Written in My Soul
Conversations with Rock’s Great Songwriters
Bill Flanagan
Written in My Soul
Copyright © 1986,1987 by Bill Flanagan
Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2010 by RosettaBooks, LLC
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
First electronic edition published 2010 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.
ISBN ePub edition: 9780795310812
To Dave & Anna, Lourdes & Mark.
Thanks for opening the door.
E-Foreword
Acknowledgments
Foreword
The Apology
A Note on Terms
SOUTHERN VOICES
Carl Perkins
Kris Kristofferson
Tom Petty
T-Bone Burnett
HEARTLAND VOICES
Willie Dixon
Chuck Berry
Bob Dylan
Neil Young
John Prine
Bruce Springsteen
LONDON VOICES
Mick Jagger
Pete Townshend
Keith Richards
Richard Thompson
Elvis Costello
PENITENTS OF THE SPIRIT
Joni Mitchell
James Taylor
Sting
NEW YORK VOICES
Paul Simon
Lou Reed
David Byrne
CALIFORNIA VOICES
Lowell George
Jackson Browne
Tom Waits
Rickie Lee Jones
EMIGRANTS
Van Morrison
Joan Armatrading
Mark Knopfler
Bono
Index
WRITTEN IN MY SOUL was my first book. It was written in 1984 and 185 and published by a small press in Chicago in 1986. It was well-reviewed and translated into Japanese, German, Italian, Dutch and other languages. A paperback came out in 1987 and the book vanished from print not too long after. That, I supposed, was that.
But WRITTEN IN MY SOUL has had a long after-life. People still write and phone me wanting to talk about it. Pirate copies of the interviews circulate on the Internet. I1m often asked where the book can be bought. A few folks have told me they have paid hundreds of dollars for a used copy. On the one hand you feel flattered and on the other you say, “Man, wish I’d held onto a box of them.”
In one unintentional backhanded complement, Oprah Winfrey had me on her show to talk about the book after it was out of print. Of course, I didn1t tell her it was unavailable. Talk about missing a great sales opportunity.
Over the years I have met with a few publishers about bringing the book back into print, but it never worked out. Often they wanted the text updated, new interviews added. I considered that over the last twenty-five years I have continued talking to musicians about songwriting, for print and for television - but a big part of what made WRITTEN IN MY SOUL work was that it was a snapshot of a number of artists at the same moment, which happened to be the last moment when pretty much everyone from the beginning of the rock era until the early days of MTV was operating at the same time. When they did these interviews, Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins were in their fifties, Dylan and the Stones were in their early forties. Bono was twenty-four. They were all speaking in the same cultural context. It seemed to me that to add interviews from five, ten or twenty years later would mess with the aesthetic balance of the book. It would be like going back and overdubbing digital instruments onto an analog recording.
The opportunity to re-issue WRITTEN IN MY SOUL as an e-book resolved my worries. Those who want the book now have a way to get it, and it doesn’t have to be pulled apart and turned into something it was not meant to be.
It will live half in the ether and half in the world - like music.
In that spirit, I am resisting the temptation to clean up some of the dumb things I wrote as a young man. Looking at the text now, I see I suffered from an east coast snobbery toward California that only exposes my own lack of sophistication. After he read the book, Tom Petty said to me wryly, “Everybody has to pass through LA eventually, you know. Even the smart people.”
I also see that I was a sucker for a good yarn told by a likable storyteller. I lapped up and repeated Carl Perkins’ tale that Elvis got his shot on the Ed Sullivan Show as a last minute replacement for an injured Perkins. That story was sort of true but omitted the important fact that Elvis was already a superstar at the time. When I realized that Carl had been pulling my leg, I asked the members of Johnny Cash1s band, who knew him well, why he had set me up like that. “Carl is a very nice man,” one of them said to me over dinner, “But if he ever accidentally tells the truth you can bet he’ll lie his way out of it.”
I can live with my youthful naiveté. The one interview I seriously considered cutting from this re-issue was the conversation with Lowell George, taped just days before he died of a heart-attack at age thirty-four. Lowell was stoned when we talked and was in the middle of what would have almost certainly been a temporary falling-out with the other members of Little Feat. He said some hurtful things about some immensely talented musicians who I admired then and admire now. Because my interview turned out to be Lowell’s last public words, his comments have over the years been given a weight that they don’t deserve.
After some soul searching I have decided to leave that interview intact, too. There’s no sense trying to re-write history, even when it embarrasses you. WRITTEN IN MY SOUL is meant to be a little bit of history. Most of it is even true.
- Bill Flanagan
New York, December 2009
There is no artist represented in this book who was not generous to me. Elvis Costello went out of his way to be helpful; we eventually piled up about 200 pages of transcribed interviews. T-Bone Burnett talked up the project to other songwriters and gave me solid advice throughout.
Max Weinberg’s book The Big Beat influenced this one, and led me to Contemporary. Max gave me lots of good ideas and steered me clear of a few landmines. Peter Wolf was an invaluable help in suggesting ways to get some tough subjects to open up. Jody Rein, my editor, went to bat for the book from conception to binding.
