A Blue-Tinged Life for the Silver Screen : Story of Rock Survivor Carl Perkins Could Be a Sobering, Uplifting Movie

Goodness, gracious, it certainly was a letdown to see Hollywood turn that strange, vibrant hellcat, Jerry Lee Lewis, into a grinning puppy dog.

The new Lewis film biography, “Great Balls Of Fire,” leaves out most of the dark, inexplicable stuff in Jerry Lee’s life so it can paint an upbeat, one-dimensional, easy-to-swallow picture. The movie presents a thoroughly likeable, almost adorable leading man. The real Lewis is as adorable--and as elementally fascinating and unpredictable--as a crazily spinning funnel cloud.

“He’s a super talent, but a super self-destructor too,” said Carl Perkins, who has known Lewis since the mid-1950s, when they both helped give rise to rock ‘n’ roll while recording for Sun Records, the Memphis label that also launched Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash.

Collectively they were known as the Million Dollar Quartet because of an informal joint recording session--for which the long-lost tapes finally surfaced nearly 25 years later.

Perkins, who will play Monday night at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana, said in a recent phone conversation that he has not seen “Great Balls Of Fire,” but word of mouth from friends in the music business is that the film fails to tell the dark side of the story.

The super talent comes through, as Dennis Quaid lip syncs Lewis’ strong new versions of his old hits. The super self-destructor, however, is missing from the picture, though he is still present and accounted for in real life, according to Perkins, who wishes that his old comrade, now pushing 54, would rein himself in a bit.

“He’s still Jerry,” Perkins said, recalling how, when they last shared a concert bill about six months ago, Lewis was carrying on his wild, hard-living ways. “Maybe he wouldn’t be who he was if he did stop and got control of himself and quit abusing himself so much. But I understand he’s still at it.”

If Hollywood is interested in making rock ‘n’ roll movies with thoroughly likeable stars and upbeat endings, maybe it should take a close look at the Carl Perkins story. Without glossing over the dark moments--which range from the excruciatingly painful to the absolutely tragic--the scriptwriters could tell a life’s story that is, in the end, warm and uplifting. The title, of course, would be “Blue Suede Shoes.”

The screenwriters would not have a hard time finding source material. They could just drop by Perkins’ place in his hometown of Jackson, Tenn., and let one of the most gracious and amiable personalities in rock ‘n’ roll spin out his tales in a slow, gravelly drawl.

If they wanted to start at the beginning, the first shot would pan over a west Tennessee cotton field. The camera would focus on a small white boy, a sharecropper’s son, picking cotton. While he works, he is captured by the music of the fields: the Southern gospel of the black farmers who shared his own family’s dirt-poor lot. The early scenes would bring in other sounds: a black neighbor, picking out the blues on his front porch while young Carl watched, or the white hillbilly music on the radio catching his ear. It would show Perkins’ father building him his first makeshift guitar out of a cigar box, a broom handle and two baling wires.

Those blues and country influences, speeded up and delivered with a distinctive guitar stutter, would fuse together into rockabilly, the music that Perkins and Presley pioneered. Perkins’ music was a family affair, with his brothers, Jay, a rhythm guitarist, and Clayton, a bassist, providing backup. They tried at first to connect with the big, New York-based record labels. But after hearing Presley’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the radio, Perkins gravitated to Sun.

“Finally, a label was recording the kind of music I’d always played,” he said.

Switch scenes to a schoolhouse in Parkin, Ark., late in 1955, where Perkins was playing on a bill with Presley and Cash.

“Cash was telling me a story about a black dude he’d known in the Air Force,” Perkins said. “I remember his name--C.B. White.”

Cash told Perkins how the man would continually groom his shoes and warn everyone away from them: “Hey man, don’t step on my suedes.”

“John said, ‘Carl, you ought to write you a song about that.’

“I said, ‘John, I don’t know nothing about those shoes.’ It did not ring a bell.”

As a struggling musician with two infants at home, blue suede footwear was not in Perkins’ budget. But Cash’s story stuck in his mind.

