Listen to the guitar break in "All My Loving": George Harrison told me that the Beatles would study the B sides of Carl's records to learn everything they could from him.Ĭarl was the real deal - a true rockabilly cat.
Carl was actually there in the studio when the Beatles cut some of them. The Beatles covered five of Carl's songs on record. He was an amazing guitar player: If you want to play Fifties rock & roll, you can either play like Chuck Berry, or you can play like Carl Perkins.Ĭonsidering how important he is to rock history, many people don't know about him. On tracks like "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Honey Don't!" he took that country-picking thing into the rock world. Image Credit: Illustration by Shawn BarberĬarl Perkins' songs will outlive us all. The song is simple, but when you look at all the elements and how they're put together and where the downbeat is, it's kind of … clever is not even really the word. "This Must Be the Place" is probably one of the most important songs in my entire life. They weren't always complex, either - there's some stuff where it's just bare-bones essentials. I'm all over the map emotionally and spiritually, like most people are, so different Talking Heads records speak to me at different times, but with Remain in Light and Fear of Music, the grit of modern living is there. I think the artist's primary responsibility is to reflect what life was like in their time.
The American Dream has a lot of back alleys, and he was showing those things, and I felt like, here's a guy trying to talk to me about something I had seen firsthand. Byrne's lyrics spoke to the artifice of the American landscape. It presented this facade that everything around us is solid and real and going to be here forever, even though we know we created it. David Byrne's parents lived there for a while. It was a planned community with man-made lakes. The town that I grew up in was called Columbia, in Maryland. I feel like they saw Brian Eno, their producer, as another instrument. If Talking Heads were around a cool idea, they would make it their own. If you listen to a Talking Heads bass line, you think the song's going one way, and then you listen to the drums and you think it's going a different way, and then you listen to David Byrne's lyrics and you're like, "This is a completely different song from what I thought it was going to be." And then the guitars come in, and then the ambience comes in - it's like several songs all blending into one. I was a kid, but I still thought, "I should have been involved in that record!" It's amazing. Remain in Light was this combination of ambient music and strong lyrics and incredibly inventive percussion and bass parts. The first song I really liked was "Once in a Lifetime." MTV had just started to sink its claws into people, and that song was like an anthem for coked-up adults trying to make sense of their world. Talking Heads was the first band I remember telling my punk friends about, saying, "Yo, check this out! This four-chord thing we're doing? We're missing out on something!" When I was a kid, I was really into hardcore punk. As you read this book, remember: This is what we have to live up to.
But at its best, it is still the sound of forward motion. In these fan testimonials, indie rockers pay tribute to world-beating rappers (Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig on Jay-Z), young pop stars honor stylistic godmothers (Britney Spears on Madonna) and Billy Joel admits that Elton John “kicks my ass on piano.” Rock & roll is now a music with a rich past. The essays on these top 100 artists are by their peers: singers, producers and musicians. The resulting list of 100 artists, published in two issues of Rolling Stone in 20, and updated in 2011, is a broad survey of rock history, spanning Sixties heroes (the Beatles) and modern insurgents (Eminem), and touching on early pioneers (Chuck Berry) and the bluesmen who made it all possible (Howlin’ Wolf). In 2004 - 50 years after Elvis Presley walked into Sun Studios and cut “That’s All Right” - Rolling Stone celebrated rock & roll’s first half-century in grand style, assembling a panel of 55 top musicians, writers and industry executives (everyone from Keith Richards to ?uestlove of the Roots) and asking them to pick the most influential artists of the rock & roll era.