Everyone at Musician helped—by making suggestions, filling in gaps in my memory, and covering for me when the book stole my attention from the magazine. The women in Billboard word-processing handled many of the transcriptions with a grace that shames me. Ebet Roberts and Bob Gruen let me wade through thousands of photos when they had better things to do.
My sister Ellen helped pull me through the deadline crunch, as did Pete Cronin. Susan Gallagher spent a whole year listening to the music, reading what I wrote, and keeping me almost organized. There’d be no book without her.
Many of the interviews here have never before been printed in any form, while two or three appear almost exactly as they did in magazines. Parts of most of the interviews, though, have appeared—often in a context so different as to be unrecognizable—in magazines and newspapers. In many cases Musician magazine published sections of the interviews while I was researching the book.
Here is a list of places different fractions have been seen before:
In The Record: Most of Lou Reed.
In Boston’s Real Paper: Part of Joan Armatrading, part of Lowell George.
In the Providence Newpaper: Most of Rickie Lee Jones.
In the Chicago Tribune: Part of Neil Young.
In Music/Sound Output: Most of David Byrne, part of Joan Armatrading, part of T-Bone Burnett.
In Honky Tonk: Part of Kris Kristofferson.
In the Providence Journal: Part of Kris Kristofferson.
In the Boston Globe: Part of Van Morrison.
In Musician: Parts of Neil Young, Tom Petty, T-Bone Burnett, Carl Perkins, Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Mark Knopfler, Bono, Lowell George, Jackson Browne, and Richard Thompson.
The following interviews have never appeared in any fraction anywhere else: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry, John Prine, Keith Richards, James Taylor, Sting, Paul Simon, and Tom Waits.
In the movie Songwriter the characters played by Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson are halfway through writing a tune together when Kris turns to Willie and asks, “Do you suppose a man’s got to be a miserable son of a bitch all the time just to write a good song every now and then?”
It’s a question that’s plagued composers at least since I started writing this book. Rock & roll musicians are strange artists. Their code of manners dictates that they not appear to take themselves very seriously, while the best of their work contains all the passion, imagination, and craft of legitimate art. The intelligent rock musician is put in the position of working as hard as a poet or painter, while being expected to accept his gifts with the self-deprecating shrug of the idiot savant. In their private conversations (and in their cups) many rock songwriters will admit to recognizing their creative ambitions—but it’s considered bad form to say so publicly. Rock & roll began as music for teenagers, and the party line for its public lack of pretension was set by John Lennon when, after the breakup of the Beatles, he told Rolling Stone, “No group, be it the Beatles, Dylan, or Stones, ever improved on ‘Whole Lot of Shakin’.’”
To be fair to those who defend the rock-as-inarticulate position, an awful lot of pretentious fluff was written in the high tide of the sixties about how certain hash-brained songwriters were great poets and geniuses. The deification of Jerry Garcia and Donovan was enough to send any self-respecting rocker or critic charging in the opposite direction. Even rock’s legitimate talents were laminated in ludicrous praise—as when Ralph J. Gleason wrote that Bob Dylan’s influence on his generation had only two precedents in history: Shakespeare and the Bible. After such accolades, what forgiveness?
And yet—the music is there, and the music is powerful. After more then thirty years it is silly to call it a fad, or to say that it is only for adolescents. It is evident rock & roll is the preferred music of the generations of Western society born after the start of World War II. Every American under fifty heard rock & roll music as a teenager, and most were moved by it. But rock songwriters are still a little embarrassed to talk about the work into which they pour their hearts.
“If you get hung up in trying to send the people a great statement,” Tom Petty suggested, “it can prohibit you from just sitting down and writing off the top of your head. Sometimes its better to just go on and do it and then worry about that later. I worry a little bit about the press these days. I wonder how they’d review Little Richard singing ‘Tutti-Frutti’ if that came out now. They might say, ‘This guy’s got nothing on his mind.’”
I conceded to Petty that it was a silly conceit to pretend that rock songwriters consider all the possible profundities of their material before they write a song. However, I suggested, it’s fun to retrace the steps after the song is finished.
“Oh, it’s loads of fun,” Petty agreed. “There’s nothing like when it all works and you do get something out of it. But the thought of it all getting very intellectual is a little scary. I don’t read poetry. I never thought I was a poet.”
Bono of U2 probably spoke for many artists when he said of his band, “We don’t take ourselves seriously, but we take our music very seriously.”
Some musicians, on the other hand, had no trouble taking themselves seriously. “It’s a long tradition,” Sting said of his calling. “It goes back to the troubadours, where people were given information about what was going on. I think, at their best, songs can still do that. They can impart information in an entertaining and informative way. I’d like to see it carry on as a tradition, I’d hate to see it die out. Because it’s a very lasting way of bringing news to people. The way the news is delivered now is instantly forgettable, it’s packaged like soap powder. But to talk about the miners’ strike in a song which will perhaps be heard in ten years’ time is a lovely idea to me.”
