Devil Sent the Rain (10 page)

The first act on the bill is Little Jimmy Dickens himself, who hits the stage like a bomb going off, gyrating and singing “Take an Old Cold 'Tater and Wait,” which has been his Opry signature tune since the 1950s; his guitar is almost as big as he is, and he shakes so much that he looks as if he's wrestling an alligator. After Dickens leaves the stage, to huge applause, Wagoner talks to the audience a little, then introduces Skeeter Davis, who sings her old hit “The End of the World.” During each tune, the upcoming performers gather behind the curtain just off to the side of the stage to watch the act preceding them.

Everybody does one song apiece, eighty-year-old Bill Carlisle comes out and does an act combining singing and high-jumping, and it's a good variety show, but as I stand and watch I can't help thinking that it's almost as if Jimmy Martin would be too strong a flavor to introduce into this stew, like uncorking corn liquor at a polite wine tasting. The performers appear one by one, as if they are making cameo appearances in a movie about the Opry, and I can't see Martin fitting into it. Anyway, in his frustration he does everything he can to make sure he won't get on. He lashes out almost as if he's trying to give himself some sense that he's the one in control, that he's the one on the offensive, and not just sitting there helplessly. Whatever his reasons, he is doing exactly what he needs to do to keep himself off the Opry.

During Jimmy C. Newman's number, it occurs to me that Martin has been very quiet. He was talking to someone for a while, but now he is standing at the theater rope that demarks the small area of the wings where the performers are about to go on, and he has been standing there silently for quite a while. I look at him, and his gaze is fixed straight ahead, and I'm thinking something doesn't look right, maybe it is just the difficulty of watching the party going on around him, but I say, “Hey, Jimmy—everything okay?”

No answer; he keeps staring straight ahead.

“Jimmy—is everything all right?”

Now he turns his head just a little in my direction and squints as if to say, Hold on a minute, I'm thinking about something.

Then, nodding in the direction of a small group of people standing just offstage behind the curtain, he says, “Go over there and tell Bill Anderson to come over here. I'm going to knock his ass right off him.”

“What are you talking about?” I say.

“Will you just go over there and tell him to come here and we can go outside—”

“I'm not going to do that,” I say. “Hold on a second—hey,” I say, trying to get his attention. “What happened?” This is not cool; Anderson is one of the Opry's biggest stars and has been since the mid-1960s. What this is about I have no idea.

“He talked to me in a way I don't like to be talked to, and I'm going to knock his ass off. I'll go over there
myself
. . .” And he moves as if to climb over the theater cord, and I grab his arm and say, “Hold on, man, what are you doing? You don't want to do this.
Hey
. . . Jimmy . . .” People are starting to notice now.

“I
will
,” he says. “I'll knock him down right
here
—”

“Hold on, man,” I say, under my breath. “You don't want to do this. Don't”—here I have an inspiration—“don't
lower
yourself into that. The hell with Bill Anderson,” I say, laying it on thick. “What does it matter what he says? Come on,” I say, “let's get out of here, okay? I've seen enough . . . I'm bushed . . . Let's get out of here and have a drink . . .”

It's too late, though; as I'm saying this, Bill Anderson walks past us with a couple of other men, not looking at us, heading toward the greenroom, and Martin lunges toward them. I step in front of him to hold him back, and as I do this I can tell that it is some kind of charade, because he doesn't struggle. As soon as the group passes Martin hollers out to the people who have been watching, “He walked right
by
me . . . If he hadn't a-been holdin' me
back
I woulda knocked his
ass
off,” and meanwhile someone out onstage is singing about yet another Lonely Heartbreak, and it occurs to me that it will be a miracle if they ever even let Jimmy Martin set foot backstage again at the Opry after this, much less perform. Calling someone an asshole is one thing, but moving on someone in front of witnesses is another. I've got to get him out of here, and I say to him now, “Come on, let's get the hell out of here, screw Bill Anderson anyway,” and he kind of nods.

But before I can pull him away he stands for a long moment looking out toward the stage, and the singer and the audience. Impatient to get him out before something worse happens, I, who have come to the Opry very late in the game, say, “Come on, Jimmy, let's go.” Then Jimmy Martin, who might well be taking his last look at the biggest dream of his life, turns around and walks out.

I spent Saturday tooling around the city, buying CDs and souvenirs and just looking around, with the previous night looming in my mind like a weird nightmare. I called Martin in the afternoon; he had a hunting buddy over visiting him and he sounded rested and happy.

