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BIOGRAPHY
Carl Perkins: The King of Rockabilly
Jeff Apter
Penguin, $39.95
When history comes gunning for rock’n’roll’s ringleaders, Carl Perkins is the man most likely to elude cancellation. To this day, most trace his Blue Suede Shoes to Elvis Presley. It was only the Beatles’ oft-professed fandom that rescued a few more of his clean-cut toe-tappers from the deluge circa ’64.
There’s naturally more to the Tennessee gent’s cotton-cum-guitar-pickin’ story, spanning as it does the hillbilly haylofts and honky-tonks of the ’40s to duets with Bono and Tom Petty in the ’90s.
But pry as we might into the leaky shotgun shack of his Bible-belting plantation roots, it’s difficult to find intrigue, much less scandal to hang him for.
That’s Sydney rock journalist Jeff Apter’s main hurdle in this worthy chronicle of the Sun Records trailblazer. In the absence of your classic arc to glory, perdition and redemption, the author finds virtue instead in Stoic consistency as he pursues a meticulous six-decade chronology of the rockabilly cat’s road, every flop album just a pothole en route to, er, another shot of Blue Suede Shoes.
The drama peaks early. It was a Carl Perkins recording session that spawned one of the great artefacts of the early rock’n’roll era, when Presley, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis joined him around the Sun Records piano for a December 1956 jam released after 25 years of legal wrangling as Million Dollar Quartet.
Rock’n’roll musicians Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash as “The Million Dollar Quartet” December 4, 1956 in Memphis, Tennessee. Credit: Getty
But Perkins’ stock had already stalled by then, thanks to a terrible car accident nine months earlier that stole his momentum just as Heartbreak Hotel was stepping on his you know what. That same year, Presley had his own crack at Blue Suede Shoes three times on the crucial national TV circuit that Perkins could only chase later.
Modest to a fault, the songwriter always voiced praise and gratitude for his stupendously handsome, hip-shaking buddy’s comprehensive hijacking of his signature song. “Any person playing this kind of music was so fortunate that we had a guy to open the door like Elvis,” he said much later.
In the near-total absence of breathing witnesses, it’s one of hundreds of quotes Apter pastes from a scrapbook of self-effacing interviews loaded with folksy, God-fearing gags and rose-tinted philosophy. Perkins’ targets of deflected glory include his lifelong sweetheart, Valda, and his bosom pal, Cash, with whom he played gun wingman for nearly a decade, and who helped him kick the demon alcohol.
“There’s no better place in the world for a man to be No. 1 than in his own home,” the family man demurs as yet another underachieving album claims Ol’ Blue Suede’s Back. “I am really so humbled when Eric Clapton and George Harrison say, ‘Carl, we like what you did’,” he declares as his wave of all-star TV tributes, Hall of Fame inductions and celebrity guest collabs peaks in the 1980s.
Carl Perkins performs on October 11, 1986 in Atlanta, Georgia.Credit: Getty Images
Years of addiction obviously allude to a darker side of the rockabilly king’s reign. Apter doesn’t underestimate the impact of his guitarist brother Jay’s passing from injuries sustained in that terrible car crash of ’56, but there’s precious little time for bad vibes in a book devoted to carrying its hero aloft on an updraft of feelgood rock’n’roll nostalgia.
That Perkins pocketed a ton of royalties from the Beatles’ cover of Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby, effectively nicked from a forgotten Alabama country singer named Rex Griffin, is glossed over too – karmically balanced, perhaps, by his later years of charity for abused children.
All this toe-tapping later, and nearly three decades since his premature passing from cancer, aged 65, it would be churlish to deny the distinguished Southern gentleman’s lifelong plea that we refrain from besmirching his immaculately maintained footwear.
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