One obstacle to the successful dispatch of this project was how awkward it is to write about musical composition. “When people write about songwriting,” Paul Simon pointed out, “they tend to write about lyric writing. It’s very hard to write about music. What do you say about it? Music is a nonverbal experience. It’s easier to address words. There are very few songs that are popular because their lyrics are good. There’s quite a lot of songs whose lyrics are meaningless that are big hits and people love them. The music part of songwriting is much more potent and powerful than the lyric part. But it’s harder to write about.”
It is inevitable that conversations like these lean more on the lyrics than on the “do-re-mi.” When discussing flights up the fretboard or unusual chord progressions, the tendency of the critic is either to turn moribund with technical terms or to go wild with adjectives. These problems are not lightened by the fact that many rock musicians do not have much training in theory, nor do they use the musical language taught in conservatories. While I trust the reader to bear with occasional descriptions of chord changes and recording techniques, only a pseudo-academic jackass would drop discussions of descants and suspensions into these pages—and this jackass is no pseudo-academic.
But, the reader trembles, does this mean we’re embarking on four hundred pages of talk about lyrics? Four hundred pages of “What does this line mean?” Should I jump ship now?
Don’t worry. The songs these musicians compose have given us the themes for our conversations. The subjects they keep coming back to are the subjects we explore. But there’s been no attempt to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means. Neil Young has written a lot about reincarnation, so it seemed reasonable to ask him about that. But it’s not a subject one would broach with Mick Jagger.
As the conversations piled up, certain themes appeared again and again. Many dialogues became glued on the big mystery: where does the song come from? Dylan, Young, Van Morrison, and other deep thinkers ascribed their gifts to the muse, saying the songs came through them as through radio receivers—without much conscious effort or direction.
Paul Simon and James Taylor leaned more toward the Protestant work ethic—that one appreciates the burst of inspiration but must then labor along to beat the mystical protoplasm into shape.
Bono hedged his bet: “It feels like the songs are already written, but our songs are too human for me to be so arrogant as to claim they were written in the air.”
Pete Townshend was dissident and adamant. “‘Inspiration’ implies that something is coming from above and flowing through you,” he declared. “But ideas for songs and motivation to write comes from an inner thing … what you write about comes from what you see and what you do. It doesn’t come from space. … A lot of writers like to mystify their work and the process, partly because they don’t understand it, partly because it adds a kind of humility: ‘It’s not me, I’m very lucky I can do it.’ But behind it all is a great human quality, which is that when you get your head down you can do something.”
That quote really rubbed Keith Richards the wrong way. He said to my tape recorder, “I believe, Peter, that songs arrive at your doorstep and all you do is give them an airing, make it possible for them to exist. And I think that’s a very noble point of view. Rather then saying, ‘Look! I made this all myself with my little tool kit!’”
This was not the only subject that proved hot. A big concern for some serious rock songwriters is how to fit adult subjects into a self-consciously adolescent tradition. Yoko Ono once told me that struggling to cut his thoughts to fit the pop form had become a show-stopping problem for John Lennon in the last years of his life.
“He didn’t have writer’s block,” Yoko explained, sitting in her apartment in the Dakota. “There was a moment when John’s mind was getting bigger than the lyrics he was writing. I don’t think that was a block. It was a conscious decision. ‘Let’s see where it goes if we don’t dish it out all the time.’ In a way, by stopping we thought we would get into bigger things.
“John said he wasn’t going to be singing ‘She Loves You’ when he was thirty. He always had that side. ‘What am I doing?’ And because he was so honest in his work he couldn’t go to his desk and say, ‘What’s going to be commercial?’ and just write. It was almost like his diary. It reflected his state of mind. Because he was so honest about it he came to a point where he said ‘Look, I’m not going to be writing all this teenage stuff.’ Somebody, some book, said that when you’re younger your mind process comes in lyrical form, and when you’re older it becomes more prose form. I think John’s mind was getting to be more prose than poetry.
“He didn’t want to limit his thoughts to ‘do-da, do-da-da-da’ and then make it rhyme, moon and spoon. That was more simplified than what he was really thinking. His thoughts were more complex.
“I kept saying to him, ‘Well, if that’s what it is, why don’t you write a book? You’re ready for it!’ But he didn’t want to make that break yet. So I said, ‘Well then write in the complex form without rhyming or anything—and if it doesn’t fit into the beat then we’ll change the beat and we’ll go into some different area. We can afford to do it. Maybe 5,000 people will buy it instead of 100,000. That’s how classical music developed. First it was like Schumann and Brahms, then it went into Berg and Schoenberg. Maybe this is a natural process for Lennon. And maybe when we put music to that kind of lyric we’ll find the music will become more complex, too. With more complex rhythms.’ And he said, ‘But then the rock beat will be lost.’ John didn’t feel like making that transition.”
Townshend and Lou Reed have had similar wrestling matches with maturity, and decided that rock & roll can be dragged kicking into adulthood. Richards figured those eternal adolescents the Rolling Stones had an obligation to try that: “The Stones are in this unique position, of making this thing that started off with the Fab Four and Stonesmania, a teeny bopper pop thing, grow up. That’s what interests me—seeing if we can make it mature, be what we are, stop pretending this Peter Pan bullshit and be men who can play up there like men and act like men and still lay the stuff on them. Rock & roll is something I grew up with, and now I’m going to see if it can grow up with me.”