“About three weeks or a month after that, I was playing a club,” Perkins said. “A boy and a girl--she could really jitterbug--were right in front of the bandstand.”

Perkins watched them by the light of a Wurlitzer jukebox, the only stage lighting he had. When the music stopped, Perkins heard the youth, a college boy, reproaching his dance partner: “Uh, uh--don’t step on my suedes.”

“She was so pretty,” Perkins said. “It hurt her feelings. She said, ‘I’m sorry.’

“I thought, ‘You must be a fool to think about a pair of shoes with a girl that pretty.’ ”

That night, with the incident floating in his mind, Perkins got out of bed and started to work out a new song on his guitar.

“I couldn’t find anything to write it on,” he said. “I took three potatoes out of a brown paper sack, and wrote it on that.”

Perkins’ wife, Valda, came out of the bedroom while he worked on the song. “She said, ‘Carl, you’re gonna wake up those babies.’ But she asked, ‘What song is that?’ ”

Perkins explained what he was doing. She said, “I’ll rock ‘em back to sleep if you wake ‘em up. That’s a good song.”

The public agreed: Recorded in January, 1956, “Blue Suede Shoes” quickly climbed the charts. Though it never reached No. 1, it held the No. 2 position for four weeks, behind Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”

By late March, Perkins and his band were driving to New York, where they had been booked to play on Ed Sullivan’s show. Perkins fell asleep in the back seat and woke up in a hospital with a fractured skull and a broken shoulder. The crash near Dover, Del., had killed Jay Perkins.

Perkins’ convalescence lasted for months, and took away his career momentum. “Right when I needed to be really going at it, I wasn’t there,” he said.

“I’d already had enough taste of the alcohol and used it when I was playing in clubs before I went to Sun Records. It eliminated a lot of worry when I’d get high. I turned to it very strong, which was the wrong turn.”

Perkins was still able to write enduring rock ‘n’ roll songs--including “Matchbox,” “Honey Don’t,” and “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby” (all recorded by the Beatles in 1963), but he never scored a major pop hit after “Blue Suede Shoes.” He felt his share of bitterness and disappointment, and he continued to use bourbon as a salve.

The profile that Perkins said came to fit him? “Not as big as he wanted to be, somebody’s beat him out that he knows isn’t better than he is, and he’s having problems at home, most of ‘em his fault, and he’s blaming ‘em on his partner.”

Not, all in all, a very sunny passage of our as-yet-unmade movie. And it gets worse.

In the early 1960s, Perkins found himself being called up to sit in with a local Tennessee band at a small club about 50 miles from Jackson. He noticed a large electric fan near the back of the stage and thought to himself that it could be dangerous. But it was turned off. By the time Perkins finished playing, however, the fan was going again.

“I was taking my guitar off,” he said. “My left hand was stuck out behind me, and it went into that thing. It almost took my arm off.”

Perkins was rushed to a hospital. “That tunnel of light they talk about (in stories of near-death experiences)--that happened to me,” he said. “It just opened up in the most beautiful colors. There was nothing scary about it.”

When Perkins came to, he found that his wife had pleaded with the surgeon not to amputate his badly mangled fingers. The doctor left them on but was skeptical that Perkins would be able to use them again.

“It was a horrible time of my life,” Perkins said.

But even before the cast was taken off his hand, he began strumming his guitar, using only his free, unharmed left thumb to hold down the strings. When the cast came off, Perkins’ left little finger was paralyzed.

“I’d go to sleep each night squeezing on a solid rubber ball” to strengthen the remaining fingers. Perkins taught himself to play without the crippled finger, and the accident has had little, if any, impact on his ability to play a hot, stinging rockabilly guitar.

He could not, however, teach himself to stay away from the bourbon he drank straight out of the bottle.

“My wife would always tell my children, ‘You’ve got a good daddy, don’t be mad at him. He’ll sober up someday.’

“I’ve been fortunate I had this woman who was so strong for me. Jerry Lee didn’t have that. I’ve watched all these guys from Elvis down. They lost their wives and families. If that had happened to me, I would never have been able to conquer my alcohol problems.”

