by John Edward
Carl’s life was like that. He was always trying to overcome setbacks and obstacles. While touring with Johnny Cash in the early 1960s, a ceiling fan fell on him and crippled two of his fingers. He figured out how to get by with three fingers and kept on playing his guitar. But his bad luck with money continued. People always seemed to be stealing his songs or screwing him on royalties, although the Beatles were good to him and recorded four of his songs: “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” “Honey Don’t,” “Restless,” and, of course, “Blue Suede Shoes.” But money wasn’t important to Carl. He didn’t need a big house or any of that stuff like most of the people he knew in the record business. He just cared about his family and writing songs and singing and playing the guitar. He was completely devoted to Valda, his wife since before “Blue Suede Shoes.” She was a seamstress by trade.
“Do you know the reason Elvis used to wear the high collar?” Rick Korn once asked me. “He had acne on the back of his neck when he was younger. So Valda designed that and also the big, fat belts that he used to wear. She designed the first studded belt for him. Years later, Elvis gave the belt back to Valda, and she and Carl framed it and put it up in their bedroom.”
In 1991, Carl, a heavy smoker, was diagnosed with throat cancer and had to have surgery that the doctors said would probably leave him without a voice. Before the surgery, he offered a deal to God: Give me my voice, and I will use it to do good. He came out of the surgery singing better than he ever had, with more range. And he kept his end of the bargain. He started the Carl Perkins Center for the Prevention of Child Abuse, which eventually became the second largest center in the country for abused children. In newspaper interviews, when he was asked why he had picked child abuse as his cause, he always said he had been moved and inspired by a horrible picture of an abused little boy he saw in a local newspaper. He said the boy looked like one of his own sons. But the truth was that the little boy reminded him of himself.
When he was a young boy in west Tennessee, Carl, like more than a few children growing up poor in cotton country in the early 1940s, was sold by his family to a farmer who wanted the use of his big hands in the fields. Many large families who had boys with big hands would sell their sons for a piece of the profits. It was a way of life. Through his youth living with a family that wasn’t his, Carl had been beaten and abused, but like many people, he tried to lock it away when he became an adult. It wasn’t until he was almost sixty and facing cancer that he unbolted the door to his past and let it tumble out. When he saw the picture of the little boy in the paper, he told those close to him that he knew that this was the work that God intended for him as his part of the deal to let him keep his voice. Carl was of a time and place in which there weren’t lines out the door of psychiatrists’ offices. The center for abused children became his therapy.
After his surgery, Carl began writing more spiritual music—long, poetic songs that he felt came from a different place in the universe from the rock ditties he had written before. He said that while in the hospital, God gave him a tiny glimpse, a feeling, of heaven.
When he called Rick Korn that day in 1995, four years after his cancer, Carl said he was looking for someone—not necessarily someone in the music business—to help him relaunch his career. He was working on some new music and had some ideas about what he wanted to do with it. A mutual friend had given him Rick’s name. They hooked up and began working on projects. They did an album together called “Go, Cat, Go”—a line from “Blue Suede Shoes”—with contributions from Carl’s old friends, the three surviving Beatles. Carl had performed on Paul McCartney’s 1982 album “Tug of War,” the one on which Paul sang “Ebony and Ivory” with Stevie Wonder.
Although they were of different generations and from very different backgrounds, Carl and Rick had a rare connection. “We had similar creative frustrations,” is the way Rick puts it. “We were brothers in arms.” The kid from Long Island loved to listen to the slow, tobacco-stained drawl of this Legend of Rock from Tennessee. His singing was one thing. But it was his talking that captivated Rick.
“Carl told so many great stories, and every story had a kind of spirituality to it,” Rick said. “He didn’t just tell you a story about him and Elvis drinking in some bar and flirting with women. He would tell you a story that had a meaning. He was almost preachy, but in a good way. There was a kind of aura about him, and it just made you feel so comfortable and warm. One day I said, ‘Carl, I could put you in front of a wall and you would talk for twenty-four hours straight. It would be great if we could get a camera and you just telling these stories. They should be preserved.’”
