No artist can claim to be perfect. Certain people can make the best music they can, but even then, there’s never a chance that they will ever create a tune that everyone is 100% happy with and wants to praise to high heaven. Although The Beatles might be the closest that we will ever get to that kind of standard, even George Harrison had to admit that the best performance he could ever think of was listening to Carl Perkins bang out ‘Blue Suede Shoes’.
However, even with the standards of traditional rock and roll, Perkins wasn’t necessarily on the same level as Chuck Berry or Little Richard. He certainly had the songwriting to back him up, but there was always something that was holding him back just a little bit from being one of the true titans of the genre.
And it’s not like time was on his side from the word go, either. Going through his discography, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ should be given proper credit as his classic, but since he didn’t have that much time to promote it, most people tended to think that the whole thing was just another Elvis Presley song.
Then again, one song shouldn’t define a rock legend, and part of the essence behind Perkins is how well he worked within the confines of both country and rock and roll. Throughout his time in the spotlight, he would make the most out of bending the strings whenever he soloed, which gave everything a certain twang that gave him something more commonly found on a Johnny Cash record than anything connected with rock and roll.
For someone like Harrison, this was a lesson in how to play guitar, and ‘The Quiet Beatle’ was more than willing to be a good student. Looking at how he structured his first solos, Harrison plays the same style of fills that Perkins did, whether that was the country style of picking or spending most of his solo bending the life out of the strings like on ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’.
Still, it didn’t really matter so long as Harrison had that piece of footage of Perkins singing ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, saying, “Carl was playing that simple, amazing blend of country, blues and early rock with these brilliant chordal solos that were very sophisticated. I heard his version of ‘Blue Suede Shoes ’ on the radio the other day, and I’ll tell you, they don’t come more perfect than that.”
Harrison wasn’t the only one blown away by what Perkins was doing. Listening back to other legends like Tom Petty, the guitarist’s charm has rubbed off on them as well, with Petty even featuring him as one of his main guests at the Fillmore and featuring him on the track ‘Cabin Down Below’ off his album Wildflowers.
But Harrison didn’t need to shout the praises of Perkins all that often. Looking at the Beatles’ repertoire, they covered Perkins more than any other artists, and while it didn’t hit the same way as his classic hit, their version of ‘Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby’ is incredibly reverent to the man who set Harrison’s world on fire when he was still a budding guitarist.