Blue Suede Shoes: A Rockabilly Session, originally recorded in London in 1985 and broadcast the following year, was a rock n roll party with a guest list to die for. Forty years on, this expanded edition finds Carl Perkins surrounded by George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Dave Edmunds and Rosanne Cash — an assembly of admirers so distinguished that, in lesser hands, the whole thing might have collapsed under the weight of its own significance.
It doesn’t. Mostly because Perkins is having none of it.
The conceit is simple enough: take one of rockabilly’s founding fathers and put him in a room with several generations of musicians who owe him a substantial debt. Dave Edmunds, who produced and directed the session, knows exactly what he’s doing. There is no attempt to turn Perkins into some embalmed rockabilly monument. He is there to play, sing, joke and occasionally remind the assembled millionaires that he wrote the bloody songs.
And what songs.
“Boppin’ the Blues” gets things moving with Edmunds alongside Perkins, and immediately you are reminded that rockabilly was never supposed to be complicated. It was supposed to be dangerous, economical and fast enough to make respectable people nervous. Perkins’ guitar still has that wonderfully dry, snapping authority — a sound that seems to have been designed specifically to prevent anyone from overthinking things.
Then comes “Honey Don’t”, with Ringo Starr, who had already helped make Perkins’ music immortal by playing it with the Beatles. Ringo’s affection for the material is obvious, although there is something deliciously absurd about watching a former Beatle turn up to sing one of the songs that helped make him famous while the man who actually wrote it stands beside him looking as though this sort of thing happens every Tuesday.
“Matchbox”, with Ringo and Eric Clapton, is even better. Clapton, who spent much of his career demonstrating that he had listened very carefully indeed to American blues records, is here confronted with the original article. Perkins doesn’t need to announce his credentials. His phrasing does it for him.
The same is true of “Mean Woman Blues”, where Perkins and Clapton trade guitar lines. Clapton is, predictably, excellent. Perkins is better in the way that the inventor of the wheel is better at making a wheel than the fellow who subsequently puts alloy rims on it.
The Harrison appearances are the real historical treasure. “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby” is irresistible, not least because Harrison approaches Perkins’ material with the unforced enthusiasm of a man delighted to be allowed into the clubhouse. “Your True Love” is another highlight, while “Glad All Over” finds the two men sounding entirely at ease together.
Harrison’s presence also underlines something important: the Beatles did not simply like Carl Perkins. They absorbed him. The rockabilly vocabulary — the clipped guitar, the vocal phrasing, the rhythmic snap — became part of the Beatles’ own musical language. Seeing Harrison return to the source gives the whole exercise rather more meaning than the average all-star reunion.
Rosanne Cash brings a different connection. On “Jackson” and “What Kind of Girl”, she provides a reminder that Perkins’ influence wasn’t confined to British beat groups and blues-rock guitar heroes. His music sits just as naturally in the American country tradition, and Cash understands the emotional machinery beneath the jukebox noise.
The real fireworks, however, come in the loose, gloriously unfussy stretches: the medley of “That’s Alright Mama / Blue Moon of Kentucky / Night Train to Memphis”, the Perkins-Clapton “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”, and, naturally, “Blue Suede Shoes” itself.
By the time the title song arrives, it would be easy for proceedings to become unbearably ceremonial. Thankfully, Perkins simply gets on with it. The song remains magnificent because it is so brutally concise: a riff, a beat, a warning and a pair of shoes that apparently possess more diplomatic immunity than most heads of state.
The 40th anniversary edition also makes a convincing case for revisiting the session rather than merely dusting it off. The CD/Blu-ray edition adds previously unseen performances, rehearsals, alternative edits and interviews, alongside stereo and ambient 5.1 mixes and a substantial booklet. In other words, someone has actually gone through the trouble of making the archive interesting rather than simply putting a new sticker on an old box.
Carl Perkins isn’t merely the author of “Blue Suede Shoes”, a song subsequently made ridiculously famous by Elvis Presley. He was one of the crucial architects of the rockabilly vocabulary: songwriter, guitarist, singer and stylist. If Elvis was the great theatrical explosion of early rock ’n’ roll, Perkins was one of the men in the workshop building the machinery.
His influence runs through the Beatles, through British rockabilly revivalists, through country music and through the guitar vocabulary of virtually every rock musician who learned that you could say considerably more with three good notes than with thirty-seven mediocre ones.
And yet Perkins has never quite received the cultural immortality granted to Presley, Chuck Berry or Little Richard. Perhaps that’s because his greatness is less flamboyant. There is no mythology of the Elvis variety, no Little Richard-sized personality overwhelming the room. Perkins’ genius is in the workmanship.
He made rock ’n’ roll work.
That may be his greatest achievement.
Blue Suede Shoes: A Rockabilly Session consequently functions as more than a pleasant reunion of famous faces. It is a musical family tree with the patriarch sitting at the centre, watching his descendants demonstrate just how much they stole from him.
Donnie’s Rating: 8/10