Rick called Dominic Ambrosio, a friend of his who worked for HBO and was living in Nashville at the time, and asked if he’d be interested in coming to Memphis with a camera and a sound man and spending a weekend with Carl. They could figure out what to do with the footage later. Dominic drove through a rare Tennessee snowstorm to get there—despite Carl’s urgings to stay home and come a week later—and he and his sound man set up in Carl’s musty studio. True to form, Carl just talked and talked, one great story after another about Elvis, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, the Beatles, his wife Valda, his brothers, and his kids. And before long, he got around to the best story of all, the story that had given Rick the idea of asking Dominic to do this in the first place.
It happened in 1981, and it began with a phone call that Valda answered. “He says he’s Paul McCartney,” she had told Carl, handing him the phone.
Carl got on and said, “Whatcha doin’, boy?”
“I’m sitting here at the house,” Paul said. “What are you doing? I’m down here in the West Indies recording an album. I’ve got a song I’ve written that’s perfect for you. Can you come down to Montserrat?”
“Well, if I knew where it was, it would help,” Carl said.
“Somewhere in the Caribbean. Just head down this way; we’ll find you.”
So Paul sent Carl a ticket, and he flew down and sang lead vocals and played guitar on a song called “Get It” for Paul’s album “Tug of War.” He spent eight great days with Paul and Linda, along with George and Ringo, Stevie Wonder, and the legendary Beatles producer George Martin, with whom Paul owned a studio on the island. The studio was in Paul’s house, while Martin had his own house elsewhere on the property. Carl described Martin’s house as a castle. That’s where he stayed for the week.
“As the time was drawing near for me to go home, I was sitting out on the patio,” Carl told Dominic Ambrosio and his camera, his guitar sitting on his lap and looking like a part of him. “And I was thinking how lucky Carl Perkins was. And I’m kind of sentimental. Sometimes I can sing it but I can’t say it, and that night before, I wrote a song. And in the morning, I went down to the studio and said to Paul and Linda, ‘I’m not good at saying good-bye, but I wrote this song last night, and I want to play it for you.’ It was called ‘My Old Friend’ . . .” Carl sang it now for Dominic with the extra emotional emphasis on the refrain: My old friend, won’t you think about me every now and then . . .
“Well, halfway through the song, I see Paul is really crying, tears flowing down his face,” Carl said. “And he stepped outside. I said to Linda, ‘Linda, I didn’t mean to upset him.’ She says, ‘Carl Perkins, how did you know?’ I said, ‘Darlin’, I don’t know what yer talkin’ about. How did I know what?’ ”
John Lennon had been killed only months before outside his apartment building, the Dakota in New York. Linda explained that, although it wasn’t publicly known, only days before his death, she and Paul had visited John and Yoko at the Dakota. At the end of the visit, as they were saying good-bye, John said to Paul, “Think of me every now and then, my old friend.”
“Linda put her arms around me,” Carl said now on a cold January day in Tennessee sixteen years later, “and she said, ‘Thank you, Carl, he needed that.’ It was a touching moment and it was a frightful moment for me.” The song had just come to him out of the blue that night as he sat al
one on the deck off his room in George Martin’s castle. And the strange thing, he later told Rick, was that he didn’t write the song down—something he always did. Whenever he thought of a lyric, let alone an entire song, he had to write it down right away or he would lose it. “Rick,” Carl said, “that song was with me. I couldn’t get it out of my head.” He was sure John had written the song from beyond and given it to him for Paul. Now, with the camera rolling, Carl wanted to finish the story by singing the refrain once more for posterity: My old friend, won’t you think about me every now and then. . . .
And just as he hit the last chord and it began to dissolve into the dank studio air and Dominic hit the fade button on his camera, the intercom in Carl’s studio sounded.
“Carl?” It was Valda.
“And that was the little girl that answered the original phone call,” Carl said with a laugh as he reached over the soundboard to the intercom. “Hello.”