On Sunday morning I called again to say good-bye, and he volunteered to come down and meet me for breakfast at the Hardee's by the Holiday Inn. While I waited for him I tried to think if there was anything I wanted to ask him that I hadn't already asked him, but there wasn't.

He arrived late—car trouble, of course—in the limo, and we had breakfast. Martin ordered fried chicken. We talked for a few minutes about different things, but what was most on Martin's mind was a set of videotapes of stars of the Grand Ole Opry he saw advertised on television and which he thought I should get. “All of 'em is on there,” he said, “Rod Brasfield, Minnie Pearl, Roy Acuff, Uncle Dave Macon,” and on and on, and he talked about each one lovingly, especially Brasfield, a comedian whom Martin called “the best thing ever to hit Nashville.” Martin wasn't making a nominating speech for himself this morning; he was just thinking about the people who made him want to do what he has been doing for almost fifty years, with an enthusiasm that reached back to the little shoeless kid's awe and love for those voices coming out of the radio. “Get 'em,” he said, “if you wanna see the real thing—the
real
thing,” he said, with lots of meaning in the emphasis.

Eventually it's time for me to go, and we head out into the bright morning. Before I go, though, he wants to tell me a joke. “There was this guy, said he could go around and talk to statues in town, and they'd talk back to him. So one day he walked up to this one, and, God, it was a big 'un, and he says, ‘Old man statue, this is so-and-so.' The statue said, ‘Yeah, glad to meet you.' So he says, ‘Listen, what would be the first thing you would do if you could come alive for a hour?' And the statue answered him back, said, ‘Shoot me
ten million pigeons
. . .' ”

I don't know if he means this to be a little parable of our couple of days together—I doubt it—but it occurs to me that it works as such, and I laugh along with him.

Then Martin, in his blue jumpsuit, black nylon windbreaker, and dirty white mesh cap, gets into his limo, which starts up with a gurgling roar, and I watch and wave as he backs her out, wheels her around, and rides off into the distance up Old Hickory Boulevard in a midnight-blue blaze of country grandeur, the goddamn
KING OF BLUEGRASS
himself.

From the
Oxford American
's First

Annual Music Issue, 1997

Jimmy Martin, RIP

H
e was one of a kind. He insisted on his own way, as a singer, guitarist, bandleader and as a man in the world, and he respected others who insisted on their own way. Especially he loved and respected the musicians whom he felt had carved out an unmistakable place of value for themselves in the world of country music and bluegrass—Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Hank Williams, George Jones, Roy Acuff, and most of the other members of the earlier generation of Grand Ole Opry stars. Implicitly and explicitly, he numbered himself among them, and he was right to do so. He reserved expressed admiration for a relatively small handful of younger performers—Marty Stuart, Tom T. Hall, a few others.

Jimmy Martin, the self-crowned “King of Bluegrass,” who died of bladder cancer on May 14, 2005, at the age of seventy-seven, was larger than life, and he will turn out to be larger than death, too. He was incapable of the kinds of dissembling, duplicity, politenesses, and homogenization that make for a smooth career in today's Gentleman's Business of country music, where every outlaw has his own hairdresser. He did everything to the hilt, whether it was telling a joke, hunting, eating, feeling sorry for himself, or playing music. Above all, playing music. He had a kind of contempt for half-measures and timid souls, and his first project would be to try and find out how steady you were on your feet.

He took things seriously, including fooling around and cutting up. He didn't like ass-kissers, politicians, wishy-washy types. He wasn't above trying to ingratiate himself with people who might be able to do him some good; he just wasn't very good at it. He wanted to be remembered as one of the greats; he was inordinately proud of his induction into the International Bluegrass Music Association Hall of Honor, and it was the frustration of his life that he was never invited to be a member of the Grand Ole Opry. It was the Opry's loss. When it seemed that the world wasn't going to rush in to build him a monument, he did it himself; several years before his death he designed and erected his own tombstone in a Nashville cemetery, taller than he was standing, a stone's throw from Roy Acuff's somewhat more modest plot. He had himself photographed in front of it, and he put the photo on the front of one of his CDs.

The documentary film
King of Bluegrass
is worth seeing, but you could easily come away from it thinking that Jimmy Martin was a more or less normal person, just with the color turned up a little high. He wasn't. He was, to quote his friend Marty Stuart, “part preacher, part prophet, and a card-carrying madman who is completely filled with the musical holy ghost.” That spirit erupts like a genie from every recording he made. He found a way to discipline his turbulent and sometimes anarchic soul through music, and his musical reputation is going to continue to grow. Jimmy Martin will be remembered long after many of his contemporaries. In an age dominated by spinmasters and bean counters, Jimmy Martin was the unvarnished Real Thing. Wave good-bye, and holler.

