The King and Queen of Rock n Roll, Little Richard

Tribute to an LGBTQ Icon

STORY BY

STEVE PAFFORD

It seems like another day, another hero lost. One of the most colorful performers in history, rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Little Richard, died in May. He was 87.

What is left to say about Little Richard that he has not already said better himself? “I am the innovator! I am the originator! I am the emancipator! I am the architect! I’m rock ’n’ roll!” he once told an interviewer, before adding, “Now, I am not saying that to be vain or conceited.”

No, Little Richard – born Richard Penniman in Macon, Georgia was just being honest. And a bit vain and conceited. As a child, he was mocked for having one leg shorter than the other, which drastically impacted his gait, and ridiculed for his eff eminate appearance. The homophobic bullying bred a massively competitive streak in him, driving Richard to outdo everyone in every endeavor he could.

Richard once said, “Rhythm and blues had an illegitimate baby and we named it rock ’n’ roll.” That may sound far-fetched but it is a fair summary of what happened in America in the early ‘50s, where it is often said that Ike Turner was its inventor, Chuck Berry its undisputed father and Little Richard anointed as its architect, usually by himself. But like the USA, no one person was the founding father of rock ’n’ roll, which was actually black slang for having sex. Its conception was a cross-pollination that irrevocably altered popular music by introducing black R&B to white America, shattering the color line on the music charts, and bringing what was once called “race music” into the mainstream.

Years before he created Tina, Turner was responsible for weaving a mixture of boogie-woogie stomp, traditional blues and white hillbilly music into a cohesive new order. And years before anybody thought in terms of a rock ’n’ roll record, there he was leading his own Kings of Rhythm on Rocket 88, a game changing single that had been recorded in Memphis in 1951. Sam Phillips, founder of the local Sun Records and the man who discovered Elvis, considers 88 to be the fi rst rock record. Even Little Richard admitted to basing his piano style on Turner’s performance.

So if Little Richard did not invent rock ’n’ roll then he most certainly reinvented it. With his piercing wail, hyperkinetic piano playing and towering pompadour, he was by far the most daring, the most outré of all the early rockers, the one that personifi ed its mutinous outsider appeal. His unfettered fl amboyance, showmanship and sexual expressiveness made him an implausible sensation — a trailblazer and trendsetter celebrated across America during McCarthyism and the buttoned-down Eisenhower era. He was also gay, gifted and black.

Little Richard playing at the halftime show

Signing his fi rst record deal in 1951 with RCA, talent whisperer Johnny Otis recalled seeing Richard this way:

“I see this outrageous person, good-looking and very eff eminate, with a big pompadour. He started singing and he was so good. I loved it. I remember it as being just beautiful, bizarre, and exotic, and when he got through, he remarked, “This is Little Richard, King of the Blues,” and then he added, “And the Queen, too!” I knew I liked him then. He was new to a lot of people, and they were just saying, “Boy, that’s something else.”

Omnisexual, alien and very ahead of his time, Richard was outrageously camp and tremendously popular with both sexes and all races, and the concerts often ended with black and white youths dancing together. In segregated America, this was dangerous stuff . But it was not just his bristling energy that made him one of the greats. Richard’s feral woo! confl ated the spiritual and the orgasmic in a way that changed the way musicians communicated desire forever.

As Jimi Hendrix put it, “I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice.” In the ‘60s, Richard would repay the favor by putting him in his band and stalking the guitarist sexually, even fi ning Hendrix for daring to upstage him by wearing frilly shirts. With unchecked megalomania Richard told him in no uncertain terms, “I am the only one allowed to be pretty.”

Like a demand to join the party which can’t be refused, when Tutti Frutti landed like a hand grenade in the charts of 1956, Richard delivered it fully charged with electricity, highlighted by his incendiary call of “wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bamboom!” and ignited radios across the country.

Everything was outrageous. The hair, the fl air, the make-up, the scream. One can only try to imagine what these otherworldly just-over-twominute explosions of raw, visceral lust sounded like when everything was Mom’s apple pie and Rock Hudson and Doris Day, especially when the lyrics were that fi lthy and butt-heavy, with Richard gushing wildly about a dude’s glutes. It is a miracle how those songs even made it onto vinyl.

It is also timely to remember how, once outside New Orleans, black performers would often be pulled over by cops barely concealing their racism. If the musician did not look at the fl oor and say ”yassuh”, the offi cer might show them the bullets in their guns and tell them “you know how much

it would cost to kill you? A nickel.” Some things don’t change too much, sadly.

In his personal life, he

wavered between raunch and religion, alternately embracing the Good Book and outrageous behavior topped off with the sky-high hair, make-up and glittery suits, yet struggled to maintain his hit making capacity when more palatable white straight boys like Elvis Presley took the genre over.

But if there’s one other thing we have learned in this year of death and destruction, it is how Little Richard was indeed the architect of much of what followed. The Beatles learned their ecstatic falsetto twists and shouts from him, not Elvis; James Brown said he was “the fi rst to put the funk in rhythm;” David Bowie described his impact as “I had heard God,” while Elton John added that once he heard him, he “got it”. Look at the androgynous album cover of Prince’s Parade - the psychosexual convolutions of the Purple One at his most mascara-lined pencil-moustached pomp are impossible to imagine without Little Richard leading the way. The world had never seen the like before – and, good golly Miss Molly, we won’t again.

—