Sometimes the artists surprised me with their honesty. Elvis Costello and Tom Petty both admitted they had deliberately played havoc with their personal lives and with the lives of the people around them in order to keep the music coming. Richards, Townshend, and Taylor talked about their drug addictions—and disagreed about whether drugs can help the act of creation. These are dangerous subjects. This isn’t advice for children.
I approached these songwriters with affection and respect. They are talented and articulate men and women. But to enter into conversations about rock & roll without a sense of humor would be a breach of taste. If a particular statement from a particular songwriter strikes the reader as off-kilter, try to go back and re-read it picturing the artist smiling.
When there was good reason, I departed from my own restrictions. Some of the interviews move away from discussion of the artist’s own work into anecdotes about other artists and a little oral history. I was especially soft on this in the “Southern Voices” section, under the influence of great storytellers such as Carl Perkins and Kris Kristofferson. The four interviews in that section will give the casual reader background information on rock history and will serve as foundation for the rest of the book. My final judgments were always based on what made the best reading. If that meant bending my own rules a bit, well, let me invoke the allpurpose alibi: “That’s rock & roll.”
There are minds at work here and there is laughter, but that should not obscure that there is also great love. These twenty-nine people use their gifts to entertain and enlighten. Just as it would be a mistake to take it all too seriously, it would be an injustice to shrug off their accomplishments. The stuff may be cheap but it ain’t disposable.
As often happened, Bob Dylan put it best: “I feel nothing for their game/Where beauty goes unrecognized.”
—Bill Flanagan
March, 1986
The astute reader will look at this volume and say, “There are many great rock & roll singer/songwriters not represented in this book.” That’s true. In fact, there are many great rock & roll traditions not covered here.
My ambition was to talk to singer/songwriters without falling into the trap of writing a study of seventies folkies. The notion was to focus on performers whose songs could be performed solo on acoustic guitar without losing their sense or impact. This standard was useful in providing some organization to a project which, in its early stages, seemed to be endless.
A year and a half was spent on the interviewing and writing, and during that time the book began to take on a shape of its own. It was always a struggle to keep the damn thing from overflowing its banks. Finally I settled on this criterion: the artists examined in the book are out of the rock tradition anteceded by Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, the tradition that narrowed to Bob Dylan before expanding again as a result of Dylan’s great impact. Guthrie and Leadbelly did not affect all rock & roll as Hank Williams and Robert Johnson did. Guthrie and Leadbelly are part of a somewhat specialized, more folk/less pop-oriented current that has always flowed around and under the mainstream.
The three subjects whose work predates Dylan’s—Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, and Willie Dixon—are here partly to provide historical context, partly because they are prototypical rock & roll singer/songwriters, and partly because they are part of that Leadbelly/Guthrie sidestream.
I have tried to give a sense of the songwriters as they are in the second half of the 1980s, while letting the accumulation of their experiences sketch an outline of rock history. Do I hear some moaning that the work favors older artists over young ones? That’s true. One of the characteristics of history is that more of it takes place in the past than in the present. There are many young singer/songwriters of great merit who have not yet recorded or have made only one or two albums. Some are people I have written about in magazines, and some are my friends. But I haven’t plugged any of them here. Too many artists have made one or two brilliant albums only to then lose the spark. The people I chose to include are songwriters who have been able to maintain their skills over the course of—at least—four albums. Most have lasted a lot longer than that.
The line this book follows is not the only line, nor is it a more legitimate line than others in the rock tradition. Another book could be written tracing the best singer/songwriters from rock’s pop side. If one talked to Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Michael Jackson, and Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook, one might go home and write a terrific book.
Or shift the emphasis away from the folk roots toward rhythm & blues, and get hold of Smokey Robinson, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, War, Daryl Hall and John Oates, Maurice White, Peter Wolf, and Ashford & Simpson. That would be a good book, too.
There are rock & roll singer/songwriters whose work cannot be effectively presented on acoustic guitar; artists such as the Clash and Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa and David Bowie. Their exclusion is no put-down. If the Who were all we had to go by, I probably would not have included Pete Townshend in the book—but his solo work (as well as oddball Who albums such as The Who by Numbers) does fit into that Guthrie/Leadbelly tradition.
As the book took shape, some interviews were thrown out and others rushed in. The toughest ambition for me to let go of was my intention to include singer/songwriters of the black oral poetry tradition—such as Gil Scott-Heron and Mutabaruka. But it eventually became obvious that that tradition is so rich it could not be fit into a section of this book. Nor is there a distinct line into that form from the roots of rock & roll. The tradition which Scott-Heron represents—and which also includes American rappers and Jamaican and British dub poets—weaves in and out of several different art forms. It draws from the old bluesmen as well as from poets such as Langston Hughes and Michael Harper. It flowed into the work of playwrights such as Ntozake Shange and jazzmen such as Pharoah Sanders and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Bob Dylan knows about these roots, and young disciples such as Mutabaruka and Kurtis Blow have been influenced by Dylan. The traditions are not without connection. But finally that stream was just too wide to fit into this volume.
