'The utter ecstasy, the lubricous excitement, he brought could never be equalled, not even by Prince'
I remember one night, we had this wonderful orgy going. It was one of the best I have ever been to. And in the middle of this orgy, that was fantastic, somebody knocked on my door. I said: ‘Just a moment! This is an orgy!’
Richard’s sui generis nature was his calling card. He was schooled in black gospel music; he loved Sister Rosetta Tharpe and he adored Marion Williams, another famous singer of the era. Like many of rock’s other progenitors, from Elvis to Chuck Berry, he was infatuated as well with the hopped-up jive styling of Louis Jordan. He was an inventive and powerful pianist, but he wasn’t a brilliant synthesizer of influences like Presley or Lewis.
He was popular in a way his relatively minor chart impact didn’t reflect in his heyday, and he remains one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th century. The first song Paul McCartney ever sang in public was Richard’s hit “Long Tall Sally.” “My idol when I was a kid was Little Richard,” David Bowie once said; he was transfixed to see him long before he himself embarked on a life of sexual and musical trailblazing.
Richard gave an elaborate oral history for his authorized biography, Charles White’s The Life and Times of Little Richard, and it is safe to say that no more explicit, or appalling, a debriefing will ever be heard from a rock star.
B. Brown put him on stage in a red dress, calling him Princess Lavonne.
Robey was a criminal and possibly an organized crime figure; but he put out some important music in the era, including work by Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and Johnny Ace, who killed himself goofing around with a gun backstage at the age of 25. Richard recorded a number of tracks in Houston, but, in Richard’s telling, when he tried to stand up for his rights he was beaten so badly by Robey that he was hospitalized and eventually had to have a hernia operation.
He then became a journeyman bandleader and star, herding a large ensemble of musicians over great distances and crummy roads to godawful corners of the country and occasionally causing pandemonium. He was arrested at a show in Amarillo, Texas, one night, and at the next, in Lubbock, caused a riot. An awestruck Buddy Holly was in the audience; the pair’s lives would cross frequently during Holly’s short career.
According to historian Larry Birnbaum, the words “tutti frutti” go back to a 1938 song by an act called Slim and Slam. Virtually all of the breakout hits of the era were variants on earlier songs. But Richard’s a cappella opening and the tune itself were apparently original. Blackwell felt he’d found a vehicle that fit the singer’s image. He enlisted a young wannabe songwriter, Dorothy LaBostrie, to reshape the words.
It’s unsurprising that Richard became at this time the epitome of the black star whose work was appropriated by white artists — denatured and repacked. Pat Boone will forever be remembered for the most pathetic of these, a puff-pabulum take on “Tutti Frutti” — which went into the top ten, whereas Richard’s version never made it into the top 20.
Richard had a blues belter’s voice, but wasn’t really convincing in straight readings. His major work managed to bring together a number of dynamic forces: urgency, desire, anxiety, excitement, and catharsis. If anything he cranked up the speed — “Jenny Jenny” is entirely frenetic. He dialed up the sex too, dispensing with innuendo and code words entirely in “Rip It Up” and in the titanic “Good Golly, Miss Molly” .
I used to like to watch these people having sex with my band men. I would pay a guy who had a big penis to come and have sex with these ladies so I could watch them. It was a big thrill to me. If the girls didn’t think they could take it, I would watch him make them take it. As I was watching, I would masturbate while someone was eating my titties. They should have called me ‘Richard the Watcher.’ My whole gay activities were really into masturbation. I used to do it six or seven times a day.
His celebrity spread in other ways as well, In 1956, he sang the title song and appeared, in a dynamic performance, in a film called The Girl Can’t Help it. The film is one of the many rock exploitation films of the time, but in that context it is an oddity, not a cheap B movie but a Cinemascope color affair with real movie stars in it: Tom Ewell and Jayne Mansfield. Richard sang two songs, along with Fats Domino, Eddie Cochran, and Gene Vincent.
Leaving chaos in his wake, he flew home and, before anyone could stop him, publicly renounced his music — and went off to bible school in Alabama. A preacher had knocked on the door at his house in LA one day, he said, and he’d listened and returned to his churchy roots. He met a woman named Ernestine Campbell at an evangelist conference in Washington, DC, and eventually married her.
John had a nasty personality … John would do his no-manners [break wind] and jump over and fan it all over the room, and I didn’t like it. You know, sometimes he would do two in a row and say, “Oooh whee! He did two tonight.” It would bother me. I didn’t want to hear that stuff, y’know. “I don’t care what you write,” Richard tells the group, “I don’t see how a man can tell how the beans are supposed to be in the pot when he don’t even eat beans!”
By the late 1970s, he was also a cocaine freak, supplementing it with angel dust and heroin. “Every time I blew my nose there was flesh and blood on my handkerchief, where it had eaten out my membranes,” he said. He made the talk show rounds again, but this time he’d dress conservatively with a modest Afro and go on, say, Letterman, explaining to the host how when he’d been gay he wasn’t a man, but now he was a man, because he could experience having sex with a woman. Letterman nodded politely.
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