Perkins Changes His Tune (1985)

 

Perkins Changes His Tune

By Michael Donahue

The Commercial Appeal

December 20, 1985

    Carl Perkins wasn't afflicted with Beatlemania in the early 1960s. "I didn't like them", said the rockabilly singer, as he discussed the mop top group from Liverpool. "Well, I just thought they were copying what we were doing. I knew they were copying Sun Records. I don't know these long-haired, slick-looking guys whom I'd seen pictures of. Well, I don't think they were original, man," said Perkins, who occasionally dabbed cigarette ashes in a guitar-shaped ashtray in his den. 

    "Well, I don't really know exactly what it was, other than they were getting so hot that every kid was going around, 'yeah, yeah, yeah'-- 'I want to hold your hand.' That's all we would hear. And I thought, 'Well, here comes four cats from England.' That's all these kids are crazy about. It was exactly what came out of Memphis, Tennessee. I don't know, it kind of felt like some kind of infringement coming from a foreign country."

     But times change. Today, Perkins, more than anybody, may be the man who will bring the remaining Beatles together. He's already brought George Harrison and Ringo Starr together in A  Rockabilly Session: Carl Perkins and Friends, debuting at 9pm January 5 on Cinemax. The special also includes Eric Clapton, Dave Edmunds, Roseanne Cash, Earl Slick, and former Stray Cats, Lee Rocker, and Slim Jim Phantom. 

    "Well, I came very close to putting the Beatles back together. That really wasn't my intention. I didn't go into this thing saying, 'I'm going to be the guy that puts these three boys together.'"

     Perkins, who still recalls the time his son showed him a photo book on The Beatles and said, 'Daddy, them long haired boys that you don't like....' 

    How did he have a change of heart about the Beatles when he met them in England? It was during a tour with Chuck Berry in 1964. He was invited to a party that night. "John, Paul, George, and Ringo were sitting on a couch, and I was sitting on the floor with a guitar, and they just wanted me to show them all these old Sun kick-offs and all that stuff that I did back on Sun Records. And wanted to talk about what it was like in the studio. Was I really a friend of Elvis? Were we not rivals? Everybody playing the same hot music, and going out on shows together."

     A cigarette brought Perkins and Harrison closer. Harrison passed around a cigarette pack, and Perkins took one and put it in his pocket. "He told me, the next night, 'I still can't get over you wanting to keep that cigarette.' I said, 'Well, why not? Man, you're great. You're George Harrison, The Beatles. I want to take it home and keep it. You gave it to me.'"

     Harrison remembered the incident and referred to it later in interviews. According to Perkins, "Harrison said, 'He wanted to keep the cigarette, and I would have given anything for something from him.' I gave him a guitar pick that night, and he swears he still has it."

     Perkins liked the Beatles. "Yeah. After I got to know them, I found them to be so humble. John Lennon was the live wire of the four, really, by that, I mean he asked more questions. He did a version of 'Blue Suede Shoes' with the group when it was called the Plastic Ono Band."

     Perkins didn't see any of the Beatles again until about five years ago, when Paul McCartney invited him to Monseratt to play on an album. "Paul told me something that was a thriller to me. He said 'We used to take your old Sun Records, The 45s, and slow them down to 33 1/3 to catch what you were doing.' "

    Lennon and McCartney got into an argument over "Lend Me Your Comb", because one thought it was impossible for Perkins to suddenly switch to falsetto on the word "out" and then continue singing without taking a breath. Perkins did switch to falsetto on the recording, but his brother was the one who picked up the lead.

     "McCartney and Lennon then began doing the same thing on stage," said Perkin. "They'd look at each other, wink, and swap parts without the audience knowing. I really don't know the right words to describe how it does make me feel to know that you influence somebody you know that deeply."

     His idea to get together with the former Beatles occurred to him about a year ago. He originally wanted to put together an album featuring himself and 25 friends. "It was just a wild dream that I had. I said, 'Well, 30 years you have been in this business, and what really have you left? If you leave here today, what have you left except a couple of songs? Why don't you really try to do something that's just beyond anything that you ever thought about?"

