Devil Sent the Rain Page 10

  In December 1955, Perkins struck gold with his third record for Phillips, a brand-new song he’d written entitled “Blue Suede Shoes.” It became Sun Records’s first million-seller and landed Perkins an important break, a national TV appearance on The Perry Como Show. The appearance could have done for Perkins’s career what the Dorsey Brothers’ television show was doing for Presley’s, but it was not to be; in March 1956, en route to New York for their Como appearance, Perkins and his band collided with a truck on a desolate stretch of road in Delaware. Perkins went into a coma, and his brother Jay suffered a broken neck. Perkins’s physical recovery took months; the professional wounds, however, never wholly healed.

  After his recovery, Perkins’s career languished. Overshadowed at Sun first by Presley and then by the younger Jerry Lee Lewis, who made his first recordings as a sideman on a Perkins record, Perkins left Sun for recording-industry giant Columbia, which didn’t quite know what to do with him. Although his Columbia recordings are excellent, they did nothing commercially, and as the 1960s got under sail, Perkins’s career was stalled in the doldrums.

  It is a puzzle. The recordings he had made, and continued to make after the accident, are among the classics of rock and roll. Unlike Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, or Little Richard, Perkins wrote his own hits. Songs like “Matchbox,” “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” and “Honey Don’t,” all three of which were recorded by the Beatles on early albums, as well as “Boppin’ the Blues,” “Put Your Cat Clothes On,” and many others, fused blues, country, and gospel music over a slapping, pulsating bass, with Perkins’s tough, sinewy guitar and vocals seemingly straining at an invisible leash. At their best, Perkins’s lyrics reveal a wit and an eye for detail that could give even Chuck Berry a run for his money.

  Still, despite these strengths, Perkins never quite managed the transition from the honky-tonks to the national arena that his famous contemporaries achieved. When the music played in the honky-tonks stepped onto a national stage, it began to change its meaning from mere lubrication on the gears of flirtation and animus into a dramatization, by the star, of those possibilities in his own personality. Performers like Presley and Lewis made this a kind of shared joke or secret between themselves and the audience; an instinct for self-dramatization became part of the necessary equipment for rock-and-roll stardom. Perkins, an electrifying performer at his best, somehow lacked that instinct, which might have allowed him to fully occupy the enlarged stage to which he now had access. In his heart, he was still playing the honky-tonks.

  He spent the early 1960s searching for a niche, alternating between country music and harder-edged rock and roll and spending long months touring, battling a deepening alcoholism. Along the way he suffered a series of personal disasters, including the death of his brother Jay and the near loss of two fingers in a freak accident. He was cheered by a 1964 meeting with the Beatles, who had idolized him from his Sun Records, but it was a bleak, wandering time for him, personally and professionally.

  In 1966, he accepted an offer to tour with his old friend Johnny Cash, an arrangement that lasted for nearly ten years and provided him with a solid economic base. He continued recording on his own for several labels, and gradually, with the help and understanding of his wife, Valda, began to get a handle on his drinking.

  When he left Cash in 1975, Perkins was a middle-aged man who had begun, the hard way, to come to a measure of wisdom and stability. In the late 1970s he began touring with a band that included two of his sons, Stan and Greg, who are a source of constant pride to him. “I didn’t try to pull ’em into the music,” he says. “But when Stan was little he would take two pencils and beat on his mama’s coffee table, and I said, ‘Oh Lord, that boy’s gonna be a drummer.’ I don’t like to hear anybody bragging on their kids, but I played with a lot of people in my life, and when those two boys look at the back of this old man’s head and start playing, it hits a groove and it just works.”

  A longstanding dispute with Sam Phillips over the royalties to “Blue Suede Shoes” also got ironed out, adding further financial security to his life. He opened a restaurant in Jackson, called Suede’s, and in 1981 founded the Carl Perkins Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse, for which he organizes an annual telethon. Then, during a 1991 recording session, he began experiencing difficulty singing. The consequent visit to his doctor turned up the worst card he had yet been dealt: he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat.

