Little Richard: Awopbopaloobop alopbamboom!

Originally published in Uncut Take 279 [August 2020] following his death, we honoured one of the founding fathers of rock’n’roll: Little Richard, whose music career was brief, but his influence was profound. Collaborators and eyewitnesses recall his colourful, groundbreaking life and times. “We were lucky to have him as long as we did,” says Steve Van Zandt…

“Always flamboyant”

The thing about Little Richard, he always made an entrance,” says David T Walker, a session guitarist who recorded with the rock’n’roll icon in the early 1970s. “He’d enter a club with bodyguards fanning him with big feathered fans. It didn’t matter where he was. It could be just a small gig, and he’d still roll out the red carpet. He was Little Richard every day. Always flamboyant. He was always himself.”

With his mile-high pompadour, layers of pancake makeup and ebullient character, Little Richard was always himself and no-one other than himself. He mixed up every kind of music he heard – popular R&B and rockabilly, jump blues and country, vaudeville and drag – and presented it all in a package that was flashy, outrageous, and sharply subversive.

On his impressive string of hits in the late 1950s, he sang jubilantly and defiantly about cutting loose, ripping up a Saturday night, and most of all sex, punctuating his barely coded lyrics with orgasmic whoops and hollers. As a gay black man in postwar America, he opened rock’n’roll up to an array of voices and perspectives that still resonate today.

“The original spirit,” said Bob Dylan

When he sang “A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!” at the beginning of his 1955 hit “Tutti Frutti”, Little Richard made one of the great entrances of his career – or anybody’s career, for that matter. The jubilation in his delivery typifies the spirit of early rock’n’roll, and yet it’s hard to imagine any of his peers – Elvis or Chuck Berry or Carl Perkins, if maybe Jerry Lee – mustering that much ecstasy. Little Richard invests those lyrics with all the depth and meaning of even the most allusive Bob Dylan song – and Dylan would probably agree.

“He was my shining star and guiding light back when I was only a little boy,” Dylan said at the news of Little Richard’s death from bone marrow cancer, aged 87. “His was the original spirit that moved me to do everything I would do.”

Dylan wasn’t the only one, either. “I owe a lot of what I do to Little Richard and his style; and he knew it,” wrote Paul McCartney. “He would say, ‘I taught Paul everything he knows.’ I had to admit he was right.”

“The quasar of rock and roll”

Born Richard Wayne Penniman on December 5, 1932, he was more than simply a rock star – and would tell you as much himself. In fact, he often described himself as something bigger, more explosive: the “quasar of rock and roll” (an expression that provided the title of his frank 1985 memoir). As such, his impact is incalculable. “We were lucky to have him as long as we did,” says Steven Van Zandt, who toured the oldies circuit on a bill with Little Richard before he even met Bruce Springsteen. “It’s miraculous to have the guy who invented rock’n’roll still walking the Earth. It’s like running into Beethoven at your local grocery store.”

If Little Richard was a quasar, then his very own big bang happened at a modest recording studio called the J&M Music Shop, at 840 N Rampart Street in New Orleans. In September 1955, he showed up to record a handful of tunes for his debut single on Specialty Records, and he had fought hard for this opportunity.

He spent years on the vaudeville circuit, singing in medicine shows and strange R&B acts, performing in drag and even recording a few early singles that could very generously be called regional hits. At the suggestion of Lloyd Price, a New Orleans singer already famous for “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, Little Richard sent demos to Specialty, then spent the next six months pestering label owner Art Rupe and producer Robert “Bumps” Blackwell to actually listen to them.

“If it’s greasy, it makes it easy”

After they finally signed the 22-year-old performer, they brought him down to New Orleans, but insisted on using local musicians – including members of Fats Domino’s band – rather than Little Richard’s own touring group The Upsetters. After several run-throughs that were fine but sounded nothing like a hit, they took a break. Several of the players followed Little Richard down to a bar called the Dew Drop Inn, where they drank among the strippers and prostitutes. Things got rowdy when Little Richard took a seat at the piano and started banging out a bawdy number about anal sex. “Tutti frutti, good booty,” he sang. “If it’s tight, it’s alright/If it’s greasy, it makes it easy.”

