Off the Charts: Little Richard

Living out loud with pancake makeup and a trademark wail

By Newt Briggs

Little Richard is a creepy dude. This is not a shot against him per se; there's just something a little unsettling about a 69-year-old man who wears pancake makeup. Imagine waking up in the middle of the night and seeing him--white sequined suit, pencil-thin mustache, hair teased into a greasy pompadour--sitting on a folding chair in the corner of your bedroom. He probably wouldn't do anything but compliment your bone structure and offer you a Frango mint, but it's a chilling vision nonetheless.

Little Richard's problem--besides the bug eyes and the regrettable fashion sense, of course--is largely one of perception (particularly for anyone born during or after the Nixon administration). He may have been the architect of rock 'n' roll, but for children suckled on Lunchables and the Game Show Network, he's little more a frequent guest on "Hollywood Squares"--no better than Whoopi Goldberg or Jm J. Bullock. Only those who managed a cursory viewing of NBC's made-for-TV biopic The Little Richard Story in 2000 would know differently, but even then it would be hard to reconcile today's withered fairy with yesterday's teen heartthrob.

Yet by most accounts, Little Richard was one of--if not the--greatest rock performers to ever shimmy onto a stage. As Nik Cohn wrote in his seminal rock polemic Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, "Out of all the great Southern rockers, just about the most splendid was...Little Richard Penniman out of Macon, Georgia, who was and still is the most exciting live performer I ever saw in my life." Although he was only 13th on Spin's August 2004 survey of the 50 greatest rock frontmen of all time, he significantly influenced the careers of at least five people in the top 10, including Prince (1), Mick Jagger (2), James Brown (4), Jimi Hendrix (5) and Elvis Presley (6).

"The Rolling Stones started with me," Little Richard wrote in Rolling Stone in April 2004. "James Brown, Jimi Hendrix--these people started with me. I fed them, I talked to them, and they're going to always be in front of me."

For the most part, he's absolutely right. If Helen of Troy had the face that launched a thousand ships, then Little Richard had the face that started at least as many record labels. He churned out so many hits that even the stodgiest A&R men had to sit up and take notice. Perhaps the greatest of these was his first, "Tutti Frutti," which almost didn't even get recorded. Composed while Little Richard was washing dishes at a Greyhound bus station in Georgia, the song--according to James Miller's Flowers in the Dustbin--was originally a "thinly veiled" homage to "anal eroticism": "Tutti Frutti, good booty/ If it don't fit, don't force it/ You can grease it, make it easy." In the closing minutes of a 1955 recording session, the song was cleaned up by Dorothy La Bostrie, and in just two takes, Little Richard transformed it into gold. He did the same with "Lucille," "Rip it Up," "Ready Teddy" and "Long Tall Sally," which would later become a crossover smash for the Beatles.

Only when Little Richard returned to the church and became a born-again Seventh Day Adventist did his career fall into decline. By the time he returned to the limelight in 1964, his celebrity had already been eclipsed by that of his followers, yet his legacy can be heard in everything from Rick James' "Super Freak" to Prince's "Darling Nikki." It might not seem like much now, but back in the day, "Good Golly, Miss Molly" was nothing short of an assault on American manners: "Good golly, Miss Molly/ You sure like to ball." In this way, Little Richard helped oversee the democratization of popular music. In the racially divided South, he was black, gay and as filthy as a sailor on a 48-hour furlough. He was also insanely popular--a furious ball of pomade and patent leather and sexual magnetism.

As Cohn writes, "For 30 years you couldn't possibly make it unless you were were white, sleek, nicely spoken and phoney to your toenails--suddenly now you could be black, purple, moronic, delinquent, diseased or almost anything on Earth and you could still clean up. Just so long as you were new, just so long as you carried excitement."