And yes, even within my narrow limits there are many great singer/songwriters who could have been included here and are not: Laura Nyro, Ray Davies, Steve Forbert, Ronnie Lane, Chrissie Hynde, Randy Newman, Patti Smith, Nils Lofgren, even Prince. I love them, too, but as my editor reminded me each time another deadline went past, you’ve got to know when to quit.
There are some loaded words scattered through this text—words such as artist and art and rock & roll. These words are like Rorschach tests; everyone has a personal meaning for them. Here are the meanings I assigned: An artist is any performer (purists take relief: some artists are bad artists). Art is what the performer creates. Rock & roll contains all the many subdivisions of music created by artists who take their cues from the rock & roll singers of the 1950s. Some people have very narrow definitions of rock & roll (get into the subject with Van Morrison or Bob Dylan or Pete Townshend, but bring your lunch). Good for them. When they write their books they can call it whatever they want. I call rock & roll all the subdivisions: folk and funk and fusion and everything else east of Lionel Ritchie, west of Miles Davis, north of George Jones, and south of Pete Seeger.
If this liberal application of the sacred terms annoys any reader who has paid for a copy of the book, I give my permission to cross out the offending words and replace them with person, work, and music.
The whole history of rock & roll could be told in southern accents, from the delta bluesmen and country troubadours to the Baptist gospel singers and Okie folkies. Rock & roll was born in the American South, and there are very few rock singers—from Europe to Hawaii—who do not affect southern accents when they sing.
There is no linear history that can be followed, there is only the point at which several different histories intersect. No matter which track you start out on, you’ll have to change trains as you go. The line this book follows started in Scotland and Ireland with Celtic folk ballads already ancient and crossbred. Those ballads came across the Atlantic with the immigrants, and in parts of America were either forgotten or evolved past recognition. But in the isolated hills of Appalachia, that tradition was preserved.
T-Bone Burnett talks about the Appalachian tradition of “country death songs,” gothic backwoods ballads of mortality and disaster. That tradition was apparent in such rock & roll songs as Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” Neil Young’s “Down by the River,” and Jimi Hendrix’s version of “Hey Joe.” The Appalachian folk songs floated through the rural South, easy to play and sing and open to variations. The African slaves and their free descendants picked up the white man’s guitar and put their own twist on the white man’s tragic laments. They bent notes, a simple little innovation for squeezing emotion out of a guitar string and one later claimed by more partisans than the true cross. Some say the bent notes are of African origin, others say Middle Eastern, and still others Eastern European. Van Morrison is said to believe it started in Caledonia—ancient Scotland. Everybody’s had the blues.
The history of the American South is of two parallel traditions—black and white—evolving side by side. The two traditions crossed over and influenced one another all the time, though they were formally as separate as the front gate and the back door. One reason black and white American folk music didn’t always acknowledge how much they lifted from each other is that black and white men often resist admitting how much they have in common.
That blacks borrowed musical ideas from whites just as whites borrowed from blacks does not mean that there was creative equality. Every consideration of the richness of America’s musical crossbreeding is tainted by the fact that black musicians were exploited and robbed by the white men who owned record companies and music publishing houses and radio stations and ballrooms. Yes, musicians of every color steal musical ideas from other musicians without regard to race. And yes, sleazy music biz sharks come in all major hues. The color that starts the trouble is usually neither black nor white: it’s green.
But because the white men held most of the economic and political power and because the southern black man was—by virtue of his disenfranchisement—unusually vulnerable to exploitation, most of the robbers were white and most of the robbed were black.
There is no glossing over this wrong. But the music was more powerful than the bigotry that sometimes separated the musicians. Musical integration, already spurred by the popularity of big band jazz, was given a new catalyst by the jukebox. The jukebox brought dancing to small bars and soda fountains, places that could never fit (or afford to pay) a band. Jukeboxes made no distinction between black music and white.
The southern sharecroppers drifted north looking for work and created Chicago electric blues. The country & western singers went to Hollywood and inspired little buckaroos to grow up to be Byrds and Eagles. The mashed-up gumbo radio from New Orleans wafted across the gulf of Mexico, got turned inside out in Jamaica, and came back as reggae.
Rock & roll is so close to universal because it can adapt so quickly to new environments. The music was destined to change with each new place it encountered. The British added to the mix as they adapted it, as did New Yorkers and West Indians and poets and millionaires and punks. From this southern intersection, you can find trains going off in every direction. We are concerned with one line.
“I played country songs and put in speeded-up black blues licks. That’s all it is. That’s what they’re doin’ today. Slow it down and everything they’re doin’ today the black man was doin’ fifty years ago, sitting on the banks of the Mississippi watching the paddle boats go by.”
Carl Perkins
Carl Perkins said he remembered dying: “It happened in 1962 in Tennessee. We were playing on a trailer in a courthouse yard. Somebody put a big window fan on the side. It had no frame on it. I was taking the guitar off, taking a bow, when I stuck my hand in there.” Perkins held up his left hand. “It busted this bone all to pieces; wiped the whole hand out. The end of this thumb was off. The fingers were just danglin’, hangin’ off.