As the crowd cheered him on, Little Richard sounded looser than he had back at J&M, and Blackwell knew this was the sound they needed. But the words! They’d be run out of town – any town, even New Orleans – so the producer had a young songwriter named Dorothy LaBostrie devise new lyrics. “Got a gal named Sue, she knows just what to do” sounds harmless enough, but after “good booty” was nonsensified to become “aw rooty”, it sounded somehow even dirtier than the original. The song was cut in three takes.

“King of Rock’n’Roll… and the Queen, too!”

The song’s raunchy excitement hasn’t diminished in nearly 70 years, nor its sense of incredible possibility. Little Richard followed it up with a series of recordings that have all become rock’n’roll standards: “Long Tall Sally” and “Rip It Up” in 1956, “Lucille” and “Jenny Jenny” in 1957, “Good Golly Miss Molly” in 1958. As he toured nonstop behind those singles, he developed a stage act that grew more extravagant with each performance. He proclaimed himself the “King of Rock’n’Roll… and the Queen, too!”

For all his subversive sexual ambiguity, Little Richard, much like The Beatles after him, excited his female fans into something like hysteria. They tore at his expensive clothes, and he not only let them but even encouraged them. “When he played, there was an expression of ‘Wow!’ on the faces of his audience,” says Walker. “He demanded that kind of reaction, and he got it.”

It was a flight to Australia that convinced Little Richard to give up rock’n’roll. He and The Upsetters were booked to fly across the Pacific Ocean, a gruelling trip with layovers in Honolulu and the Fiji Islands.

“We weren’t on a jet plane,” recalls his drummer Charles Connor. “It was a four-engine plane in those days and one of those engines caught fire! We thought the plane was gonna go down and Richard said, ‘I’m really gonna come out of show business now. I’m singing the devil’s music, and that’s not right.’”

He enrolled in ministerial school

The plane landed safely, but the quasar – already trying to reconcile his church upbringing with his rock’n’roll celebrity and his not quite definable sexuality – was shaken. He cut the tour short, returned home and enrolled in ministerial school.

Little Richard’s defection from rock to gospel is usually cast as a rejection of his hedonistic lifestyle, which was certainly part of his decision. But it was also a rebellion against the music industry, which he felt was ripping him off. A lousy contract with Specialty meant he got only a pittance from sales and publishing; he made most of his money on the road, which mean he was playing every night, sometimes multiple shows a night, for weeks on end. This was no different from other rock performers of that era, white or black, but that didn’t assuage his exhaustion or his outrage.

Joining the church and making gospel records was one way to break his contract with Specialty, which raided the vaults and continued to release singles of questionable quality. Little Richard married Ernestine Harvin in 1959 and released a handful of gospel albums that sound staid compared to his previous material. Today, Pray Along With Little Richard from 1960 and King Of The Gospel Singers from 1961 are disregarded even by his fans for sounding restrained – a betrayal of everything he had come to represent – yet he still emerges as a vocalist both imaginative yet disciplined.

“I would watch his moves every night,” said Mick Jagger

He had to be tricked into playing his old tunes again. In 1962 he was booked on a European tour on what he believed would be the gospel circuit, and he hired a young pianist and singer named Billy Preston to accompany him. The audiences at his first show reacted with hostility to his preaching, but as soon as he tried to win them over with an old hit, he was back to his old self. Legend has it he returned to the States without buying a ticket for Preston, who was stranded in London and later befriended by The Beatles.

The groups he influenced had supplanted him on the pop charts, but Little Richard’s tours were more popular than ever, and future superstars seemed to float into his orbit. He hired a young, left-handed guitarist named Jimi Hendrix, who played on a few singles before being sacked.

A subsequent UK tour included a band called Bluesology on the bill, fronted by a young piano player named Reggie Dwight, soon to rebrand himself Elton John. Joining him for a few shows was another band called The Rolling Stones. “When we were on tour with him,” Mick Jagger said in tribute, “I would watch his moves every night and learn from him how to entertain and involve the audience and he was always so generous with his advice to me.”

He struggled to reconcile his gospel calling with his rock’n’roll liberation

Little Richard closed out the ’60s with a residency at the Aladdin in Las Vegas, where he hit peak flamboyance right before glam rock hit. He devised his most elaborate stage show yet, featuring a wardrobe including a jacket made of mirrors and a white jumpsuit with a red cape. He swore he saw Elvis at one of his shows, taking notes for his own residency.