     It was hard, however, to get his friends together on an album because of the demands of their labels. So Perkins decided on TV. "If these same dudes want to do a television show, you wouldn't have to deal with record companies. They can just say, 'Back off, Jack. I want to sing with this man on the show', and that's it."

     Perkins thought, "What would George Harrison, Ringo, Clapton, these kinds of people, what would they say if they got a video cassette from Carl Perkins and they put it in their machines and I said, 'Hey, George, this is your old buddy, Carl Perkins. Ah, I'm getting old and fat. I know that, but I'm Carl Perkins, and I'd like to-- I've got to have some help.' I want to do something before I slide completely out of this business, and that's the way I did it."

     He sent the cassettes (no two were alike) to his friends, with a little card enclosed for the recipient to note whether he or she would appear; the cards began to fly back. McCartney had to decline because he was recording an album, but he said he would do anything Perkins wanted after the album was complete. 

    "The first one I got back was one I didn't think would do it, and that was George Harrison. He has just been a recluse and has completely gotten out of the business. And since Lennon was killed, he has just been scared to death. His house is like a fortress. He's got radar vision that scans the wall at night, everything. He just refused to do anything public."

     But Harrison also was the Beatle who changed his name to Carl Harrison when the group was known as the Silver Beetles.  The special was set. Perkins arrived for the rehearsal. "The elevator door opened, and I heard, 'uh, Honey Don't' (from one of Perkins' songs). George and Ringo had already been there. They got there at 1:30. I was on time. I got there at 2:00. It just sent chills through my body.

     "Harrison looks so great, clean, healthy, radiant, smiling, happy. From the word go and from the first slick to the last, it was just dynamite."

     Following the rehearsal, Harrison invited Perkins to dinner. "Later, Harrison's limousine pulled up to this massive, massive gate. It looked like a prison. You couldn't run through that gate with Casey Jones' train. Guards standing on each side of it."

     They finally reached Harrison's castle. "It was absolutely mind-boggling. I don't know why the Queen lives where she does, because her castle is second-rate."

     Harrison, his wife Olivia, and their little boy, Danny [sic], were standing at the door. Inside the castle were robots in the playroom and a dining table that could seat 30 people. There also was a state of the art all digital mounted studio. 

    When Perkins remarked on how well Harrison looked, he said, "I've had to live it all to find out the simplicity of life is being part of putting your hands in dirt.

    " And Olivia told me that he's in the yard every day, said Perkins. "He's out there cleaning up, planting, working in that yard. Well, we wound up sitting on the music room floor. His guitar collection is on the wall. Harrison asked questions. There was still some of those old licks he wanted, and I had forgotten them. I made up a little song. 'Carl, where did that song come from?' I made it up."

    Harrison, then began talking about how he might like to go on stage with Perkins. "That might be neat," said Harrison, "What would you think about it? I said, 'I'm going to faint right now. When I get back, I'll tell you that it'll be the greatest thing that's happened in my life.' He said, 'Let me think about it. Let's talk about it some more.'

    "I played him a lot of new stuff I've been writing. He said, 'I want to do an album with you.' I said, 'What do you mean? You want to produce something?' 'Well, I'll produce it. We'll all sing, we'll all do whatever we want to. You just come back and stay maybe a month, and we'll just work in the studio.' And that's what the boy said. I said, 'Well, you have my phone number, Hoss, just call. I'll be here. I'll be glad to.'"

     Perkins already had planned future specials. He's lined up artists including Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Linda Ronstadt, and John Fogerty, and Faye Dunaway, who was in the audience for the Cinemax special. She asked them to write the music and appear in an upcoming movie for her in February. 

    But Perkins is proud of his work on his first Cinemax special, and equally proud that the Beatles think so much of him. In fact, he once asked Harrison 'Why me when I was probably the worst one who ever recorded? Now, really now, I definitely feel that way.

     "He said, 'Well, look here, Carl, you forgot you were writing your songs. You played your own lead. You were singing your songs, and you were singing the lead and harmony on your songs. We wanted to write our own songs, we wanted to play our own music, and we wanted to sing our own songs. So we liked Elvis, but that isn't what he did. You are the only one at Sun Records who was doing what we wanted to do."

Motley Crew

 

George and Van

 

Van Morrison with George in 1990 

He didn't know Ringo?