“Paul McCartney just called.”
Carl looked at Dominic. “Val, are you kidding me?”
“I didn’t answer the phone, I was in the washroom . . .”
“What? Paul McCartney?” Dominic asked in disbelief from behind the camera.
“Paul McCartney,” Carl answered, as if he needed to say it to believe it.
“Hear me?” Val asked obliviously.
Carl turned to the camera: “Now, listen. I’m tellin’ you guys,” Carl said. “If you think this boy has not got a connection to the spirit world . . .”
Carl told Val they were coming right up to listen to the tape. He hit the Play button and heard the voice of Paul McCartney: “Carl, Val, this is Paul and Linda. We’re on holiday here in the Caribbean and our minds wandered over to you. We just want to say hello and send our love and wish you a Happy New Year. Call us back when you get home.”
The footage Dominic shot that weekend didn’t find its way out of the can, but Rick knew it had to have some purpose. He had never been very religious or particularly spiritual, but after hanging around Carl the last couple of years, he wasn’t chalking up Paul McCartney’s phone call to coincidence. In time, he would understand the connections.
Beyond the Blue
TEN MONTHS LATER, in November of 1997, Carl had a pair of strokes, the second more serious than the first. He came out of the hospital, but he was weak and partially paralyzed. He fell into a coma, and on January 19, 1998, at the age of sixty-five, Carl Perkins passed away. It was exactly a year to the day Carl had sat in his studio telling stories, and Paul McCartney had made the phone call that nearly knocked him out of his chair.
When Carl died, Valda and Debbie asked Rick Korn to come to Tennessee and help arrange the funeral, which meant dealing with a lot of celebrities and a lot of press. It was a Who’s Who of rock ’n’ roll descending on Jackson, Tennessee, from all over the world. Rick was honored to do it for Carl. He would never forget driving to the airport in Carl’s tan Lincoln Continental, with the license plate that said SUEDE, and picking up George Harrison the morning of the funeral. Driving to the chapel, this child of the sixties, who was a second grader at Parkway Elementary School when the Beatles took Ed Sullivan’s stage, thought, I’m sitting next to George Harrison.
In his hotel room in Jackson the night he arrived, Rick, exhausted, turned on Larry King Live. The guest was James Van Praagh. Rick wasn’t interested. “At first I’m thinking this guy’s full of crap,” Rick recalled. “But Larry’s buying it, and I respect Larry. And the more I listened, I was saying, wow, this guy’s pretty good. And I was thinking this is weird. Larry King’s doing a show on life after death the day after one of my best friends dies.”
He thought of calling Debbie and telling her to put the show on, thinking it might be comforting, but he stopped himself. He didn’t know what her beliefs about this were, and didn’t want to take a chance of upsetting her. After the show ended at ten o’clock, the phone rang in Rick’s room. It was Debbie. “By any chance, did you watch Larry King tonight?” she asked.
“I want a reading with that guy,” she said. She wanted Rick to call his brother, who was chief operating officer of CNN at the time. Rick wasn’t sure he could get his brother to arrange a psychic reading for someone he didn’t know with a guy who was on Larry King, but if Rick had words to live by, they were: It never hurts to ask. He told Debbie he would call his brother right after the funeral.
The next morning, Rick went to the airport to pick up Stephen Reed, a TV producer who had been working with Carl and Rick on a special for the Showtime network. Driving into town, Rick told Stephen about what had happened the night before, and how Debbie wanted him to connect her with a psychic medium. Stephen said it just so happened he knew a medium. He might be able to hook her up with him. “I don’t know,” Rick said, “she wants me to get this guy who was on Larry King.” Stephen said, “Let me talk to my friend John.”
