Richard’s spectacular sexuality - the term bisexual doesn’t begin to capture it, implying as it does merely two poles - encompassed multitudes, sometimes literally at his height, he graciously hosted an orgy after every show. “The mere mention of Elvis or Little Richard,” Elton John writes in his recent autobiography, “would set off on an angry lecture in which my inevitable transformation into a wide boy figured heavily: One minute I’d be happily listening to ‘Good Golly Miss Molly,’ the next thing you knew, I was apparently going to be fencing stolen nylons or duping people into playing Find-the-Lady on the mean streets of Pinner.” It was everything rock-and-roll haters hated. In this getup, he stood - not sat - at his keyboard howling his innuendo-filled songs. He topped it all off with a towering pompadour. Wildly effeminate at a time when (it needs scarcely be said) this was not the norm, he wore lush flowing robes onstage, pancaked his face with white makeup, drew kohl rings around his eyes, and sported eyelashes that could be seen from the balcony of the enormous venues he played. His music aside, Richard was a visual phenomenon as confrontational as his music. “Reaching back through years of striving, of living in a shadow world of black Southern gay bars, of hollering his lungs out while washing dishes in bus stations and dives, he had finished inventing Little Richard.” “Little Richard had invented something,” wrote historian Ed Ward of “Tutti Frutti” in his History of Rock & Roll. He was, simply put, a star, a showman, a force of nature, and an original. He was an inventive and powerful pianist, but he wasn’t a brilliant synthesizer of influences like Presley or Lewis. 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 schooled in black gospel music he loved Sister Rosetta Tharpe and he adored Marion Williams, another famous singer of the era. Richard’s sui generis nature was his calling card. That said, it’s true to say this: In 1955, no one had ever made a record even half so explosive as “Tutti Frutti.” But at the time they were all just misfits doing things no one had ever heard before. (Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, at 84.) Little Richard, Lewis, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, and Elvis Presley - they all did different things that, we can now see, collectively made up rock and roll. They are persuasive evidence of his claim to being the first king of rock and roll - and at his death he was one of our culture’s last links to the giants who created the music in the early and mid 1950s. His falsetto voice and boundless explosive energy at the keyboard made for hits of unprecedented psychic force. Now this, the producer thought, I can work with.Ī set of bowdlerized lyrics later, “Tutti Frutti” was cut onto acetate, and kickstarted Richard’s outlandish and chaotic celebrity. The song was filthy - and utterly irresistible.
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and rocketed into a wild ride that was basically a fairly graphic how-to manual for gay sex: Richard, who never could sit still, jumped over to a piano and belted out a number from his stage act. They went out for a liquid lunch at the local club, which was actually called the Dew-Drop Inn. But Richard’s producer wasn’t hearing anything exciting in the music he was recording. The session was his big break, though really, a big break back then involved being crowded into a small studio at the back of a furniture store. In 1955 a young Richard Wayne Penniman was recording in New Orleans.
Indeed, there’s a story that demonstrates that Richard, who died today at 87, owed his very career to his embrace of his libido. In the life of no other star did sex play so wild a part - as we shall see.
The utter ecstasy, the lubricous excitement, he brought could never be equalled, not even by Prince. But it is safe to say the music would not be quite the same if Little Richard had never existed. Sex was a potent part of the blues - and of course this influence came down into rock and roll as well. I said: “Just a moment! This is an orgy!” And in the middle of this orgy, that was fantastic, somebody knocked on my door. It was one of the best I have ever been to. I remember one night, we had this wonderful orgy going. Imagine sitting next to Little Richard at a dinner party: