Like many people, I knew Little Richard was great before I understood exactly why. I was born in 1982, and I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of him. He hadn’t had a hit in years, but he was as unmistakable a presence in the pop culture of my childhood as Prince or Cyndi Lauper. You’d see him everywhere: ice-skating with Pee-Wee Herman, singing a rock-and-roll version of “Itsy Bitsy Spider” at a piano shaped like a giant spider, or playing Old King Cole to Shelley Duvall’s Little Bo Peep. Every time he popped up, he would inevitably be greeted with joy. Not awe or admiration, but joy—how could you not be glad to see Little Richard? For the longest time, though, that was all I knew of him.
Eventually, though, anyone who cares about popular music finds their way back to the wondrous recordings Richard made from 1955 to 1957, when he created, essentially, a new type of music. People love to argue over who invented rock and roll, and there really is no answer that will satisfy everybody. Truthfully, there are plenty of records from the late Forties and early Fifties that sound, more or less, like rock and roll. But nobody had ever sounded like Little Richard before. Nobody had ever even tried to sound like him before. He drew a line between himself and everything that had come before him. You can listen to Jackie Brenston’s 1951 “Rocket 88,” which the textbooks tell us is the first true rock and roll record, and you can hear a hint of what Little Richard would become. But only a hint.
On song after song, from “Tutti Frutti” to “Kansas City,” you can hear his band struggling to keep up with him, trying to match the incredible speed and momentum of his voice. Richard sang as if he wanted the sound of his voice to break through every barrier in its path, to scorch its way around the entire world. And it did: To a teenage John Lennon, sitting and listening to “Long Tall Sally” at a friend’s house in Liverpool, Richard sounded “so great I couldn’t speak.”
He still sounds like that. These recordings are still as much fun as ever—and that is not to diminish them one bit, because fun matters as much as anything does in this world. They are also deeply strange, the product of a mysterious person who was utterly in touch with his own mystery. You can’t imagine how they must have sounded in the context of Fifties America—that is, the context of a world where there was no Little Richard. Perhaps that is why they have escaped that context so completely; when you hear “Long Tall Sally,” you don’t think of soda jerks and sock hops, you only think of Little Richard. He created his own world, and he brought it with him. (Stylistically, the Eighties suited him better than the Fifties ever had.)
It would be easy to reduce Richard to just that—to say he was great because he was weird and he was great because he rocked. But there was more to it than that. Listen to “Rip It Up,” where Richard’s voice moves from one syllable to the next with the speed, grace, and confidence of a tap dancer:
Well it’s Saturday night and I
JUST GOT PAID
Foolaboutmymoney
DON’T
Try to save!
Then listen to “Ooh! My Soul,” where Richard roars his way down each verse like a freight train, only to skid to a halt and turn to the audience with a wink, chirping the title phrase like a cartoon character. Then he’s off again without missing a beat. Listening to it today, I shake my head in disbelief: How does he do that?
I should know these recordings by heart; I’ve heard them all dozens, if not hundreds, of times. But they always take me by surprise. I can never quite remember what happens next, whether Richard will sing the next line in his sly, knowing coo or whether he’ll crush five words into one or whether he’ll make a simple word like “don’t” explode like dynamite. I have never put on a Little Richard record and thought “Well, that’s the last time I’ll ever listen to that,” and I suspect few other people do.
I could go on, but the last word should really belong to Little Richard himself.
At the 1988 Grammy Awards, Little Richard walked on stage to present the award for best new artist. Standing beside, of all people, Buster Poindexter—formerly David Johansen of the New York Dolls—Richard tore open the envelope and declared: “And the best new artist is…ME!”
As the crowd laughed and cheered, Richard added: “I have never received nothing. Y’all ain’t never gave me no Grammy and I been singing for years. I am the architect of rock ‘n’ roll and they never gave me nothing. And I am the originator!”
Richard said these words with a smile, and the audience responded to his warmth and good humor with delight. He could just as easily have spoken the same words with anger, and it would have been entirely justified. But he didn’t have to. Why bother? He was Little Richard. That was all the glory anyone could ever ask for, and it was his forever.
But he wasn’t kidding, either. After all—he was Little Richard. And when was Little Richard ever kidding?