Recording "Get It"

Carl Perkins arrived in Montserrat on February 21st, 1981. But the entire first day of recording with him was on the 24th. McCartney and Perkins rehearsed and jammed on old songs, before recording the song “Get It“.

From an interview with Guitar Player Magazine:

You played with Carl Perkins on “Get It” [from the album Tug of War]. How did you two get together?

Paul McCartney: I rang him up, and he was in the States playing clubs. We met him in the very early days with the Beatles, and he was a good old friend, such a down-home boy. I love Carl — he’s so great. I’ll tell you a story about Carl; I don’t think he’ll mind me telling this. We were recording at Montserrat, and a musician friend was sailing around the world on a yacht — a bit of a tax dodge, I think [laughs] — and he sailed into Montserrat, and came to see us. He invited us to his boat. There was this British naval crew piping us aboard this spotless yacht. Carl was really impressed with the buffet and the champagne, and the way it was all laid out. He came over to me and said, “Paul, where I come from they call this shittin’ in high cotton.” It’s one of my favorite expressions. After that, we recorded “Get It.” At the end of the song, you can hear both of us laughing — and that’s the joke we’re laughing at. We had to cut the joke out, though, because we’d have never gotten it played on the radio.

Did you both play guitar on that song?

Paul McCartney: Yeah, I just played a little bit, and Carl played a rhythm part. The fun tended to come when we had a free moment. He and I sat on the floor of the studio, and we were talking, and there was a mic on. I was just telling him about some of his old songs that we loved, like “Lend me Your Comb” and “Your True Love.” I told him we were big fans of his and we used to do “Your True Love.” Then we’d sing together. Then we’d stop, and he’d say, “Well, you know, Paul, I used to do this,” and he’d show me some fingerpicking thing he used to do.

From Tug Of War Archive Collection, 2015

The plan to have Carl out to Montserrat was me paying homage to him. I’d known him on and off through the years. We’d played a bit together, but nothing seriously. We’d never made a record together, and I thought, ‘I’d love to write a song for him to sing.’ […]

I wanted to do this song with him called ‘Get It’. So we rehearsed a bit. I showed him how it went – where I might sing, where he might sing – and he was happy to do it. But when we got in the studio he wasn’t very comfortable about using headphones. In the old days of Sun Records, they didn’t use headphones, they just played live, in a room. Laid down a track and that was it. The engineers dealt with the technical side. So we had a moment where Carl was going to do a bit of vocal. He put the headphones on and he was going ‘Ohhhh, man…’ and he couldn’t get to grips with it at all. He was having a terrible time.

[With Carl] we had to go back and use the early techniques that we’d used when we baulked at using headphones. You wouldn’t think there would be anyone who didn’t know about headphones, but in the early days of recording it was how people recorded. All the great Elvis records, all the great rock ‘n’ roll records, were the band just standing there, playing, and you just played it live.

Paul McCartney, from Tug Of War Archive Collection, 2015.

Session activities

1. Get It

   Written by Paul McCartney

   Recording

2. Honey Don't

   Written by Carl Perkins

   Recording

3. Boppin' The Blues

   Written by Carl Perkins, Howard Griffin

   Recording

4. Lend Me Your Comb

   Written by Kay Twomey, Fred Wise, Ben Weisman

   Recording

5. Cut Across Shorty

   Written by Marijohn Wilkin, Wayne P. Walker

   Recording

6. The Saints (When the Saints Go Marching In)

   Written by Traditional

   Recording

7. Red Sails in the Sunset

   Written by Hugh Williams, Jimmy Kennedy

   Recording

Going further

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