I had met Stephen around 1994, when I was still working in the hospital but thinking about a career change. My cousin knew a woman whose daughter wanted a reading. In those days, that’s how I got most of my clients—the source was always two or three people removed. The daughter’s name was Victoria, and she had a radio and TV production company. Afterward, she said she liked the reading so much that she wanted to try to put some kind of radio show together. I can’t always explain what makes me interested or not interested in something, other than to say that I usually get a little pull in one direction or another. So even though I was still a little media-shy, the pull in this case was in the direction of “check it out.” Victoria arranged an introduction at a Japanese restaurant with a producer. That was Stephen Reed. Stephen had no belief whatsoever in what I do, but hey, this was business. He was glad to meet me at the “check it out” counter.
Driving through Central Park that night, I was thinking about whether some kind of show was really going to happen, and where it was going to wind up. Just then a bus passed with an ad across its side for the cable-TV Sci Fi Channel, and with it a flashed message of the psychic kind: It’s Sci Fi. When I met Stephen and Victoria, I was all excited. “It’s going to be a TV show, and it’s going to be on Sci Fi,” I said. They looked at me as if I was the goofy kid that I was. Slow down, cowboy. You haven’t even been on the radio yet. We actually did get a meeting at Sci Fi, but they weren’t interested.
Stephen and I became good friends anyway, so when he asked for a rare favor, I tried to say yes. When he e-mailed me and asked if I would read the woman in Tennessee, he did it with an urgency that my guides made me feel I should pay attention to. Stephen told me the woman’s father had passed, although he knew enough not to tell me anything more about her. But he did give me the feeling that there was something unusual or important attached to this woman. It would be a good idea for me to read her.
AS SOON AS SHE HUNG UP the phone after our reading that day in January of 1998, Debbie Perkins Swift called Rick Korn, crying. Oh, no, he thought. It must have been a disaster. The guy must have been a fake, and she’s really pissed. I’m gonna kill Stephen. But to his unspeakable relief, Debbie wasn’t upset—she was overjoyed. She gave him the whole thing, beginning to end, reading from the pages of notes her friend had taken down while listening in on the extension. Rick couldn’t believe it. He had never really thought much about life after death, although he’d had two experiences that he’d never forgotten. Once, when he was in his twenties, he thought that a friend who had died came to him in a dream. And then, when he and his wife and kids were living in Tennessee in the early nineties, something happened one night that was so unsettling that he had never been able to talk about it, or even acknowledge that it had happened—even to his wife, A.J. Now, after hearing about Debbie’s reading, that night started coming back to him.
A.J. didn’t believe anything Rick told her about Debbie’s reading. And Rick is a pretty convincing guy. “Well, if it’s true, set up one of these readings for me,” A.J. challenged him. Rick had already asked Stephen for one favor. But he really wa
nted A.J. to have a reading. He found himself thinking a lot about that night in Tennessee. He couldn’t shake this feeling that I might be able to unlock this secret he had lived with for eight years.
So Rick asked Stephen for another favor. And Stephen said he really didn’t want to ask me again. “Well, can A.J. and I take John and his wife out to dinner?” Rick said. “Just to thank him for Debbie? He wouldn’t even take any money from her.” Stephen called me, and I said dinner would be fine. And that I really didn’t mind reading his friend’s wife when we got together. It wasn’t a problem. We could do it at Stephen’s apartment before dinner.
When Rick told A.J. about it, both started thinking the same thing. They didn’t even have to say it out loud. A.J.’s father. It had been eight years now.
Driving toward New York on the New Jersey Turnpike, A.J. started getting really cold feet. “I’m not doing this,” she said. “I can’t do this. I mean, even if it’s true, my father’s dead. I don’t want to disturb him. There’s something not right about that. It’s against my religion.” She’s Catholic; Rick is Jewish. “Anyway, I don’t believe this.”
“A.J.,” Rick said, “do you remember the night when we were living in Tennessee and you woke up in the middle of the night? And you said there was someone standing over the bed?”
Of course she remembered.
“And you said you didn’t know if the guy was going to kiss you or attack you? And I went around the house with my broken lacrosse stick, and there was nobody there? And then you said the guy had a hat and coat on, and you thought it looked like your father?”
A.J. didn’t like where this was going.
“Well, what I never told you was that I saw him, too.”