ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, November 19, 1996 TAG: 9611190027
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW ORLEANS
SOURCE: TOM PIAZZA NEW YORK TIMES
It is just after noon here on an October Saturday. Carl Perkins, composer of the song ``Blue Suede Shoes'' and the original rockabilly singer and guitarist, stands outside a small guitar store in an ordinarily quiet uptown neighborhood, waiting for filming to resume on a promotional video for his new CD.
He flew down from his home in Jackson, Tenn., where he has lived for the last 50 years. He takes all the flurry of activity in stride, joking with crew members and photographers, harmonizing on country songs with onlookers and telling stories.
At age 64, Perkins is slim and handsome, with sculptured cheekbones, a prominent chin, an easy smile and a curly, steel-gray toupee, which is the topic of frequent jokes by its owner. He wears blue jeans, a tight, ribbed crew neck shirt, thick aviator glasses and, yes, blue suede shoes.
``Back in the days when that song was popular,'' he says in his thick Tennessee country accent, ``somebody would always come up with a camera and want a picture of themselves stepping on the shoes. I used to carry a wire brush in my back pocket so I could reach down and brush them back to life. They sold the brush with the shoes.''
From the street, someone passing on a bicycle stops and yells: ``Hey! Carl Perkins! How's it going?''
Grinning widely, gesturing at all the activity, Perkins replies: ``Well, country as I am, I don't really know. It seems like it's rocking right along.''
Things are, indeed, rocking right along for Carl Perkins, although he seemed admirably unimpressed by that fact. Perkins is, in a sense, the lost man of early rock 'n' roll.
He was there in Memphis at the creation, the big-bang of rock, a contemporary of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis when country music, Southern gospel and blues fused into a new hybrid. His 1956 song ``Blue Suede Shoes'' became as much a rock 'n' roll anthem as ``Great Balls of Fire'' or ``Roll Over, Beethoven.''
Yet as the rockets of Jerry Lee, Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly shot off into the great American night of legend, Perkins spent decades touring the middle and the bottom of his profession, battling alcoholism for long, honky-tonk years and searching for an ever-elusive follow-up to his big hit.
Now Perkins has written an autobiography (with the writer David McGee), ``Go, Cat, Go!''; the title comes from the famous refrain of his most famous composition. And he has recorded a new CD, of the same title, which includes duets with his old Sun Records label mate Johnny Cash as well as George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Tom Petty, John Fogerty, Paul Simon and Willie Nelson.
Suddenly Perkins seems poised on the brink of a long-overdue rediscovery.f+b f+if-b f-i
Perkins was the archetypal rockabilly. He spent his early years in a Lake County, Tenn., shack without electricity or indoor plumbing; he acquired his first guitar from an older black neighbor who traded it to him for a couple of dollars and a one-legged chicken named Peg.
With his two brothers, Perkins formed a band that became active in the Jackson area, playing a mixture of country and rhythm-and-blues for dancing. ``I don't think none of us even ever quite knew what it was,'' he says. ``It didn't have a name; we called it feel-good music. A few guys got brave enough to get out and start playing it in the honky-tonks.''
The honky-tonks were the crucible that shaped both the band's sound and Perkins's emerging songwriting talents.
Spurred by a chance meeting with Presley, who had just made his first recordings for Sam Phillips's Sun Records, Perkins and his band headed for Memphis, hoping to audition for Phillips. In October 1954, three months after Presley's debut, Perkins cut his first record. The recordings gained the band important local exposure, and Perkins often found himself on the same concert bill with Presley.
In December 1955, Perkins struck gold with his third record for Sam Phillips, ``Blue Suede Shoes.'' It became Sun Records' first million-seller and landed Perkins a national television appearance on ``The Perry Como Show.''
The appearance could have done for Perkins' 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 suffered a broken collarbone and a severe concussion.
Perkins' physical recovery took months; the professional wounds, however, never fully healed. After his recovery, Perkins' career languished. Overshadowed at Sun first by Presley and then by Jerry Lee Lewis, who made his first recordings as a sideman on a Perkins record, Perkins left Sun for the recording-industry giant Columbia, which didn't quite know what to do with him. As the 1960s got under sail, Perkins' career was stalled.
It is a puzzle. The recordings he had made, and continued to make after the accident, are among the classics of rock 'n' roll.
Unlike Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard, Perkins wrote his own hits. Songs like ``Matchbox,'' ``Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby,'' ``Honey Don't'' (all of which were recorded by the Beatles on early albums), ``Boppin' the Blues,'' ``Put Your Cat Clothes On'' and many others fused blues, country and gospel music over a slapping, pulsating bass.
Above it all, Perkins' tough, sinewy guitar and vocals seemingly strain at an invisible leash. At their best, Perkins' lyrics reveal a wit and an eye for detail that could give even Chuck Berry a run for his money.
Even so, despite these strengths, Perkins never quite managed the transition from the honky-tonks to the national arena that his famous contemporaries achieved.
He spent the early 1960s searching for a niche, alternating between country music and harder-edged rock 'n' roll and spending long months touring, all the while 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 days, 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 nearly 10 years and provided him with a steady income. He continued recording on his own for several different labels and gradually, with the help of his wife, Valda (whom he married in 1953), began to get a handle on his drinking.
When he left Cash in 1975, Perkins was a middle-aged man who had 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 were a source of constant pride to him.
``I didn't try to pull them into the music,'' he says. ``But when Stan was little, he would take two pencils and beat on his mamma's coffee table, and I said, `Oh, Lord, that boy's going to be a drummer.'''
A longstanding dispute with Sam Phillips over the royalties to ``Blue Suede Shoes'' also got ironed out, giving a solid base of 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. Doctors diagnosed cancer of the throat.
Two years later, after 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.
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 and informal living-room 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 in awe of the fact that he has survived and that he appears 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.''
He has more friends than just his fishing buddies, however, and most of them, it seems, appear with him on ``Go, Cat, Go.'' The recording runs a gamut from country-flavored duets with Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash to two collaborations with Paul Simon, to a remake of his 1968 rocker ``Restless'' with Tom Petty.
Over the years, Perkins has come to accept himself as he is. If the upper reaches of popular recognition have eluded him, he is certain that has gained something more valuable.
``I never envied Elvis his mansion and all that. All these boys - Elvis, Jerry Lee, Roy Orbison - they all lost their wives, their families. People say, `What happened to you, Carl? All of them went on to superstardom. Where'd you go?' I say, `I went home.' And that's a good place to be.''
LENGTH: Long : 159 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Carl Perkins' new book and CD both are titled ``Goby CNBCat Go!''. 2 (no caption).