“The driver had to take me about sixty miles to the hospital. They just wrapped a towel around it. It bled so much. I was in a ’62 Buick. Blood filled the floor boards and was running out the back doors. It got the main arteries and every time my heart beat, blood poured out of the towels. I remember getting weaker and weaker. I remember so vividly that it seemed like I lifted off the back seat. I put my hand down to hold onto the seat and my hand was still there! It hadn’t moved. I went through that passing from life. I can remember a dark, gray tunnel and a peak of light at the very end of it. I went out and it was the prettiest colors of blues and orchids. I was just floatin’ like a feather through those beautiful colors.”
At the hospital Perkins’s wife was begging a reluctant physician not to remove the guitarist’s ruined fingers. Finally the surgeon agreed, though he warned that the digits were dead and, if Perkins lived, would only get in his way. For four hours they pumped blood into the guitarist’s body, and then for six hours the surgeon operated.
“I woke up the next afternoon,” Perkins recalled. “My wife was sitting on one side of the bed and the doctor was sitting at the foot. He said, ‘You are very, very lucky. You were beyond life. It was very touch and go. But you’re gonna be all right.’ To get that close! I was happy to have a thumb left, anything! I tuned my guitar in open E, laid it across my lap and picked with the end of my thumb with that big cast on. I was gonna play!”
Perkins worked and worked, and eventually got back the use of the first two fingers on his damaged hand. He played using those fingers and his thumb, and sometimes even managed to use his paralyzed little finger; he’d look down and place it where he wanted it to go. What he could no longer play was the Chet Atkins style of picking that depends on a mobile little finger to supply harmony. But the guitarist shrugged off his limitations.
“People have told me, ‘Carl, you play better than you ever did.’” He let out a rolling laugh. “I think I play a little louder. I move a little bit. If I get into trouble with the guitar I just jump and they say, ‘Oh, he meant to do that!’”
Meeting Carl Perkins is, for a rock & roll fan, a visit to the museum. Perkins, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis were Sun Records’ Million Dollar Quartet. Perkins composed—and had the original hit with—“Blue Suede Shoes.” Driving to New York to perform that song on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1956, the guitarist was in an automobile crash that broke his neck and nearly took his life. Presley ended up being the one to sing that song on “Ed Sullivan.”
Unlike most of the fifties stars, Perkins embraced the 1964 British invasion. He hung out with the Beatles in London, showed them guitar licks, and watched proudly as they recorded “Honey Don’t,” “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” “Matchbox,” and other Perkins tunes. In the late sixties Perkins reunited with Johnny Cash, then approaching the height of his fame. Carl played guitar with Cash, opened his concerts, and appeared regularly on his television show. In 1968 Cash had a hit with Perkins’s gospel composition, “Daddy Sang Bass.”
In the eighties Perkins often toured with a band that included his two sons. He played on Paul McCartney’s Tug of War. A couple of attempts at reunions with Cash and Lewis (they called themselves, in reference to Presley’s unexpected mortality, the Survivors) foundered on the jagged reef of the mighty egos of the Killer and the Man in Black. Perkins didn’t let such foolishness bother him. He kept playing the bars and playing the guitar. The easygoing humor of Perkins’s lyrics influenced young Nashville rockers such as Steve Forbert and John Hiatt. Sometimes he sat in with the Stray Cats, NRBQ, or the Blasters. There were always new disciples
BF: Let’s talk about how your guitar style developed.
CP: My guitar style is nothin’ in the world but black blues speeded up. If you slowed down the guitar break on “Blue Suede Shoes” or any of my old Sun records, it wouldn’t be a thing but black blues. I loved the blues. I grew up in the cotton lands of Tennessee. I worked in the fields with the black people. I loved their gospel, spiritual singin’—all that rhythm. I listened to an old black man by the name of John Wesbrook who lived on the plantation. I was a kid, six to ten years old. He wasn’t that great a guitar player, but I thought he was. He was playin’ much different from what I was hearin’ on the Grand Ole Opry. I played country songs and put in speeded-up black blues licks. That’s all it is. That’s what they’re doin’ today. Slow it down and everything they’re doin’ the black man was doin’ fifty years ago, sitting on the banks of the Mississippi watching the paddle boats go by.
Were the blues and country mixed before rock & roll?
I think rockabilly is the music that united the two. As far as the guitar is concerned, I’m certain of it. But it relied even more on black gospel—that’s where the beat and the rhythm came from. I know Elvis loved black quartets. Bill Monroe was my favorite country singer because he had up-tempo bluegrass. Bluegrass and black blues with a drumbeat is about all you’ve got in rockabilly. That’s what it is.
In all the men who created rock & roll, one sensed a tension between the fundamentalist Christian, spiritual part and the hell-raising part. Some—like Little Richard and Johnny Cash—went away from the hell-raising toward the spiritual, while others like Elvis went the other way, toward hedonism.
