Pinetop Perkins – The living blues
There are some parts of his life that are emblematic of the blues. Like a large proportion of first-generation blues artists, Pinetop was born in the Mississippi Delta and eventually became part of the great migration north to Chicago. He is the sole surviving member of the King Biscuit Boys, the band led by Rice Miller (aka Sonny Boy Williamson) made famous in the 1940s for the King Biscuit Time radio program out of Helena, Arkansas, sponsored by King Biscuit flour. He recorded the Pinetop Smith song “Pinetop’s Boogie” for the fabled Sun label out of Memphis in 1950, a version so stirring that he appropriated Smith’s “Pinetop” moniker as his own. For eleven years beginning in 1969, he was the piano player for Muddy Waters, regarded as the father of the electric Chicago blues.
Other parts of Pinetop’s life are emblematic of a legend. He switched to the piano full time after a woman who mistakenly thought he had locked her in a bathroom slashed through the muscles and tendons in his left arm with a knife. Doctors would have amputated up to the elbow if the manager of the King Biscuit show hadn’t demanded they save it; as it was, they sewed the tendons back too short, constricting his movement. He ruptured his right eardrum when guitarist Earl Hooker turned up his amplifier too loud and set it next to him on the stage. He beat a serious drinking problem at the age of 82, and walked away from an auto accident that killed three people and injured Muddy Waters so badly he had to sit down when he played for the rest of his career.
Then there was the time Pinetop’s car was hit by a train in LaPorte, Indiana, resulting in a broken arm and 55 stitches in his head. He’s been smoking cigarettes since the age of 9 — more than 85 years — and for decades has eaten at McDonald’s as often as he can, which is generally once or twice a day. He once married a whore so his violent, jealous girlfriend — at the time the daughter of the mayor of Waterloo, Iowa — would leave him alone.
All that — the blues part and the legend part — is what prompted the pandemonium at the Circle B. It almost didn’t matter that this old man in the fancy suit was playing blaring, distorted piano riffs and singing into a microphone that wasn’t connected. Everyone could say they’d seen the icon, Pinetop Perkins, and as likely as not had a chaotic cell phone video to prove it.
But then something really legendary happened. The soundman got the piano feed turned down and the vocal feed turned on, the iconic old man had his hands cupped over the keys and was nodding at his four sidemen, and suddenly some rumbling, kinetic, boogie-woogie riffs were doing jumping jacks out of the speaker, the notes crisp and penetrating. “Down in Mississippi, it is my native home,” Pinetop was singing into the working microphone, perfectly tagged to the rhythm of his piano riffs.
Four more songs wrapped up the 40-minute set. There was the autobiographical “They Call Me Pinetop Perkins” (ironically cribbed from a Sunnyland Slim tune), then another Pinetop original, “Big Fat Mama”, featuring two-fisted barrelhouse riffs that had his hands churning like pistons. The lone ballad, “How Long”, was also Pinetop’s best vocal, especially the tear-jerking tone he gave to these lyrics: “I hear that train whistle blowin’/But I can’t hear no train/Just like deep down in my heart/I have an actual pain/ Baby how long…” The closer was another standard that traded on his association with Muddy Waters, “Got My Mojo Workin'”, the rollicking call-and-response blues boogie designed to evoke an elated expenditure of energy.
Was this vintage Pinetop Perkins? No, probably far from it. “He’s not as fast as he used to be — forget about that,” says Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, who has played with him for decades and probably knows him as well as any musician alive. “But even now, at 94, you listen to him play and you know it’s Pinetop. And you know he knows what he’s doing.”
“I grew up hard. Hard,” Pinetop emphasizes. “I picked the cotton and plowed with the mule and fixed the cars and played with the guitar and the piano. What I learned I learned on my own. Just saws how the other folks did it.” He holds up three slender fingers. “I didn’t have much school. Three years.”
That’s because you ran away from an abusive grandmother when you were 13, I answer, knowing the story. He nods solemnly. “Knocked me out with a quart bottle. When I came to, she was still going on me with a big stick of stove wood, liked to have killed me. Uh huh.”
We’re driving down Highway 43 toward Chicago the morning after the Cedarburg gig. Sitting in the back seat in his black jeans, a denim jacket and a leather cap, Pinetop has already expressed a desire to steal my wife, his good mood abetted by a stop at McDonald’s — “I don’t call it that. McDaniels,” he corrects — where he orders two double cheeseburgers, two apple pies and a decaffeinated coffee with two creams and five sugars, “to make it sweet.” The appetizer is one of a steady procession of More brand menthols, smoked outside, leaning on a rail, while I retrieve the food. How is this guy still alive?
“Lord’s will, I guess,” he answers, touching his forehead as if he’s about to make the sign of the cross, betraying the permanent influence of his Baptist preacher daddy. “I pray to the Lord all the time. Every day.”
The Lord has paid attention, and delivered him a slew of guardian angels over the past ten to fifteen years. “Pine had a drinking problem for a little while there,” Smith says. “When we were with Muddy, we used to go fishing almost every day, so he wasn’t drinking then. If there were no bites, he’d just started walking along the bank, he couldn’t sit still. But after we left Muddy [differing accounts cite squabbles over money and Muddy’s inability to tour after the auto accident in 1980 as causes] he started drinking some. Pine’s a guy who will give you the shirt off his back, and that got him in some trouble.”
“After his wife died he went into a little slump,” says Pat Morgan, the former Cal-Berkeley professor who retired to become Pinetop’s manager. “She had eight or nine children [none biologically related to Pinetop] and one or two of them talked Pinetop into some commitments he didn’t need. He started drinking heavily and they kept pulling him over, he kept driving, they kept looking the other way, until finally they threw him in jail. They put him in treatment and it seemed to work. But they had him on house arrest with an ankle bracelet, and every time Pinetop wanted to play he would cut off the bracelet.
“I wanted to meet this guy who was so tenacious in his 80s. I realized he couldn’t read or write very well and was a little deaf — people could take advantage of him unless he got some help. So I took early retirement and agreed to be his manager about twelve years ago.
“We moved him down to Laporte, Indiana, south of Chicago, but he was living in a decrepit house and it was hard to find people to check in on him,” Morgan continues. “Then one day in February he decides he’s hungry and goes and gets hit by a train.”