 December 12, 2025

You most likely have heard this story recently.  This guy was in an airport lounge at Heathrow and doing a live stream.  Ringo comes up to see what he is doing, and the live streamer has a very laid back conversation with Ringo -- asking him where he is from (Liverpool) and saying how he had been in Manchester recently.    Someone in the chat of his livestream said it was "Beatle Ringo."  

When they got on the airplane, the livestreamer took a selfie with Ringo and Barb.  Some people are just lucky like that! 

Ringo's Theme

 

Sunny Miami

 

Ringo and George clown around

December 16, 2000

The Epistles of Paul (1990)

 

Paul backstage at Wembly
Photo by David Modell

The Epistles of Paul

By Giles Smith

The Independent (London)

December 14, 1990

    Prior to selecting the songs he would play on his recent World Tour, Paul McCartney made a small policy decision. "I basically thought, don't get subtle and don't medley your hits into two and a half seconds like Prince does. When I go to Prince's show. I want to hear "Purple Rain," "When Doves Cry," the hits.

     "So I asked myself, 'What would I want to hear Paul McCartney play?' And I decided, 'Well, his best stuff, basically.' So I took out a piece of paper and thought, 'Maybe I'm Amazed'. Pretty good. 'Let It Be' was good. 'Hey Jude,' not bad, 'The Long and Winding Road', yeah, and so on, until the songs on the list numbered 35."

     But even that would have to rank as a modest sample from the available catalog. McCartney doesn't know how many hits he has written in the last 30 years, let alone how many misses. (He talks about them casually, as he talks about much else, for that matter, with a nod and a wink, dipping in and out of funny voices, performing a fairly thorough impersonation of an ordinary bloke.) "It's just like a lot, and I did a couple last week, so it's always adding up."

     It's worth recalling at this point that while his early career was hardly sluggish, once the Beatles split up, McCartney really took off; the statistics go haywire. At this point, the record industry is giving up on the traditional gold and silver discs with which they were rewarded for sales. Simply handed him one made of rhodium, hoping to call it quits. 

    McCartney has sold more records as a solo artist and as a member of his post-Beatles band Wings than he did in all the previous years. Until this last tour, though he had supposed that a certain portion of his work, in fact, the most popular part, was for concert purposes, out of bounds. "I shied away from Beatles stuff with Wings. It was a bit near to the breakup of the Beatles, and it was a painful breakup, a bit like I hear a divorce, and the idea was that you don't want to sing any of the ex-wife's songs. And all of us had that feeling independently. We wanted to establish a new life after the Beatles. 

    "Now I thought, I don't have to do that anymore. I don't have to deny the Beatles' songs or McCartney's songs, because some of them were recorded by the Beatles, but I wrote them. So that was a great unblocking."

     Enough time had passed, it seemed to unpack in public at least part of the Lennon and McCartney myth. The songs continued to be credited to the pair of them long after they had ceased collaborating, and the specific details about who did what have remained cloudy, as prone to distortion as the tales about the personal stresses within the group's fracture. Now it seemed somehow easier to assign the spoils. 

    "I didn't want to do John's stuff, except as a separate tribute. That's for Julian or for Yoko to put together. That's for his side of things. I figured there was enough stuff with "Fool on the Hill", which was mine, which would "Let it Be" which was mine. The "Long and Winding Road," "Yesterday", there's a lot of stuff which is definitely mine, like "Eleanor Rigby". These are the ones which are basically acknowledged to be mine, the ones I knew were mine. So I thought, that's fine. What I'm doing is going out as a performer and showing you whut I writ."

     He took a band and "whut he writ" into the studio and began to whittle the material down. "Certain things in rehearsal weren't as fun as they were on records. It wasn't fun to play them, and that was a pretty big criterion. If it's not fun to play, I'm not taking it out on tour; it had better be fun now, because it's going to get boring later.

     "But the best thing about it was that there were certain old songs that I'd never done before. I kept thinking, why does this feel fresh doing "Sgt. Pepper"? And I suddenly realized I only sang it once at Abbey Road the night we recorded it. That was the vocal take, and I never had any cause to do it after that; nobody asked me, and the Beatles had stopped touring by then.