We shook the devil loose! How can you make people happy, get ’em up to dance, shake, have a ball, without shakin’ that old devil feeling you’re talking about. I wrote a song called “Boppin’ the Blues.” That’s what we did. We forgot they were blues. We bopped those blues! It’s uptempo, it’s rhythm. You ain’t sittin’ there worrying about car payments or house notes. You’re out there shakin’ dust loose on those honky-tonk floors.
Elvis got into religion so deep that it eventually hurt him as much as any one thing ever did. It got too mind-boggling. He lost reality. Religion ain’t supposed to be that complicated, man. It ain’t meant to destroy your life and warp your mind. It’s a very simple, private thing between a man and his maker. We ain’t gonna die in groups and we ain’t gonna wake up and face Him in groups. I’ll be alone. Elvis was alone when he died.
He got into psychic powers he thought he had. I don’t know, maybe the boy had too much idle time. He needed to grab a fishin’ pole and a shotgun and get out. God didn’t put all those fish out there just to swim around. He wanted man to have sense enough to enjoy watchin’ that cork bob. The greatest mindeasers are stars at night. Elvis couldn’t see that. How could he see it from behind a wall at Graceland with guys paid to laugh at his jokes?
You were with the Beatles when they recorded your songs?
Yeah. I was over in London on tour. They invited me to the studio—sent a car for me. We messed around, just showin’ them different licks I did on the old things. Ringo kept sittin’ beside me callin’ me “Mister Perkins.” I said, “I wish you’d quit that! That’s my daddy, boy. My name’s Carl.” He said, “Gosh, I can’t call you Carl. It’s Mister Perkins.” I said, “Well, help yourself.” He seemed a little nervous. All of a sudden he blurted out, “Do you mind if we cut some of your songs?” I said, “God, no, man. I’d love it.” He said, “Guys, he don’t care! He don’t care!” And he jumped up and got on the drums.
The first thing they did was “Matchbox.” They said, “What do you think, Carl?” I said, “Why, that son of a bitch sounds like that old Sun record.” They said, “God! That’s great!” They really wanted it to sound like that old Sun record.
They cut it live in the studio?
I don’t know of a thing that was changed. It’s just those four boys pickin’. Same thing with “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby” and “Honey Don’t.”
Now that night they did record “Blue Suede Shoes” and “True Love,” and they have a hell of a cut on “True Love” that has never been released in any form. Of the five songs of mine they cut that night, that was by far the best thing. Their harmony was terrific on that song! They threw their “Yeahhhh” in there. It was great. I asked Paul about it not long ago and he said, “Oh, it’s in the can.” He just smiled.
You’re one of the few people who knew both Elvis Presley and John Lennon. Do you see any parallels in their lives?
Lennon … it was so, so terribly sad that this boy had to be taken out at a time when he was touchin’ reality. He said he’d found a place where he could walk down the street. He thought he had. He wanted that.
McCartney’s got that. He sees to it. Paul’s got a house on Abbey Road and a Rolls-Royce and furs and tuxedos. But he don’t live there, he don’t use it, and he don’t like ’em. He lives in a four-bedroom house and he drives a jeep. When I was with him down in Montserrat, he had Linda and their children there. He didn’t get upset one time. We’d be right in the middle of a take and that little boy would be sittin’ there. Paul’d be barefoot and the little boy’d be playin’ with his toes. Now that, to me, says something.
I don’t belong to the country club. I’m not saying it’s bad if that’s the way you were raised. Certainly. That’s part of America. But I was raised in a cotton field. I feel fortunate to have what I’ve got, but it’s not the only thing in life. My wife and children are, and my friends.
How did your upbringing shape your musical attitudes?
Bein’ poor, workin’ in the fields with the blacks, we were forced into close association. The wealthier kids weren’t influenced by them as much. But I was. By their talk, the way they acted. They liked to have a good time on Saturday night and I did, too.
I like that carefree attitude. The west Tennessee black man didn’t have nothin’ and didn’t worry too much. The white men in that part of the country who owned land had to worry that somebody was gonna take it away from them. But if you don’t have much of nothin’, it’s pretty easy to get along with people. We picked up on a lot of the black man’s traits. Music was one. It comes from the soul of those people and I like that. I like music of any kind played by people who are sincere about doin’ it. To play just to get paid don’t move me. If a group is givin’ it all they got, I don’t care what kind of music they’re doin’.
I like a simple amplifier. A guy with a guitar plugs in and gets at it. Rockabilly’s simple music but it’s not that easy to play. Rockabilly music gets under the skin, gets inside the ear and stays. You are part of that song. If it’s real, it’ll move you some way or another. If you ain’t tappin’ your foot, you’re missin’ the boat. Might as well go on to the next club.
When you began performing, did you run into folks who resented a white man playing black music?
No, not too much. The white man liked the black man’s music. The white man always liked certain things about the black man. Black man’s always liked certain things about the white man.
I think music had as much to do with integrating people as anything. I was talking not very long ago with Fats Domino. He’s a very wise man. He said, “You know, Carl, when I first heard ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ I thought you were one of us. Then when I found out you wasn’t, it made no difference. Because we had so much in common.” And he said, “You know, maybe in our own humble way, without realizing it, we did have something to do with getting a lot of problems solved.”