  Two years later, after a long course of radiation therapy, which Perkins ranks just behind prayer and his wife’s love as a curative, he was pronounced cancer-free. “It was a miracle,” he declares, unironically and convincingly. In the ensuing three years he has resumed touring with his sons for about half of each year, spending the rest of the time at home, writing songs, and visiting with family and friends.

  Perkins today is a warm, relaxed man who would just as soon play guitar and sing during an interview as talk, although he is prodigiously gifted as a storyteller, raconteur, and informal livingroom preacher. His emotions are close to the surface and he breaks into tears easily when remembering a kindness done him, or when talking about his family. He seems to be constantly surprised by the fact that he has survived, and that he seems to have outrun his demons.

  “I’m not a society man,” he says. “I don’t go to the country clubs, I don’t go to Nashville and hang out. I never fit in with that. My friends at home work at the service station. I like to go fishing, I like an old cotton field, and I like to spend time with Valda. I never get tired of her.”

  Perkins has more friends than just his fishing buddies, however, and most of them, it seems, appear with him on Go, Cat, Go!, his new CD. The record runs a gamut from country-flavored duets with Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, to two excellent collaborations with Paul Simon, to a remake of his 1968 rocker “Restless” with Tom Petty. One of the best tracks on the disc is a version of a new song, called “Quarter Horse,” on which Perkins’s unaccompanied voice and guitar weave magic on a sentimental tune about childhood dreams.

  Somehow, over the years, Perkins has learned to live with a set of conditions that may have exempted him from the pantheon of martyrs to the Fast Lane but apparently gave him something better in exchange. “I never envied Elvis his mansion and all that. All these boys—Elvis, Jerry Lee, Roy Orbison—they all lost their wives, their families . . . I never was in envy of them when they hung their platinum records on the walls. People say, ‘What happened to you, Carl? All of them went on to superstardom. Where’d you go?’ I say, ‘I went home.’ ”

  From the New York Times, Fall 1996

  Elegy for Carl Perkins

  Carl Perkins died this past January, and most of the obituaries have already been written. All mentioned his paternal role in the history of rockabilly music, his authorship of its anthem, “Blue Suede Shoes,” and the fact that his career never quite followed the same upward trajectory as the careers of Elvis, Jerry Lee, and the rest.

  Almost all of the obituaries also acknowledged that Perkins had managed to escape, or at least outrun, many of the ravaging effects of what is usually called success in America. By the time he died—of a series of strokes, at age sixty-six—he had beaten alcoholism, throat cancer, and the odds against a public figure growing up and having a meaningful life in this culture.

  The following is offered as an addendum to the official eulogies. I spent some time with Perkins in the fall of 1996, when he was visiting New Orleans to film a video. We visited for a while on a bright Sunday morning in a private French Quarter home with a lovely living room, overstuffed pastel sofas, curtains; outside French doors the sun shone in a lush courtyard, a far cry from the rough Tennessee farmland Perkins had grown up sharecropping. When I arrived, Perkins’s blue Stratocaster was out, the amplifier on; he and his hosts had been relaxing singing gospel songs. It was clear immediately that he was primarily a country boy; he liked to sit around and tell stories, and sing. He was a man whose first band was made up of his brothe
rs, and whose last was largely made up of his sons. He kept repeating how much he liked New Orleans. The previous night he had played with a local band at the Mermaid Lounge, and he had been greeted by a cadre of rockabilly freaks dressed in retro style. He got a kick out of the way they used period slang when they talked to him; there was one blond girl he couldn’t get over, who kept telling him how “cool” he was. His manner was unfailingly generous and self-effacing.

  Conversation was interspersed with Perkins’s guitar playing, which was crackling, relaxed, and exuberant; he played a quasi–Merle Travis version of “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise,” sang the new tune “Quarter Horse” from his recent CD, and sang a few gospel numbers as well. Then at one point something remarkable happened: Perkins wrote a song on the spot.