The long, dark middle section of our imaginary film stretches into the late 1960s. Perkins, recovered from his hand injury, has been touring since 1965 as part of Cash’s road show. One night, he walks onto the stage of the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles and sees only a blur. He is in the middle of a three-day drinking jag. On an off day in Southern California, the Cash entourage spends a day at the beach. Perkins, unable to function, stays on the parked tour bus.

“I’d gotten as bad as I could stand,” he said. “I was crying a lot, because I had a good wife at home and four kids who loved me and were waiting for Dad to get home. I got scared. I was fixing to die out on the road. I said, ‘Lord, if you let me get home, just to see my family, I won’t drink a drop.’

“I had some left in a pint bottle in a little shaving kit I kept with me. I had practically a new pint bottle. I started raising it up, and something seemed to tell me, ‘That’ll maybe get you back on your feet, but there won’t be no talking to Me.’

“I staggered out on the sand, where there weren’t a lot of people, and I threw it in the ocean. I watched it make three skips, and a wave grabbed it and away it went.”

Finished with drinking, Perkins later wrote one of Cash’s biggest hits, “Daddy Sang Bass,” about a country family sticking together and showing its love through music. He continued to tour with Cash until 1974.

When Perkins went out on his own again, it was with family support: his sons, Stan, now 37, and Greg, 30, have backed him on drums and bass since 1975.

Over the past few years, there has been renewed acknowledgment of Perkins’ position as one of rock’s founders. In 1985, he taped an HBO special, “Blue Suede Shoes: A Rockabilly Session With Carl Perkins and Friends” that featured guest spots by Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and George Harrison.

The next year, Perkins was reunited with his old Sun Records cronies, Cash and Lewis, as well as Roy Orbison, for “Class of ‘55,” an album commemorating the birth of rock in general and Presley’s impact on it in particular. In 1987, Perkins was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Perkins has still had his struggles. In 1986, he recorded what was to be his comeback solo album with Chips Moman, who produced “Class of ’55.” But Perkins began to doubt whether Moman, who had his own record label, was working to gain the major-label distribution he had promised.

Perkins said: “I saw the writing on the wall: ‘Ain’t nothing going to happen.’ I just felt we were spinning our wheels.” So he severed ties with Moman--who he said still has the finished recordings--and went back on the road.

About a year ago, Perkins got a call from Ken Stilts, manager of the Judds, the successful mother-daughter country vocal duo.

“He said, ‘You need a record out there. I don’t think you’re washed up at all, you’re looking fine, your music’s popping up all the time.’ I told him about the deal with Chips that had fallen through.”

Stilts became Perkins’ manager and negotiated him a contract with Universal Records, a new Nashville-based label affiliated with MCA Records. The resulting album, “Born to Rock,” is Perkins’ first release under his own name in 10 years.

It covers the old rockabilly style with jumping, humorous numbers delivered in a cottony, amiable voice that is an obvious influence for such younger performers as John Hiatt. The album also includes country balladry in the George Jones openhearted-and-fervent mode, including “Love Makes Dreams Come True,” an appreciative love song from Perkins to his wife.

That song could roll over the credits until that final, bopping rendition of “Blue Suede Shoes” kicks in.

The album has not burned up the charts, but Perkins sounds like a man who has found equanimity, even if he is not one of the first few names to pop into most rock fans’ heads when they think of ‘50s rock pioneers.

A tale worth telling, one would think, but so far, Perkins said, Hollywood has not come calling.

“No, they really haven’t,” he said, without any touch of chagrin in his ever-gracious voice. “I would consider it one of the highest honors a man could be paid in his lifetime to have the big screen tell his story.”

We’ll let Perkins himself sum up the moral of that story: “You just don’t count what you’ve lost. You count what you’ve got left. And you can do a lot with a little if you work and put your heart in it.”

Carl Perkins plays Monday at 7 and 10 p.m. at the Crazy Horse Steak House, 1580 Brookhollow Drive, Santa Ana. Tickets: $19.50. Information: (714) 549-1512. Perkins will also play Sept. 30 at the Pacific Amphitheatre, with the Judds and Restless Heart.