    Some of the songs seemed particularly geared to live performances, a fact which probably wouldn't have surprised the average Beatles fan, but somehow caught out McCartney. "What's nice about 'Sgt. Pepper' the way John and I conceived it. It's all directed to an audience. 'Splendid time, guaranteed for all', or whatever. The whole idea of Pepper is a show-- a circus. So the song works great live, because you're saying, 'You're such a lovely audience. We'd like to take you home with us.' It's like, wow. Shirley Bassey time!

    " And then, "Hey Jude"  I realized I'd never done. God, I thought, This is great, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. I've got an audience-participation number, which I've always wanted. I love that!"

     Slightly more obscuring the show, (like the recently released album Tripping the Live Fantastic, which documents the tour) included the three-song medley sequence from the close of the Beatles' Abbey Road LP. It was suggested for inclusion not by McCartney, but by his keyboard player. 

    "When we did the Abbey Road medley in rehearsals, one of my old mates who manages my studio now, had to excuse himself. He started crying during it because it brought back so many memories. He was there when we recorded it, and that was 20 years ago, and so much water had gone under so many bridges. You catch your breath a bit when you hear it sung as one of the guys in the group said 'by the real voice', the fellow you heard in the record."

     As the material fell into place, so did a notion about the perimeters of the band. "We thought, are we going to have an army of backing singers or an army of people on gongs? But we kept it to six of us, and one of the things I was proud of was that at the end of each night, there were only six people holding up their hands. 'Got to Get You Into My Life' would have been really cool with a horn section, but we made a decision to keep it at six.

     "My philosophy about a band is, if you can play your stuff in a pub, then you're a good band. It's a very old-fashioned philosophy, but it seems to me like an earthy philosophy, which might last. We had one or two nights when the computers broke down, and that's so alien to me, because in the Beatles, if anything broke, it was a string or an amp, and the rest of us could still fiddle it, but if it's a big, integral drum part, and it's got all the rhythms that happened at once. That's why we kept it where we could-- stripped right down. "

    He kept the stage business to a minimum, too, at least technically. Aside from a keyboard on a hydraulic platform, which rose and span during the "Fool on the Hill", the show was propelled by now traditional McCartney needs, furious, waving, and raising of the thumbs to those in the furthest seats. It's a sort of behavior which gets him a bad name in some circles, particularly among those who set him in opposition to Lennon, the latter, a wit and philosopher. McCartney merely an entertainer, a crowd pleaser. 

    It was principally McCartney, it is said, who wanted to keep the Beatles on the road. It's McCartney, or so it is claimed, who is behind the periodic calls for the remaining Beatles to perform and play. But this approach involves a somewhat generous appraisal to Lennon. (There is a chance to assess the wit and philosophy of John and Yoko's bed-in for peace at the Amsterdam Hilton on a newly released video.) and to be sent, curiously, to a small store by what might be involved in pleasing a crowd. 

    "The Beatles were a little club act, plus me, in front of an audience. I'm afraid I won't ignore them. I can't do the sort of thing Pink Floyd might do. One thing which turned out to be a big inspiration for this tour was going to see The Merchant of Venice just before we went out. I just got this feeling when Dustin Hoffman came on that he was coming into the room we were all in. I was like, I could just go, 'hey up, Dustin!', I could shout, and he'd have to hear me. It wasn't like a film. So I use this announcement every night. I'll tell the audience, 'It's nice to be in the same room as you', just to get something of that across."

    It was perhaps a long shot in venues that were holding anything up to 180,000 people, yet McCartney still claims to have noticed an intimacy with the audience, even if only at close range. "You see, about the first 20 rows, and those little things flashed by-- those cameos. We would often see couples necking during 'Let It Be'. For some reason, people would neck, which was great, because suddenly you could be a voyeur. And in Rio, carrying on the theme, they were said to be bonking in the audience, which is highly unlikely, I think. But then, you know Latin temperament. And you would have broads throwing themselves at you, but I'm a married man. Sorry, dear. That was very strange, because in the Beatles, you were always looking to pull. Now, it's a vicarious thrill. Terrible, really.

