Pinetop Perkins – The living blues
“I was going to McDaniels. Man, I waited two or three hours trying to get through the gate [over the railroad tracks] and the gate stayed down,” Pinetop insists, as Onnie, the woman Morgan frequently hires to travel with him on tour, rolls her eyes and chuckles. “The train went by and I waited an hour or two. Then I went around the gate and the other train went by — came out of the woods, whistle wasn’t blowing — and I met it. Good thing it was running slow.”
“He had a little station wagon he called Grandma that was filled with fishing stuff,” Morgan says, “and it dragged him quite a ways — 48 stitches in his head, a fractured arm. He was 90 at the time. And he still was driving without a license. We had to get him out of LaPorte.”
Enter Clifford Antone, founder of Antone’s, the blues and roots nightclub at the epicenter of the thriving, closely-knit musical community in Austin, Texas. Pinetop and Clifford had been friends since the Muddy Waters Band began playing at the club in the mid-1970s. He paved the way for Pinetop’s move down to Austin in October 2004, lining up everything from medical care and supervision to a place to stay. Pinetop had a new fishing partner, and in a warmer climate to boot — until May 2006, when Antone died of a heart attack at age 56.
People in Austin knew how close the two men were, and they’ve adopted Pinetop as one of their own. Before Clifford died, the Mayor of Austin had declared the bluesman’s 92nd birthday to be Pinetop Perkins Day and renamed a street in honor of the pianist. Since then, “He goes out every single night of the week,” Morgan reports. Sometimes it’s to Antone’s, sometimes to a little blues bar called Nuno’s, sometimes to the Broken Spoke, a legendary country dance hall near his home.
Clifford’s sister, Susan Antone — known affectionately to Pinetop as “Susie Q” — has made sure there is always room available for Pinetop at his favorite spot by the shoeshine stand at Antone’s, and if he’s brought along some CDs he wants to sell that night, the little alcove near the stage is cleared for him, a privilege afforded no one else. Folks at the Broken Spoke have taken to e-mailing Pinetop’s friends about how he’s doing whenever he stops by. A special caregiver monitors his whereabouts, and a cab driver is on retainer to take him home whenever he asks.
“It takes a village to raise a Pinetop,” Morgan jokes, then says more earnestly that “with all the positive reinforcement he gets, these trips out at night are like revival meetings. It can go a long way toward keeping you healthy. His memory may be going a little and his prostate is probably the size of Kansas, but when he gets up onstage and starts playing, 30 years drop away immediately.”
Friends in the north have likewise rallied to his side, chief among them Doug Nelson, a LaPorte resident who has played harmonica alongside Pinetop on many occasions and has been involved in a variety of projects related to the music business. Back when Pinetop was still living in LaPorte in the ’90s, Nelson and Chicago-area blues producer Michael Freeman began agitating for the pianist to be granted a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys, an event that finally came to fruition in 2005.
“It was ridiculous that he’d never been awarded a Grammy,” says Nelson (a situation further rectified by his 2007 award for Live In Dallas), “considering that he won the W.C. Handy Award for piano players something like nineteen or twenty years in a row until they finally named the award after him so they could give it to somebody else.
“I’ll tell you what others have told me. From Elton John to Billy Joel to Billy Payne of Little Feat to Gregg Allman, all these boogie-woogie characters say that Pinetop’s playing has been a huge influence. And it’s been said many times that his rolling left hand [the one altered by the slashed arm to create a distinctive touch] helped create the sound of rock ‘n’ roll. And if you know the influence Muddy Waters and his band had on the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton, you see how that happened.”
Back in 2003, Nelson and Freeman decided to produce a record made with foresight and loving care rather than the quick and dirty session work or one-night-stand in concert that typifies many discs cut by old blues legends. It was decided to structure the theme around guitarists and vocalists. “We thought about harmonica players too, but it started to get too complicated,” Nelson says. They asked Pinetop to put together a list of people with whom he’d like to record, and began planning for sessions at a studio Nelson had built in his 19th-century barn in LaPorte.
The result is Pinetop Perkins And Friends, set for a June 3 release on the Telarc label. A superb blend of perennial Pinetop tunes and others he rarely if ever attempts, the record features such luminaries as B.B. King (on “Down In Mississippi”, dappling his trademark liquid riffs from “Lucille” and engaging Pinetop in some spirited talk-song repartee), and a typically soulful and understated Eric Clapton on a doleful medley of “How Long Blues” and “Come Back Baby”. Austin’s Jimmie Vaughan peppers the groove of “Take It Easy Baby”, and Eric Sardinas cavorts and careens on slide guitar through “Got My Mojo Working”.
Little Frank Krakowski, the up-and-coming guitarist who supplies Windy City gusto to “Sweet Home Chicago”, was part of the house band backing Pinetop in Cedarburg, and has played with him on numerous occasions. “He is one of the last barrelhouse boogie-woogie players from the Delta,” Krakowski says. “He took that style and brought it to Chicago, played a major part in helping to form that Muddy Waters electric blues sound. So yeah, he’s a pretty major player. And yet he always gets up there and does his job, so consistently. I really can’t remember one gig where his playing was weak.”
I dropped off Pinetop and his assistant Onnie at a motel near Chicago’s O’Hare airport, where they were scheduled to fly out to Seattle the next morning and join Krakowski, Smith, Stroger, and the rest of the Legends of Chicago Blues. Unfortunately, his room was in the middle of the second floor of a facility with no elevator. As he labored to the top of the stairs, turned the corner and discovered he still had half a hallway to traverse, he muttered, “I’ve got a good wheelchair at home” — the only note of exasperation I heard the entire time I was around him.
The early-June release of Pinetop Perkins And Friends was purposefully designed to coincide with events in his honor at the Chicago Blues Festival later that week. He’ll be a month shy of his 95th birthday, and while the bright red pinstriped suit is probably too warm for the occasion, expect sartorial elegance — and live, vibrant, apparently timeless blues musicianship.
“Pinetop has lived as long as he has because he is doing what he loves to do,” says Willie “Big Eyes” Smith. “We come from where this music started. If you go to the sanctified churches down south, it sounds like they’ve been playing the blues since the beginning of time. That was the music that he and I was brought up around. It was tough times, but you didn’t mind the tough times, because all you wanted to do was play that music anyway.”
Britt Robson is a freelance journalist who writes about music, sports and politics from Minneapolis. He first saw Pinetop Perkins play with Muddy Waters more than 30 years ago.