Even after his successful comeback in the early 1960s, Little Richard struggled to reconcile his gospel calling with his rock’n’roll liberation. He enjoyed a few more surprise hits, including “Freedom Blues” in 1970 and “Great Gosh A’Mighty (It’s A Matter Of Time)” in 1986, and even accepted a few acting gigs, including a role in Paul Mazursky’s 1986 film Down And Out In Beverly Hills, alongside Nick Nolte and Bette Midler. At one point, he was even offered a role in a sitcom starring Vanna White, but his Hollywood career was thwarted by his spiritual misgivings.

“He called me up one day and said, ‘Do you think my music is the devil’s music?’” recalls Travis Wammack, the Muscle Shoals guitarist who served as his band leader from 1986 until the mid-1990s. “I said, ‘Richard, when I hear those songs, I think of good times.’ He wanted to play rock’n’roll again, but he had gotten a scripture book printed up and had his brothers pass them out at every concert. If we played Sweden, he had those books printed in Swedish. He even passed them out when he played Vegas. He was something else.”

“The essence of rock’n’roll”

In one regard, however, Little Richard did find a way to meld rock music with the gospel. In 1982, Steven Van Zandt asked Little Richard to officiate his wedding to Maureen Santoro. Springsteen served as best man and Percy Sledge singing “When A Man Loves A Woman”. Later he performed wedding ceremonies for Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Willis and Tom Petty.

“I consider him the essence of rock’n’roll,” says Van Zandt. “He transmitted nothing but joy, whether it was on record or in person. With his flamboyant androgyny, he was communicating: don’t be afraid to be yourself, whatever that is. You can be flashy, you can be quiet. And you can be gay, you can be whatever you want to be. You can be it in this new art form called rock’n’roll.”

11 Essential Little Richard Songs

“Tutti Frutti”
(1955)
His first single on Specialty Records boasts one of the greatest intros in rock’n’roll history: “A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!”

“Long Tall Sally”
(1956)
Co-written by a teenager named Enotris Johnson to pay for her mother’s medical treatment, the song makes the sexual undercurrents of Little Richard’s music all the more blatant.

“Rip It Up”
(1956)
Continuing his run of earth-shaking singles, “Rip It Up” recounts a wild Saturday night on the town, although that chorus – “I’m gonna rip it up… I’m gonna ball it up” –doubles as a musical manifesto.

“The Girl Can’t Help It”
(1956)
In the first rock movie shot in colour, Little Richard gets three performances – including the title track – and steals the film from the flamboyant Jayne Mansfield.

“Good Golly Miss Molly”
(1958)
Little Richard heard that phrase from a New Orleans R&B DJ and (by his own admission) stole a piano theme from Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88”, but the result sounds like nobody else, from his orgasmic delivery to the coded lyrics about prostitutes.

“Ride On, King Jesus”
(1962)
Fleeing pop for gospel, he sounds almost unrecognisable on his relatively staid religious records from the early 1960s. But there are a few spirited highlights from this era, including his barely contained interpretation of this popular African-American spiritual.

“Goodnight Irene”
(1964)
Well into his comeback, Little Richard took on the old folk standard, popularised by Lead Belly and The Weavers, and vamps over a groove that’s funkier for sounding so off the cuff and possibly inebriated.

“Greenwood, Mississippi”
(1970)
This slab of Southern funk wasn’t the biggest hit off his comeback album The Rill Thing (“Freedom Blues” scratched the Top 50), but it’s one of his best from an era when Richard and his peers were enjoying unprecedented comebacks.

“Money Is”
(1972)
Little Richard teamed with Quincy Jones on the soundtrack to the heist flick $ (also known as Dollars). While he’s hemmed in by Jones’ slick orchestration, he still sounds like he’s having a high time rolling around in cash. “My mind starts relaxin’,” he shouts, “when my pocket is full of Jacksons!”

“Great Gosh A’Mighty! (It’s A Matter Of Time)”
(1986)
Anchoring the soundtrack to Paul Mazursky’s Down And Out in Beverly Hills, “Great Gosh A’Mighty” gave him his biggest hit in nearly 30 years. The production is pure ’80s, but he barrels through it with a punkish intensity.

“Old MacDonald”
(1992)
If he built his career playing for teens, Little Richard aimed this later studio LP at an even younger crowd. On Shake It All About he takes on a dozen children’s tunes, and turns “Old MacDonald” into a rambunctious rave-up.