Springs where Elvis Presley played. Elvis was then strictly a regional phenomenon, but already his effect was something like that of the Sex Pistols in 1976. Everyone who saw him was changed. Buddy Holly catches a Presley show around the same time too. But for Carl it s not so much shock, as recognition. This mixed-up confusion of styles is what he s been accidentally playing all along.

TWO FOR THE SHOW . . .
Carl goes to Memphis, 706 Union Avenue, home of those yellow Sun records, home of Elvis and later demi-gods Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Rich. The very first time I met Carl I knew he was an artist I could work with, recalls Sam Phillips. He was very eager and ready to listen, but most of all he had talent in abundance.
By January 1955 the first Carl Perkins single Turn Around c/w Movie Magg (a song which he d written aged 12) appeared on the Sun subsidiary Flip, and he was supporting Elvis on a tour of the South. Then, at year s end, he recorded Blue Suede Shoes .
Sun was the detonation point at the pivot of the American Century. It was a clear decade before the mass Civil Rights Movement, but already Sun rock n roll was dancing all over the absurdity of racial segregation. Not as a political thing. But as a gut thing. An elemental fusion of raw artistry going beyond the racial, or even the personal. Listen to Blue Suede Shoes , the guitar playing is just speeded-up simple black Blues, he explains, it s just Blues applied to Country. That s all Rockabilly is.
Perkins crude but fluid guitar playing is a combination of finger and pick style, incorporating a slap-back technique developed by attempting to replicate Les Paul s echo sound without realising that Paul was utilising studio tape delay technology! And straight out of the traditional poor White C&W booking circuit, the Perkins Brothers raw acoustic slapping stand-up bass rhythms had got allied to a heavy backbeat of black boogie drums and electricity until their tight band integration can at times seem closer to the feel of the new generation than even that provided by Bill Black or Scotty Moore for Presley s contemporary sides. Carl Perkins has a more quietly assertive power. But Rock n Roll ? This is where it all comes from. All the way from Memphis . . .
THREE TO GET READY . . .
History records Elvis as winner of the Blue Suede Shoes wars. He even reprises it with a self-referential joke in his post-Army movie GI Blues. But it was a close-run thing. Carl s original Sun single simultaneously topped the Country and the R&B charts. The first record ever to make that trans-racial leap. And in the British Top Ten (13th June 56) Carl s version trails a mere position behind Presley s at nos. 9 and 10. Yet Elvis has the more extreme edge.
To Carl Perkins the song is third-person reportage. He s observing, and writing about an incident he saw during one of his shows in Jackson, Tennessee. He s watching the hepcats jive. To Elvis, it s personal. He WEARS the goddam shoes! When Elvis signed to RCA, Sam Phillips promptly promoted Carl as his replacement: Carl was the big name at Sun at the time . But he conspicuously lacked Presley s Dionysian good looks, sexual charisma, and crucially, the killer instinct necessary to take it all the way. He was too much the nice guy. More the Teen Chronicler than Teen Idol.
But that s where his uniqueness lies. Carl Perkins lyrics come from within the communal changes almost as perfectly as Chuck Berry s do, defining the sly minutia of style and Teenage fad with a true sense of its urgent fun. He s a student of Rockin n Boppin, a reporter and recorder of hip-speak, life-style and fashion, he s there where the Hep-Cats jive.
Blue Suede Shoes is just Perkins vision most perfectly realised, written spontaneously after a gig in ten minutes or less I had it exactly like it stayed for 30 years. I couldn t find anything to write on, so I took three Irish potatoes out of a bag and I wrote Blue Suede Shoes on that sack. I didn t even know how to spell suede swade is the way I wrote it.
Legend has it that the Perkins group were on their way to premier the single on Perry Como s NBC-TV show, to give the song its first national network exposure, when they hit a pick-up truck in Wilmington Delaware (21st March 56). Carl wound up in Delaware Hospital with three head fractures and a smashed shoulder watching Elvis do the song on the rival Ed Sullivan Show.