    In Sweden, McCartney remembers watching a man tending his girlfriend's fingers after she burned them on the cigarette lighter she was holding  aloft during 'Let It Be.' "It's strange how you can take in a story like that. Be singing. 'I saw her standing there. ' Be playing a bass. I could be singing 'Yesterday' and wondering what we were going to have for dinner. It's like driving-- that thing when you almost fall asleep for a second. That can happen when you're performing. What I like about it is the speed with which your brain reacts. 

    "The weirdest one was during the Live Aid concert when I was singing ' Let It Be,' and the mic wasn't on. But I didn't know. This was like the finale of a mega, mega event piped to every country with television. I've arrived with no roadies. I've just driven there. 'Where's the piano?' That's all I've said. I hadn't been touring. It would have been easier this year. I would have grabbed a couple of guys off the tour, but I was just freelancing.

     So I'm singing, and I've got a little monitor, and I can hear nothing but two roadies shouting at one another. And I think 'I wonder if that's coming over on the telly', but then you think, 'no, it's the Beeb. Everything will be fine. This mic will be working'. It wasn't, though. The two Queen guys had done a thing, and the roadies had inadvertently pulled the plug on my mic, tidying up after them. And as I'm going through the song, I suddenly hear feedback, and it occurred to me to sing, 'There will be some feedback. Let it be'. And another part of my brain said, 'No, don't. This is a serious event that will be perceived as frivolous'. And yet, another part of my brain said, 'feedback.'  Ethiopia, marvelous, a conceptual link. And in the split second, I decided not to do it, thank God. But it gives me hot flushes to think about it.

     McCartney is currently working in conjunction with Carl Davis on an Oratorio to mark the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic's 150th year. (He adopts a thick, mocking Liverpudlian accent when he talks about it, oratorio, all right? Paul, what's the oratorio? Wasn't he the guy who shot Moby Dick?)  "But you could call it a project with precedence. With 'Eleanor Rigby ' 'Yesterday', and 'For No One', I flirted with classical instruments that were very different from the piano and the guitar on which I compose all the pop stuff. 

    "As a kid, when depressed, I would go off with a guitar, off into the bathroom because of the best acoustics, and hold the guitar to myself. That's one of my little hammy theories, incidentally, a guitar you hold to you like another body, a piano you push away from you, the two different physical acts.

     "I've been composing melodies long enough to understand the mechanics of it. I just can't notate, and I don't want to learn to do it, it's almost a superstition. Richard Lester said, 'The thing about your music is it takes unexpected twists.'  At the end of 'Ticket to Ride', where we sing, 'My baby, don't care'. Suddenly, a new song pops in out of nowhere. That's just a fade section. That's very classical that."

     He doesn't intend to leave pop behind, though, and he's currently working on a new album "to remind me that I haven't deserted it. 10 days ago, three nice songs emerged from a writing session with Elvis Costello. I thought 24 was the end of the line when I was 18. That was actually the latest you could be in art school. And that was my backup plan. If everything else failed, I was going to go to art school at about 23. God knows how I thought they were going to accept me, but the horizons just continually expanded.

     So, to the hit list, there's a certain bunch of songs I have got which I think are very good songs. Without being too egotistical, one: people have told me they're good songs, have bought them, and still remember them. And two, because they were very satisfying to write "Here There and Everywhere was a very satisfying song to write. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, like essays in school, and I could never do that with essays. Always a good beginning, but it petered out, and I could never end it. Disastrous. 

     "And 'Yesterday' was very satisfying to write. I actually dreamt 'Yesterday.' Dead jammy. I actually woke up one morning here in London, on Wimple Street, in an attic flat, just woke up, and I had that tune of 'Yesterday' in my head, with no idea where it came from. I put words to it later. I've just got an award for it. It's been played 5 million times, and the next song down the list is 3 million. So it's way out ahead, and I dreamt of it. So if that's not magic, what is?"

Director Paul

 

Don't go Messing About With Me Kit

 

I loved this part of Anthology when Ringo is going to be interviewed, and Paul is behind him playing his drum kit.  It reminded me of that scene in A Hard Day's Night.   It also reminded me of the story of when John and Paul jammed together in 1974 (the toot and a snort sessions) and Ringo could tell that Paul had been messing with his drum kit.