  Among the first generation of rock and rollers, only Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly stand with Perkins as songwriters. Little Richard wasn’t a songwriter, nor was Jerry Lee Lewis, nor Elvis. Perkins’s lyrics at their best are wry, sharp, and funny; songs like “Dixie Fried,” “Pointed Toed Shoes” (“Everything’s all-reet cause I got ’em on my feet”), “Put Your Cat Clothes On,” “Movie Magg,” and a number of others are rock-and-roll classics.

  At one point, Perkins was fooling around with a little whiplash lick in the key of G that he played on the high strings with his index and middle fingers, set against a driving rhythm on the low strings that he played with his thumb. After he played it once through a jumping blues chorus, I asked what it was and he laughed and said, “I don’t know what that’s called . . . I just been foolin’ with that little old lick, hopin’ a song’ll jump out that I can use it on.” He played it again, and said, “It’s just kickin’ the string back a little . . .” Then, out of nowhere, over that little rockabilly riff he started singing:

  She was walking down the street

  Struttin’ down in New Orleans

  She was hot and hard to handle

  She’d be everything I need

  She was cool . . .

  They say, “Cool, man; cool, man . . . cold.”

  (big chuckle from Perkins)

  Lord, that gal got to me,

  She buried herself down in my soul.

  (then a series of rhythmic breaks)

  Lord, I got on me a Learjet

  And I just headed south

  I got to New Orleans and . . . Whoo! . . .

  (a moment of free fall in which he searched for a rhyme and the rest of us hung on for dear life . . .)

  . . . There went my mouth!

  ( . . . and we all cracked up as he went on singing)

  I saw her walking down the street. . .

  All I ever need, she’s for me.

  (spoken: “Yes, she is . . .”)

  Lord, you all know what I mean

  I got to get back to New Orleans

  ’Cause it’s cool, man . . .

  . . . and after a few more guitar licks the songs broke up in laughter. When it was over I asked if that was something he ever played before.

  “Naw,” he said, shaking his head once and lighting a cigarette, and laughing. “Just popped out.”

  Over the course of a few hours we talked about all kinds of things. Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Elvis (whom he worshipped), Bob Dylan (whom he loved). He spoke frankly about his family, his faith in God, and his struggle with alcoholism (“I had to drink. That’s where I got the courage to get in front of those drunks in those honky-tonks. If I hadn’t been drinking with them I’d-a got scared and run home”).

  At the end of our visit, I asked a question that had come to me in an odd moment. Maybe because he was so strongly identified with one tune, “Blue Suede Shoes,” it had occurred to me that the two and a half minutes he spent recording it on that particular day in 1955 became thousands of hours of other people’s lives. I started by assuming that “Blue Suede Shoes” had sold a million copies. (It had sold more.) Say you could play the record twenty-five times in an hour. That means you could play it a hundred times in four hours, and in forty hours you could play it a thousand times. So it would take 40,000 hours (238 weeks, or over four and a half years) for everybody who bought the first million records to play the song only once. And we know that people played it a lot more than that and that it sold more than that. So two and a half minutes of his life had become years and years of other people’s lives. Had he ever thought about that?

  He looked at me for a long moment. “No,” he said, slowly. His face slid into a thoughtful frown. “I . . . I never have. That’s awesome. It really is. I . . . I . . . I had never thought of that.” He looked past me, suddenly subdued, thinking about it. “I started getting these awards from BMI [a company that licenses music for radio play] when it passed a million plays. I’m past two million airplays for ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’ They have ways of keeping up with this. That’s not counting what you’re saying—that the kids who buy it, and the people who listen . . . No, that is . . . It’s very weird. I never thought of that. I’ve wasted a lot of people’s time.”

  As I watched his face I began to realize that he was genuinely disturbed by what I had said.

