It was 1957, my birthday was coming up, and I knew exactly what I wanted. So, when my parents and I walked by a record store, it seemed like a stroke of luck. But when I reached into the rack to pull out the album I wanted, I felt a powerful sense of unease. Did I really want my folks with me?
The album was “Here’s Little Richard” — the first LP from the Macon-born, gospel-turned rhythm and blues singer who helped to lead the charge of early rock ‘n‘ roll into widespread popularity. The cover was dominated by his face, bathed in sweat, mouth open to unleash the patented scream that triggered the instrumental breaks on his songs.
“We should play it before we buy it to make sure it’s not scratched,” my mom said. Oh, jeez, no, please.
But it was too late, and the first verse of Little Richard’s first hit blared out over through the speakers in the record store, as my parents listened, ashen-faced.
“Tutti-fruitti,
“Aw-rooti,
“A wop bop b-luma b-lop bam bom!”
There was nothing political about Little Richard’s celebration of Sue and Daisy, who knew just what to do. There was nothing political about any of the stream of songs that followed, nor, for that matter, any of the music that defined early rock ‘n‘ roll. But if politics is downstream from culture, as they say, that music — which no artist exemplified more than the man born Richard Penniman — not only made a cultural impact but served as a foundational element in the political upheaval that followed a few years later.
The rhythm and blues that was at the root of rock ‘n‘ roll might have been embraced by teenagers, but it was decidedly not music aimed at our tender ears. It was produced for adults, originally performed largely in segregated theaters and played on radio stations geared to Black audiences. Until midcentury, Billboard magazine called it “race music.”
Its subject matter was often bluntly sexual: “My baby rocks me with a steady roll.” “I’m your 60-minute man.” The phrase “rock ‘n‘ roll” itself was a euphemism for sex. Indeed, the original lyric of Little Richard’s first hit was: “Tutti-frutti / good booty,” and the rest of the song was explicit about just what kind of sex it was celebrating.
So, when a Cleveland disc jockey named Alan Freed began playing this music to a wider and wildly receptive audience and began staging dance parties where crowds of Black and white kids mingled, our elders recoiled at what they understood as transgressive, “threatening” music whose insistent back beat only made the songs more appealing (to us) and appalling (to them).
The resistance took many forms. Politicians denounced it as “jungle” music, disdaining to conceal the racism implicit in the charge. Disc jockeys staged “record-burning bonfires.” Established record labels issued sanitized versions of the music. In Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” the title character was “built for speed / she got everything Uncle John need.” The uber-vanilla Pat Boone’s Sally “has a lot on the ball / and nobody cares if she’s long and tall.” After Elvis swiveled his hips on Ed Sullivan’s show, his later appearance was televised from the waist up.
But we teenagers knew what we wanted; we wanted the real thing. Watching Little Richard at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater pounding his piano as his tenor-sax heavy band drove home the rhythms — a band named, with perfect pitch, “The Upsetters” — was to be witness to a performer unbound, flinging his cape off his body, collapsing on stage with exhaustion, carried off by band members, only to leap from their arms to sing “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On.” (If this sounds like James Brown’s stage moves, that’s no accident). We wanted the music that was “transgressive,” even if we’d never heard of the term. Maybe we thought that when Richard sang “God Golly, Miss Molly, sure like to ball,” he was singing about her love of dancing. But at its core, this was music that drew a bright line between us and our elders. This was not bobby-soxers squealing at Frank Sinatra at the New York Paramount, which the parents of that day could treat with an indulgent smile. When Freed, by then based in New York, staged a rock show in that same venue in 1958, the crowd pushing to get in — of which I was a part — set off a near-riot. The songs Little Richard performed were musical versions of what Marlon Brando said in “The Wild One“:
“Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”
“What have you got?”
It took a decade — and a divisive war, a racial conflict and a generation coming into adulthood — to bring politics more explicitly into the music of the day. But the seeds of confrontation that would turn a gap into a chasm were sowed in that “quiet decade” of the ’50s, and the music of Little Richard found fertile soil.
After his years of hits in the mid-50s, Little Richard’s life was a series of twists and turns. He left the business to preach the gospel; staged comebacks throughout the next decades; alternately embraced his gayness and denounced it; played packed auditoriums in Europe and dreary clubs in the South; morphed from the threatening outsider to a regular on “Hollywood Squares” as his fans aged. But he was clear about his influence.
“I think my legacy should be that when I started in show business, there wasn’t no such thing as rock ‘n’ roll. When I started with ‘Tutti Frutti,’ that’s when rock really started rocking.” (He was also ultimately open about his sexuality: “Elvis may be the king of rock and roll,” he said, “but I was the queen.”)
When he died this past May at age 87, the world of pop music more than endorsed his self-evaluation. Everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Paul McCartney to Elton John remembered him as the Architect, the Founding Father, of rock ‘n‘ roll — the music that was a leading indicator of what was to come.
December 26, 2020 at 06:22PM
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/26/little-richard-rock-n-roll-postscript-445172
Little Richard: The Founding Father of Rock ’n’ Roll - POLITICO
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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