From the
Oxford American,
2005

 

Carl Perkins was one of the nicest people I've ever met. He came to New Orleans in 1996 to film a promotional video for his about-to-be-published autobiography and its companion CD. He was warm and genuine, utterly without star pretensions of any sort, and a living product of the fleeting era after World War Two when country honky-tonk music, bluegrass, and Memphis blues got real friendly and produced rock and roll. Included here are two pieces on him: a profile that appeared in the Sunday
New York Times,
and a remembrance that appeared in the
Oxford American
after Perkins's death in 1998.

The Gillian Welch essay was another of my
Oxford American
columns, and is more or less self-explanatory.

The Lost Man of Rock and Roll

I
t is just after twelve noon, an October Saturday in New Orleans. Carl Perkins, composer of the song “Blue Suede Shoes” and the original rockabilly singer and guitarist, waits outside a small guitar store in an ordinarily quiet uptown neighborhood for filming to resume on a promotional video for his new CD. He flew down this morning from his home in Jackson, Tennessee, where he has lived for the past forty-five 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 sixty-four, Perkins is slim and handsome, with sculpted cheekbones, a prominent chin, easy smile, and a curly, steel-grey toupee which is the topic of frequent jokes by its owner. He wears blue jeans, a tight, ribbed crewneck shirt, thick aviator glasses, and, yes, blue suede shoes.

“Back in the days when that song was popular,” he says, in a thick Tennessee country accent, lighting a cigarette as cameramen and technical crew members swirl around him, “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 'em 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 goin'?”

Grinning widely, gesturing around at all the activity, Perkins says, “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 right now, although he seems admirably unimpressed by that fact. Mr. Perkins is, in a sense, the Lost Man of early rock and 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 of a rock-and-roll anthem as “Great Balls of Fire” or “Roll Over Beethoven.”

Yet as the rockets of Jerry Lee and Elvis and Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly shot off into the great American night of legend, Mr. 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, with a just-published autobiography, entitled
Go, Cat, Go!
—the title comes from the famous refrain of his most famous composition—and a new CD of the same title—including Perkins duets with everyone from his old Sun Records labelmate Johnny Cash to Beatles George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr, to Tom Petty, John Fogerty, Paul Simon, and Willie Nelson—Carl Perkins seems poised on the brink of a long-overdue rediscovery.

Mr. Perkins was the archetypal rockabilly. He spent his early years in a Lake County, Tennessee, shack without electricity or indoor plumbing; he acquired his first guitar from an older black neighbor who traded it to the boy for a couple of dollars and a one-legged chicken named Peg.

He emerged from that background into a post–World War Two milieu in which country people were gravitating to large towns and small cities. “It was a time in America when the war was over,” he says, during a break in the weekend's filming. “People were happy. And it was a time when black and white were fusing musically. See, there was a little circle in West Tennessee, where we combined the blues influence coming up from Mississippi, and the bluegrass from out of Kentucky, but I don't think none of us even ever quite knew what it was. 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.”

Perkins formed a band with his two brothers that became extremely active in the area around Jackson, playing a mixture of country and rhythm and blues material for dancing. The honky-tonks were rough places where the atmosphere was suffused with the highly charged possibilities of both physical love and violence, and the demands they placed on musicians were straightforward and unequivocal: stimulate dancing and drinking. The honky-tonks may seem, in retrospect, an unlikely setting for the complex, introspective, often sentimental man one meets today, yet they were the crucible that shaped both the band's sound and Perkins's emerging songwriting talents.

Spurred by a chance meeting with Elvis 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. He persisted despite initial rebuffs, eventually got Phillips to listen, and in October 1954, three months after Elvis's debut, Perkins cut his first record. The two tunes, both Perkins originals, were a beautiful, Hank Williams–ish country ballad called “Turn Around” and the jumping “Movie Magg,” a quintessential rockabilly song about the exhilaration and dangers of courtship. The recordings gained the band important local exposure, and Perkins often found himself on the same concert bill with Presley.

Even today, Perkins is awestruck by Presley. “He was the first boy I heard on record playing the songs the way I always done. I think Elvis was the complete entertainer. I believe when Elvis was born, God said, here is a messenger, and I'm gonna make him the best-lookin' guy, and I'm gonna give him every piece of rhythm he needs to move that good-lookin' body on that stage. I was fightin' a battle workin' with him, knowing I looked like Mr. Ed, that mule, and here was a guy that could go out and clear his throat and have ten thousand people scream.”

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