It s an event often seen as a watershed. Career momentum was lost in the months that followed. Brother Jay never fully recovered; he died in October 58. And Clayton, after a long battle with booze suicided in 74. Back in Memphis Sam Phillips presents Carl with a 1956 Cadillac Fleetwood, a compensation prize but one nonetheless acknowledging over a million sales! The follow-up, Boppin The Blues , about how Carl got bitten by the cat-bug , stalled at no.70, but the year would hold one more triumph.
Carl is at Sun with Jay, Clayton and their regular drummer WS Holland laying down a song called Matchbox . New boy Jerry Lee Lewis is pumping piano. Johnny Cash drops by. Then Elvis. As they jam and bitch, playing a Country-Gospel cutting session together, Sam Phillips leaves the tapes running. The result is the legendary Million Dollar Quartet (not released in full until 1987). At one point Carl starts to reminisce about a tour he d just done with Chuck Berry. Unfortunately the flawed tape omits the punchline . . .

NOW GO CAT GO . . .!
Ringo came up to me, a little shy, and told me he wanted to do Honey Don t . Well, of course, I just saw dollar signs. After the Sun glory days, Carl had stints with CBS /Columbia, Decca, Brunswick, Dollie and ABC / Dot, contracts that resulted in albums shifting from retro-Rock to new Country, but yielding only patchy artistic, and minimal commercial success. So he was amazed to arrive in England for a May 1964 Package Tour with Chuck Berry and the Animals, to be greeted not only by hordes of loyal first-generation fans, but by the adulation of new young British Beat groups worshipping this Grand Ole Man of Rock.
The Beatles came round to jam. They subsequently covered no less than four of the songs which they d used as regulars in their set since the Cavern days. They recorded more Carl Perkins than any other writer. Matchbox alone a US no.17 Beatles single earned Carl more in royalties than the combined sales of all his own post-Sun records. Honey Don t , the original Blue Suede Shoes B-side, and Everybody s Trying To Be My Baby on the Beatles For Sale album followed, while Sure To Fall which they at first passed over to Brian Epstein s protighs The Fourmost, eventually surfaced on the Beatles At The BBC CD sets.
By then Carl had followed his drummer WS Holland into the Johnny Cash Extravaganza, spending ten years as Featured-Guitarist-With-A-Solo-Spot touring and recording with the Man in Black and contributing to the million-selling Live At San Quentin album. Carl wrote Daddy Sang Bass , a US Country hit for Cash. Cash wrote sleeve-notes for the Carl Perkins Greatest Hits album, calling him my brother . They fought booze and pills addiction together with a joint dry pact. Then became Born Again Christians together.
To Carl, incidents like his long-term war with alcohol, the deaths of his brothers, and an accident with an electric fan which ripped his guitar-hand to ribbons, were all part of God s obstacle course . He recorded an album with eclectic New York rockers NRBQ (New R&B Quartet) and filled in with movie work. From a cameo in the 1957 (Disc Jockey) Jamboree doing his song Glad All Over , he wrote songs for Robert Redford s biker flick Little Fauss And Big Halsy, collaborated with the Stray Cats on the Porky s Revenge soundtrack, and wound up cast as a Night-Club bouncer in the John Landis movie Into The Night alongside Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer a role that involved him in a vicious knife-fight with David Bowie s psychotic Englishman.
His survivor s instincts paid off as loyal audiences of vintage Ted s with thinning quiffs got regularly refuelled by new intakes of Rockabilly Rebels drawn to specialist s re-issue programmes, like the excellent Charly label reactivating arcane Sun rarities. Until the 80s saw Ole Blue Suede back with a new family band not brothers this time, but sons, in time for his induction into the Rock n Roll Hall Of Fame.
Now he s dead. What I play was called Rockabilly, he insisted, and I still think that s what it is. I ain t changed. They started calling it rock n roll, making it bigger and louder. But I still play what I played when I was a kid.
Carl Perkins wrote and played guitar with taste, economy and the guileless simplicity of an earlier age, saying only what needed to be said. rock n roll is a term misused, abused and vastly over-used. But let s be specific. Carl Perkins was the authentic thing. Rock n roll. This is where it all came from. All the way from Memphis . . . n