  “They could have . . . built a city in the time they spent listening to that tune,” he went on. “I don’t know how I feel about that. I feel weird. It’s an awesome thought. Maybe on my tomb rock they’ll carve the words ‘I’m sorry for taking up so much of your time . . .’ ”

  This was too much; I hadn’t wanted to ruin his sense of what he had done with his life. I explained that I had only wanted to ask him a question I had thought of in other forms, at other times, a mystery close to the heart of any profound human action, a kind of grace, how one moment can expand, like the parable of the loaves and fishes . . . I floundered, trying to articulate what I meant. Perkins listened, seemed to brighten a little, and eventually stopped me.

  “I . . . I follow you,” he said. “I’m in that same place that you are. You stirred up something I’ll think about the rest of my life. Thank you for working that out. I mean, it is an awesome thing, to think, only two and a half minutes of my life, but look what it spread into, you know. I don’t know . . . I never really thought of it that way.” His eyes focused on me again, and he seemed to return to the room. “And I don’t know what I’m going to do with it now that I’ve got it.” And with that he laughed again, and the dark mood broke, and I breathed a little easier.

  Later that afternoon he flew back home to Tennessee and never, to my knowledge, visited New Orleans again. I thought many times about our conversation. How many performers would have seen the question I’d asked as anything other than a cause for celebration? Somehow Carl Perkins had managed to stay real enough to think seriously about the value of his life and his actions.

  The CD never did engender a Carl Perkins renaissance. I have a feeling that was okay with him. He’d been through it all, and he had achieved something more important than megastardom. I always hoped I’d see him again; he was the kind of person who made you feel that way, as if you had made a friend. And if you expand that feeling through all the people who listened to and enjoyed his music, maybe you have something like immortality.

  From the Oxford American, 1998

  Trust the Song

  We have entered an era of mass confusion between people’s ability to perform public tasks for which they are, presumably, trained, and their personal lives, which in healthier times are considered nobody’s business. Former vice president Dan Quayle has even announced that marital fidelity will be “the issue” in the next presidential race. Sure—the heck with foreign policy, education, the economy, public works . . .

  “Trust the song, not the singer” is age-old wisdom. I’m glad that the singers and musicians, male and female, whose work I have loved over the years did not have to display certificates of marital fidelity in order to qualify as performers. Likewise the fiction writers. No one asked them to be moral exemplars in their personal lives. It was their work that was important.

  Lately th
e agenda of aesthetic discussion, along with politics, seems to have been lifted from an afternoon talk show. One example from recent memory: Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel American Pastoral, which I read and admired. At least three quarters of the people to whom I mentioned the book didn’t really care what was between the covers of American Pastoral, but wanted to know if I had read Claire Bloom’s memoir of her apparently troubled marriage to Roth.

  To some people, an artist’s work is only an avenue by which to get to the real point, which is the artist her/himself. A kind of sacrificial element comes into play, a desire to consume the body and drink the blood. “Who are you, really?” is the question. But most creative people are trying to escape from the cage of “who they are.” It is a mistake to think that most artists and creative people are trying to express the self; they are more likely to be trying to escape the day-to-day self, complete it, even find its opposite.

  These thoughts are occasioned by the career of the singer and songwriter Gillian Welch since her brilliant 1996 debut CD Revival, and perhaps even more so since her second recording, Hell Among the Yearlings, was released last year. Both discs consist of original material, strongly inflected by different kinds of traditional music, as well as some rockabilly, folk, and so on. Easily one of the most talented and distinctive singers and songwriters to come down the pike in a long, long while, she and her partner and cowriter, the excellent guitarist and harmony singer David Rawlings, have gained a wide and appreciative following for themselves.

  Along with that following, though, like hyenas following a wagon train, has come a chorus of scattered carping voices, issuing from places like the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone, questioning Welch’s right to use themes and musical elements from traditional music in her songs. The problem, for them, is that Welch grew up in Los Angeles, to music-business parents. Maybe the writers looked at her picture, thought she was a mountain girl, and then were embarrassed when they realized they’d been fooled. Who knows.