Rock and roll legend Carl Perkins had just written the hit song Blue Suede Shoes, his career was building momentum and he was set to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show in front of the entire country - before even Elvis had done so. Unfortunately, he never made it.

“En route to New York, Carl and his band had this terrible car crash and Carl ended up in hospital for weeks and weeks - broken and bruised. His brother, who was in the band, almost died. Someone in another car actually did die in the accident,” says Jeff Apter, the author of Carl Perkins: The King of Rockabilly. 

“So, he never made it to the show and as he was lying in his hospital bed - he turned on the TV and there's Elvis on national TV. Seizing his moment.”

Jeff explains that this was just one of many "sliding doors" moments in Carl Perkins’ career. And that although he went on to have a successful career in his own right, Perkins will likely forever live in the shadow of the man who appeared on his TV screen while he lay battered and bruised in that hospital bed.

Carl Perkins: The King of Rockabilly is the new music biography written by Jeff Apter, a Wollongong local, who is launching the book on Saturday 8 March, 2pm at the Kiama Library Auditorium as part of the Kiama Jazz and Blues Festival.

Jeff Apter's new book. Photos supplied.

Jeff has written more than 30 books about music and musicians. He also spent four years working for Australian Rolling Stone. Interestingly, it was a biography about Australian star Keith Urban that led to this new book project.

“I'd written a book about Keith a few years ago for an Australian publisher. It was picked up by a US publisher, Kensington books, in New York. They really loved it and they actually said to me - you're a music biographer, what do you know about Carl Perkins? We want to write a book on him,” says Jeff.

“I knew where he came from, his involvement with Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Sun Records, Blue Suede Shoes and his relationship with The Beatles and I thought - someone's willing to pay me to find out more about someone who fascinates me. So it was a fantastic 12 month journey of research and writing. Every day I learnt something new about this really interesting, somewhat shadowy figure in American popular culture.”

In the 90’s Jeff was fortunate to spend four years living in the U.S. and visiting a lot of the places that Perkins would have been recording, performing and living - and he says that this experience helped him capture the time and place of the book.

“I really tried to vividly present how it felt to be in the moment, at that place and time. It was almost incidental that I'd done some research and legwork for this book 20 years ago just by being in America and getting a feel for it,” Jeff says.

“While I hadn’t been to Jackson, where Perkins spent most of his life, I had been to Memphis, Nashville, and Austin, Texas - all key music cities. I’d also visited Sun Studios where Carl recorded. So, I already had a feel for that world, which really helped.”

But beyond capturing the essence of Perkins’ life, Jeff is particularly interested in understanding how someone in the spotlight manages to stay sane (or goes insane,) and in examining the evolution of the specific song or album that defines that artist for a lifetime.

“I guess I'm fascinated - especially in the case of Carl Perkins - about how you can stay relatively sane when you are in the spotlight every night. How do you deal with that? How do you adapt? In Carl’s case - he would go on these great tours, play to thousands of people and he’d come home, slip off the toupee, pull out the dental plate, put on his baseball cap and ride on his lawnmower around the front yard,” says Jeff.

“And also I'm really interested in evolution. The song that becomes the song that is the soundtrack of your life. How does it come into existence? What inspired it? Not technically, I'm not really interested in saying this chord followed by that chord and that note. I am interested in motivation and inspiration.”

With Carl Perkins: The King of Rockabilly, Jeff hopes to bring Perkins out from the shadows of figures like Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Roy Orbison, even if only by an inch.

Catch Jeff at the Kiama Library Auditorium on 8 March at 2pm - more information available here.