I said, “Man, there’s no question about it. In the white honky-tonks where I was playin’ they were punchin’ ‘Blueberry Hill’ and ‘I Want to Walk You Home.’ And white cats were dancin’ to Fats Domino. They were dancin’ to Chuck Berry.”
He said, “You know, the same thing happened in the black areas with you. ‘Blue suede shoes—don’t step on ’em!’ You played music we felt, we could hear, we knew.”
It happened at the right time. Teenagers wanted their own identity. They wanted to wear their leather coats and their ducktails. Up till that point if their dad wore a crewcut they did. With that song they could step up in their daddy’s face and say, “Hey man, don’t step on my shoes!”
Was there, at Sun, any sense of competition between you and Elvis and Jerry Lee and Johnny Cash?
No, no. … There might have been just a tad with Jerry Lee. Jerry Lee’s kind of like Muhammad Ali, who said, “I am the greatest!” In a way, Jerry is. He can be. He’s not as great as he could be. I think he’s one of his own worst enemies, by tootin’ his horn a little bit too loud. But there wasn’t any animosity among the guys at Sun. He would say, “I’m gonna be the biggest damn thing Sun Records ever had! You wait till this ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ ’ comes out!” He was almost right. He’s got a lot of confidence and he expresses that. Where I never would. Cash never would, Elvis never would.
I think deep down Elvis never worried about anybody catchin’ or passin’ him. But he certainly never acted like he was a big cock o’ the walk. Elvis was as fine actin’ a guy as I ever knew. He was the most courteous, was not conceited in any way. He was very humbled by the fact that he was risin’ so fast. He didn’t know what was happening, but he took it and handled it very well. I think he lasted under the pressure longer than any of us could have. This man was the number one thing in the world for twenty years. Even when the Beatles were number one, Elvis was always back there. He never really died and never will. You don’t change as much of the world as Elvis Presley changed—hair styles, clothes, moods, looks, sideburns—dad gum! He cut a path through this world! He’s gonna be history, man. And he should be.
Here was a guy who never taught kids bad things to do; who loved his parents and proved it. He went out onstage and, sure, he shook around. But that was his way. It was part of getting it out of his system. But he didn’t talk bad onstage, he wasn’t on drugs. I’m not talkin’ about the last part of his life. The Presley I knew would never have let himself get out of shape, get so bloated. He was very concerned about the way he looked. He got into karate, he worked out. He was in very good physical condition. But then I started seein’ these pictures pop up in later years. I said, “Uh-oh, something’s wrong.” As it turned out, Elvis was a sick man. I mean he actually had physical illnesses.
How did Elvis come to cut “Blue Suede Shoes?” It seems odd that a song that had just been a huge hit for you would be redone right away.
They wanted Elvis to cut that song before he did, but he wanted me to have a hit. He heard it at Sun two or three days after I cut it and he said, “That’s a hit song.” He felt it. But he didn’t want to run ahead of me with it. He knew I had a hit in that song so he laid off it. He waited till my record had turned gold before he cut it.
It’s interesting to me that when the fathers of rock & roll really get down to it, be it on the Survivors album you did with Cash and Jerry Lee or all the way back to Sun’s Million Dollar Quartet, you always choose to sing gospel music.
It goes back to what I told you earlier. Gospel music has so much to do with rockabilly music. It’s the bone of it, no question. That rhythm came out of there.
At the end of the night, younger rock musicians play old rock & roll songs, but the men who invented rock play gospel. It sometimes seems like the fathers of rock & roll don’t love it as much as the children.
I know what you’re talkin’ about. We go back to where it really came from and the younger guys go back to where they picked up on it. And there is a difference. It came out of black spiritual music and whenever the old guys get together—if there’s two of us or four or a roomful—we sing, “Gonna lay down my burdens, uh-huh, by the riverside, oh yeah, by the riverside.” It’s a natural thing. We mixed that up with country music. But the new guys don’t go that far back with the music. They go back with the records. We go from the record on down to the cotton patch where it came from. That’s the difference.
There was talk a while back of you, Cash, and Jerry Lee going out on the road together. What happened?
We did a couple of shows, played Madison, Wisconsin, and Terre Haute, Indiana. Jerry Lee and John have a little problem with … uh, I don’t know… it may be an ego thing. Jerry wanted to close the show and John wanted to close the show. They didn’t have any words in front of me, but… there were a lot of dates planned and we just played two. I’m not going to put up with that type of thing. One night Jerry closed the show and one night John closed, and then we all went back out together. The audience response was terrific. But it fell through.
Too bad. It seems like everyone could have gotten a turn closing.
Why certainly, man. I’ve never had a problem with opening shows. I’ll take ’em fresh any time! When “Blue Suede Shoes” was number one, if they wanted me to open up the show, I didn’t care. I’ll get my money and sit back and watch the other guy. In fact, I’d rather open and get it over with. It’s work to me. I take it seriously. It’s the best I can do.
“William Blake is an example of total dedication to his art. You’re just a sinner if you don’t do it. If you are organized by the Divine to do it and you don’t, then you’re just a scumbag.”
Kris Kristofferson